Chapter II
The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. America has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste. It is a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and communities. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability. Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what America's military with the UK and France, and top government contractors, have been doing since WWII.

by
Germain Dufour
Global Civilization
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The four chapters of October 2018 Newsletter were based on the articles, letters, reports, research papers, discussions and global dialogues, and messages written by author(s) whose work were published in monthly Newsletters of years mostly 2017 and 2018. All published work can be found in the Global Dialogue Proceedings (check link http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/). Scroll down to years 2017 and 2018 and follow the Proceedings sections, and you will find the actual authors lists, with their papers and all references. Global Community Media is a way to communicate workable sound solutions to problems arising in the world. Let us share our problems and workable sound solutions. Sharing information is a necessity to all life and humanity's survival. Our world is changing fast before our eyes, and we must react quickly and hard to protect all life on Earth. No hesitation! Right now and no waiting! Life on the planet is our first priority. We must protect it at all costs. We, global citizens, fight to protect life on Earth for this generation and the next ones. We are the defenders of the environment and the global life-support systems. We know who the beasts are, and how they destroy the living on our planet. We have rallied together all over the world to protect our home, Earth. Just so you all know we don't pay anyone, and we don't pay expenses. We do volunteer work for humanity. We expect volunteers to be responsible and accountable of all their actions. We do soft activism work. We do not have a copyright research expert to do this work. In order to create a harmonious and compassionate Global Civilization, and to protect our planetary environment, the global life-support systems, we want to help you concerning all issues, and you may become a volunteer yourself. Check our volunteer page at: http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/gpahelpsyou.htm

Table of Contents.

• US enemy number one is its military spending over 60% of budget.


• Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the West.


• The pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat.


• Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat. Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of deterrence.


• More nations are clearly rejecting American interference, favoring instead a dialogue with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Duterte in the Philippines is just the latest example of this trend.


• With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.


• Americans bombed Syria again just as Russia had finally defeated the terrorist groups armed by USA and Saudi Arabia. List of 27 bombed nations show that Millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support or indifference of ordinary Americans, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to. So, ‘exceptionalist’ Americans in military uniform have bombed Syria again. They bombed Syria again just as the Syrian army with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah had finally, after seven years, defeated the terrorist groups, which had heavy weaponry and Toyota trucks supplied to them by United States and Saudi Arabia. The terrorist groups destroyed much of the country and caused the death of some 350,000 Syrian men, women and children. Many Syrians had their heads cut off by the fanatic terrorists. It has been an open secret that Americans and Saudi Arabians have been funding and arming them for some seven years.


• Syria is not experiencing a “civil war.” It is being targeted by both proxy and direct military force organized by the United States and its allies for the explicit purpose of dividing and destroying yet another Middle Eastern nation.


• The USA Navy plays violent war games in Alaska, killing fish and destroying the environment. When the U.S. Navy sails its warships into the Gulf of Alaska, they will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet.  Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.


• It’s war in the Gulf of Alaska. The U.S. Navy will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet. Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.


• Proven US aliance lying over chemical weapons attack and Trump pretext for destruction of Syria.The Russian and Syrian denials are true if they are innocent and lies if they are guilty of the suspected chemical weapons attack that killed 90 people including 30 children in Syria. However Trump, US and US Alliance certitude over Russian and Syrian guilt is clear, proven, warmongering lying in the absence of findings from expert and independent investigators. Meanwhile a mass murdering, child-killing Trump continues to make endless war on famine-wracked Somalia and Yemen where half of the starving populations of 11.2 million and 27.9 million, respectively, are children.


• The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. Any unilateral invasion of another country, without prior approval from the UN Security Council, is a flagrant violation of international law, hence a war crime.


• Trump wants to hand $54 billion more to one of the world's biggest drivers of climate catastrophe. But Trump’s proposal is also dangerous for a less-examined reason: the U.S. military is a key climate polluter, likely the “largest organizational user of petroleum in the world,” according to a congressional report released in December 2012. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability.


• The overlooked climate footprint of the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations.


• Spreading environmental harm across the globe. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. The United States probably has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste.


• The oil industry is tied to wars and conflicts around the world. It has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-half of all interstate wars since 1973 have been linked to oil, and that oil-producing countries are 50 percent more likely to have civil wars. Some of these conflicts are fought at the behest of western oil companies, in collaboration with local militaries, to quell dissent.


• Oil wealth is central to the global arms trade, as evidenced by the heavy imports of the oil-rich Saudi government. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Saudi Arabia was the world’s second largest arms importer in 2012-16, with an increase of 212 percent compared with 2007–11. During this period, the U.S. was the top major arms exporter in the world, accounting for 33 percent of all exports, SIPRI determines.


• Some organizations are getting concrete about what it looks like to stage a “just transition” away from a military and fossil fuels economy. ‘No war, no warming’!


• Trump attacks Syria: a gambit and a War Crime. Syria is possibly the most secular country where Shia, Sunni, Maronite, Druze, Christian, atheists, pagans, and women enjoy much more freedom and equal opportunities than anywhere else in the Muslim World. If promotion of democracy and freedom is the prime US objective in Syria, one wonders as to why it is teaming up with Saudi Arabia and its reactionary allies, the thuggish Jabhat al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and last but not least, ISIS! As Fareed Zakaria told CNN, ISIS is a bigger threat to the free world than the Assad regime. “The weaker Assad gets, ISIS becomes stronger”, he spelled out. Despite the sound and fury about Trump’s missile attack in Syria – which amounts to war crime – it’s nothing more than a balderdash, so much so that it’s only going to boost Trump’s sinking popularity among Americans, who are historically great admirers of presidents who invade countries and kill tens of thousands of civilians, in the pursuit of democracy, freedom, and glory for the “Greatest Nation on Earth”.


• America’s current annual military expenditures are around $1.5 trillion, which is to say, almost equal to that entire global estimate of more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. America’s actual annual military budget and expenditures are unknown, because there has never been an audit of the Defense Department, though an audit has routinely been promised but never delivered, and Congresses and Presidents haven’t, for example, even so much as just threatened to cut its budget every year by 10% until it is done, there has been no accountability for the Department, at all. Corruption is welcomed at the Defense Department. Furthermore, many of the military expenditures are hidden, for instance, by funding an unknown large proportion of U.S. military functions at other federal Departments, so as for those operations not to be officially Defense Department budget and expenditures, at all. The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget is already here.


• Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what you sell, that’s what you (as a billionaire with a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to the USA, UK and France governments.

US enemy number one is its military spending over 60% of budget.

For the US Government it is more important to make weapons of destruction, build more military bases with endless military ships that threaten many nations. Social security, global affairs and environment, Medicare and health, community affairs, Veterans Benefits and education do not seem to mean anything. As a result, the American people and those of other countries are suffering numerous deprivations. All those responsible should not let this to continue to happen.

Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the West.

This segment will describe how Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the West; in particular, how the American drive for global hegemony has actually accelerated the end of the 'unipolar moment' thanks to the emergence of a multipolar world. From the moment the Berlin Wall fell, the United States saw a unique opportunity to pursue the goal of being the sole global hegemon. With the end of the Soviet Union, Washington could undoubtedly aspire to planetary domination paying little heed to the threat of competition and especially of any consequences. America found herself the one and only global superpower, faced with the prospect of extending cultural and economic model around the planet, where necessary by military means. Over the past 25 years there have been numerous examples demonstrating how Washington has had little hesitation in bombing nations reluctant to kowtow to Western wishes. In other examples, an economic battering ram, based on predatory capitalism and financial speculation, has literally destroyed sovereign nations, further enriching the US and European financial elite in the process. In the course of the last two decades, the relationship between the three major powers of the Heartland, the heart of the Earth, changed radically. Iran, Russia and China have fully understood that union and cooperation are the only means for mutual reinforcement. The need to fight a common problem, represented by a growing American influence in domestic affairs, has forced Tehran, Beijing and Moscow to resolve their differences and embrace a unified strategy in the common interest of defending their sovereignty. Events such as the war in Syria, the bombing of Libya, the overthrowing of the democratic order in Ukraine, sanctions against Iran, and the direct pressure applied to Beijing in the South China Sea, have accelerated integration among nations that in the early 1990s had very little in common.

The pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat.

Accompanying the important economic integration is strong military-strategic cooperation, which is much less publicized. Events such as the Middle East wars, the coup in Ukraine, and the pressure exerted in the South China Sea have forced Tehran, Moscow and Beijing to conclude that the United States represents an existential threat.

In each of the above scenarios, China, Russia and Iran have had to make decisions by weighing the pros and cons of an opposition to the American model. The Ukraine coup d’état brought NATO to the borders of the Russian Federation, representing an existential threat to the Russia, threatening as it does its nuclear deterrent. In the Middle East, the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria has obliged Tehran to react against the alliance formed between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. In China, the constant pressure on South China Sea poses a serious problem in case of a trade blockade during a conflict. In all these scenarios, American imperialism has created existential threats. It is for this reason natural that cooperation and technological development, even in the military area, have received a major boost in recent years. In the event of an American attack on Russia, China and Iran, it is important to focus on what weapon systems would be used and how the attacked nations could respond.

Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat. Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of deterrence.

Certainly, US naval force place a serious question mark over the defense capabilities of nations like Russia, China and Iran, which strongly depend on transit via sea routes. Let us take, for example, Russia and the Arctic transit route, of great interest not only for defense purposes but also being a quick passage for transit goods. The Black Sea for these reasons has received special attention from the United States due to its strategic location. In any case, the responses have been proportional to the threat.

Iran has significantly developed maritime capabilities in the Persian Gulf, often closely marking ships of the US Navy located in the area for the purposes of ​​deterrence. China's strategy has been even more refined, with the use of dozens, if not hundreds, of fishing boats and ships of the Coast Guard to ensure safety and strengthen the naval presence in the South and East China Sea. This is all without forgetting the maritime strategy outlined by the PLA Navy to become a regional naval power over the next few years. Similar strategic decisions have been taken by the navy of the Russian Federation. In addition to having taken over ship production as in Soviet times, it has opted for the development of ships that cost less but nevertheless boast equivalent weapons systems to the Americans carrier groups.

Iran, China and Russia make efficiency and cost containment a tactic to balance the growing aggressiveness of the Americans and the attendant cost of such a military strategy. The fundamental difference between the naval approach of these countries in contrast to that of the US is paramount. Washington needs to use its naval power for offensive purposes, whereas Tehran, Moscow and Beijing need naval power exclusively for defensive purposes. In this sense, among the greatest weapons these three recalcitrant countries possess are anti-ship, anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic systems. To put things simply, it is enough to note that Russian weapons systems such as the S-300 and S-400 air-defense systems (the S-500 will be operational in 2017) are now being adopted by China and Iran with variations developed locally. Increasingly we are witnessing an open transfer of technology to continue the work of denying (A2/AD) physical and cyberspace freedom to the United States. Stealth aircraft, carrier strike groups, ICBMs and cruise missiles are experiencing a difficult time in such an environment, finding themselves opposed by the formidable defense systems the Russians, Iranians and Chinese are presenting. The cost of an anti-ship missile fired from the Chinese coast is considerably lower than the tens of billions of dollars needed to build an aircraft carrier. This paradigm of cost and efficiency is what has shaped the military spending of China, Russia and Iran. Going toe to toe with the United States without being forced to close a huge military gap is the only viable way to achieve immediate tangible benefits of deterrence and thereby block American expansionist ambitions.

A clear example of where the Americans have encountered military opposition at an advanced level has been in Syria. The systems deployed by Iran and Russia to protect the Syrian government presented the Americans with the prospect of facing heavy losses in the event of an attack on Damascus. The same also holds for the anti-Iranian rhetoric of certain American politicians and Israeli leaders. The only reason why Syria and Iran remain sovereign nations is because of the military cost that an invasion or bombing would have brought to their invaders. This is the essence of deterrence.

More nations are clearly rejecting American interference, favoring instead a dialogue with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Duterte in the Philippines is just the latest example of this trend.

The future for the most important area of the planet is already sealed. The overall integration of Beijing, Moscow and Tehran provides the necessary antibodies to foreign aggression in military and economic form. De-dollarization, coupled with an infrastructure roadmap such as the Chinese Silk Road 2.0 and the maritime trade route, offer important opportunities for developing nations that occupy the geographical space between Portugal and China. Dozens of nations have all it takes to integrate for mutually beneficial gains without having to worry too much about American threats. The economic alternative offered from Beijing provides a fairly wide safety net for resisting American assaults in the same way that the military umbrella offered by these three military powers, such as with the the SCO for example, serves to guarantee the necessary independence and strategic autonomy. More and more nations are clearly rejecting American interference, favoring instead a dialogue with Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Duterte in the Philippines is just the latest example of this trend.

The multipolar future has gradually reduced the role of the United States in the world, primarily in reaction to her aggression seeking to achieve global domination. The constant quest for planetary hegemony has pushed nations who were initially western partners to reassess their role in the international order, passing slowly but progressively into the opposite camp to that of Washington.

The consequences of this process have sealed the destiny of the United States, not only as a response to her quest for supremacy but also because of her efforts to maintain her role as the sole global superpower. As noted in previous articles, during the Cold War the aim for Washington was to prevent the formation of a union between the nations of the Heartland, who could then exclude the US from the most important area of ​​the globe. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, sights were set on an improbable quest to conquer the Heartland nations with the intent of dominating the whole world. The consequences of this miscalculation have led the United States to being relegated to the role of mere observer, watching the unions and integrations occurring that will revolutionize the Eurasian zone and the planet over the next 50 years. The desperate search to extend Washington's unipolar moment has paradoxically accelerated the rise of a multipolar world.

With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes.

But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination. Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive, as UN aid agencies are warning, then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The Saudi coalition which includes Emirati forces and foreign mercenaries as well as remnants from the previous regime (which the Western media mendaciously refer to as “government forces”) is fully backed by the USA, Britain and France. This coalition says that by taking Hodeida it will hasten the defeat of Houthi rebels. But to use the cutting off of food and other vital aid to civilian populations as a weapon is a blatant war crime. It is absolutely inexcusable. This past week an emergency session at the UN Security Council made the lily-livered call for the port city to remain open. But it stopped short of demanding an end to the offensive being led by Saudi and Emirati forces against Hodeida, which is the second biggest strong hold for Houthi rebels after the capital Sanaa. The port city’s population of 600,000 is at risk from the heavy fighting underway, including air strikes and naval bombardment, even before food, water and medicines supply is halted. Since the Security Council meeting was a closed-door session, media reports did not indicate which members of the council voted down the Swedish call for an immediate end to hostilities. However, given that three permanent members of the council, the USA, Britain and France, are militarily supporting the Saudi-led offensive on Hodeida, one can assume that these states blocked the call for a cessation.

As the horror of Hodeida unfolds, Western media are reporting with a strained effort to white wash the criminal role of the American, British and French governments in supporting the offensive. Western media confine their focus narrowly on the humanitarian plight of Hodeida’s inhabitants and the wider Yemeni population. But the media are careful to omit the relevant context, which is that the offensive on Hodeida would not be possible without the crucial military support of Western governments. If the Western public were properly informed, the uproar would bean embarrassing problem for Western governments and their servile news media.

What isnotable in the Western media reportage is the ubiquitous descriptor when referring tothe Houthi rebels. Invariably, they are described as “Iran-backed”. That label isused to implicitly “justify” the Saudi and Emirati siege of Hodeida “because” the operation is said to be part of a “proxy war against Iran”. The BBC, France 24, CNN,Deutsche Welle, New York Times and Washington Post are among media outlets habitually practicing this mis-information on Yemen. Both Iran and the Houthis have said that there is no military linkage. Granted, Iran politically and diplomatically supports the Houthis, and the Yemeni population generally, suffering from the war. The Houthis share a common Shia Muslim faith as Iran, but that is a farcry from military involvement. There is no evidence of Iran being militarily involved in Yemen. The claim of a linkage reliesheavily on assertion by the Saudis and Emiratis which is peddled uncritically by Western media. Even the US government has shied away from making forthright accusations against Iran supporting the Houthis militarily. Washington’s diffidence is a tacit admission that the allegations are thread bare. Besides, how could a country which is subjected to an illegal Saudi blockade of its land, sea and air routes conceivably receive weapons supplied from Iran?

By contrast,while the Western media repeatedly refer tothe Houthis as “Iran-backed”, what the same media repeatedly omit is the descriptor of “American-backed” or “British and French-backed” when referring to the Saudi and Emirati forces that have been pounding Yemen for over three years. Unlike the breathless claims of Iranian linkage to the Houthis, the Western military connection is verified by massive weapons exports, and indeed coy admissions by Western governments, when they are put to it, that they are supplying fuel and logistics to aid and abet the Saudi and Emirati war effort in Yemen. The infernal conditions in Yemen as a “complex war”, as if the conflict is an unfathomable, unstoppable mystery. Why doesn’t the New York Times publish bold editorials bluntly calling for an end to US government complicity in Yemen? Or perhaps that is too “complex” for the Times’ editorial board?

The “The world’s most dire humanitarian crisis may get even worse. Emirati-led [and Saudi]offensive underway against port city of Hodeida, which is controlled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels.” In its report, the Post did not mention the fact that air strikes by Saudi and Emirati forcesare carried out with American F-15 fighterjets, British Typhoons and French Dassault warplanes. Incongruously, the Post cites US officials claiming that their forces are not “directly involved” in the offensive on the port city. How is that credible when airstrikes are being conducted day after day? The Washington Post doesn’t bother to ask further. In a BBC report last week also lamenting the “humanitariancrisis” in Hodeida, there was the usual evidence-free casual labelling of Houthi rebels as “Iran-backed”. But, incredibly, inthe entire article (at least in early editions) there was not a single mention of the verifiable fact that the Saudi and Emirati military are supplied withbillions-of-dollars-worth of British, American and French weapons.

In the final paragraph of its early edition of the report, the BBC editorializes: “In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and eight other mainly Sunni Muslim Arab states launched a military campaign to restore [exiled president] Hadi’s government after becoming alarmed by the rise of the Houthi group which they seeas an Iranian Shia Muslim proxy. Note the BBC’s lame and unconvincing implication of Iran. This is a stupendous distortion of the Yemeni conflict by the British state-owned broadcaster which, astoundingly, or perhaps that should be audaciously, completely airbrushes out any mention of how Western governments have fueled the genocidal war onYemen. At the end of 2014, the American and Saudi puppetself-styled “president” Mansour Hadi waskicked out by a Yemeni popular revolt led bythe Houthis, but not exclusive to these rebels. The Yemeni uprising involved Shiaand Sunni. To portray Iran as sponsoring a Shia proxy is a vile distortion which the Saudis and their Western backers have usedin order to justify attacking Yemen for the objective of re-installing their puppet, who has been living in exile in the Saudi capital Riyadh. In short, covering up a criminal war of aggression with lies.

In reality, the Yemen war is about Western powers and their Arab despot client regimes trying to reverse a successful popular revolt that aspired to bring a considerably more democratic government to the Arab region’spoorest country, overcoming the decades it languished as a Western, Saudi client kleptocracy. For over three years, Saudi and Emirati forces, supported with Western warplanes, bombs, missiles, attack helicopters, naval power, and air refueling, as well as targeting logistics, have waged a non-stop bombing campaign on Yemeni civilians. Nothing has been off-limits. Hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, funerals, wedding halls, family homes, farms, water-treatment plants and power utilities, all have been mercilessly obliterated. Even grave yards have been bombed. Even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Saudi-led coalition, the supposed custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, has continued to massacre innocents from the air.

Elsewhere in the region, Western politicians and media have mounted hysterical protests against the Syrian government and its Russian ally when they have liberated cities from Western-backed terrorists, accusing Syria and Russia of “war crimes” and “inhuman sieges”. None of these hyperbolic Western media campaigns concerning Syria has everbeen substantiated. Recall Aleppo? East Ghouta? The Syrian people have gladly returned to rebuild their lives now in peace under Syrian government protection after the Western terror proxies were routed. Western media claims about Syria have transpired to be outrageous lies, which have been hastily buried by the media as if they were never told in the first place. Yet in Yemen there is an ongoing, veritable genocidal warfully supported by Western governments. The latest barbarity is the siege of Hodeida with the callous, murderous objective offinally starving a whole population into submitting to the Western, Saudi, Emirati writ for dominating the country. This is Nuremberg-standard capital crimes. With no exaggeration, Western news media are a Goebbels,like propaganda ministry, par excellence, whose duty is to white wash genocide conducted by their governments. The barefaced lies and sly omissions being told about Yemen is one more reason among many reasons why the Western media have forfeited any vestige of credibility. They are serving as they usually do, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria among others, as accomplices in an epic war crime against Yemen.

Americans bombed Syria again just as Russia had finally defeated the terrorist groups armed by USA and Saudi Arabia. List of 27 bombed nations show that Millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support or indifference of ordinary Americans, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to. So, ‘exceptionalist’ Americans in military uniform have bombed Syria again. They bombed Syria again just as the Syrian army with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah had finally, after seven years, defeated the terrorist groups, which had heavy weaponry and Toyota trucks supplied to them by United States and Saudi Arabia. The terrorist groups destroyed much of the country and caused the death of some 350,000 Syrian men, women and children. Many Syrians had their heads cut off by the fanatic terrorists. It has been an open secret that Americans and Saudi Arabians have been funding and arming them for some seven years.

No sense in paying attention to the West’s criminal media propagated pretexts for the US government and other Western Colonial Powers ordering their airmen to bomb and invade former colonies. It is now documented history that in each case the publicly announced and promoted pretext has been either a blatant lie or an absurdity.

Absurdities and lies notwithstanding, every genocidal action performed by the GIs of superpower USA, has had all the Caucasian populated nations of the world, to one degree or another, in solidarity with USA, or looking the other way in tacit acquiescence. Meanwhile, Mr. & Mrs. America have been watching their sons and daughters in uniform go off to bomb smaller and poorer nations than their own and be acclaimed as heroic. American attitudes have been media altered from what this writer was taught as a child some seventy-five years ago. Back then when we saw a fight, we’d cheer for the little guy, and that bully on the block slapping around kids half his size made us angry. This archival research peoples historian thought it might be an enlightening reminder of similar unjust bullying for some readers, especially readers in nations that have suffered being bombed by Americans in uniform, to scroll down a list of all the smaller nations Americans have bombed since the Second World War.

Look into any of these regime change bombings upon innocent populations by GI sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. America, and it becomes clear that the defenders of their small but beloved countries are the real heroes facing American high tech missile weaponry and air power that can high altitude carpet bomb, strafe the ground and release fiery clouds of napalm. The insane upside down version of history propagated on American mainstream media internationally via satilite will eventually be exposed for the evil insanity that it is. With the rise in economic power of Chinese civilization, the rapid increase of populations of the victimized Third World, and personal communication technology racing forward, new sources of information will soon be available. But why wait for honest media from the victim nations for enlightenment. Your author has included a little extra history of unlawful bombing events that have received little attention both in criminal media and independent and alternate media. In the list, the name of the nation bombed is followed by the population of that nation at the time of earliest unlawful bombing committed by Americans. The nations of smallest populations are at the top of the list.

Grenada population 100,000

1983 invasion, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, used, besides bombing, a parachute drop. There were Marine landings from Navy warships. Grenada had its Marxist government overthrown. During the American led coalition offensive in the Persian Gulf War, American, and American led Canadian, British and French aircraft bombed retreating Iraqi military personnel attempting to leave Kuwait on the night of February 26–27, 1991, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of vehicles and an enormous death toll, including refugees trying to flee Kuwait. Between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were hit or abandoned on the main Highway 80 north of Al Jahra, Kuwait, thereafter dubbed ‘Highway of Death’. Several hundred more littered Highway 8 to Basra.

Laos population 2.5 million

USA made Laos the most bombed nation per capita in the history of world , bombing was initiated by President Eisenhower and continued until 1975. It failed to suppress communism. Laos has a communist party run government.

Nicaragua population 3.5 million

The Reagan administration authorized the CIA to organize, fund, arm and train remnants of defeated dictator Somoza’s National Guard. The CIA run army operated out of camps in the neighboring countries of Honduras Costa Rica. It engaged in a systematic campaign of terror amongst the rural Nicaraguan population to disrupt the social reform projects of the Sandinista revolutionary government, destroying health centers, schools, and cooperatives. Murder, rape, and torture occurred on a large scale in contra-dominated areas. The United States also carried out a campaign of economic sabotage, and disrupted shipping by planting underwater mines in Nicaragua’s port of Corinto, an action condemned by the International Court of Justice as illegal. The International Court of Justice, in Nicaragua v. United States in 1984, found, “the United States of America was under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by certain breaches of obligations under customary international law and treaty-law committed by the United States of America”. During the war between the contras and the Sandinistas, about 30,000 people were killed.

Lebanon population 2.7 million

In the fall of 1983, President Reagan dispatched the battleship New Jersey to Lebanon, authorizing naval gunfire and airstrikes. On December 4, 1983, the Syrians shot down two U.S. planes, and held one of the pilots, Lt. Robert Goodman, prisoner until releasing him to Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson.

Bosnia and Herzegovina population 3.8 million

In 1995, in the air campaign code named Deliberate Force, 3,515 sorties were flown and a total of 1,026 bombs were dropped on 338 Bosnian Serb targets located within 48 complexes. The US and other NATO aircraft involved in the campaign operated from Aviano Air Base, Italy, and from the U.S. aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS America in the Adriatic Sea. (The German Luftwaffe saw action for the first time since 1945 during Operation Deliberate Force.)

Guatemala population: less than 4 million

On 27 June 1954, a CIA Lockheed P-38M Lightning attacked Puerto San José and dropped napalm bombs on the British cargo ship, SS Springfjord, which was being loaded with Guatemalan cotton and coffee. CIA chosen regime change leader Castillo Armas began intensive aerial attacks, with the extra planes that President Eisenhower had approved. The brutal coup was widely condemned in Europe and led to decades of genocidal dictatorships.

Panama population 4.1 million

United States Bombing and Invasion of Panama, code named Operation Just Cause occurred between mid-December 1989 and late January 1990.) Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark estimated that 3,000 Panamanians died. Many sections of the city’s slums were destroyed.

Dominican Republic population 4.1 million

Bombing began on April 28, 1965. 42,000 American troops invaded the Dominican Republic. Dominicans were seen to be becoming insufficiently anti-Castro and anti-communism.

El Salvador population 4.9 million

In 1985, in El Salvador, a U.S. civilian pilot died on an CIA intelligence mission that ended in a crash on the side of a volcano near San Salvador. In 1983, US Army Sgt. Jay T. Stanley was wounded by gunfire while piloting a helicopter on a mission to establish an airborne communications link with a U.S.-trained rebel battalion in El Salvador. Civil war is of course the ubiquitous strategy of capitalist colonial imperialism. The United States provided huge amounts of military aid to the government of El Salvador during the Carter and Reagan administrations. By May 1983, US officers took over positions in the top levels of the Salvadoran military, were making critical decisions and running the war.

Cambodia population 6 million

On March 18, 1969, the United States began its Operations Menu and Freedom Deal, a four year long secret carpet-bombing campaign in the skies of Cambodia, devastating the countryside and causing socio-political upheaval that eventually led to the installation of the Pol Pot regime.

Libya population 6 million

2011 massive missile strikes and bombing by Americans and NATO nations military acted as an air force for the armed terrorists made in criminal media to appear as ordinary citizens in uprising fighting the Libyan Army and militias. Three months before the assassination of Gaddafi, Gaddafi addressed a wildly pro Gaddafi and pro Socialist Libya demonstration by an near million Libyans with a mile long green flag while British and French planes bombed Tripoli. This was simply not reported in Western media as NATO warplanes finished off the Libyan Army and militias. After the total destruction of prosperous Libya, murderous infighting between the terrorists themselves and also against pro-Gaddafi tribes has continued on in what is now a waste land. During the 1960s there were almost continual acts of sabotage, bombings and attempts on the life of the President Fidel Castro during CIA Operations Mongoose. There was Central Intelligence Agency–Mafia collusion. The CIA conspired with a Chicago gangster described as “the chieftain of the Cosa Nostra and the successor to Al Capone” in a bungled 1960 attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist revolution, according to classified documents published by the agency. The Chicago ‘Outfit’ was to be given access to its former casinos if it helped overthrow Fidel Castro. In 1976, CIA contacts blew up a Cuban passenger plane killing everyone on board including the Cuban Olympic Fencing Team. Serbia (Yugoslavia) population, including

Kosovo, 8.7 million

The USA 1999 bombing was code named Noble Anvil. A group of economists from the G17 Plus party has estimated the total damages to have been about 29.6 billion dollars”. The U.S. was the dominant member of the coalition against Yugoslavia, although other NATO members were involved. During the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. “Dual-use” targets, used by civilians and military, were attacked; the targets included bridges across the Danube, factories, power stations, telecommunications facilities, headquarters of Yugoslavian Leftists, a political party led by Milošević’s wife, and the Avala TV Tower. The Yugoslavian government gave estimates of between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian deaths

Somalia population 10.5 million

More than 15 years of US genocidal interventions have caused great starvation, for US led war on the popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government made famine relief nearly impossible. The dis and misinforming ploy used in media coverage was that the Islamic Courts Union government would hide Islamists wanted by US for questioning about US Embassy attacks. This pretext was hyped up to justify the next round of carnage by intervention of US military allies Ethiopia, Kenya and finally the hated UN African ‘Peacekeeping Force,’ organized and militarily supported by the US. January 3, 2007 – Ethiopians and U.S. airstrikes forced ICU withdrawal from Kismayo. (US airstrikes hit Badmadow Island; Chief of Staff to the Somali president: “US airstrikes killed 31 civilians.”) US warplanes from aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower were used in strikes. AC-130 plane rained gunfire down on the southern village of Hayo – “many dead bodies and animals.” reported Associated Press. The Islamic Courts’ Youth Wing, al Shabaab (Shabaab = “youth’ in Arabic), with great cost in deaths and casualties to themselves, heroically pushed the heavily weaponized Ethiopians back out of cities. In early December 2008, Ethiopia announced it would withdraw its troops. US kept this war going at great human cost after the US pro warlords conflict destroyed Somalia’s chosen government.

By January, 2013, Al-Shabaab with other militants had taken back cities conquered by the Ethiopians and the hard pressed Ethiopians withdrew when more the UN authorized African Union Force troops arrived. When again the forces of colonialism were on the verge of defeat, US proxy Kenyan Armed Forces were added into the soup of death, to accomplish what the Ethiopians had begun. Al Qaida elements have now long introduced themselves into the fray, and the mayhem overseen by the USA continues.

1993 – the ‘Blackhawk Down’ incident was an earlier brutal US air attack, which included indiscriminate firing down into the roof of a closed market, and ended with the sight of dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu being broadcasted around the world. Hundreds of Somalis and eighteen US Elite Force members lost their lives that day.

Congo population 17 million

In 1964, CIA and US planes bombs overthrew Congo’s first democratic government. CIA was complicit in the the assassination of its popular president, Patrice Lumumba, and the installing of the dictator Mobutu opening a fifty-four year history of constant civil wars that have taken many millions of lives.

Iraq population 18 million in 1991; population 26 million in 2003

Operation Desert Storm in 1991 began with the bombing out Bagdad’s infrastructure, and ended after Gen. Colin Powell had some 100,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers shot in the back from the air. In 2003 invasion Operation Enduring Freedom and subsequent US military action continuing through to 2018, has brought more than 2 million Iraqi casualties.

Sudan population 26 million

In 1998, USA bombed out the only pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan with subsequent loss of lives for lack of critical medicine.

Afghanistan population 13.5 million in 1979; population 24 million in 2001

In 1979, President Carter had CIA invade Afghanistan with Pakistan and Saudi secret services fund, arm and train mountain warlord armies of terrorists – later paid Osama bin Ladin’s al Qaida ed al to attack popular women liberating socialist Kabul government and its Russian defenders. In 2001, Americans blitzed, invaded and murderously overthrew the Taliban government and occupied Afghanistan with a coalition included armed forces of every single nation of Caucasian population in the world.

Iran population 18 million in 1953; 38 million in 1980; 51 million in 1987

The CIA has publicly admitted that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in its Operation Ajax. 200 to 300 Iranians were killed.

In 1980, Operation Eagle Claw failed to retrieve American hostages in US Embassy. One Iranian was killed. His truck was rocketed and destroyed. Operation Nimble Archer was the 19 October 1987 attack on two Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf by United States Navy forces. The attack was a response to Iran’s missile attack three days earlier on MV Sea Isle City, a reflagged Kuwaiti oil tanker at anchor off Kuwait. The action occurred during Operation Earnest Will, the effort to protect Kuwaiti shipping during the American assisted, Saddam Hussain ordered, eight year long Iraqi invasion of Iran. Iran subsequently filed a lawsuit against the United States for reparations at the International Court of Justice. The Court ruled, by 14 votes to two, that the retaliatory attacks by the U.S. Navy against certain Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf in 1987 and 1988 constituted an unlawful use of force. Yemen population 27 million

“U.S. forces have conducted multiple ground operations and more than 120 strikes in 2017,” The U.S. Has Helped Saudi Arabia Bomb Yemen for Almost Three Years. Nawar al Awlaki, age 8, was killed in an airstrike in Yemen ordered by President Trump. Since March 2015, bombings have so far caused more than 14,600 civilian deaths and injuries. Over three million people have been forced to flee their homes due to the bombing and fighting. 22 million people (75 percent of Yemen’s population) need emergency aid, the greatest number in any country in the world. There is famine and 100,000 cases of cholera.

Korea 1950 population 30.2 million (North 11 million; South 19.2)

all 38 cities of North Korea and most cities in South Korea were bombed into utter destruction, USA announced intentions: ‘fight communism.’ In 1905, USA recognized all Korea as Japanese Territory in return for Japanese recognition of Philippines as USA territory. In September, 1945 US Army landed in the south, cut the peninsula in half, overturned democratic Korean government allowed by departing Japanese, declared martial law, flew in Syngman Rhee from Washington, arranged his election as president of ‘independent’ nation of South Korea. Rhee’s secret police and special forces massacred 100,000 communists, socialists, unionists, farmer organizers, members of overthrown government and people who opposed the division of Korea, before the Northern army invaded the South. When North Korean Army unified the peninsula in five weeks (as South Korean Army refused to fight their brothers of the North), US invaded again and bombed all cities flat, both North and South, before the Chinese entered and pushed US forces out of the North. US holds live fire exercises within ear shot of Pyongyang twice a year ever since.

Vietnam population 35 million:

USA dropped more than twice the bombs dropped in all of the Second World War in Europe, Asia and Africa on Vietnam. Millions of GIs took ‘tours of duty’ in Vietnam. In final body count, 15 Vietnamese are found to have died in their own country for each American who died there as an invader. USA announced intentions were to stop communism, but failed! Vietnam is still governed by its communist party today – pointless genocide.

Syria population 24 million in 2010 – (Syria’s population dropped to 17.5 in 2016).

Since 2011, Syria has experienced an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France, UK and Israel. Insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations cross the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department had immediately confirmed that it was supporting the insurgency. As of April 2018, approximately 350,000 Syrians have lost their lives. A monolithic unified slant media cartel restricts reports to ‘indiscriminate killing of civilians by the Syrian government.’ At present, roughly 2,000 American troops live in Syria, despite the Syrian government citing them as unlawful invaders. For months Americans have been bombing the very Islamic invaders, who had been receiving US aid, even heavy weapons for years supplied mostly from Saudi Arabia. This has been an open secret for years, headlined even in UK tabloid newspapers and admitted various times in mainstream media.

Indonesia population 85 million

In 1958, CIA had supplied one pilot and six B-26 bombers to ‘anti-communist’ rebels trying to overthrow the Indonesian Government. American pilot Allan Pope’s plane was shot and Pope accused of bombing the rural village of Ambon and killing many people and was sentenced to death.

Pakistan population 151 million

Pakistan The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the following cumulative statistics about U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan (as of 17 September 2017): Total strikes: 429; Total killed: 2,514 – 4,023; Civilians killed: 424 – 969; Children killed: 172 – 207; Injured: 1,162 – 1,749

Since the end of the unbelievably profitable for Wall Street Second World War, tens of millions of innocent children, women and men have died right in their own beloved countries during unlawful and prosecutable regime change bombings and invasions by Americans. All these tens of millions died so investors in the illegal and genocidal use of US Armed Forces, CIA, sanctions and US media could make money from wars that at the same time brought the investors increased financial hegemony and more opportunity for capital and power acquisition. These millions had to die, murdered right in their homelands, because of the support and/or indifference of ordinary Americans in all walks of life, with enough of them willing to follow orders, even when unlawful orders, to bomb and invade whatever nation instructed to. All this hell and horror for millions of fellow human beings and their children could have been avoided if enough Americans had followed Champion Muhammad Ali, who stated before the US Supreme Court, “No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”

Syria is not experiencing a “civil war.” It is being targeted by both proxy and direct military force organized by the United States and its allies for the explicit purpose of dividing and destroying yet another Middle Eastern nation.

Syria is not experiencing a “civil war.” It is being targeted by both proxy and direct military force organized by the United States and its allies for the explicit purpose of dividing and destroying yet another Middle Eastern nation.

Worse than that, the United States is employing tactics to transform Syria’s heterogeneous multi-ethnic and religious communities into segregated ghettos, and using this as a means of dividing and conquering the nation and even the region. The US is also widely employing the abhorrent tactics of socioeconomic, psychological, and armed terrorism to break the Syrian people completely and absolutely. Libya – besieged, divided, and destroyed by US-led NATO aggression in 2011 – has suffered a similar fate and currently exists as a cautionary example of what may become of Syria should US plans succeed. Libya will no longer contest US special interests geopolitically or otherwise in its current form as a failed, divided, and destroyed state. Similar tactics have been employed in Iraq as well, with much greater success. And even as far as Thailand in Southeast Asia the groundwork is being laid for similar tactics to be employed to divide and weaken states targeted by Washington for regime change – highlighting the global nature of America’s neo-imperial proclivities.

The USA Navy plays violent war games in Alaska, killing fish and destroying the environment. When the U.S. Navy sails its warships into the Gulf of Alaska, they will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet.  Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.

The U.S. military's Alaska Command has branded Emily Stolarcyk "a troublemaker" for insistently pointing this out.  It’s why she’s taken a fierce and unwavering stand for years now against the ongoing training exercises the Navy carries out in the Gulf of Alaska during one of the largest migrations of birds and marine life on Earth. These exercises, which inject tons of toxic materials into the Gulf and use significant explosive ordnance, are once again scheduled to take place just as Alaska's commercial fishing season opens. Located in the state’s massive Chugach National Forest, coastal Cordova is nestled between the glacial-clad Chugach Mountains, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River. Fishing is the heart and soul of the town, as well as the foundation of its economy. A rough and tumble place, it regularly lands on lists of the top 10 American fishing ports, whether measured in pounds of fish caught annually or their value. A fish tax pays for its schools and the upkeep of most of its infrastructure. At least a quarter of its jobs are connected to the commercial fishing industry. "Without fishing, the town wouldn’t even be here," says Stolarcyk, who knows the intricacies of the Navy's plans better than most people in the Navy do, as we tour Cordova’s harbor.

It is impossible to overstate how iconic salmon are here. “What we have in Cordova is one of the last wild places left in the world, and one of the last places on Earth where we still have healthy salmon runs," she tells me.  She’s the program director for the Eyak Preservation Council, an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit based in Cordova, whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat. Her partner is about to start his seventh season as a commercial fisherman. Their apartment building even has a fish smoker. "Salmon bring this town to life, you can feel the energy once the fish start returning, it's palpable," she explains, excitement in her voice. "You can hear the boats coming in and people go to stand on the shore to welcome them back." However, this year, as in 2015, the Navy plans to conduct its part of  Northern Edge 2017 (NE 17), a training exercise, right in her neighborhood. These war games, which occur every other year, include ships, aircraft, ordnance, and the widespread use of sonar across more than 42,000 square nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska. And it is well known that sonar causes injury and death to whales, dolphin, and other marine life.  It has been shown that whales will even beach themselves to escape the noise, which is more than 100 decibels louder underwater than even the loudest rock concert. Thanks to a major lawsuit against them, the Navy agreed to limit the use of certain kinds of sonar in Southern California and Hawaii, due to its impact on the endangered Blue Whale along with other species. But not in the Gulf of Alaska. The Navy's plans threaten an area of the Gulf that couldn’t be more biologically sensitive or rich in wildlife.  Their training area includes a State of Alaska Marine Protected Area, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Protected Area, and both the Gulf of Alaska Seamount Protected and Slope Habitat Conservation areas. Nevertheless, the Navy is requesting permits to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in "realistic" war-training exercises that could release as much as 352,000 pounds of "expended materials" into those waters including, according to the Navy’s own Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), missiles, bombs, and torpedoes.These waters support some of the most valuable fisheries left in the United States and the commercial fishing industry is the single largest private sector employer in the state of Alaska, providing over 63,000 jobs. Nevertheless, the Navy's own EIS claims that fish in the area are at risk of chemical exposures of various sorts because the war games will introduce chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, and ammonium perchlorate, along with numerous other heavy metals and toxic substances, into Alaskan waters.  While the Navy itself is aware of some of the damaging impacts of its exercises, others remain unknown and that service is making no effort to learn what they might be. The precautionary principle of do no harm is clearly not operative here. The Navy's EIS does estimate that, during the years in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 "takes" -- direct deaths of marine mammals or disruptions of their essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On fish deaths, it offers no estimates at all. A partial list of affected species includes blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only about 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun'aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.

Eighteen carcasses of endangered whales were found floating near Kodiak Island within the area in which the Navy had conducted its exercises, attracting national media attention. Statewide, in the year that followed, Alaska had its worst pink salmon fishing season in four decades.  A federal disaster declaration was even issued to give salmon fishermen some relief, deferring the repayment of loans. That year also saw the biggest die off of Murres, a small seabird, ever recorded in the state. Human-caused climate disruption impacts had long been noted across the North Pacific, whose climate-change-affected waters were warming to record temperatures that year. While this obviously played a role in such events, what impact the naval exercises had across the Gulf of Alaska remains largely unknown, in part because the Navy refused in 2015 -- as it will again this year -- to allow independent observers on its ships or to conduct follow-up studies focused on how their war games impacted the environment and marine life. Local opposition is strong, as 10 Alaskan communities have passed resolutions requesting that the Navy move the timing and location of Northern Edge 2017 and all future training events to the fall or winter months and further offshore to minimize their impact on fisheries and migrations. Furthermore, the mayors of Cordova, Girdwood, Tenakee Springs, and Valdez sent letters to Senator Murkowski, requesting that she ask the Navy to relocate NE 17.  The senator, hardly a critic of the military, nonetheless wrote the secretary of the Navy last September to "express concern over the manner in which the Navy is approaching its participation in Northern Edge 2017," and called a lack of naval public affairs guidance "extremely troubling." The late afternoon sun is just beginning to hint at the evening to come as she stares out into the waters of the Gulf, takes several deep breaths, and says, “We have to defend our lifestyle here, because if we don't do it, who else is going to do it? If the Navy destroys the Gulf of Alaska, they can just leave, while we’re the ones who have to live with whatever is left.The Navy Is Getting Away With Murder”. If we don't save the ocean as a potential place to farm, we're not going to be able to feed ourselves in the future.

It’s war in the Gulf of Alaska. The U.S. Navy will engage in military maneuvers and possibly drop bombs, launch torpedoes and missiles, and engage in activities that stand a significant chance of poisoning those once-pristine waters, while it prepares for future battles elsewhere on the planet. Think of it as a war against wildlife, an assault on the environment and local coastal communities.

And call it irony or call it American life in 2018, but the U.S. military’s Alaska Command will brand you “a troublemaker” for insistently pointing this out. In a state where such a phrase is the equivalent of an obscenity, some have bluntly called you “anti-military.” The office of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski will say you are a “rabble-rouser,” while a Kodiak Assembly member labeled you as being “just silly.”

For a resident of the tiny fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, the most radical rabble-rousing thing about "you" may be the passion with which you love this region of the planet in all its majesty. It’s why we are taken a fierce and unwavering stand for years now against the ongoing training exercises the Navy carries out in the Gulf of Alaska during one of the largest migrations of birds and marine life on Earth. These exercises, which inject tons of toxic materials into the Gulf and use significant explosive ordnance, are once again scheduled to take place just as the next Alaska’s commercial fishing season opens.

Located in the state’s massive Chugach National Forest, coastal Cordova is nestled between the glacial-clad Chugach Mountains, Prince William Sound, and the Copper River. Fishing is the heart and soul of the town, as well as the foundation of its economy. A rough and tumble place, it regularly lands on lists of the top 10 American fishing ports, whether measured in pounds of fish caught annually or their value. A fish tax pays for its schools and the upkeep of most of its infrastructure. At least a quarter of its jobs are connected to the commercial fishing industry. Without fishing, the town wouldn’t even be here, who knows the intricacies of the Navy’s plans better than most people in the Navy do, as we tour Cordova’s harbor. It is impossible to overstate how iconic salmon are here. What people have in Cordova is one of the last wild places left in the world, and one of the last places on Earth where we still have healthy salmon runs.Salmon bring this town to life, you can feel the energy once the fish start returning, it’s palpable. You can hear the boats coming in and out of the harbour. However, the Navy plans to conduct its part of Northern Edge 2017), a training exercise. These war games, which occur every other year, include ships, aircraft, ordnance, and the widespread use of sonar across more than 42,000 square nautical miles of the marine environment of the Gulf of Alaska. And it is well known that sonar causes injury and death to whales, dolphin, and other marine life. It has been shown that whales will even beach themselves to escape the noise, which is more than 100 decibels louder underwater than even the loudest rock concert. Thanks to a major lawsuit against them, the Navy agreed to limit the use of certain kinds of sonar in Southern California and Hawaii, due to its impact on the endangered Blue Whale along with other species. But not in the Gulf of Alaska. The Navy’s plans threaten an area of the Gulf that couldn’t be more biologically sensitive or rich in wildlife. Their training area includes a State of Alaska Marine Protected Area, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Protected Area, and both the Gulf of Alaska Seamount Protected and Slope Habitat Conservation areas. Nevertheless, the Navy is requesting permits to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in “realistic” war-training exercises that could release as much as 352,000 pounds of “expended materials” into those waters including, according to the Navy’s own Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), missiles, bombs, and torpedoes. These waters support some of the most valuable fisheries left in the United States and the commercial fishing industry is the single largest private sector employer in the state of Alaska, providing over 63,000 jobs. Nevertheless, the Navy’s own EIS claims that fish in the area are at risk of chemical exposures of various sorts because the war games will introduce chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, and ammonium perchlorate, along with numerous other heavy metals and toxic substances, into Alaskan waters. According to the EIS, “Little is known about the very important issues of nonmortality damage in the short and long-term, and nothing is known about the effects on behaviour of fish.” It adds that “potential effects” include “death or damage” and that “fish not killed or driven from a location by an explosion might change their behavior, feeding pattern, or distribution.”

While the Navy itself is aware of some of the damaging impacts of its exercises, others remain unknown and that service is making no effort to learn what they might be. The precautionary principle of do no harm is clearly not operative here. The Navy’s EIS does estimate that, during the years in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 “takes”, direct deaths of marine mammals or disruptions of their essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On fish deaths, it offers no estimates at all.

A partial list of affected species includes blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only about 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun’aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities. Alaska has witnessed the single largest whale mortality event ever to occur in its waters. Eighteen carcasses of endangered whales were found floating near Kodiak Island within the area in which the Navy had conducted its exercises, attracting national media attention. Statewide, in the year that followed, Alaska had its worst pink salmon fishing season in four decades. A federal disaster declaration was even issued to give salmon fishermen some relief, deferring the repayment of loans. That year also saw the biggest die off of Murres, a small seabird, ever recorded in the state. Suddenly, Councilman Kyle Crow speaks up, questioning the threat of toxic wastes. “I know about how hazardous waste is defined and I’ve seen folks declare a block of concrete with a chip of paint on it as hazardous waste.” A chart taken from the Navy’s environmental impact statement is indicating that more than five tons of toxic materials has been introduced into the fertile fishing areas of the Gulf each time the Navy conducted a training event.

The dangers of the Navy’s use of sonar, comparing theirs to what he uses on his own fishing boat. The Navy’s sonar generates audible blasts up to 235 decibels, humans begin to suffer hearing damage at 85 decibels, that travel for thousands of miles across the ocean. Cordova is the image of what coastal Alaska once was. There are no cruise ships and the fishing industry still dominates the town, although some of its fisheries were wiped out in 1989 when the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled at least 11 million gallons of crude oil and they have never recovered. Anyone trying to consume seafood knows how fragile everything is and is very concerned about what is going to happen to it because it’s part of their everyday life. Cordova is very much in opposition to the training especially when the salmon and the rest of the sea life in the Gulf aren’t at their height. It’s a food web and if salmon get tested and show contaminants from the Navy, everything is at stake. There are safer places for these Navy drills to happen. They need to be conscientious about what they are affecting.

Proven US aliance lying over chemical weapons attack and Trump pretext for destruction of Syria.The Russian and Syrian denials are true if they are innocent and lies if they are guilty of the suspected chemical weapons attack that killed 90 people including 30 children in Syria. However Trump, US and US Alliance certitude over Russian and Syrian guilt is clear, proven, warmongering lying in the absence of findings from expert and independent investigators. Meanwhile a mass murdering, child-killing Trump continues to make endless war on famine-wracked Somalia and Yemen where half of the starving populations of 11.2 million and 27.9 million, respectively, are children.

From 2011, in a process of egregious state terrorism and state-sponsored non-state terrorism, the US, UK, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Apartheid Israel, Jordan and Turkey have variously backed rebellion against the Syrian Government under Bashar al-Assad by increasingly jihadi-dominated Sunni Syrian rebels that include the Free Syrian Army and jihadi groups like Al-Nusrah. The secular and democratic Kurds, violently opposed by a decreasingly secular and decreasingly democratic Turkey, have contained the Turkey-facilitated IS (Islamic State) in the north. The fanatical and barbarous Sunni jihadi IS (that was generated by the genocidal and war criminal US Alliance invasion of Iraq and has been variously covertly supported by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Apartheid Israel and Turkey) dominates the eastern half of Syria but now faces inevitable eventual destruction in Iraq by US Alliance, Iranian and Iraqi forces and in Syria by everybody. Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah support has been crucial for the survival of the Syrian Government which is now dominant in the western half of Syria through control of the 3 biggest cities, Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. The US Alliance-backed Syrian Genocide has been associated so far with 0.5 million violent deaths, a comparable number of deaths from war-imposed deprivation, and 11 million refugees, 6 million of whom are Internally Displaced Persons. Syria is presently subdivided into

(a) the Apartheid Israel-occupied Golan Heights,

(b) Rebel- and non-IS jihadi-ruled areas,

(c) Syrian Government-ruled areas,

(d) Kurdish-ruled areas, and

(e) IS-ruled areas.

With the defeat of IS, Syria now has a chance under Assad or a like-minded leader of reverting to its former unitary existence. However a re-unified Syria is opposed by a Zionist-subverted US and Apartheid Israel that want the destruction of Syria by Balkanization for reasons connected with divide-and-rule hegemony, gas and oil exploitation and distribution plans, and, Apartheid Israeli need for water. Trump’s escalation of the Syrian crisis to a pre-WW3 level over 30 murdered children is simply a pretext for intervention to trump and cripple Russian-backed Syrian re-unification as discussed below.

1. Alleged chemical weapons use as a pretext for US Alliance invasion, conquest and Balkanization of Syria. The US Alliance would like a “free fly zone” in Syria that would enable destruction of Syria (formerly the most religiously tolerant country in the Middle East) [3] just as a UN-permitted “free fly zone” enabled the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance destruction of Libya (formerly the most prosperous country in Africa). In 2013 the US Alliance used alleged Syrian Government use of poison gas in the Ghouta atrocity as the basis for demanding formal UN green-lighting of US Alliance intervention. However this move was thwarted by Russian intervention that forced the Syrian Government to hand over such weapons for destruction and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), noting that it is clear that both the US Alliance-backed Rebels as well as the Syrian Government had access to such weapons.

Presently 192 states, including Syria, have signed the CWC but genocidal, serial war criminal Apartheid Israel has signed but not ratified it, and Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan have not signed. One notes that chemical weapons have been seen as a “poor man’s weapon of mass destruction” and nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel has an arsenal of up to 400 nuclear weapons. 5 UN member countries have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) , of which 4 have nuclear weapons (India, Apartheid Israel, Pakistan and North Korea) ( South Sudan has also not signed). Egypt’s refusal to sign the CWC is directly connected with nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT. The recent suspected chemical weapons atrocity in Syria (at Khan Sheikhoun near Idlib with 90 killed, including 30 children) has been used as a pretext for a massive and war criminal US attack on Syria, and for further attacks, and renewed US calls for the removal of Bashar al-Assad (regime change). The US actions, threats and demands have been supported by the US Alliance with the endlessly warmongering, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist, US lackey Australian Government and Opposition united in their support for the US position (in contrast, the humane Australian Greens have been quite sceptical and have suggested the US attack was for domestic political reasons). The Syrian Government and the Russians deny the alleged use of chemical weapons.

2. Syrian Rebel and jihadi possession of chemical weapons.

Unlike the CMC signatory Syrian Government, the US Alliance-backed non-state Rebels are not bound by the CMC and indeed are evidently in possession of chemical weapons. Thus back in 2013 Carla Del Ponte (formerly Switzerland’s attorney general, prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and a member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria) indicated that there was evidence that rebel groups had access to sarin nerve gas: “According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated … I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition”.

Obviously, in the absence of conclusions from an expert, independent inquiry the world does not yet know who was responsible for the alleged chemical gas attack that killed about 90 people including about 30 children in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the Idlib region of north-western Syria. Trump and many US Alliance lackeys immediately and unequivocally blamed the Syrians for using chemical weapons. However the Syrians and Russians have suggested that the chemical incident arose because of the bombing of a Rebel/jihadi warehouse containing chemical weapons. A search of the UK BBC and the Australian ABC (the Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) reveals that the phrase “suspected chemical attack” is widely and indeed properly used by both media. UK Labour Party leader and Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, demanded independent verification: “Unilateral military action without legal authorisation or independent verification risks intensifying a multi-sided conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people.”

4. Cui bono & Means, Opportunity and Motive (MOM) – Rebels and jihadis had means and opportunity, benefited immensely from the gas attack disaster, and may have been responsible.

The Syrians have suffered immensely from this attack whereas the Rebels/jihadis have benefited enormously. The Rebels/jhihadis had opportunity and had access to chemical weapons whereas the Syrian government surrendered all such weapons in its possession for US-monitored destruction after a similar gas attack incident at Ghouta in 2013. The fact is that we no longer know what goals Washington pursued when deciding to carry out these strikes, but it is univocal that they are launched de facto in the interests of Daesh [IS], al-Nusra Front and other terrorists. In this connection, we can only express regret… So far, it can be said unequivocally that these strikes did harm to the fight against terrorism. With their backs against the wall, they have next to no chance of opposing the regime militarily. As President [Donald] Trump’s recent statements show, such actions make it possible for anti-Assad groups to receive further support.

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the chemical weapons attack in northern Syria. Experts suggest it could have been jihadi rebels. Presumably, a deciding factor was an analysis of the chemical weapons used in Ghouta, conducted by a British military lab, which found the gas to be of a different composition than the Syrian army used to have. Beside, why would Assad bring world opinion against him at a time when his continued rule is beginning to be accepted.

The day after US warships rained some 60 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian government airbase, US officials made it clear that this unilateral and criminal attack against an oppressed former colonial country is merely the first shot in what is to be an escalating and widening campaign of American military aggression. The governor of Syria’s central Homs province reported Friday that the missiles killed at least 15 people, including nine civilians. Four of the dead were children. Many more civilians were injured by two of the missiles, which struck nearby villages. Six of the dead were Syrian personnel at the al-Shairat airbase. The missile strike was the first time that Washington has carried out a direct military attack against Syrian government forces since the US and its regional allies orchestrated a war for regime change utilizing Al Qaeda-linked Islamist “rebels” as its proxy ground troops. The attack on the airbase is a direct intervention in that war on the side of the Al Qaeda elements… Washington seized on an alleged incident Tuesday involving chemical weapons in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province as the pretext for Thursday night’s attack. Syria has denied any use of such weapons, and Washington and its allies have presented no evidence to support their allegations in relation to the incident, which has all the earmarks of a provocation staged by the CIA and its Islamist proxies. Nothing unifies America at home and rallies support among its allies quicker than a bombing of a Muslim nation, no matter the ideological, political, and moral justifications about the military option as a first resort before or after the bombing… This is not to imply that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad (2000-present) has been politically and socially just; certainly no more so than others in the region allied with the US against Syria in the civil war started in 2011 and intended to bring down the regime that the US, UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel, [Qatar] and Turkey oppose…. On 6 March 2017, the US hit Syrian Shayrat Airfield with 59 missiles from two ships in the Eastern Mediterranean. The reason given was that US officials “believed” that Damascus was responsible for the use of gas warfare against jihadist rebel targets a few days before where 100 civilians died. The UN Security Council had requested time to investigate the use of chemical weapons to determine what actually took place. Russia argued that Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed in 2014 and that its planes hit a gas chemical weapons site belonging to jihadists, thus releasing the toxic chemicals that killed innocent civilians. Who benefits for the chemical attacks? If one does use some rationality, meaning who benefits from it, the answer is definitely not Assad, and Assad should not be mistaken for either stupid or irrational. The beneficiaries are ISIS and al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria). One of the side line winners as always with U.S. military mayhem in the region, is Israel, a country all our politicians seem to fawn over in spite of their terrible human rights and international law record. Israel would love to have all the rest of the Middle East broken up into fighting little fragments of tribal groups in order that their tribe can dominate the region, its resources, and perhaps find a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian demographic problem. There is no independent evidence and no plausible motive to implicate the Syrian Government. The main sources of this allegation are those working closely with the al Qaeda groups. On the other hand, there is a long history, from 2012 onwards, of the al Qaeda groups using chemical weapons, at time falsely blaming this on the Syrian Army. The Syrian Army certainly has been bombing and killing many hundreds within the al Qaeda groups in Idlib, without need for chemical weapons. Nor does the Syrian state possess such weapons, since the unilateral disposals of 2013 – 2014, which were held as a deterrent against nuclear armed Israel. The US (which was involved in the process) has previously agreed that this disposal was effectively carried out. On the other hand, al Qaeda stocks of chemicals have been discovered several times.

The pretext for the US attack is the sinister and dubious allegation that Assad’s air force used chemical weapons in an attack on a rebel-held town on Tuesday. The claims are dubious, above all, because the Syrian government had no motive to use such weapons, knowing that it would be seized upon to demand that Trump order a direct US-led intervention. The Islamist rebels, by contrast, along with their CIA advisors, had ample motive under conditions in which they are facing complete military defeat. Moreover, the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra militia is known to be in possession of, and to have used chemical weapons… On the other side of the world, an indication of how numerous US allies may respond has been given in Australia. The country’s defence minister was phoned by US officials several hours before the US strikes. Australia has fighter-bombers and other aircraft operating with American forces in Syria and Iraq. Both the [Coalition] government and the main Labor Party opposition have made statements fully endorsing the US strike, though Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would not confirm if the Australian military would join attacks on the Syrian government. We now have the situation in Syria where deception once again trumps reality as the US seeks to gain support for broadening its military campaign to balkanise Syria and redraw the map of the Middle East. Unfounded claims about Assad using chemical weapons are front page news, mirroring similar baseless claims that occurred a few years back and mirroring the lie of WMD in Iraq. Millions are dead in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan as the US and its allies play out a continuation of a modern-day ‘Great Game’. The world is in the grip of a structural war against people, land, economies and ecosystems. It is being waged by organised, institutional criminal interests bent on monopolizing energy, food and violence across the globe. Now the Syrian government stands accused of using a chemical that was disposed of under international supervision. Is the Syrian government that stupid to risk another threat of invasion by using a non-conventional attack?

International Law says that a nation can only invade another country

(a) if it has been invited to do so by that country,

(b) if it or another nation has been invaded by that country, or

(c) if it has been permitted to do so by the UN Security Council, with extensive pre-invasion dialogue being a fundamental requirement.

In this instance, (a) the Syrian Government has not invited the US to invade its territory, (b) the Syrian Government has not invaded the US, (c) the UN Security Council has not permitted such a US invasion of Syria, and there has been no extensive pre-invasion dialogue (e.g. of the kind that preceded the illegal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003). Trump and his war-making associates are war criminals in gross violation of International Law and his US Alliance lackeys like Canada, Australia, the UK, France and Germany are accessories to this US war crime. UN has developed instruments of international law to precisely prevent a situation where the most powerful attack the weakest with impunity and to ensure a balance in the world.

The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. Any unilateral invasion of another country, without prior approval from the UN Security Council, is a flagrant violation of international law, hence a war crime.

Unfortunately, the US has been behaving like a bull in the china shop since its annexation of Mexican territories in the 1840s. It’s invading countries, almost non-stop and with impunity from Hawaii to the Philippines, Hiroshima to Honduras, Indo-China to Indonesia, Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and in the process, has killed multiple millions of innocent civilians across the world. Instead of justifying the latest US aggression in Syria, it’s time to condemn it as war crime. The UN should ask US to apologise to Syria, and pay compensation for the illegal attack. U.S. Policy is so devoid of any compassion that it dehumanizes those we kill and refers to them as “collateral damage”. When Trump says he did it to protect babies, we need to ask which babies. The babies starving to death in Somalia, the babies we kill with drones, the babies in Yemen, the babies who drown while escaping a war zone, the Palestinian babies, the babies who are refugees that we will not allow in our country. No, President Trump does not care about the beautiful babies. That is not why he used Tomahawk Missiles in Syria. The official Korean news agency KCNA quoting an unnamed spokesman for the North Korean foreign ministry: “The US missile attack against Syria is a clear and unforgivable act of aggression against a sovereign state and we strongly condemn this. The reality of today proves our decision to strengthen our military power to stand against force with force was the right choice a million times over. One notes that 28% of the North Korean population was killed in US bombing in the 1950-1953 Korean War, a Korean Genocide with genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention being “:acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

Truth is the first casualty of war. The Russians and/or the Syrians may be (a) telling the truth (if they had no hand in the gassing atrocity) or (b) lying (if they were responsible). However in the absence of a report from expert, independent investigators, Donald Trump and his US and US Alliance supporters are undoubtedly and unequivocally lying by baldly asserting that the Russians and/or the Syrians were responsible because either (a) they do not actually know what happened, or (b) were actually complicit in rebel use of poison gas as a false flag pretext for US military intervention.

The 4th of July is Independence Day for the United States of America and commemorates the 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence for America, the key passage of which is “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Unfortunately entrenched American racism has grossly violated the proposition that “all men are created equal” and the worst form of racism involves invasion and devastation of other countries. The US has invaded about 70 countries since its inception and has invaded a total of about 50 countries since 1945. Indeed I have suggested that the 4th of July be celebrated as Independence From America Day. A properly informed World needs to urgently declare a transition from the 4th of July as Independence for America Day to the 4th of July as Independence From America Day.

To be precise, the US has invaded 72 countries (including Syria; 52 after WW2). The list does not include the 1801-1805 US Marine Barbary War operations against Barbary pirates based in Morocco , Algeria , Tunisia and Libya , and also ignores massive US subversion of virtually all countries in the world and US bases in about 75 countries. By way of comparison, over the last millennium the British have invaded 193 countries, Australia 85, France 82, Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25, Apartheid Israel 12 and China 2.

The remarkable thing about American imperialism is that it always requires an “excuse for war” or “casus belli” . The excuses for war are typically pretexts purveyed by remorseless mainstream media lying and in particular by mainstream media fake news by lying by omission. Consistent and monumental American Government and pliant Western mainstream media lying is compelling evidence in itself for the utter fraudulence of the US Government’s 9-11 deception. Numerous science, architecture, engineering, aviation, military and intelligence experts have concluded that the 9-11 atrocity (about 3,000 killed) was a US Government false flag atrocity (with likely Zionist and Israeli complicity) that was used as a pretext for the post-9-11 War on Terror. The US War on Terror (in reality a genocidal US War on Muslims) has, so far, been associated with 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since 9-11. The US-mediated Syrian Holocaust and Syrian Genocide (0.5 million dead, 11 million refugees) is part of a wider and horrendous Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide and a genocidal, Zionist-backed US War on Muslims.

The 9-11 false flag deception that led to the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan by the US Alliance and thence 20 other countries from Mali to the Philippines, must take its place with other excuses for American imperialist wars e.g. defeat of American invaders at the Alamo (seizure of present-day South-western USA, Texas and California from Mexico), the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor (blamed on the Spanish by the Yellow Press; Spanish-American War), the sinking of the arms-laden Lusitania (long-term British denial of arms shipment; US entry into WW1), Pearl Harbor (permitted to occur notwithstanding and US and UK pre-knowledge; US entry into WW2); Korean invasion of their own country (Korean War), the fictional Gulf of Tonkin Incident (US Indo-China War), alleged threat to US students (US invasion of Granada) , General Noriega’s longstanding CIA-linked drug involvements (US invasion of Panama), and false claim of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (war criminal invasion of Iraq by the US, UK and Australia).

Just as there is no report from an independent investigation of the Idlib atrocity proving Syrian Government guilt in this atrocity, so there has been no formal trial of those accused by the lying Bush Administration of the 9-11 atrocity. Indeed the FBI had Osama bin Laden on its Most Wanted List but not for his alleged complicity in 9-11, an allegation that he denied. Osama bin Laden was allegedly killed by US forces in 2011 and his body rapidly disposed of at sea according to the endlessly lying Obama Administration. Further, Western Mainstream media continue to remorselessly lie by commission and lie by omission for a genocidally racist, serial war criminal and exceptionalist America.

Trump’s crocodile tears over Syrian children as he makes war on famine-wracked and starving Somalia and Yemen populations (50% children).

Under Trump the US Alliance is making war in 20 significantly or substantially Muslim countries and the US per se is directly making war in 8 of these countries, namely (West to East) Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The UN reports that 20 million people, half of them children, are now facing famine and starvation in Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. Child-killer Trump is obscenely and unforgivably making endless war in Somalia and Yemen, countries with populations (50% children) of 11.2 million and 27.9 million, respectively, and which are presently ravaged by drought, famine and starvation.

In the 14-year post-9-11 period of September 2001- November 2015, there were an estimated 26.8 million Muslim avoidable deaths from deprivation in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since 9-11 i.e. 26.8 million/14 = 1.91 million avoidable deaths per year. For impoverished Developing countries, under-5 infant deaths are about 0.7 times the avoidable deaths and hence there were 1.91 million x 0.7 = 1.34 million under-5 infant deaths per year in these invaded countries. If 90% of these infant deaths were avoidable then there were 0.9 x 1.34 million = 1.21 million avoidable under-5 infant deaths per year or 1.21 million /365.25 = 3,312 such avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths each day from war-imposed deprivation . War criminal Trump as leader of the US Alliance is killing these 3,300 Muslim under-5 year old infants each day through imposed deprivation just as surely as if he were bombing, shooting or gassing them [41].

The ultimate in racism is invading another country “with intent to destroy in whole or in part”, conduct that is defined as genocide by the UN Genocide Convention. When Trump was elected worried people asked who is next in the American firing line? Now we know, Syria, that Trump now seems to have condemned to de facto Balkanization and endless civil war on the pretext of the Idlib atrocity but without expert determination of who was actually responsible. Who is next after Syria? North Korea, one supposes, as a missile-armed and one supposes nuclear-armed US battle fleet heads for Korea. And then, who is next after North Korea? And after them … ? Of course one can well ask “Why America?” Why not civilized, neutral Sweden, civilized neutral Switzerland or indeed civilized, army-free Costa Rica to police the world? The honest answer to these questions reveals that the US has been invading country after country for over 2 centuries for hegemony and resources and not for “freedom”, “democracy”, “human rights” or the well-being of innocent children.

It is claimed that about 90 Syrians including about 30 children were killed in the alleged gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun near Idlib in Syria. About 0.5 million people have been violently killed so far in the Syrian Civil War and a similar number of Syrians would be expected to have died from war-imposed deprivation. About half of the Syrian population are children and one can accordingly conclude that the US Alliance support for the Syrian Civil War means critical complicity in the killing of 0.5 million Syrian children through violence or war-imposed deprivation. 32 million Muslims, about 16 million them children, have died from violence, 5 million, or imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity.

US President Donald Trump has inherited the war criminal mantle of his blood-stained, child-killing predecessor and is continuing the genocidal and mass pedocidal, Zionist-backed US War on Syria and US War on Muslims. What can decent humanity do in the face of this mass murder of men, women and children?

Trump wants to hand $54 billion more to one of the world's biggest drivers of climate catastrophe. But Trump’s proposal is also dangerous for a less-examined reason: the U.S. military is a key climate polluter, likely the “largest organizational user of petroleum in the world,” according to a congressional report released in December 2012. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability.

Under his plan, the Environmental Protection Agency would be slashed by 31 percent, or $2.6 billion. According to the outline, the budget Eliminates the Global Climate Change Initiative and fulfills the President’s pledge to cease payments to the United Nations’ (UN) climate change programs by eliminating U.S. funding related to the Green Climate Fund and its two precursor Climate Investment Funds. The blueprint also discontinues funding for the Clean Power Plan, international climate change programs, climate change research and partnership programs, and related efforts.

The move comes as no surprise for a president who once claimed that climate change is a hoax invented by China, ran on a platform of climate denialism and appointed Exxon Mobil oil tycoon Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. However predictable, the slashing comes at a dangerous time, as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warn that 2016 was the hottest year on record globally, in the third straight year of record-breaking temperatures. For people across the global south, climate change is already sowing disaster. Worsening droughts have jeopardized the food supply of 36 million people in southern and Eastern Africa alone. But Trump’s proposal is also dangerous for a less-examined reason: the U.S. military is a key climate polluter, likely the “largest organizational user of petroleum in the world,” according to a congressional report released in December 2012. Beyond its immediate carbon footprint—which is difficult to measure—the U.S. military has placed countless countries under the thumb of western oil giants. Social movements have long sounded the alarm over the link between U.S.-led militarism and climate change, yet the Pentagon continues to evade accountability. “The Pentagon is positioned as a destroyer of the environment, war is being used as a tool to fight for extractive corporations and we now have a state department that is openly run by an oil magnate,” Reece Chenault, national coordinator for U.S. Labor Against the War, told AlterNet. “Now more than ever, we have to be really aware of the role militarism plays in climate change. We are only going to see more of that.”

The overlooked climate footprint of the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations.

The U.S. military has a massive carbon footprint. A report released in 2009 by the Brookings Institute determined that “the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations.” Those findings were followed by the December 2012 congressional report, which states that the “DOD’s fuel costs have increased substantially over the last decade, to about $17 billion in FY2011.” Meanwhile, the Department of Defense reported that in 2014, the military emitted more than 70m tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. And according to journalist Arthur Neslen, that figure "omits facilities including hundreds of military bases overseas, as well as equipment and vehicles.” Despite the U.S. military’s role as a major carbon polluter, states are permitted to exclude military emissions from United Nations-mandated cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to negotiations dating back to the Kyoto climate talks of 1997. As Nick Buxton of the Transnational Institute noted in a 2015 article, “Under pressure from military generals and foreign policy hawks opposed to any potential restrictions on U.S. military power, the U.S. negotiating team succeeded in securing exemptions for the military from any required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Even though the U.S. then proceeded not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the exemptions for the military stuck for every other signatory nation.

There is no evidence that military emissions are now included in the IPCC guidelines because of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement does not say anything about military emissions, and the guidelines have not changed. Military emissions were not on the COP21 agenda. Emissions from military operations overseas are not included in national greenhouse gas inventories, and they are not included in the national deep decarbonization pathway plans.

Spreading environmental harm across the globe. The American military empire, and the environmental harm it spreads, expands far beyond U.S. borders. The United States probably has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history, numbering over 1000. This military presence brings large-scale environmental destruction to the land and peoples across the globe through dumping, leaks, weapons testing, energy consumption, and waste.

This harm was underscored in 2013 when a U.S. naval warship damaged much of the Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines. The environmental destruction of Tubbataha by the presence of the U.S. military, and the lack of accountability of the U.S. Navy for their actions, only underscores how the presence of U.S. troops is poisonous to the Philippines. This destruction goes hand-in-hand with mass displacement of and violence against local populations, including rape.

U.S.-led wars bring their own environmental horrors, as Iraq's history shows. Oil Change International determined in 2008 that between March 2003 and December 2007, the war in Iraq was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If the war was ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60 percent of all countries.

This environmental destruction continues to the present, as U.S. bombs continue to fall on Iraq and neighboring Syria. According to a study published in 2016 in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, air pollution directly tied to war continues to poison children in Iraq, as evidenced by high levels of lead found in their teeth. Iraqi civil society organizations, including the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, have long been sounding the alarm on environmental degradation that is giving rise to birth defects.

There are some mothers who have three or four children who don't have limbs that work, who are totally paralyzed, their fingers fused to each other. There needs to be reparations for families facing birth defect and areas that have been contaminated. There needs to be cleanup.

The oil industry is tied to wars and conflicts around the world. It has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-half of all interstate wars since 1973 have been linked to oil, and that oil-producing countries are 50 percent more likely to have civil wars. Some of these conflicts are fought at the behest of western oil companies, in collaboration with local militaries, to quell dissent.

During the 1990s, Shell, the Nigerian military and local police teamed up to slaughter people resisting oil drilling. This included a Nigerian military occupation of Oganiland, where the Nigerian military unit knows as the Internal Security Task Force is suspected of killing 2,000.

More recently, the U.S. national guard joined forces up with police departments and Energy Transfer Partners to violently quell indigenous opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a crackdown many water protectors called a state of war. This country has a long and sad history of using military force against indigenous people, including the Sioux Nation. Meanwhile, the extractive industry played a key role in pillaging Iraq’s oil fields following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. One individual who benefited financially was Tillerson, who worked at Exxon Mobil for 41 years, serving the last decade as CEO before retiring at the beginning of this year. Under his watch, the company directly profited from the U.S. invasion and occupation of the country, expanding its foothold and oilfields. As recently as 2013, farmers in Basra, Iraq, protested the company for expropriating and ruining their land. Exxon Mobil continues to operate in roughly 200 countries and is currently facing fraud investigations for financing and backing junk research promoting the denial of climate change for decades.

Oil wealth is central to the global arms trade, as evidenced by the heavy imports of the oil-rich Saudi government. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Saudi Arabia was the world’s second largest arms importer in 2012-16, with an increase of 212 percent compared with 2007–11. During this period, the U.S. was the top major arms exporter in the world, accounting for 33 percent of all exports, SIPRI determines.

So many of our military engagements and wars have been around the issue of access to oil and other resources. And then the wars that we conduct have an impact on the lives of individual people, communities and the environment. It's a vicious cycle. We go to war over access to resources or to defend corporations, wars have a devastating impact, and then the actual use of military equipment sucks more fossil fuel resources.

Some organizations are getting concrete about what it looks like to stage a “just transition” away from a military and fossil fuels economy. ‘No war, no warming’!

At the intersections of war and climate chaos, social movement organizations have long been linking these two human-made problems. The foundation is laid for people to make the connections, and we are trying to find ways to integrate peace and anti-military sentiment into that language. When we talk about solidarity, it is often those communities exactly like ours in other countries that are being harassed, killed and targeted by U.S. military operations. We think it is important to challenge militarism and hold folks accountable who are defending these structures. It’s communities around military bases that have to deal with the legacy of contamination and environmental destruction.

Social security, global affairs and environment, Medicare and health, community affairs, Veterans Benefits and education do not seem to mean anything.

As a result, the American people and those of other countries are suffering numerous deprivations. All those responsible should not let this to continue to happen.

Trump attacks Syria: a gambit and a War Crime. Syria is possibly the most secular country where Shia, Sunni, Maronite, Druze, Christian, atheists, pagans, and women enjoy much more freedom and equal opportunities than anywhere else in the Muslim World. If promotion of democracy and freedom is the prime US objective in Syria, one wonders as to why it is teaming up with Saudi Arabia and its reactionary allies, the thuggish Jabhat al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and last but not least, ISIS! As Fareed Zakaria told CNN, ISIS is a bigger threat to the free world than the Assad regime. “The weaker Assad gets, ISIS becomes stronger”, he spelled out. Despite the sound and fury about Trump’s missile attack in Syria – which amounts to war crime – it’s nothing more than a balderdash, so much so that it’s only going to boost Trump’s sinking popularity among Americans, who are historically great admirers of presidents who invade countries and kill tens of thousands of civilians, in the pursuit of democracy, freedom, and glory for the “Greatest Nation on Earth”.

What’s surprising – and extremely sickening though – is the way Western governments, media, analysts, and some of their counterparts across the world are analyzing the short- and long-term effects of the US missile attacks in Syria. As if only the Assad regime is responsible for human rights violations and war crimes, while the US is just “defending democracy and freedom”, as Americans always claim before and after all major wars and invasions it makes across the world. Sadly, only a handful of US analysts and politicians are publicly criticizing the Trump administration for attacking Syria without a UN Security Council resolution, and without seeking any approval from the US Congress either. However, the Congress approval for invading a country by the US, doesn’t bring any stamp of legitimacy for the crime, in international law. Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran are openly condemning the attack. NATO and EU countries in general, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey in particular are seemingly very happy with Trump as he punished Assad for crossing the redline, but truly defending his own people. Some even praise Trump for not behaving like another Obama, who despite his promise, didn’t retaliate against Assad for crossing the redline by allegedly using chemical weapons against his own people, in 2013. While China isn’t relishing the attack, Russia has announced retaliatory steps against such US attacks. It’s also going to strengthen Syrian air defence capabilities. Iran and Hezbollah have also registered their strong protests against these unlawful attacks. So far so good! However, those who are happy about the so-called “retaliatory attack” against Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapon against his own people don’t know several anti-Assad rebel groups also have piles of chemical weapons, and some of them have already used it in the recent past. On several occasions, neutral UN observers pointed fingers at some Syrian rebel groups, backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in 2012-2013, for chemical weapon attacks. Syrian civil war is a cumulative long-drawn effect of multiple proxy wars in the region, between Washington and Moscow, and Tehran and the Riyadh-Telaviv-Ankara triumvirate, backed by Washington. It’s time to understand, Russia and China along with Iran and Hezbollah aren’t going to give up their interests in Syria. They aren’t going to accept a pro-Western regime there. In Syria, Russia has its strategically very important and only military base in the region. It has more than 100,000 “advisers” in the country. So, Trump’s missile attack in Syria is going to become an episode without any fruit for Washington and its allies. It’s time to reflect on what former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan emphatically stated in June 2012 after the failure of the UN-sponsored peace plan in Syria: “Syria is not Libya, it will not implode; it will explode beyond its borders”. Now, is Syria only a “strategic issue” or a battlefield for multiple proxy wars? No. It’s a small country with very diverse population, who profess different faiths, and are racially multi-ethnic as well. It used to be a peaceful country. Thanks to the influence of the Israel Lobby, America has had a problematic relationship with Syria since 1948. In March 1949, CIA toppled the democratically elected President Shukri al-Quwatly through a military coup d’état, and installed Colonel Husni al-Zaim (the “American Boy”) to power. Zaim legitimized Israel by signing an armistice with it, and allowed the ARAMCO to pipe Saudi oil to go through Syria to the Mediterranean coast. Afterward, America staged multiple military coups in Syria. Eventually, Syria became a self-reliant, free, modern, and secular dictatorship under Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1971 to 2000. His son Bashar al-Assad is the President since 2000. In view of the above, there’s no reason to assume that what America, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and their allies are doing in Syria is anything but promoting democracy, human rights, and secularism. Syria is possibly the most secular country where Shia, Sunni, Maronite, Druze, Christian, atheists, pagans, and women enjoy much more freedom and equal opportunities than anywhere else in the Muslim World. If promotion of democracy and freedom is the prime US objective in Syria, one wonders as to why it is teaming up with Saudi Arabia and its reactionary allies, the thuggish Jabhat al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and last but not least, ISIS! As Fareed Zakaria told CNN, ISIS is a bigger threat to the free world than the Assad regime. “The weaker Assad gets, ISIS becomes stronger”, he spelled out. Despite the sound and fury about Trump’s missile attack in Syria – which amounts to war crime – it’s nothing more than a balderdash, so much so that it’s only going to boost Trump’s sinking popularity among Americans, who are historically great admirers of presidents who invade countries and kill tens of thousands of civilians, in the pursuit of democracy, freedom, and glory for the “Greatest Nation on Earth”. Since the attack has agitated and angered Putin a lot, it could work like a steroid shot for Trump. He can now defend himself better from those who think Putin’s hackers were somehow instrumental in his victory in the Presidential election. Nevertheless, a war crime is a war crime! The US has no international mandate to work as the custodian of any world order. There’s nothing called “US exceptionalism” in any textbook on international law or diplomacy. Any unilateral invasion of another country, without prior approval from the UN Security Council, is a flagrant violation of international law, hence a war crime. Unfortunately, the US has been behaving like a bull in the china shop since its annexation of Mexican territories in the 1840s. It’s invading countries, almost non-stop and with impunity from Hawaii to the Philippines, Hiroshima to Honduras, Indo-China to Indonesia, Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, and Syria – and in the process, has killed multiple millions of innocent civilians across the world. Instead of justifying the latest US aggression in Syria, it’s time to condemn it as war crime. The UN should ask US to apologise to Syria, and pay compensation for the illegal attack.

The Pentagon has formally asked the Trump White House to lift limited restrictions imposed by the Obama administration on US military aid to the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s near genocidal war against the impoverished people of Yemen. The Washington Post reported Monday that Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a recently-retired US Marine general, had submitted a memo earlier this month to Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster, an active duty US Army lieutenant general, for the approval of stepped-up support for military operations being conducted in Yemen by both the Saudi regime and its principal Arab ally, the United Arab Emirates. The memo, according to the Post, stressed that such US military aid would help to combat “a common threat.” This supposed “threat” is posed by Iran, US imperialism’s principal regional rival for hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East. Both the Saudi monarchy and the Trump administration have repeatedly charged, without providing any significant supporting evidence, that Iran has armed, trained and directed the Houthi rebels who seized control of the Yemeni capital and much of the country, toppling the US-Saudi puppet regime of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2014. A major escalation of the US intervention in Yemen will be directed principally at provoking a military confrontation with Tehran, with the aim of weakening Iranian influence throughout the region. Trump himself campaigned in the 2016 election denouncing the Obama administration for being too “soft” on Iran and for joining the other major powers in negotiating what he characterized as a “disastrous” nuclear agreement with Tehran. His advisers, including his ousted first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, and Defense Secretary Mattis, have all voiced bellicose hostility to Iran. The immediate impetus for the call for increased US aid to the Saudi-led war is reportedly a proposed Emirati operation to seize control of the key Red Sea port of Hodeida. The effect of such an offensive would be to cut off the large portion of the country and its population under Houthi control from any lifeline to the outside world. Fully 70 percent of the country’s imports now come through the port. Even before the war, Yemen was dependent upon imports for 90 percent of its food. Aid agencies have warned that a military offensive on the port could tip the country into mass starvation. The proposed US escalation in Yemen coincides with the second anniversary of the Saudi war on the country, launched on March 26, 2015 in the form of an unending bombing campaign directed largely against civilian targets, along with a halting offensive on the ground. The anniversary was marked in the capital of Sanaa and other Yemeni cities by demonstrations of hundreds of thousands denouncing the murderous Saudi military campaign. The Houthis have won support that extends far beyond their base in the country’s Zaidi-Shia minority because of popular hatred for the Saudi monarchy and its crimes. As the war enters its third year, Yemen is teetering on the brink of mass starvation, confronting one of the worst humanitarian crises anywhere on the planet. This war, waged by the obscenely wealthy royal families of the gulf oil sheikdoms against what was already the poorest nation in the Arab world, has killed some 12,000 Yemenis, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and wounded at least 40,000 more. Saudi airstrikes have targeted hospitals, schools, factories, food warehouses, fields and even livestock. Coupled with a de facto naval blockade, the aim of this total war against Yemen’s civilian population is to starve the Yemenis into submission. A US-backed campaign to seize the port of Hodeida would serve to tighten this deadly stranglehold.

In a statement issued Monday marking the beginning of the war’s third year, the United Nations emergency relief agency reported that “nearly 19 million Yemenis—over two-thirds of the population—need humanitarian assistance. Seven million Yemenis are facing starvation.” UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency, reported that roughly half a million children are suffering from acute malnutrition in Yemen, while 1,546 have been killed and 2,450 have been disabled by the fighting. The agency said that the rate of child deaths had increased by 70 percent over the past year, while the rate of acute malnutrition had increased by 200 percent since 2014. The deliberate Saudi bombing of hospitals and clinics has left 15 million people without any access to health care, while the destruction of water and sanitation facilities has led to epidemics of cholera and diarrhea. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 children have lost their lives due to the lack of clean water and medical services since 2015. Washington, under both the Obama and the Trump administrations, has been fully complicit in the war crimes being carried out by the Saudi regime and its allies against the Yemeni people. Washington poured a staggering $115 billion worth of arms into the Saudi kingdom under the Obama administration, resupplying bombs and missiles dropped on Yemeni homes, hospitals and schools. It set up a joint US-Saudi logistical and intelligence center to guide the war and provided aerial refueling by US planes to assure that the bombing could continue round the clock. While a part of this decisive military aid was curtailed for public relations purposes following the horrific October 2016 Saudi bombing of a funeral ceremony in Sanaa that killed over 150 people, the US Navy entered directly into the conflict that same month, firing Tomahawk missiles at Houthi targets based on unsubstantiated charges that missiles had been fired at US ships. Nonetheless, the request by Mattis would mark a qualitative escalation of the US intervention. While the Post reported that an Emirati request for US Special Operations troops to participate directly in the siege of the port of Hodeida was not part of Mattis’s proposal, it went on to warn that the Gulf sheikdom’s military “may not be capable of such a large operation, including holding and stabilizing any reclaimed area, without sucking in US forces.” Indeed, the Emirati army is in large measure a mercenary force, having recruited former members of the Colombian, Salvadoran and Chilean military to do the ruling royal family’s dirty work. The Post goes on to report: “A plan developed by the U.S. Central Command to assist the operation includes other elements that are not part of Mattis’s request, officials said. While Marine Corps ships have been off the coast of Yemen for about a year, it was not clear what support role they might play.” As numerous reports have indicated, the Trump White House has essentially given free rein to Mattis and the US military commanders to conduct armed operations as they see fit. The result has been the more than doubling of the number of US troops on the ground in Syria along with an escalation of the US intervention in Iraq, as well as a request for another 5,000 troops to be deployed in Afghanistan. In Yemen, they are preparing to drag the American people into another criminal war against one of the world’s most vulnerable populations, threatening to hasten the deaths of millions of starving people. The strategic aims underlying this vast war crime are the imposition of US imperialist hegemony over the Middle East through a military confrontation with Iran and the preparation for a global conflict with Washington’s principal rivals, Russia and China.

Forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched a long-anticipated siege of Yemen’s Red Sea port city of Hodeidah Wednesday, in what is certain to be the bloodiest battle since the Saudis began bombing the impoverished Arab country in March 2015. The charity group, CARE International, reported 30 airstrikes in the space of a half an hour Wednesday morning, while warships off Yemen’s coast conducted a naval bombardment. The military operation is being carried out in defiance of warnings from both the United Nations and multiple aid groups that hundreds of thousands of civilians in the crowded city are in danger of losing their lives. They have also warned that the devastation of the port of Hodeidah, which receives an estimated 70-80 percent of Yemen’s imports, including food, fuel and medicine, threatens millions more with starvation in a country where 22.2 million depend on food aid and at least 8.4 million are already facing famine. Carrying far greater weight than these humanitarian warnings, however, was the approval provided by Washington. Over the past week, a report surfaced that the Trump administration had ordered the Pentagon to review plans for a direct US participation in the siege of Hodeidah. This was followed by a perfunctory statement last week, given anonymously by a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, that the US opposed any military action “likely to exacerbate the dire humanitarian situation” in Yemen. On Monday, however, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement described as a “blinking yellow light,” i.e., proceed with caution. He allowed that he was “closely following” the situation in Hodeidah but failed to make any appeal to Saudi Arabia or the UAE to refrain from attacking the city. Instead, he declared: “I have spoken with Emirati leaders and made clear our desire to address their security concerns while preserving the free flow of humanitarian aid and life-saving commercial imports.” And on Wednesday the Wall Street Journal, citing Pentagon sources, reported that the “US military is helping its Gulf allies develop a list of targets,” supposedly with an aim “to minimize the number of civilian casualties.” Similar claims were made in relation to US targeting in the cities of Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, which were reduced to rubble by US bombs and shells, while the number of dead and wounded ran into the tens of thousands.

The siege of Hodeidah, a city of 600,000 people, may well eclipse even those US war crimes. “A military attack or siege on Hodeidah will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” the UN humanitarian coordinator in the country, Lise Grande, warned in a statement on Friday. “In a prolonged worst case, we fear that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything—even their lives.” The British government of Prime Minister Theresa May, which like the Trump administration and the Obama administration before it, has backed Saudi Arabia and the UAE with massive arms sales, was clearly warned in advance by the UAE of the impending siege, passing on an advisory to British-based aid groups late last week to evacuate the city. The Red Cross, Care, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other groups have pulled their personnel out of the port city, as has the United Nations. These evacuations, together with the bombing and shelling, have brought the distribution of food to Yemen’s starving population to a halt. More than 13,000 Yemenis have been killed since Saudi Arabia began its bombing campaign over three years ago in a bid to topple the government led by the Houthi rebels and to reinstall the US-backed puppet regime of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. Hadi, who spends most of his time in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, made a rare trip to the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi Tuesday on the eve of the full-scale attack on Hodeidah. According to the Middle East Eye website, the UAE strong-armed Hadi into supporting the attack in order to lend the military operation a thin veneer of legitimacy. Hadi had previously condemned the UAE for pursuing its own interests in Yemen, backing southern separatists and seeking to secure for itself Yemeni ports and islands in order to control the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, through which most of the maritime trade between Europe and Asia passes. While UAE troops are on the ground—a number of whom have been killed in the operation—and Saudi planes are providing air support, a force made up of Yemeni mercenaries is led by Tareq Saleh, the nephew of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled the country for over two decades before being forced out by a mass revolt in 2012. In 2015, the ex-president had allied himself with the Houthis, but two years later shifted his allegiance to the Saudi-led forces, only to be killed by Houthi militiamen last December. There is little doubt that his nephew is now pursuing his own ambitions to take over the country. A statement was issued in the name of Hadi’s regime declaring, “The liberation of Hodeidah port is the start of the fall of the Houthi militia and will secure marine shipping in Bab al-Mandeb strait and cut off the hands of Iran, which has long-drowned Yemen in weapons that shed precious Yemen blood.” The statement was clearly aimed at identifying the bloody military operation with US imperialism’s aims in the region. Both the Saudi and Emirati rulers and Washington have claimed that the port of Hodeidah has been used by the Houthis to import arms from Iran, but no evidence has been presented to support this allegation. From both Riyadh’s and Washington’s perspective, however, the rule of Yemen by any regime that is not a puppet of US and Saudi interests is unacceptable and would weaken the anti-Iranian axis that US imperialism has forged in the region. Before the siege of Hodeidah began, the International Crisis Group warned that such an operation would be “bloody, prolonged and leave millions of Yemenis without food, fuel and other vital supplies.” “Any attack on or significant, long-term disruption of operations of the port will have catastrophic consequences for the people of Yemen,” Frank McManus, the International Rescue Committee’s country director in Yemen, told ABC News. Jolien Veldwijk, the acting country director for CARE International, called the attack “catastrophic, hopeless and devastating.” She warned, “If the port closed, even for a day, then the number of people at risk of famine will increase because no food will come into the country.” “With this assault, [children] are now suffering more hunger and death,” Anas Shahari, a spokesman for Save the Children, told Reuters. He said that some 300,000 children would lose access to food, water and medicine. Describing the conditions when he visited Hodeidah three months ago, he added, “I could see children who are hungry, children who are on the streets with their ribs sticking out, babies unable to cry because they are so malnourished. That was the situation before, and now it is going to get worse.”

The near-genocidal war against Yemen has been waged since its outset with indispensable aid from Washington, first from the Obama administration, which sold Saudi Arabia and the UAE the warplanes and munitions to slaughter civilians, providing mid-air fueling to their jets to assure round-the-clock bombing and setting up a joint US-Saudi command to render intelligence and logistical support. Since then, under Trump, special operations troops have been deployed with Saudi forces in the war against Yemen and US support for the war on the Yemeni people has been intensified in the context of the preparation for military confrontation with Iran. President Trump placed this on the agenda through his unilateral May 8 abrogation of the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 between Tehran and the major powers. While the Trump administration is portraying the US president’s Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a de-escalation of global tensions, the predatory face of US imperialism finds its naked expression in Yemen, where the White House and the Pentagon are prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions in pursuit of hegemony against its regional and global rivals.

After three years of relentless conflict, it has been estimated that out of a populationof 27.4 million, 22.2 million people inYemen are in need of humanitarian assistance, 17 million are food insecure, 14.8 million lack basic health care, 4.5 million children are suffering malnourishment, while 2.9 million people are internally displaced. As for dead and injured, the toll stands at almost 10,000 and 50,000 respectively. As a result of the conflict, the country is also facing the "largest document edcholera epidemic of modern times." And this epidemic can only have been intensified by the Saudi bombing of a cholera treatment center in the west of the country, causing the French NGO Médecins Sans Frontières to halt their work at thefacility. Yet despite this mammoth scale inhuman suffering, the Saudi-led Sunni coalition's war not only continues, it has intensified with the unleashing of a massive air, land and sea offensive against the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, one of the last remaining points of entry of food, medicines, and other essential humanitarian aid into the beleague red country. According to Amnesty International, Hodeidah'sport is crucial to a country that is 80% dependent on imports to meet basic necessities. Cutting off this crucial supply line would further exacerbate what is already the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Thus the assault on Hodeidah could have a devastating impact for hundreds of thousands of civilians, notjust in the city but throughout Yemen. Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is the poorest country in the Middle East, with a per capita GDP prior to the conflict of just $1,400. Yemen has long been buffeted by the stifling domination of the Arabian Peninsulaby Saudi Arabia. This domination is partly fueling the rebellion of the country's Houthis, for whom President Hadi is a Saudi puppet. This being said, that the insurgency enjoys the sympathy if not open support of the wider Yemeni population is measured in its success in taking control of the country's capital, Sanaa, along with other urban centers such as the port city of Hodeidah.

Taking a wider view, the conflict is considered part of an ongoing regional proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. From the rebellion's outset in 2015, Riyadh has claimed that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, thus justifying their own involvement. Three years on and the Iranians are now certainly involved, supplying the Houthis with weapons and, according to some sources, also military advisers. Thus, Saudi Arabia's intervention in 2015 on the spurious claim of Iranian involvement has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Returning to Western complicity in the carnage and suffering being meted out to the Yemeni people, never has there been a more naked example of hypocrisy masquerading as democracy. Indeed, the long standing alliance between the US, UK and Saudi Arabia takes a scalpel to the oft-repeated boasts of Washington and London when it comes to their self-appointed role as champions and guardians of human rights and democracy. US involvement in this brutal conflict has consisted of direct military air strikes (carried out against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State targets, according to Washington), along with logistical, intelligence, and othernon-combat support provided to the anti-Houthi Saudi-led coalition. This, ofcourse, is not forgetting US arms sales to the Kingdom, consisting of over 50 percent of all US arms exports. Meanwhile, in 2017, the Pentagon confirmed that US ground troops were also present in Yemen, again justified on the basis of being engaged in operations against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS,formerly ISIS).

As for London's role in supporting the Saudi war effort in Yemen, UK arms sales have also been key to the Wahhabi state'sability to project hard power in the region, amounting to £4.6bn (US$6bn) since 2015 alone. As with the US, Saudi Arabia is the biggest market for UK arms sales and has been for a number of years. In 2017, campaigners brought a legal case against the UK government over its sale of weapons to the Saudis, alleging that some of them have been used to kill Yemeni civilians. In 2017, it was also revealed that Britain's role in the conflict has amounted to more than arms sales. A story appeared in the Daily Mail outlining details of hitherto secret military operation, known as Operation Crossways, which involved up to 50 British military personnel training Saudi troops destined to be deployed to take part in the conflict.

In response to this revelation, British Tory MP and former Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell lambasted it as evidence of the UK's "shameful complicity" in the suffering of the Yemeni people. Given the scale of this suffering, it would be safe to assume that all right thinking people share Mr.Mitchell's sentiments. The war in Yemen is a dirty war, being waged by a Western-supported Saudi kleptocracy in the name of clerical fascism. Bertolt Brecht was right: As crimes pile up, they become invisible.

America’s current annual military expenditures are around $1.5 trillion, which is to say, almost equal to that entire global estimate of more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. America’s actual annual military budget and expenditures are unknown, because there has never been an audit of the Defense Department, though an audit has routinely been promised but never delivered, and Congresses and Presidents haven’t, for example, even so much as just threatened to cut its budget every year by 10% until it is done, there has been no accountability for the Department, at all. Corruption is welcomed at the Defense Department. Furthermore, many of the military expenditures are hidden, for instance, by funding an unknown large proportion of U.S. military functions at other federal Departments, so as for those operations not to be officially Defense Department budget and expenditures, at all. The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget is already here.

America’s military expenditures, including the ones he could identify at other federal agencies, were actually already nearly a trillion dollars ($934.9 billion) a year: To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2006, the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available. In that year, the Department of Defense itself spent $499.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the Department of Energy budget added $16.6 billion. The Department of Homeland Security spent $69.1 billion. The Department of State and international assistance programs laid out $25.3 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The Department of Veterans Affairs had outlays of $69.8 billion. The Department of the Treasury, which funds the lion’s share of military retirement costs through its support of the little-known Military Retirement Fund, added $38.5 billion. A large part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s outlays ought to be regarded as defense-related, if only indirectly so. When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2006 total by nearly half again, to $728.2 billion.”

Furthermore, much, if not all, of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. Department of Homeland Security, many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. The Federal Bureau of Investigation devotes substantial resources to an anti-terrorist program. The Department of the Treasury informs us that it has ‘worked closely with the Departments of State and Justice and the intelligence community to disrupt targets related to al Qaeda, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as to disrupt state sponsorship of terror.

But, almost everything there relied upon mere estimates, because the Congress and the President always supply to the public numbers that are sadly uninterpretable by anyone who wants to know what percentage of the federal government is actually military. The ‘Defense’ Department is the only one that’s “unauditable” so that in one of the attempts to audit it is designed to be confusing, uninterpretable and incomprehensible. The magnitude of the problem is further demonstrated by the fact that, of $5.8 trillion of those adjustments that we audited this year, $2.3 trillion were unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid general ledger accounts.

The Real U.S. National Security Budget: The Figure No One Wants You to See. For example, probably fewer than 1% of Americans have even been informed by the press as to what the currently authorized annual federal spending for the ‘Defense’ Department is.

Future generations of U.S. taxpayers will be paying the price for the profligacy of today’s U.S. aristocracy, who receive all the benefits from this scam off the public, and especially off those future generations. But the far bigger losses are felt abroad, in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, where the targets will be suffering the consequences of America’s invasions and coups. Notwithstanding its pervasive corruption and enormous uncounted waste, the U.S. military is, by far, the U.S. institution that is respected above all others by the American people. A great deal of domestic propaganda is necessary in order to keep it that way. With so many trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for, it’s do-able. All that’s needed is a tiny percentage of the huge graft to be devoted to funding the operation’s enormous PR for ‘patriotism’. And this treasonous operation has been sustainable, and very successful (for its ultimate beneficiaries), that way, in the U.S., at least for decades. I have previously explained why specifically military corruption has come to take over the U.S. Government, but not certain other governments. And the result of its having done so has by now become obvious to people all around the world, except in the United States itself. Furthermore, ever since the first poll was taken on that matter, in 2013, which showed that globally the U.S. was viewed as the biggest national threat to peace in the world, a subsequent poll, in 2017, which unfortunately was taken in fewer countries, showed that this negative impression of the U.S. Government, by the peoples in those fewer countries, had actually increased there during the four intervening years. So: not only is the situation in the U.S. terrible, but the trend in the U.S. appears to be in the direction of even worse. America’s military-industrial complex can buy a glittering ‘patriotic’ image amongst its own public, but America’s image abroad will only become uglier, because the world-at-large dislikes a country that’s addicted to the perpetration of invasions and coups. Just as bullies are feared and disliked, so too are bully-nations. Even if the given bully-aristocracy becomes constantly enriched by their operation, economies throughout the world suffer such an aristocracy, as being an enormous burden; and, unfortunately, the American public will get the blame, not America’s aristocracy — which is the real beneficiary of the entire operation. This deflection of blame, onto the suckered public, precludes any effective response from the publics abroad, such as boycotts of U.S.-branded products and services might be. Instead, American tourists abroad become increasingly perceived as ‘the ugly American’. The restored ‘Cold War’ — this time with no ideological excuse (such as communism) whatsoever — could produce a much stronger global tarnishing of America’s global reputation. The beneficiaries, apparently, just don’t care.

The American, British, French tripartite aggression against Syria is a grave international war crime violating article 51 of the United Nation charter, that forbids any state to attack any other sovereign state except in the case of self-defense, or with the consent of a majority of UN members according to chapter seven. Added to this crime is the American crime of threatening to attack another UNSC member nation; considered a crime according the UNSC charter. It is also a crime in the UNSC of threatening to attack Syria even without the Council’s permission, and in doing so, the US dragged the UK and France to commit the crime of attacking Syria under the justification of an alleged chemical attack in Douma. The terrorist sponsored “White Helmet” produced a clearly staged video of chemical attack against children, an act that had been repeated in the past and had proven to be fake. To vindicate itself Syria had invited in and guaranteed a safe passage to inspectors of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to investigate the allegation. Trump’s administration, knowing very well that the alleged chemical attack is fake, and without waiting for the results of the OPCW’s inspectors, behaved as investigators, judges, and executors, decided to attack Syria one day before the arrival of the OPCW’s inspectors. Trump had just announced insultingly that the American forces are just mercenaries for hire. Apparently, Saudi Arabian MBS (Mohammad Bin Salman) had paid not only the US, but also the UK and France during his latest visits to these countries for the attack to happen. The UK and France were enlisted as partners in this crime in an attempt to give the attack some appearance of unanimity.

An American military armada was shipped to the Middle Eastern region, and with the American presence in its bases in some Gulf Arab States and in the Red Sea, an attack on Syrian targets was perpetrated during the early hours of Friday 13th. It was estimated that more than 110 Tomahawk missiles were fired in an attempt to overload Syrian defense systems. Yet Syrian forces were able to shoot down about 71 missiles demonstrating an exceptional defensive military capability. The rest of the missiles hit vacated facilities that had been previously bombed by Israeli forces. Israel had provided the coordinates of these facilities to the American forces. The attack, despite what tripartite had stated and Trump’s empty “mission accomplished” statement, was an utter military failure that had accomplished nothing, and at the same time had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Syrian defensive capabilities. This criminal attack came under the justification of protecting the Syrian civilians from suffering any further chemical attack. The question that poses itself here is: how does the bombing of the chemical stockpiles and the resulting dispersion of these chemicals in the air would protect civilians? Did the American military take into consideration that such dispersion would expose Syrian civilians to chemical danger? One would have doubts whether the American military had carefully thought through this attack, especially when there were reports of opposing opinions in the Pentagon. What are the real goals of the attack? Definitely it was not the alleged destruction of the chemical weapons since there was no precautions about the dispersion of chemicals after the bombing. The disposal of chemical weapons requires tedious safety preparations following intensive political negotiations. It is very well documented that with the cooperation of other countries these three; US, UK and France, had been the major supporters of the terrorist groups attacking Syria. It has been observed that every time the Syrian forces gain an upper hand over the terrorist, an allegation of a chemical attack surfaces. These Western countries would perpetrate an attack, similar to last year’s attack on the Shayrat air base, to sabotage Syria’s victory and to boost the morals of the terrorists. If this attack comes to accomplish this purpose, then it came too late since the terrorists were defeated, had surrendered, and entered into an evacuation agreement with Syrian government.

One may think that this aggression had come because the US found itself out of any political negotiation concerning the future of Syria and wanted to force its presence. Such an attempt had failed since the attack had succeeded only in alienating the US further. This aggression had served only to demonstrate that the American “nice, new and smart missiles” are inferior to the relatively older Syrian defense systems. Russia was so confident of the effectiveness of the Syrian defensive missile system that the Russian forces sat watching idly without any interference as they had warned earlier. Besides, Russia is now supplying Syria with its latest very powerful defensive missile systems including S-300 and S-400 and more advanced military equipment. If the intent of such an attack was to intimidate the Syrians into submission fearing American reprisals, as the US is accustomed in doing to some UNSC member states, then this goal had also failed, and succeeded only in boosting the morale of the Syrian population and strengthening their trust and support to Al-Assad government. Immediately after the end of the attack the Syrians went into the streets celebrating their victory. Previous American and Israeli attacks aimed at strengthening terrorist positions and boosting the morale of what is called Syrian opposition. This attack resulted the exact opposite. The Syrian opposition leaders had already expressed their disappointment of such a frail attack that resulted virtually into nothing tangible. Severe disappointment has also hit the hearts of Israeli leaders, the AIPAC; American Israeli lobby, and some Persian Gulf Arab states especially Saudi Arabia, who were pushing for the bombing of Syrian vital targets including Syrian air bases, ministry of defense, military bases, and even the presidential palace. Although these might have been the initial targets for the American armada, yet the Pentagon’s fear of a possible devastating wider military confrontation with Russia and Iran that would turn the whole region into hell, had led them to limit the attack to mere bombing of evacuated and deserted facilities. Recognizing their military failure US, UK and France went back to the UNSC demanding the Council to issue resolutions to condemn the chemical use in Syria, to form an independent investigation to determine responsibility of chemical attacks, to demand a permanent seize fire and to allow unrestricted shipments of humanitarian aid to all parts within Syria, that would, undoubtedly, include hidden arms delivery to terrorists. In addition to their military war crime they also are demanding to be involved into what they called further political negotiations to be followed to achieve peaceful solution to the Syrian war.

This tripartite criminal aggression, and the failure of the UNSC to condemn it, clearly expose the criminality of the Western countries, and their utter disregard to any international law and to human lives. The complicity for this crime by the UNSC member countries make them partners to the crime, regardless whether are afraid of American reprisal or seeking economic rewards from Trump’s administration. This international body has become useless and obsolete the way it is now. It is unable to protect weaker countries and has not served to enhance world peace and justice but became a tool to legalize the crimes of strong and rich rogue nations such as the US, the UK and France and their Israeli terrorist tool. If this tripartite is allowed to attack one-member country without suffering any consequences, then it would be emboldened to attack any other member country any time it deemed to serve its “ambitions” The long history of these three countries clearly demonstrate their contempt to all international laws and their disregard to international organizations. During the last two decades they had created and armed terrorist groups to lead their own proxy wars around the world, then under the claim of fighting terrorists they instead invade and destroy other countries. They had used fabrications and lies to attack and destroy weaker and smaller countries they coveted their natural resources and their geostrategic locations. US, UK, and France are the real triangle of evil creating and sponsoring terror groups to perpetuate wars.

The United States government has once again shamelessly violated international law. There was no legal or moral justification for launching more than a 100 missile strikes against so-called chemical weapons’ sites in Syria on the 14th of April 2018. Unlike the last strike targeting a single airfield in April 2017 which was also in retaliation for President Bashar Assad’s alleged use of sarin gas against civilians, the US was joined in its assault this time by its allies, Britain and France.The three Western powers claimed that they had strong evidence that the Assad government had again employed chemical weapons in Douma on the 7th of April, killing scores of civilians, including children. If the evidence was so compelling, why didn’t the US President present it to the US Congress and seek its endorsement for military action, as required by law? Why didn’t the British Prime Minister seek approval from her Parliament, instead of getting a Cabinet cabal to endorse her war plan? The French President also erred in this respect. One could go further and ask why Washington did not share the evidence it had with Moscow, Syria’s staunchest protector? Or, with other members of the UN Security Council, apart from Britain and France? Is it because the so-called evidence was obtained from dubious sources — such as the terrorist group, Jaish al- Islam which was fighting the Assad government and in control of parts of Doumaon the 7th of April? Were the White Helmets, a fake civil defence outfit established by British intelligence and funded by both Britain and the US yet another supplier of ‘evidence’? Or as it has happened on numerous occasions in the past, was the ‘evidence’ generated by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence network, in pursuit of its own nefarious agenda ? The source or sources of evidence of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons is an issue that has to be explored thoroughly for an obvious reason. Since the beginning of the war in Syria in 2011, there have been at least half a dozen alleged episodes of Assad resorting to chemical weapons in order to eliminate his adversaries which after independent investigations have turned out to be false flag operations or gross distortions of what had really occurred. In fact, some analysts are of the view that a terrorist group had stage managed the 7th April Douma episode and then put the blame upon the Syrian government to justify foreign intervention. Ghouta in 2013 was also a false flag operation, according to the celebrated investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. Let’s not forget that Syria’s neighbourhood has witnessed some major false flag operations including that monstrous lie about Saddam Hussein’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in 2002-3.

What lends credence to this view about fabricating evidence and false flag operations is the actual situation on the ground. Why should Assad employ chemical weapons when he is on the cusp of total victory over his terrorist opponents and other militants? How does it benefit him? Why should he deliberately elicit the wrath of people everywhere when he is already in a position of strength? Besides, he had surrendered his arsenal of chemical weapons to the UN affiliated Dutch based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2013. This was verified by the OPCW. It was also the OPCW that established some time ago that one of the three facilities destroyed by Western missiles on the 14th of April was in fact a civilian pharmaceutical and chemical research centremanufacturing among other things drugs for cancer treatment necessitated by the embargo imposed upon Syria. With all this as the backdrop, one is not surprised that the US and its allies chose to attack Syria on the eve of the visit of the OPCW to Douma to verify whether, and what type of, chemical weapons were used on the 7th of April. Were the aggressors afraid that the truth about the 7th April episode would expose them? Was the attack a move meant to render the OPCW investigation academic? Given these and a multitude of other questions hanging over the allegation about Assad’s chemical weapons, why were the US and its allies in such a hurry to strike Syria? Before we attempt to answer that question, we must understand that the US and Israel have for decades regarded Syria, together with Iran and the Hezbollah, as the unyielding obstacle to their persistent drive to dominate and control the region. To put it in another language, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah constitute the triumvirate of resistance to the US-Israel Agenda of Hegemony over West Asia and North Africa (WANA). Israel in particular seeks to curtail and if possible crush each of the three for similar and dissimilar reasons. Since our concern is with Syriawe shall examine why the leadership of that country is in Israel’s radar.

For Israel, control over Syria’s Golan Heights is vital for its security. Israel’s notion of security is defined by its ability to control and dominate its neighbours such as Syria and Lebanon. The Golan Heights which Israel captured in the 1967 War was formally annexed on 14 December 1981. It is important to note that it supplies water to Israel and contains oil, gas and minerals. With annexation, Israel asserted its perpetual sovereignty over Golan which to this day international law recognises as part of Syria. To translate its illegal annexation into political reality, Israel has for a number of years sought to oust the independent minded government in Damascus and replace it with a puppet regime. It saw the uprising that broke out in March 2011 in a small township in Syria as an opportunity and backed the rebels. Very soon, the rebels were joined by militants, many of whom were linked to various terrorist outfits. These terrorist outfits such as Al-Qaeda were financed by countries in the region and trained and equipped by groups in WANA and from Europe and the US. It is not widely known for instance that Israel itself has provided arms to seven different terror groups in Syria. By the middle of 2015, Israel and other supporters of these groups within WANA such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey and those outside the region such as the US, Britain and France, were confident that they would be able to oust Bashar Assad, based upon the vast swathes of land and resources that the anti-Assad forces had seized. Realising that its longstanding ally in WANA was in mortal danger, Russia decided to intervene militarily in September 2015. It fortified the Syrian Army, and with the assistance of Hezbollah and Iranian advisers and militias, Russia intensified the fight against terrorist groups in Syria. Within 20 months it was obvious that the tide had changed. The Bashar government, buttressed by Russia, had regained control of most of Syria by the last quarter of 2017. Douma was in a sense one of the last footholds of one of the terrorist groups. With defeat staring in the face of not only the terrorists but also Israel, some other regional players and of course the US and its allies, the latter decided hastily to strike against Syria on the 14th of April.

Defeat in Syria is more than defeat in one Arab state. It portends a significant shift in the power balance in the entire region. Russia may well emerge as the pivot of this change with crucial roles for Iran and Syria and other players. It is a scenario that is totally unacceptable to the US and its allies like Britain and France. Incidentally, all three at various points in the present and the past have been imperialist powers in the region. It is not a coincidence that in all these three countries, Israel and Zionism exercise inordinate influence. Israel has always viewed the US and to a lesser extent Britain and France as the protectors of a power structure in WANA that guarantees its own regional hegemony. It is because Israel and its protectors are now uncertain about their dominance that they have chosen to flex their muscles. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia. Read Striking Syria: The Real Reasons April 16, 2018Page 83 7 Questions About the Syria Airstrikes That Aren’t Being Asked by Richard Eskow in Imperialism, Countercurrents

“Mission accomplished,” says the President. What, exactly, was the mission? And what exactly was accomplished? Donald Trump is being mocked for using this phrase in a tweet to praise what he claims was a “perfectly executed” airstrike against chemical weapons facilities in Syria. This recalls George W. Bush’s egregious evocation of the phrase in 2003 to claim an early end to the U.S. entanglement in Iraq, which is still ongoing fifteen years later. History made a fool of Bush for that proclamation, which was printed on a banner behind the President as he delivered his speech proclaiming an end to the Iraqi conflict on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But Bush’s foolish and lethal incursion to Iraq had the backing of virtually the entire national-security establishment. So did Donald Trump’s bombing attack on Syria, as did the bombing attack he ordered last year. The Costs of Intervention U.S. media, for the most part, reinforce the idea that intervention by the US military is the preferred solution to global conflicts. Some of the same reporters who now mock Trump for saying “Mission Accomplished” cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq. They remember Bush’s errors, but not their own. The media’s job, we are told, is to ask skeptical questions about the people in power. That didn’t happen much in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, and it’s not happening now. Here are the questions that should be asked – not just on the eve of a bombing attack, but every day we continue our disastrous and drifting military intervention in the Middle East.

1. Why couldn’t the military wait for inspectors to do their jobs?

Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international non-proliferation organization, were scheduled to arrive in Douma, Syria on Saturday, April 15 to begin investigating the reported chemical attack on civilians there. The airstrikes took place on Friday, April 14. This is a disturbing echo of the 2003 Iraq invasion. There, too, the United States was unwilling to wait for international inspectors to discover the facts before beginning the attack. Fifteen years on, we know that didn’t work out very well. Why couldn’t the bombing of Syria wait for inspectors to do their work?

2. How do we know we’re being told the truth?

“We are confident that we have crippled Syria’s chemical weapons program,” said U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. That statement was echoed by military leaders. But a report from Agence France Presse suggests that one destroyed building, described by attacking forces as a chemical-weapons facility, was actually a pharmaceutical and research facility specializing in food testing and antivenoms for scorpion and snake bites. “If there were chemical weapons, we would not be able to stand here,” said someone who identified himself as an engineer who worked at the facility. Given our country’s long history of public deception from military and civilian officials, why aren’t we demanding independent confirmation of the airstrikes’ effectiveness?

3.Have strikes like these ever really “punished” a country’s leader – or “sent them a message,” for that matter?

We keep hearing the cliché that airstrikes like these are meant to “punish” leaders like Assad. This time was no different. And yet, it’s unlikely that Assad personally suffered as a result of this attack. So who, really, are we punishing? Then there’s this comment, from Defense Secretary James Mattis: “Together we have sent a clear message to Assad and his murderous lieutenants that they should not perpetrate another chemical weapons attack.” That was also the presumed purpose of Trump’s last missile attack on Syria, less than a year ago. Trump supporters claimed that attack sent a forceful “message,” too – to Assad, to Putin, the Chinese, and others. “With just one strike that message was sent to all these people,” claimed former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka. The situation in Syria did not perceptibly change after that attack. And the day after this latest airstrike, Assad launched a new round of airstrikes of his own. These airstrikes seem more performative than tactical – warfare as theater, but with real lives at stake. There must be better ways to send a message.

4. Why isn’t the full range of U.S. activity in Syria getting more coverage?

Thanks to widespread under-reporting of U.S. involvement in Syria, commentators can complain about “years of unmasterly inactivity by the democracies” with a straight face, wrongly blaming that nation’s disasters on a failure to intervene. In a paragraph that was subsequently deleted from its website, the Washington Postwrote that the latest airstrikes “capped nearly a week of debate in which Pentagon leaders voiced concerns that an attack could pull the United States into Syria’s civil war.” As of this writing, that language can still be found in syndicated versions of the article. We were pulled into that civil war a long time ago. The United States has more than 2,000 troops in Syria, a fact that was not immediately revealed to the American people. That figure is understated, although the Pentagon will not say by how much, since it excludes troops on classified missions and some Special Forces personnel. Before Trump raised the troop count, the CIA was spending $1 billion per yearsupporting anti-government militias under President Obama. That hasn’t prevented a rash of commentary complaining about U.S. “inaction” in Syria before Trump took office. It didn’t prevent additional chaos and death, either – and probably made the situation worse.

5. Where are the advocates for a smarter national security policy?

There’s been very little real debate inside the national security establishment about the wisdom of these strikes, and what debate there has been has focused on the margins. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a senior State Department official under Secretary Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration, tweeted: I believe that the U.S., U.K, & France did the right thing by striking Syria over chemical weapons. It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors. It is illegal under international law. But it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough. In other words: This attack will not achieve any tactical goals or save any lives. And it is illegal – just as chemical weapons attacks are illegal – under international law. It’s illegal under U.S. law, too, which is the primary focus of Democratic criticism. But, says Slaughter, the amorphous goals of “drawing a line” and “saying enough” make it worthwhile, for reasons that are never articulated. Michèle Flournoy, who served as Under Secretary of Defense under President Obama and was considered a leading Defense Secretary prospect in a Hillary Clinton Administration, said: •What Trump got right: upheld the international norm against [chemical weapon] use, built international support for and participation in the strikes, sought to minimize collateral damage — Syrian, Russian, Iranian. •What Trump got wrong: continuing to use taunting, name-calling tweets as his primary form of (un)presidential communication; failing to seriously consult Congress before deciding to launch the strikes; after more than a year in office, still no coherent Syria strategy.

How can a country uphold international norms by violating international law? If Trump lacks a coherent Syria policy, he has company. Obama’s policy toward Syria shifted and drifted. Hillary Clinton backed Trump’s last round of airstrikes and proposed a “no-fly” policy for Syria that could have quickly escalated into open confrontation with Russia. The country deserves a rational alternative to Trump’s impulsivity and John Bolton’s extreme bellicosity and bigotry. When it comes to foreign policy, we need a real opposition party. What will it take to develop one? Commentators have been pushing Trump to take aggressive military action in Syria, despite the potential for military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. MSNBC’s Dana Bash accused Trump of “an inexplicable lack of resolve regarding Russia” – leaving the audience to make its own inferences – adding, “We have not been willing to take them on.” In the same segment, reported by FAIR’s Adam Johnson, Bash complained that “the U.S. hasn’t done “a very good job pushing Russia out of the way,” adding that “we’ve let Russia have too free a hand, in my view, in the skies over Syria.” Her colleague Andrea Mitchell responded that “the criticism is that the president is reluctant to go after Russia.” The Drum Beats On

6. Was “Mission accomplished?”

This drumbeat of political pressure has forced Trump’s hand. He has now directed missiles against Syria, twice. Both attacks carried the risk of military confrontation with the world’s other nuclear superpower. That risk is greater than most people realize, as historian and military strategist Maj. Danny Sjursen explained in our recent conversation. Trump has now adopted a more aggressive military posture against Russia than Barack Obama. Whatever his personal involvement with the Russian government turns out to have been, it is in nobody’s best interests to heighten tensions between two nuclear superpowers. The national security establishment has been promoting a confrontational approach, but they’ve been unable to explain how that would lead to a better outcome for the US or the world – just as they’ve been unable to explain how unilateral military intervention can lead to a good outcome in Syria.

7. Did the airstrikes make Trump “presidential”?

“Amid distraction and dysfunction,” wrote Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan for Axios, “Trump looked and acted like a traditional commander-in-chief last night.” The constitutional phrase, “Commander in Chief,” was originally understood to underscore the fact that the military is under civilian control. It has devolved into a title that confers a quasi-military rank on the president. That’s getting it backwards. The fetishization of all things military is one of the reasons we can’t have a balanced debate about military intervention. Besides, saying that an act of war makes Trump “presidential” – that’s so 2017! Here’s a suggestion: In 1963, John F. Kennedy rejected his generals’ advice to strike Soviet installations during the Cuban missile crisis. Rejecting reckless calls to military action: Now that’s a “presidential” act worth bringing back.

Invading other nations, overthrow by means of a coup, killing people and destroying buildings, and military occupations of foreign countries are what you sell, that’s what you (as a billionaire with a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to the USA, UK and France governments.

Unlike corporations that sell to consumers, Lockheed Martin and the other top contractors to the U.S. Government are highly if not totally dependent upon sales to governments, for their profits, especially sales to their own government, which they control — they control their home market, which is the U.S. Government, and they use it to sell to its allied governments, all of which foreign governments constitute the export markets for their products and services. These corporations control the U.S. Government, and they control NATO. And, here is how they do it, which is essential to understand, in order to be able to make reliable sense of America’s foreign policies, such as which nations are ‘allies’ of the U.S. Government (such as Saudi Arabia and Israel), and which nations are its ‘enemies’ (such as Libya and Syria) — and are thus presumably suitable for America to invade, or else to overthrow by means of a coup. First, the nation’s head-of-state becomes demonized; then, the invasion or coup happens. And, that’s it. And here’s how. Because America (unlike Russia) privatized the weapons-industry (and even privatizes to mercenaries some of its battlefield killing and dying), there are, in America, profits for investors to make in invasions and in military occupations of foreign countries; and the billionaires who control these corporations can and do — and, for their financial purposes, they must — buy Congress and the President, so as to keep those profits flowing to themselves. That’s the nature of the war-business, since its markets are governments — but not those governments that the aristocracy want to overthrow and replace. The foreign governments that are to be overthrown are not markets, but are instead targets. The bloodshed and misery go to those unfortunate lands. But if you control these corporations, then you need these invasions and occupations, and you certainly aren’t concerned about any of the victims, who (unlike those profits) are irrelevant to your business. In fact, to the exact contrary: killing people and destroying buildings etc., are what you sell — that’s what you (as a billionaire with a controlling interest in one of the 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government) are selling to your own government, and to all of the other governments that your country’s cooperative propaganda will characterize as being ‘enemies’ — Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, etc. — and definitely not as being ‘allies’, such as are being characterized these corporations’ foreign markets: Saudi Arabia, EU-NATO, Israel, etcetera. In fact, as regards your biggest foreign markets, they will be those ‘allies’; so, you (that is, the nation’s aristocracy, who own also the news-media etc.) defend them, and you want the U.S. military (the taxpayers and the troops) to support and defend them. It’s defending your market, even though you as the controlling owner of such a corporation aren’t paying the tab for it. The rest of the country is actually paying for all of it, so you’re “free-riding” the public, in this business. It’s the unique nature of the war-business, and a unique boon to its investors.

Thus, on 21 May 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump sold to the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, an all-time-record $350 billion of U.S. arms-makers’ products, which they’re now obligated to buy during the following ten years, with an up-front commitment of $100 billion during just the first year, so as to make even that one-year commitment an all-time record. This deal is by far the biggest part of Trump’s boost to American manufacturers — but it’s only to military manufacturers, the people who depend virtually 100% on sales to governments, specifically to ‘friendly’ governments: to ‘allies’, such as, in this case, to the Saud family. In fact, the Sauds’ war against their neighbor Yemen is a good example of just how this sort of operation (profit to the billionaires, bloodshed and destruction to, in this case, the Yemenites) works: Yemen’s war goes back to the “Arab Spring” revolution in Yemen, which overthrew the U.S.-and-Saud-backed President, former Colonel and then General, Saleh. Wikipedia says of him: According to the UN Sanctions Panel, by 2012 Saleh has amassed fortune worth $32-60 billion hidden in at least twenty countries making him one of the richest people in the world. Saleh was gaining $2 billion a year from 1978 to 2012 mainly through illegal methods, such as embezzlement, extortion and theft of funds from Yemen’s fuel subsidy program. And, furthermore: New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent Robert F. Worth described Saleh as reaching an understanding with powerful feudal ‘big sheikhs’ to become ‘part of a Mafia-style spoils system that substituted for governance’. Worth accused Saleh of exceeding the aggrandizement of other Middle Eastern strongmen by managing to ‘rake off tens of billions of dollars in public funds for himself and his family’ despite the extreme poverty of his country. Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s Army installed the Vice President, and former General, Hadi to succeed him. Then, there was a second revolution, and, on 21 January 2015, the Shia Houthi tribe took over, and the rabidly anti-Shia Saud family promptly started their bombing of Yemen, using American training, weaponry and tactical and refueling support. The U.S. Government, like its ally the Saud family, is rabidly anti-Shia. That’s to say: The U.S. aristocracy, like Saudi Arabia’s aristocracy (the royal family), is rabidly anti-Shia. But, whereas for the Sauds, this is motivated more by hate than by greed, it’s more greed than hate on the U.S. side, because at least ever since the U.S. coup in the leading Shia country, Iran, in 1953, it’s been purely about greed, specifically that of the oil (and other) companies who also (in addition to the armaments-firms) control U.S. foreign policies. (For example, international oil companies need to extract and sell oil from many countries. They’re highly dependent upon the military, though not nearly to the extent that the weapons-firms are.)

The most recent poll that has been taken of American public opinion regarding America’s arming and training Saudi forces to fly over and bomb Yemen was taken during November 2017, tabulated on 28 January 2018, and finally published a month later, on 28 February 2018. This “Nationwide Voter Survey – Report on Results – January 28, 2018” asked 1,000 scientifically sampled American voters, “Question: Congress is considering a bi-partisan bill to withdraw U.S. forces from the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Would you say that you support or oppose this bill?” It reported that, “Support” was 51.9%, “Oppose” was 21.5%, no opinion was 26.6%; and, so, 71% of the opinions were “Support”; only 29% were “Oppose.” That’s more than two-thirds supporting this bill to consider withdrawing U.S. forces from that war. But, when the vote was taken in the U.S. Senate, it was 55% opposing the bill, opposing, that is, consideration of the matter, and 44% supporting consideration of the matter (and not voting was 1% of the 100 Senators). 55% of Senators didn’t want the Senate to even consider the matter. Here’s how the issue had managed to get even that far: On 4 December 2017, just weeks after that poll of Americans was taken, Russian Television headlined “Saleh’s death means a fresh hell beckons for Yemen”, and the U.S. Government’s participation in the bombing of Yemen then did increase. This event — the murder of Saleh — raised the Yemen war to broader public attention in the country that was supplying the bombs and the weapons to the Sauds. On 28 February 2018, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders was the lone sponsor of “S.J.Res.54 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)”: “This joint resolution directs the President to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting Yemen, except those engaged in operations directed at Al Qaeda, within 30 days unless: (1) the President requests and Congress authorizes a later date, or (2) a declaration of war or specific authorization for the use of the Armed Forces has been enacted.”

On March 19th, NBC bannered “Senators to force vote to redefine U.S. role in Yemen”, that was merely to force a vote in the Senate, not actually to vote on the issue itself. However, given how overwhelmingly America’s voters opposed America’s arming the Sauds to slaughter the Yemenese, this vote in the Senate to consider the measure was the gateway to each Senator’s being forced to go public about supporting this highly unpopular armament of the Saudis; and, so, if it had gotten that far (to a final vote on the issue itself), the arms-makers might lose the vote, because Senators would then be voting not ‘merely’ on a procedural matter, but on the actual issue itself. So, this vote was about the gateway, not about the destination. The next day, Breitbart News headlined “Administration, Bipartisan Interventionist Establishment Kill Aisle-Crossing Effort to Rein In U.S. Military Involvement in Yemen” and presented a full and documented account, which opened: “The Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act to demand the administration seek congressional authorization or withdraw American support from Saudi Arabia’s military operations in Yemen was defeated Tuesday by a vote of 55-44.” The peace-activist, David Swanson, headlined at Washingtonsblog, “Why 55 U.S. Senators Voted for Genocide in Yemen”, and he alleged that the vote would have been even more lopsided than 55% for the weapons-industry, if some of the Senators who voted among the 44 non-bloodthirsty ones hadn’t been in such close political races. The weapons-industry won’t hold against a Senator his/her voting against them if their vote won’t even be needed in order to win. Token-votes against them are acceptable. All that’s necessary is winning the minimum number of votes. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake. So, this explains how the U.S. Government really ignores public opinion and only pretends to be a democracy. It’s done by fooling the public. On the issue of which countries are ‘allies’ and which are ‘enemies’, and other issues regarding national defense, all necessary means are applied in order to achieve, as Walter Lippmann in 1921 called it, “the manufacture of consent.”

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

The CIA virtually controls the ‘news’ media.

Corporations that aren’t on the list of top 100 U.S. Government contractors can be crucially dependent upon their income from the U.S. Government. For example, since 2014, Amazon Web Services has supplied to the U.S. Government (CIA, Pentagon, NSA, etc.) its cloud-computing services, which has since produced virtually all of Amazon’s profits, though Amazon doesn’t even so much as show up on that list of 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government; so, this extremely profitable business is more important to Jeff Bezos (the owner also of the Washington Post) than all the rest of his investments put together are. The most corrupt part of the U.S. Government is the ‘Defense’ part. That also happens to be, and by far, the most popular part, the most respected (by the American public) part. That’s a toxic combination: toxic not only for a government’s domestic policies, but especially for a government’s foreign policies, such as for identifying which nations are ‘allies’, and which nations are ‘enemies’. This type of mega-toxic combination can’t exist in a nation whose press isn’t being effectively controlled by the same general group that effectively controls the Government (in America, that’s the richest few, by means of their many paid agents), the Deep State. In America, one key to it is that the ‘Defense’ firms are privately owned.

POSTSCRIPT:

There can be no doubt that the chaos in the White House since Trump’s victory has reflected a fight behind the scenes for control of foreign policy, homeland security and military spending. It has been about the CIA’s ultimately successful attempts to ensure Trump backtracked on relevant electoral promises and complies with its own agenda. So far, Trump has backed down on Russia, North Korea, and Iran, suggesting he is well on the way to becoming the Deep State’s lackey. It now seems the CIA wants to control the balance of power in Congress. If the US military-intelligence complex manages to pack out Congress, it will be the killer blow for any democracy remaining in America. It will clear the field for a secret state organisation, which has shown little or no regard for human life and the rule of law, to accelerate its warlike agenda. It will have unfettered access to the national finances to accelerate its programme of global aggression, and damn the consequences for anyone else.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq is the best-known example of America’s Government and press lying to fool its public to invade a foreign country that actually posed no threat to U.S. national security (so that America’s Defense Department was obviously America’s Aggression Department, and even its very name was a lie). However, that fraud and its resulting mega-violence were unfortunately typical, not at all exceptional, for the brutal American regime. This crucial but ugly fact will be documented here, so as to destroy (by clear facts) the lying U.S. regime’s supposed credibility, and this refers to both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party wings (and their ‘news’media), of the ruling aristocracy. (Same for America’s lapdog, UK.) First, however: it’s important to document that both Americans and Brits were lied (and that word should be not only a noun, but also a verb, because “deceived” is far too soft a term for so heinous a consequence) into invading and occupying Iraq: A crucial date was 7 September 2002, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair both said that a new report had just been issued by the IAEA saying that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon. The IAEA promptly denied that it had issued any such “new report” at all, and the ‘news’ media simply ignored the denial, which the IAEA then repeated weeks later, and it again was ignored; so, the false impression, that such an IAEA report had been issued, remained in the publics’ minds, and they consequently favored invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein before there would be, as Condoleezza Rice warned the next day following Bush-Blair, on September 8th, a “mushroom cloud”. It was all just lies — lies that were believed by the public, at the time, and even believed by many for a long time after we invaded.

Some of these lies were derived from torturing detainees, torturing them to say what the U.S. and British regimes wanted them to say. But all were concocted by the perpetrating dictators. Like CIA Director George Tenet told his boss, George W. Bush, fooling the public into invading Iraq would be a “slam-dunk.” Even today, many Americans still are successfully suckered into believing that torture extracts truths, instead of the desired lies, from suspects, to serve as ‘evidence’, in this ‘democracy’. So: that’s the reality behind America’s destruction of Iraq, it was based upon lies from the Government, which were stenographically published and broadcast to the public as being truths, while the actual truths were being simultaneously hidden from the public, and the truth that the regime was lying didn’t get to reach us until we had already invaded and occupied the targeted country. That’s what happens when an evil regime fools its public, into supporting and doing its aristocracy’s invasion, at the taxpaying public’s expense, and psychopathically ignoring the massive horrors it is imposing upon the residents in the attacked country. This is psychopathy being displayed by a dictatorship, one that claims to be a ‘democracy’ and that demonizes other governments that it claims to be (and some of which, occasionally, are) dictatorships. With the ‘anti-communist’ excuse gone, only these types of lies still work; so, they’re used non-stop.

Here are other such instances:

Right now, the Obama-Trump regime, which use Al Qaeda in Syria to train and arm jihadists from around the world to go to Syria to fight and overthrow Syria’s Government and replace it by one that will be a stooge-regime of the U.S. aristocracy’s allied Saudi aristocracy (the Saud family), is, yet again, violating Trump’s promise to leave Syria as soon as ISIS is defeated. In contrast to the U.S. regime’s promises, Trump stays on in Syria after ISIS’s defeat and tries to carve out the northeastern part of Syria, now relying mainly upon Kurdish forces in Syria’s northeast, but also upon Al Qaeda-led jihadists in Ghouta and elsewhere, to serve as America’s “boots-on-the-ground,” for establishing the stooge-regime that the U.S. aristocracy and its allied Saudi and Israeli aristocracies want to control that land, so as to construct through it oil and gas pipelinesfeeding the EU nations and to increase the invading aristocracy’s profits. How can a news-consumer tell if a supposed ‘news’-medium is honest about Syria? Here’s a simple and reliable method: If the ‘news’-medium uses the term ‘rebels’ instead of “jihadists” or “terrorists” in order to refer to the people who are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, then you know it’s lying, because those aren’t ‘democrats’ in any sense: they are jihadists-terrorists who are aiming to establish in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni, Wahhabist-Salafist, and rabidly anti-Shia, dictatorship there, which will be basically run by the Sauds. For example, on 2 April 2018, the BBC headlined “Uncertainty Over Rebel Deal in Ghouta” instead of “Uncertainty Over Jihadist Deal in Ghouta” or “Over Terrorist Deal,” and so the BBC is clearly a lying propaganda-outlet that cannot reasonably be believed, but whose reports one instead must independently verify before citing or quoting to others. Similarly, the prior day, the Telegraph had bannered “Ghouta ‘deal struck’ as rebel fighters evacuated” and thus made clear that it too is propaganda, not reliable news-reporting. To show how consistent these types of deception are through time, the Telegraph, on 6 March 2013, had headlined an editorial “To end the conflict in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has to go” and called his overthrow “Our moral obligation”. And, just two days later, they bannered “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” which ‘news’ would have been real news-reporting if only those ‘rebels’ (and what they actually represented) had been at all honestly described. The basic technique of propaganda is to lie in the framing of an issue. It’s so routine as to be endemic in the ‘news’-reporting in any dictatorship. For yet another example: Any ‘news’-medium that refers to the overthrow in 2014 of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, and its replacement by a racist-fascist (nazi) rabidly anti-Russian dictatorship, as having been not a coup but instead a ‘revolution’, is a rotten lying propaganda-medium, nothing better than that. If the word “revolution” is used to describe the 2014 Ukraine overthrow, and the word “rebels” is used to refer to the fighters for the overthrow of Assad, not only is the medium consistently propaganda, but it is consistently pumping to precipitate World War III. The dictatorship needed to hide this shocking news from the public, not broadcast it to the public. The mainstream media (and some of the non-mainstream media) are fake-news media — and this comprises almost all of the ‘news’-media. On international relations, they’re just loaded with lies, and the key terms right now are, for Syria, “rebels” versus “jihadists”; and, for Ukraine, “revolution” versus “coup.”

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a government)

• China 1949 to early 1960s
• Albania 1949-53
• East Germany 1950s
• Iran 1953 *
• Guatemala 1954 *
• Costa Rica mid-1950s
• Syria 1956-7
• Egypt 1957
• Indonesia 1957-8
• British Guiana 1953-64 *
• Iraq 1963 *
• North Vietnam 1945-73
• Cambodia 1955-70 *
• Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
• Ecuador 1960-63 *
• Congo 1960 *
• France 1965
• Brazil 1962-64 *
• Dominican Republic 1963 *
• Cuba 1959 to present
• Bolivia 1964 *
• Indonesia 1965 *
• Ghana 1966 *
• Chile 1964-73 *
• Greece 1967 *
• Costa Rica 1970-71
• Bolivia 1971 *
• Australia 1973-75 *
• Angola 1975, 1980s
• Zaire 1975
• Portugal 1974-76 *
• Jamaica 1976-80 *
• Seychelles 1979-81
• Chad 1981-82 *
• Grenada 1983 *
• South Yemen 1982-84
• Suriname 1982-84
• Fiji 1987 *
• Libya 1980s
• Nicaragua 1981-90 *
• Panama 1989 *
• Bulgaria 1990 *
• Albania 1991 *
• Iraq 1991
• Afghanistan 1980s *
• Somalia 1993
• Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
• Ecuador 2000 *
• Afghanistan 2001 *
• Venezuela 2002 *
• Iraq 2003 *
• Haiti 2004 *
• Somalia 2007 to present
• Honduras 2009
• Libya 2011 *
• Syria 2012
• Ukraine 2014 *

Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?

A: Because there’s no American embassy there.