I was interviewed recently by Stefan Molyneux, Jason Stapleton and Dave Smith. You know, about the wars and things.
Category: Asia
Why Did the US Test an Outdated Bomb in Mountains of Afghanistan?
The U.S. Military, apparently eager to test a huge out-dated bomb – anacronym “MOAB” for “Mother Of All Bombs” – dropped one for the first time in the sparsely populated mountains of Afghanistan this week.
The goal was apparently to fulfill Trump’s earlier campaign promise to ~”Bomb the hell out of ISIS.”
Continue reading “Why Did the US Test an Outdated Bomb in Mountains of Afghanistan?”
Obama’s Hiroshima Speech Was Lovely, Frustrating, and Infuriating
President Obama’s #apology tour keeps a-rollin’ on, am I right? No, hang on.
As unforgivable as Obama has been on foreign policy in myriad ways — and how much worse, perhaps, a Clinton or any Republican ever might be with the help of Obama’s drone precedents — there is something about him which almost looks like better than it could be. At least in certain lights. That is to say, Obama kills people, but he also occasionally appears to notice that the US has made foreign policy mistakes. This is what the hawks and right-wingers dub the apology tour, even though “sorry” never crosses the president’s lips when he’s discussing the heavy handed US response to 9/11, or admitting America’s role in the 1953 coup in Iran.
Obama is the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. The opening act for his visit to the site of the first nuclear bomb ever dropped on human beings was Secretary of State John Kerry, who went last month. Kerry’s delicate acknowledgement that the bombing was a tragedy gave conservatives a case of indigestion. Obama’s Friday speech may make them lose their minds entirely. Continue reading “Obama’s Hiroshima Speech Was Lovely, Frustrating, and Infuriating”
Emails Reveal US State Department Influenced Sony’s “The Interview” so as to Encourage Assassination and Regime Change in North Korea
Sony’s decision yesterday to cancel its release of The Interview after being hacked and threatened by a group that may or may not be tied with the North Korean government has been the top story in the media ever since. Decidedly less-covered, and almost completely obscured by the cancellation, is another revelation made yesterday about the movie that is actually far more important.
The Daily Beast reported yesterday on leaked emails from the Sony hack which show that the United States government was involved at high levels with the content development of The Interview, especially its controversial ending depicting the assassination of North Korean ruler Kim Jong-Un. As the report’s headline states, “Sony Emails Say State Department Blessed Kim Jong-Un Assassination in ‘The Interview.’” The emails also reveal that a RAND corporation senior defense analyst who consulted on the film went beyond “blessing” and outright influenced the end of the film, encouraging the CEO of Sony Entertainment to leave the assassination scene as it was (in spite of misgivings at Sony) for the sake of encouraging North Koreans to actually assassinate Kim Jong-Un and depose his regime when the movie eventually leaks into that country. According to the Sony CEO, a senior US State Department official emphatically and personally seconded that advice and reasoning in a separate correspondence. The emails also reveal that the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human-rights issues also consulted with Sony on the film.
While a tiny nation state possibly being involved in scuppering a movie premiere by hacking and threatening a Hollywood studio by proxy may be more novel and sensational than yet another psyop by the US Regime Change Machine, the latter is far more important. The United States, as part of its “Asian Pivot,” made an explicit push for assassination and regime change in yet another foreign country under the cover of art and commerce, and the North Korean regime and its ally China are both now 100% aware of it. That has huge implications for politics in the region, for US relations with those countries, for the character and integrity of American art and media, and for the mischievous, generally havoc-wreaking way our government is secretly using our tax dollars.
Imagine how the U.S. and its CIA would respond if a major movie studio anywhere in the world were to make a film centered around the assassination of a sitting U.S. President: especially if a foreign government was involved, pushing for just such an assassination. That North Korea, or any state, might respond with speech-suppressing attacks and threats is not to be excused, but it should be no surprise either. Yet the US was more than happy to help foment a predictable crisis like this, thereby putting its own people at risk. And it did so by surreptitiously penetrating Hollywood to steer it toward using “artistic” existential threats to taunt a nation-state that is such a basket-case that it would only be dangerous to Americans if made desperate by such existential threats. That shows what little regard our “security force” has for our actual security, as compared to pursuing global power politics.
On a side note, this makes one wonder if the State Department also pushed for this other memorable dictator-detonating scene from Charlie Sheen’s 1991 comedy Hot Shots, depicting regime-enemy Saddam Hussein catching a bomb in his lap while sipping a cocktail in his poolside lounge chair.
Here are the key passages from the Daily Beast report (emphasis added):
Continue reading “Emails Reveal US State Department Influenced Sony’s “The Interview” so as to Encourage Assassination and Regime Change in North Korea”
Why “we” REALLY nuked both Hiroshima & Nagasaki. In just 3 days.
OLIVER STONE: … Every school kid — still, my daughter in her school, in private school, in good school, is still learning this: We dropped the bomb because we had to, because the Japanese resistance was fanatic, and we would have lost many American lives taking Japan. This is one — there’s no alternative to that story. —Oliver Stone on the Untold U.S. History from the Atomic Age to Vietnam to Obama’s Drone Wars | Democracy Now!
Here’s the alternative — a part of the truth that should be taught in good, honest, schools:
At 8:16 on the morning of August 6, 1945, the world got a glimpse of its own mortality. At that moment, the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a fireball that sent waves of searing heat, then a deafening concussion, across the landscape. Three days later, a second bomb hit Nagasaki. … [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower said in 1963 “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
… Besides the Manhattan Project’s internal momentum was an external motive. Its leaders had to justify the $2 billion ($26 billion in today’s dollars) expense to Congress and the public… Byrnes…warned Roosevelt that political scandal would follow if it [the atomic bomb] was not used. … “How would you get Congress to appropriate money for atomic energy research [after the war] if you do not show results for the money which has been spent already?” …the U.S. had produced two types of bombs–one using uranium, the other plutonium. Whenever anyone suggested that the moment the bomb was dropped the war would be over, [bureaucrat] Groves countered, “Not until we drop two bombs on Japan.” As [historian] Goldberg explains… “One bomb justified Oak Ridge, the second justified Hanford.” Hiroshima was hit with the uranium bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”; the plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” was used against Nagasaki.
From Why We Dropped The Bomb By William Lanouette, CIVILIZATION, The Magazine of the Library of Congress, January/February 1995
It’s hard for Americans who identify with the U.S. Government to accept the idea that that organization could have engaged in such horrendous acts – twice in three days – without pristine motives. Here’s what Vietnam era U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara – who was part of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s command when the bombs were dropped – thought about it: McNamara: “He, [General Curtis LeMay] and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”
As far as war criminals go, unfortunately we still have them.
Civ Worker on Afghanistan: “I’d give it 18 months before all hell breaks loose”
I received a sad missive from a friend who has been working in Kabul as a civilian teacher on behalf of the U.S aid effort on and off for the last 11 years. A staunch believer in the inevitable triumph of democracy over the Taliban and Afghanistan’s brutal warlordism, her hope, it would seem, is running out.
“I think we have got another 18 months here, maybe less before all hell breaks loose frankly,” she wrote. “And then if all of Kabul is blown up again in internecine conflict, what did we spend billions on?”
It’s a question that I think most people who spent the better part of the last decade thinking and talking and speculating about Afghanistan are clearly avoiding these days. It’s a practical question and it’s an existential one, too. It’s symbolic: after Iraq, Afghanistan was supposed to be the war in which America had a pure mission. Instead it is where America found its superpower status was a Potemkin Village.
The Washington think tank club has been pretty quiet. the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is like that one cheerleader who refuses to give up the spirit even when the team on the field is getting clobbered to death, recently released this report, aptly entitled “Toward a Successful Outcome in Afghanistan,” led by former commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen, Michele Flournoy and Michael O’Hanlon, based on a recent fact finding mission. This likely means the report is how the military that courted these three Washington insiders inside the country wants us to think about Afghanistan: forever on the verge of democracy, and only if we hold out for longer, the 2014 elections go off right, women get integrated into the system, our European allies kick in more money and trainers, the Afghan military can perform without us, etc., will things go off as planned. Where they ever got that poll saying Hamid Karzai enjoys 60 to 70 percent approval ratings is beyond us.
Frankly, if what they say is true, that the Afghan Army is now leading 85 percent of its security missions and responsible for 87 percent of the population’s security — 312 out of 400 districts countrywide — then that is a good thing, at least American blood and treasure counts for something. But it would be good to get an independent assessment. After 11 years of the Pentagon spin machine at work, forgive us for wanting a second opinion. Plus, one of the key recommendations to jump out of the CNAS report is to leave behind a “bridging force” of “several thousand” beyond the already reported “enduring force” (estimated 8,000- to 12,000 NATO troops) for “two to three years after 2014… to help the Afghans finish building their air force, their special operations forces and certain other enablers in medical realms, in counter-IED capability and in intelligence collection.” So what really goes on over there we can’t say with any conviction.
We do know, outside of the Beltway Bubble, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to smile at (even if, as CNAS suggests, the “good news” is not getting through the Western media). The headlines just aren’t good. I opened the paper yesterday to one blaring the worst of tragedies: “Suicide blast kills 10 Afghan children,” plus, the subhead noted, two NATO troops and an Afghan police officer. The children had just been dismissed from school for lunch and were in the way of an attack on a coalition convoy. At the same time, a land mine claimed the lives of seven Afghan civilians – four women, two children and their driver – after driving home from a day of collecting fire wood in the Hills.
This week, the Red Cross was forced to scale back its own operations after a brazen attack in which a staffer was killed, as well two other people and an Afghan guard, at their headquarters in Jalalabad. Other international staff members had to be rescued as the attackers went on a rampage, according to reports.
Meanwhile, the Army announced Tuesday that two U.S soldiers, ages 20 and 23, were killed by an IED while serving in Tsamkani, Afghanistan. While tens of thousands of their counterparts will be coming home from college this month, they’ll be coming home in a box. That brings the total to 2,235 U. S killed since the war began.
They say America is war-weary and it is. For good reason. There seems to be no good answers. Leaving the country to the Taliban seems to be a cruel way to go – we are already hearing that the number of attacks on girls’ schools is increasing. And did you hear more women in Afghanistan are in prison for “moral crimes” now than at any point since the Taliban was kicked out of Kabul 11 years ago? The old warlords are eager to re-impose their own brutal control, too. Yet leaving U.S Special Forces in the country to shadow local Afghan security forces in counter-terror operations seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Protests again erupted in Wardak this week with charges that U.S Special Forces played a hand in disappearing and torturing local young men to death, a charge flatly denied by American officials.
There are pockets of hope, however. The front page of The Washington Post Monday featured Farhad Akbari, 33, who in revenge of the death of his mother by the Taliban, has raised a local vigilante force to keep them out of Kolangar, “a quiet farming region” in Logar province. This local milita has kicked the Taliban out of a number of local hamlets and it doesn’t work with the Americans, which might be their secret.
Of course, the Americans don’t believe so much in small crusades, do they? My aforementioned friend felt she was part of something much bigger and to hear her angst about the failure of the endeavor is a blow. I’ll take her view from Kabul over the think tankers every time.