Thursday 12th of December 2024
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joe believes in his destiny....

It has been clear since the terror attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — the date I choose to mark a great turn in the global order — that America’s abdication of its postwar hegemony was to rank high among the 21st century’s defining events. 

The questions from that day onward have been how the policy cliques in Washington would respond to such a change in America’s place in the community of nations and what they might do — how great the risks they would take — to avoid, or at least forestall, this world-historical shift. 

 

Patrick Lawrence: Biden’s ‘Samson Option’

 

How chaotically or otherwise, to put this question another way, would the arrival of a new, post–American world order prove?  

We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.

Washington and London — the latter with the former’s assent — have now authorized the grossly irresponsible regime in Kiev to fire American– and British-made missiles into Russian territory. 

The Ukrainians wasted no time doing so. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a volley of U.S.–made ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles at Russian targets last Tuesday. A day later the AFU fired a similar barrage of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory. 

The degree of planning and coordination behind these attacks seems to me self-evident. Nobody in Washington, London, or Kiev is commenting on the targets hit, but these, too, were without question chosen after careful consultation.      

Moscow has responded just as it said it would weeks ago. It now considers itself at war with the Western powers and, last Thursday, attacked a Ukrainian target with a new-generation hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

The message could scarcely be clearer — providing, I must add, one is capable of reading it accurately.    

So we now have answers to the above-noted questions. 

It was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, lacking all imagination and anything remotely resembling courage, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order.

After the Sept. 11 events, a continued commitment to American primacy was ineluctably going to prove a commitment to one or another degree of disorder.  

The Biden regime’s latest escalation of its proxy war in Ukraine indicates the limits of this commitment: There are none.

We are now on notice that the world — bitter to write this — is condemned to unceasing chaos and violence so long as the American imperium’s ideologues are capable of mounting a resistance against against the world as it struggles to be.

We know now the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation. 

We hear a lot these days about the Israeli doctrine known as the Samson Option, whereby the Israelis, if they thought themselves under an existential threat, would use their nuclear arsenal to bring the world down with them. Those freak-show terrorists running the Zionist state, you might say: Who or what could be more diabolic?

It is a reasonable question. But there is no longer any pretending as to the unique perversity of terrorist Israel and its Samson Option. America in its post–Sept. 11 phase — fearful, viewing itself as threatened by history itself — has just proved equally perverse, equally diabolic, equally given to contempt for the human cause. 

There is a greater and lesser way to understand the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets. It is partly a matter of passing politics, this is to say, and partly a question of the dynamics of late-imperial ideology. Let us consider each.

It is certainly so, as Joe Lauria pointed out in Consortium News last week, that the immense recklessness of the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets reflects a failed president’s spiteful determination, on his way out of office, to undermine President-elect Trump’s announced intention to end the war in Ukraine. 

I do not see how giving Kiev permission to use Western-made missiles (with Western military operating them)  against Russia will do anything to alter Trump’s intentions. The only way such a gambit could work is by provoking Russia into a vastly expanded, vastly more dangerous war. This goes to my previously made point: No risk is too great if taking it will prolong the long U.S. assault on Russia in the name of American preeminence.     

There is also Joe Biden’s pitiful desire to preserve his “legacy.” Biden was foolish beyond words when he settled on the subversion of the Russian Federation — is “subjugation” my word? — as the project that would engrave his name in the history books. 

This is another lost war: Biden’s “legacy” lies in ruins even before he leaves one behind. The Man from Scranton will go down, as measured by the failures, dangers, and messes he leaves behind, as the worst-performing president in postwar American history. 

We can fairly mark this down to Biden’s native ineptitude: Any careful review of his career reveals him to be — no apology for my word choice — very stupid. His declining mental state, which has received so much press in the months since he was forced to withdraw his bid for reelection, is a case of incapacity piled atop incompetence.

A little while back the Russians began referring to “the collective Biden” to take account of the reality that there is no way of knowing who makes the judgments and policy decisions commonly attributed to “the president,” or “Mr. Biden,” or “the White House.”

You might think it unbelievably irresponsible of the Democrats, and the whole of Capitol Hill along with them, to leave the United States without a capable president, but I propose a reconsideration:

While it is certainly irresponsible to leave the Oval Office vacant for many months, if not years, it is perfectly believable given the extent to which the Deep State (the national-security state if this makes you more comfortable) now runs U.S. policy — this not quite but nearly out in the open.

So far as one can make out, to dolly in on this point, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a very few others form an inner circle that has been directing U.S. policy for much of Biden’s presidential term, either autonomously or by way of his nodding (literally) assent.

An outer circle, with input at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but less operational authority, would include such figures as Samantha Power, who directs the Agency for International Development, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

This is “the collective Biden” — so well coined, this phrase. Look at its members, and there are many more I have not named. These are the imperium’s praefecti, procurators and consuls. They have no interest in politics and want nothing to do with the citizenry. The empire is their ideology, and they are dedicated solely to extending its power. 

And it is these more or less remote apparatchiks who form the collective Biden and who are yet more indifferent to the taking of unconscionable risks than the weak figure behind which they manage the empire’s affairs. 

As many remarked after Russia began its intervention in Ukraine two years and nine months ago, Joe Biden started a war he cannot afford to lose. But Joe Biden will content himself with his Corvette and his sunglasses in a few weeks’ time. 

The Deep State has a lot, lot more on the line at this point — not less, I would say, than the longevity of the American imperium. The people who form it are the true losers who cannot afford to lose. 

It is impossible to know at this point what will come next now that the U.S., with Britain in tow, has authorized the long-range missile strikes.

We do not know, among much else, how the Deep State will field what efforts Trump may make to end the war. These people subverted his plans to improve relations with Moscow during his first term, we must remind ourselves. 

But the extent of the desperation shared between the Deep State and Biden-the-outgoing-pol is very plain. The collective Biden reportedly did not inform the Pentagon before taking the missiles decision. It simultaneously announced plans to provide Kiev with anti-personnel land mines, the kind that blow combatants’ legs off and maim children who come upon them years or decades later. 

This is not, to put the point mildly, the conduct of a policy clique confident it is in control of its destiny. 

The Russian Response

Much has been made of the hypersonic missile, called the Oreshnik, the Russian military fired at a Ukrainian defense industry plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk last Thursday — a day after Kiev fired its volley of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia. Out came the shrieks in Western media that “Putin’s Russia” has again threatened to resort to a nuclear attack.

There is no question of the Oreshnik’s unusual, if not unprecedented power. It triggered explosions that lasted three hours, according to the first press reports. And it can indeed carry a nuclear warhead.  

But I do not share the prevailing read of the Oreshnik’s first deployment — just as I have not shared any of the previous talk of Russia’s suppose threats to go nuclear. I would summarize the message the Kremlin may as well have scribbled in chalk on the Oreshnik’s fuselage as,

Let us remind you that we, on both sides, are nuclear powers. Let us introduce some sanity to the impasse to which you have brought us.

The televised speech President Vladimir Putin delivered last Thursday evening supports this interpretation. While there are likely to be more Oreshniks fired into Ukraine, the targets, like last Thursday’s, will be chosen for their military merit and Russia will continue to refrain from deploying any short– or medium-range missiles anywhere beyond Ukraine —depending, he said, on what the U.S. does next. 

Per usual, the Russian leader has taken the long view — as we all should — and places Russia’s response to the crisis the U.S. and Britain just created in the historical context of the West’s long list of post–Cold War betrayals.

“It was not Russia but the United States that destroyed the system of international security,” Putin said, the latest of his many references to Washington’s withdrawal from various arms-control treaties since the Bush II administration.

Glenn Diesen, an editor at Russia in Global Affairs and among the wisest heads in matters such as these, published a piece last week in which he asserted that the West has “crossed the line between proxy war and direct war.” In it Diesen posed the question on everyone’s mind right now:

“How will Russia respond? There are several more steps on the escalation ladder before pushing the nuclear button. Russia can intensify strikes on Ukrainian political targets and infrastructure, introduce North Korean troops that were likely intended as a deterrent for a situation like this, strike NATO assets in the Black Sea and logistic centres in Poland or Romania, destroy satellites used for the attacks on Russia, or attack US/NATO military assets in other parts of the world under the guise of enabling other countries to defend themselves.”

I do not know the likelihood or otherwise of any of these projections. But it seems to me the collective Biden and the national-security apparatus behind it may have got the Kremlin in a Catch–22 of sorts. 

So long as Russia exercises the restraint it now exhibits — let’s say so long as Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, remain the statesmen in the room — the U.S. and clients such as Britain are likely to press their campaign of provocations to the next step, and the step after that, and so on. This is the long road to America’s version of the Samson Option.  

And if the only way to stop these provocations is to respond to them as the West intends — that is, to escalate into a state of risk no sane statesman would find acceptable — the Russian Federation could find itself in the very war it has resisted, over many years, entering upon. The short road to the Samson Option. 

We can thank Joe Biden for leading the world to this perilous moment. But I don’t think Biden is diabolically intelligent enough to get this done on his own. And this is what ought to worry us most. 

https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/26/patrick-lawrence-bidens-samson-option/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

escalating american imperialist war....

 

The Trump administration and the escalating imperialist war in Ukraine
    BY Joseph Kishore

 

With eight weeks until Inauguration Day, the incoming Trump administration is wasting no time in preparing its agenda. Trump has assembled a cabinet dominated by billionaires and fascists, intent on unleashing a massive assault on immigrants while dismantling the democratic and social rights of the working class.

In response, top Democrats, from Biden to Bernie Sanders, have pledged to “work with” the incoming administration, emphasizing “collaboration” and “compromise” with Trump and their “Republican colleagues.” The Democrats’ overriding concern is not Trump’s authoritarian designs but safeguarding the continuity of the Biden administration’s central imperialist objective: the war against Russia in Ukraine.

The war was the main topic of discussion at the White House meeting a week after the election, when Biden offered to do “everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated.” Behind closed doors, the outgoing and incoming presidents discussed the plans for a major escalation of the war and, in particular, the authorization for Ukraine to use US-provided long-range missiles to target cities deep inside Russia, which it has now done.

During the campaign, Trump made occasional warnings about the danger of “World War III,” while stating that he favored some sort of negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine. This, however, will be among the first demagogic statements that will be jettisoned. The incoming administration will be no less committed than the outgoing one to the defense of the core strategic interests of American imperialism.

In a significant statement, Representative Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice for national security advisor, declared in an interview with Fox News over the weekend, in relation to Ukraine:

For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong. We are hand-in-glove, we are one team with the United States in this transition.

 

Waltz said that he has had numerous discussions with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, as part of the “seamless transition” to the Trump administration. While still calling for a negotiated end to the conflict, Waltz stressed the need to “restore deterrence” and “get ahead of this escalation ladder”—that is, engage in some sort of massive military provocation or preemptive action to force a “deal.”

The conflict in Ukraine is central to the imperatives of American imperialism. An underlying driving force has been the effort to secure control over strategic resources, in both Ukraine and Russia itself, which are seen as critical to control over the world economy.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent Trump ally, laid bare the material motives of US imperialism, declaring Sunday:

This war is about money. ... The richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars worth of minerals. ... So Donald Trump’s going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals, a good deal for Ukraine and us.

The US puppet regime in Kiev hopes that it can appeal to Trump on this basis to take, if anything, a more aggressive stance. In a commentary on Monday, under the headline “Ukraine prepares to sell Trump on why U.S. should maintain support,” the Washington Post reported on efforts of the Ukrainian government to convince Trump that the war is “a cost-effective economic and geostrategic opportunity that will ultimately enrich and secure the United States and its interests.”

Using speculation about Trump’s policies as a pretext, the imperialist powers of Europe are preparing to assert their own interests more aggressively. According to the French daily Le Monde, “sensitive discussions, most of which are classified,” have been “relaunched in light of a potential American withdrawal of support for Kyiv once Donald Trump takes office on January 20, 2025.”

Among the options being discussed is the direct deployment of European troops into the war. According to Le Monde, plans for the deployment of troops, which were initially raised by French President Emmanuel Macron in February, are now being revived. A British military source revealed that “discussions are underway between the UK and France on defense cooperation, particularly with a view to creating a hard core of allies in Europe, focused on Ukraine and wider European security.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stated during a visit to London last week that European powers must “not set and express red lines” in their support for Ukraine. When asked by the BBC about deploying French troops, Barrot responded, “We do not discard any option.”

The war in Ukraine is itself only a component part of an escalating global war, indeed the initial stages of world war. This includes the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, a campaign of brutal imperialist violence supported by both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the intensifying US confrontation with China. 

For the past nearly three years, the escalation of the war in Ukraine has followed a relentless logic. For American imperialism, military victory against Russia is seen as necessary not only in relation to Russia itself but for its implications in this broader war. As the Washington Post editorialized on Saturday, “abandonment of Ukraine—or a deal that leaves Ukraine untenably territorially diminished” would signal “that Western resolve comes with an expiration date.”

For its part, the Trump administration and its cabal of fascists and militarists will come to power under conditions of escalating economic, political and social crisis. Its dreams of imposing a massive assault on the working class will encounter enormous resistance, and its nationalist policies will confront the reality of a globally interconnected world economy. It will seek, as the American ruling class has during the past 30 years of unending and expanding war, to resolve the internal crisis of American capitalism through military force.

Writing in the midst of World War I, Lenin explained:

The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood; and the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie and its servitors, the governments, are more and more moving into a blind alley from which they can never extricate themselves without tremendous upheavals.

Once again, tremendous upheavals are in store.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/26/amwr-n26.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

the most dangerous man ever......

 

Norman Solomon: From Genocide Joe to Omnicide Joe

 

President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”

That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks—and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.

Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”

In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide—defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”

That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.

With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.

In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties — Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies — and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.

Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion — more than every other nuclear-armed country combined — updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.

Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.

From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers—even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.

A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”

Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.

Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation—the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”

Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”

Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants—a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.

Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase.

Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”

For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/26/norman-solomon-from-genocide-joe-to-omnicide-joe/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SAY YOUR PRAYERS...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSaHXxiFlzM