“A newly formed and, by all appearances, well-funded national security advocacy group, devoted to more hawkish U.S. policies toward Russia and other adversaries, provides the most vivid evidence yet of this alliance.”
“Billionaire Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi is best known for his roles in some of the most infamous political scandals of the 1980s. They include the Iran-Contra affair (he was a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange) and accusations that he concealed funds alongside Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos. But the 81-year-old, who now lives in Monaco, was also a womanizer with multiple wives and a bevy of beautiful girls at his beck and call. Among them was young American model Jill Dodd.”
Read more: http://nypost.com/2017/05/27/i-was-a-saudi-arms-dealers-pleasure-wife/
“The Israel travel ban, passed in the Knesset last month, has drawn widespread condemnation, including from mainstream Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the Reform movement. Since its establishment in 1999, Birthright has brought more than 500,000 young Jewish adults to Israel. Most of the participants in the program are college-age students. The program’s largest benefactor is billionaire casino magnate and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.”
Read more: http://forward.com/news/israel/369270/birthright-faces-j-street-led-protest-over-israel-travel-ban/
“The worst part of Venezuela’s tragedy is that it was so obviously predictable. Economists familiar with the work of Ludwig von Mises understood the necessary results of socialist policies. A sound money and freely floating prices provide a society with functioning markets that deliver the goods to the people. The market economy is true populism.”
Read more: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=9070
“It’s easy to explain, once you understand that there is no such thing as foreign policy: all policy is domestic.”
Read more: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/04/11/behind-trump-syria-turnabout/
The Pentagon has admitted to an airstrike that is believed to have killed more than 200 civilians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, at the edge of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
In the 1980s, Kurdistan was targeted by Saddam Hussein, then-president of Iraq, because the Kurds supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. After his capture in the second Gulf War, Hussein was charged by the U.S. occupational government with genocide, convicted, and hung for his crimes.
What is lesser known is that at the same time, the U.S. government, still fuming after the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis (a populist reaction to the brutality of the U.S.-backed dictator Mohammad Reza Shah, and a major factor in Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election), was a major – and thoroughly documented – supporter of Hussein in the war:
Iraq began receiving support from the United States and west European countries as well. Saddam was given diplomatic, monetary, and military support by the US, including massive loans, political clout, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites. The Iraqis relied heavily on American satellite footage and radar planes to detect Iranian troop movements, and they enabled Iraq to move troops to the site before the battle.
With Iranian success on the battlefield, the US made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying intelligence, economic aid, and dual-use equipment and vehicles, as well as normalizing its intergovernmental relations (which had been broken during the 1967 Six-Day War). President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran”, and that the United States “would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran”. Reagan formalised this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive to this effect in June 1982.
In 1982, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of countries “supporting terrorism” and sold weapons such as howitzers to Iraq via Jordan and Israel. France sold Iraq millions of dollars worth of weapons, including Gazelle helicopters, Mirage F-1 fighters, and Exocet missiles. Both the United States and West Germany sold Iraq dual-use pesticides and poisons that would be used to create chemical and other weapons, such as Roland missiles.
Although the U.S. government began to play both sides a few years later in the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA nevertheless threw its support heavily to the Iraqi government utilizing internationally banned chemical weapons in its campaign against Iran.
Precursors to chemical weapons, as well as biological weapons, cluster bombs, and the loans to pay for them, were brokered to Iraq by pharmaceutical representative Donald Rumsfeld, who would later be appointed Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration would go on to invade Iraq in 2003 citing as a primary motivation its possession of such “weapons of mass destruction”.
By 2014 it became well known that many a true word was spoken in such jest: Iraq did in fact have WMDs, and they were obtained from the United States itself. (The truth, however, was revealed in the context of whipping up a new war against the terrorist organization ISIL, so the media still gets zero points for honesty.)
Until now, the Kurds have been major supporters of U.S. interests in the Middle East, perceiving the U.S. as a liberator and protector pursuant to their darkest hour in 1988.
Is the U.S. military going to burn one of its few remaining bridges in the Middle East by invoking the “collateral damage” doctrine in this instance? How will Kurds, tough fighters to the core, react to their family members being wiped out in reckless bombings?
“With promises to ‘drain the swamp!’ still ringing in our ears, we have watched Trump appoint nothing but Goldman banksters, Soros stooges, neocon war hawks and police state zealots to head his cabinet. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we examine the swamp-dwellers with which Trump has filled his swamp.”
“To focus on the man himself rather than on the circumstances that produced him is to miss the significance of what has occurred. Note, for example, that his mandate is almost entirely negative. It centers on rejection: of globalization, of counterproductive military meddling, and of the post-Cold War cultural project. Yet neither Trump nor any of his surrogates has offered a coherent alternative to the triad of themes providing the through line for the last quarter-century of American history.”
Read more: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176228/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_how_we_got_here/
“John Bolton is one of the arsonists who set the world on fire. He was a proponent of the Iraq war and all the other policies that have inflamed the Middle East. He continues to endorse those policies, proving that he’s incapable of learning from his mistakes. Even worse… He’s been an advocate of the old George W. Bush policy that we should never negotiate with anyone unless they first submit to all our demands. This is the negation of diplomacy. It instantly disqualifies Bolton to be the Deputy Secretary of State. Mr. Bolton should never again hold any government position. I will be watching what you do in this matter.”
https://downsizedc.org/blog/opposition-john-bolton-assist-sec-state
“Mr. Mnuchin was on the board of Sears for the past 11 years, throughout its devastating decline. He is resigning now, letting the ship go down without him. Besides, he has already stolen the silver. How do you destroy a business? It’s not that hard. Rather than invest in new people and new methods, you take the money for yourself. It is even more attractive if you can borrow a lot of fake money at ultra-low rates against the company’s credit… pay it out to yourself and other financiers… and then jump ship, leaving the company, its employees, and its creditors to drown in your debt.”
http://bonnerandpartners.com/how-do-you-destroy-a-business/