Who Is the Institute for the Study of War?

By Guy Somerset - January 27, 2023 at 03:45PM



Attention Students! Before we begin, that’s not a typographical error in the title.

Whenever one investigates a "think tank," "study group," "not-for-profit," "non-governmental organization," or other such meddlesome troublemakers it needs to start with who rather than what.

The people involved make the difference betwixt a mere charity and a nefarious character.

As will be seen below, the folks at The "Institute" For The Study Of War are about as sinister as they get.

Why Does the Establishment Sound Familiar…

If you have any interest in the Ukraine Conflict at all – or even if you are actively trying to avoid news on the topic – your senses have no doubt been assailed by a report, recommendation or review of matters breathlessly covered by the local news…brought helpfully to you courtesy of The Institute For The Study Of War.

This collective, which nobody – including most policy experts – had ever heard of until a few months ago now seems to be everywhere throughout every day.

Since the moniker sounds so very anodyne the casual viewer receiving these nightly (or hourly) dispatches might be lulled into believing the "Institute" is some leafy green Collegiate establishment where doddering old bespeckled professors hum and haw their way through lectures while wearing dusky black robes a la Mr. Chips.

Unfortunately, no.

Let’s Just Have a Look-See at this Faculty of Horror…

These are the cretins listed as top members of the "Institute" for human suffering: General Jack Keane, Kimberly Kagan, former US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft, William Kristol, former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Kevin Mandia, Jack D. McCarthy, Jr., Bruce Mosler, General David Petraeus, Warren Phillips, and William Roberti.

To a man – and particularly to a woman – this "Institute" is staffed by War-Mongers and War-Criminals.

They also have something else in common…take a gander.

Each and every one is involved with armaments corporations which means they – in a very literal sense – are plausibly funded by blood money.

There is not a single individual associated with this joint who is not an enemy of Mankind itself.

Okay, Time to Review the Syllabus…

Needless to say, a reputable venue for an examination of warfare would logically conclude it as the most wasteful manner in which to resolve disputes.

Thus, this "Institute" is clearly in opposition to an escalation of war in general and particularly in Ukraine…right?

What’s that you say? The "Institute" For The Study Of War is in point of fact the most vocal proponent for an expansion of hostilities? I can verily claim to be shocked by this news!

But surely, Dear Scholar, in at least some instances the "Institute" must conclude peace is the proper solution to conflict?

No again!?! You tell me as far back as 2007 the "Institute" was advocating for a "Surge" in Iraq (which did not succeed and instead got a lot more people murdered on both sides)? Nay, it cannot be so!

Who would ever have believed a military advocacy group filled with jingoes might be trying to secretly propagandize Americans to go get themselves slayed half a world away for no good reason at all?

Merely because it serves the weapons-suppliers which support their lucrative salaries (Kagan gets nearly $200,000 a year telling you to send your son off to die, by the way)?

Astounding!

How About Some Prior Recommendations…

If the whole "Hey look! It’s a totally new organization that’s suddenly everywhere!" theme sounds reminiscent of an earlier organization dedicated to entangling Americans in a war they didn’t need, didn’t want and in which we didn’t belong…you’re damn right.

This "Institute" is nothing less than the bastardized child of The Project For The New American Century which was earlier instrumental in martialing unsuspecting Citizens into the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. (They tried to swindle us into an Iran War as well but couldn’t quite pull it off.)

In that case another gang of criminals encouraged – some would correctly say conspired – the United States into fighting which sucked in Trillions of our Taxdollars, Cost us Ten and Twenty Years of prosperity respectively, as well as Maimed and Murdered thousands of American servicepeople.

By the way, several of The Project For The New American Century domestic-enemies (notably of the Kristol and Kagan Klans) also "coincidentally" happen to also be connected to The Institute For The Study Of War fifth-columnist anti-American brigade currently trying to finagle us once more.

Nothing to see here…now go fight and die again, Plebian Scum.

Who Exactly Funds This Campus…

So it bears inquiring who funds an "Institute" which almost has as its Mission Statement to incite conflict?

Glad you asked, Classmate, because it’s pretty important.

Some on the list are:

– DynCorp… which began by making aircraft but now functions as "private military contractor" or what some might allege is a horde of mercenary killers for hire.

– General Dynamics…which produces aircraft guns, naval gun systems and everything else to kill people.

– General Motors (GM)…which under the GM Defense subsidiary makes military vehicles. (Fun Fact: during Vietnam good ‘ol GM sent over more than 500,000 M16 rifles to make bank on the killings.)

– Raytheon…which manufactures about every missile or missile-system you can possibly comprehend, many of which are currently being funneled by corrupt Washington politicians to Ukraine…and is another coincidence of killing.

Others who spread their decadence over the organization are a series of "capital management" firms which are well-known to be paragons of virtue and who never participate in untoward activities detrimental to the average American Taxpayer or Humanity in general.

Notes In The Maidan Uprising Margin…

In case anyone out there in the Lecture Hall thinks this is all just one more wacky happenstance of history…buckle in, buddy.

When the "Maidan Uprising" occurred in Kiev it was as political coup to oust the then-Ukrainian President.

Long Story Extremely Short: The West wanted Ukraine to cozy up to them. The Russians wanted the same. The West offered nothing for this privilege. The Russians offered virtually free natural gas. The Ukraine President chose the Russians. The West organized a political coup d’état to get him out.

One way we know? There was a leaked telephone call between US Diplomat Victoria Nuland and her Western counterpart wherein they discuss what really happened and who to support in the coup.

Pop Quiz: Guess what figure is also involved in The "Institute" For The Study Of War…can you guess?…did you guess it yet?

That’s correct, Students! None other than Friend of Humanity Victoria Nuland features in the school of thought!…Victoria Nuland is – again, totally coincidentally, of course – married to Robert Kagan…who is amazingly just randomly the brother-in-law to…Kimberly Kagan, who runs the "Institute" For The Study Of How To Fool Americans Into Dying In A War In Ukraine.

Hey! I thought I already told you…nothing to see here!…Incidentally, shouldn’t you already be off dying for Kiev, you Stupid Peasant!

Higher Learning and Higher Body Counts…

So here we are a second time.

Back at commencement just before Americans were swindled into Afghanistan and Iraq by a bunch of money-mad degenerate stone-age idol worshipping adversaries of Civilization.

They craft a cutsey little title for their organization to delude you it is anything other than a front for the slaughterhouse.

Make no mistake – Kagan and her crew of brigands want to slit our throats. Their aim, to the benefit of themselves and their armament manufacturers, is nothing less than World War Three (or maybe Four as well, if they can figure out how to bring China into the maelstrom).

What is the resolution to this dilemma? That is another article for another day.

For now it is enough to recognize the Evil for what it is and what it wants.

To blind you to truth and then send you to be killed in service of eternal darkness.

Class dismissed.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

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WaPo Neocon Josh Rogan: Republicans Responsible for Ukraine Loss

By Daniel McAdams - November 11, 2022 at 12:32AM



Every time a neocon/warmonger policy produces a disaster - and they always do - the neocon authors of said policy begin canvassing for someone, anyone but them, to blame.

So it was with Vietnam, which they are still fighting. It wasn't that it was an idiotic idea to kill a million Vietnamese civilians in the name of an imaginary "domino theory" that a hammer and sickle ten thousand miles away would unleash a communist virus that would soon have us all locked down with our Little Red Books.

No, it was the fault of the millions of Americans who saw through the lies and propaganda and finally, taking to the streets, brought a political anvil down on the heads of the warmongers. Americans who dared speak for the nearly 60,000 of their own brothers and sons killed for nothing. All their fault.

"We coulda won!" Yeah.

Similarly, it was never the fault of the neocons who lied and knew they lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an Iraqi involvement in 9/11 that their hundred democratic flowers blooming was displaced by a million civilian graves. It was all Ron Paul's fault for pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. That there were no WMDs and that they were taking us to war on a lie all the while dropping a cluster bomb on the Constitution.

And their plan to "democratize" Libya resulted in the knife-sodomy of Gaddafi but also the metaphorical knife-sodomization of our tiny remaining bit of moral authority. Instead of the neocon-promised "Arab Spring," we had open slave markets for those whose skin was a bit "too dark."

And monsters like Hillary cackled and loved it.

Oh but it was not her fault. It was the fault of those who opposed their "liberation." They were the racists, not her slave market allies.

So it is now with the Russia/Ukraine conflict, which began in 2014 under a neocon-infested Obama State Department and DoD.

Neocon poster boy Josh Rogin - not as evil as the worst, I must add - has penned a piece in the regime press, Washington Post, telling the very few people who still view the Bezos Bugle as any kind of paper of record that if Ukraine loses the US/NATO proxy war with Russia it will be entirely the fault of those very few Republican US Representatives who have dared make a squeak over authorizing nearly 70 BILLION dollars to Ukraine. Free money without even a single bookkeeper attached to the windfall to make sure it doesn't all go to Ukraine's notoriously corrupt leaders' purchase of even more property in Switzerland.

Never mind that actual military minds, like Col. Douglas Macgregor - architect of the Battle of 73 Easting in the first Gulf War and author of several key books on military strategy - have said from the beginning that Ukraine has no chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield.

Nope. WaPo's desktop warrior Rogan has found a way to blame Ukraine's inevitable destruction at the hands of the Russian military - a bloody horror cooked up in Washington like the Maidan - on a couple of Republicans with the courage to withstand the slings and arrows of being accused of being "Putin's puppets" for asking whether starting WWIII is really a good idea.

Writes Rogin: 

According to several lawmakers and senior congressional staffers, McCarthy and other GOP House leaders are already discussing how to alter the Ukraine aid package in the next Congress to respond to a wide array of concerns within their caucus. Some far-right lawmakers are calling for a complete cutoff of aid to Ukraine. But many Republicans are looking to cut much of the economic assistance while keeping or even increasing the military component — something of a compromise.

Ah yes...that "far right" problem of being opposed to WWIII. No doubt following in the footsteps of their hero, that good old rainbow peacenik Hitler.

Rogin continues:

But cutting the economic aid now, most of which is direct support to the Ukrainian government, would be ill-timed and dangerous, Ukrainian officials told me.

Breaking news: people getting endless stream of free money predict bad things will happen if they stop getting free money!

Rogin's real point is another feint. He claims that the global economic crisis is not caused by idiotic EU/US sanctions against Russia, which are turning Europe into a third world ghetto while Russia chalks up record profits, but by Russia itself.

The fact is, Russia has gazillions of tons of gas and oil to sell but has pivoted southwards for new customers in response to old and reliable customers walking away from the exchange. What a shock: business seeks new customers.

Neocons hate the free market, though. Like their communist intellectual forefathers, they despise free exchange between people. There is only politics. Free exchange is anathema. All human action is a means to an end.

Here's Rogin's coup de grace:

The costs of supporting Kyiv financially are small compared to the costs for the United States and the world if Ukraine falls. If Ukraine collapses economically, that would exacerbate the energy crisis, the food crisis, the refugee crisis and the global economic slowdown.

Sorry Josh, the "the energy crisis, the food crisis, the refugee crisis and the global economic slowdown" are all the result of what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban rightly observed as Europe having "shot itself in the lungs" with sanctions against Russia. 

Orban went on at the time to accurately assess the EU's öngyilkosság (suicide):

Initially, I thought we had only shot ourselves in the foot, but now it is clear that the European economy has shot itself in the lungs, and it is gasping for air.

Dear Josh Rogin: if you actually are not just a neocon propagandist and are genuinely looking for someone to blame for Ukraine's loss of a good chunk of territory - and more to come - look no further than Obama's neocons, now Biden's re-treads, who, being themselves Ukrainian or part Ukrainian, decided to hijack the entire US government to settle centuries-old scores in the old country.

This is the real problem with US foreign policy: it's for sale. And the military-industrial complex is very happy to play the role of auctioneer in the process. 

Ukraine's loss and destruction was long baked into the cake. As was the destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia, and so on and so on. Thus far none of the neocon/interventionist destruction-mongers have been called to the carpet for their multiple genocides. 

So they keep repeating them. After all, none of their victims matter to them. They aren't even human.

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Heritage Turns Conservative, Neocons Freak Out

By Daniel McAdams - September 15, 2022 at 06:58PM



The Heritage Foundation is getting carjacked by Beltway neocons after its political arm, Heritage Action, actually embraced fiscal conservatism and opposed the latest round of endless multi-billion dollar giveaways to Europe's most corrupt country, Ukraine. With crocodile tears, the Washington Post's neocon scribbler Josh Rogin is bemoaning how the "once-conservative" (read: neocon) Heritage Foundation is "abandoning the principles" of Ronald Reagan and instead embracing the isolationist nationalism of the MAGA crowd.

Quoting several neocon former Heritage "analysts" who took their toys and went home when Heritage began to veer off the neocon reservation, Rogin notes that:

The Heritage Foundation has been an influential brain trust for GOP administrations since the Reagan years — and still claims to stand for Ronald Reagan’s doctrine of 'peace through strength.' But beginning in the Trump era, and even more so now under its new president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage is moving away from that tradition, according to several foreign policy staffers who recently left the foundation.

Rogin quotes a former spook and Heritage analyst with the ridiculous name of "Klon Kitchen," who said of Heritage's newfound embrace of actual conservative principles, “This pivot on foreign policy is ignorant, reckless, and it is clearly elevating partisan opportunism over literally decades of principle.”

Yes, as we learned from the first Trump impeachment, any dissent from the blob's embrace of endless war is not approved by the "inter-agency consensus."

Mr. Kitchen went on to land a gig at the neocon warmongering American Enterprise Institute after walking away from Heritage, so we needn't feel sorry for him. As long as Raytheon's checks are still clearing, Kitchen will keep on cooking at AEI.

The target of Rogin's attack is new Heritage president, former Texas Public Policy Foundation director and self-described "recovering neocon" Kevin Roberts, who committed the ultimate sin of praising Sen. Rand Paul for his "leadership" in opposing the seemingly-limitless Ukraine aid gravy train.

Roberts is to be commended for his realization that the Cold War is actually over and that were Reagan still with us it is unlikely he would be espousing the same foreign policies as he did in the 1980s when there was this thing called the "Soviet Union." The world is changing and thanks to Roberts, Heritage is realizing it.

Rogin is no dummy, and in the semi-hit piece on Heritage he accurately captures what the shift is all about:

In the battle for the soul of GOP foreign policy between establishment Republicans and Trump-style national conservatives, the former still hold the levers of official power but the latter are gaining ground. The Heritage Foundation’s turn toward the 'new right' is the clearest symbol yet that the MAGA movement’s foreign policy is becoming institutionalized but moving further away from the Republican leadership.

If the Republican Party is to have any future it will continue to move into the camp of the antiwar conservatives and the example set by former Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul (and other trailblazers like Pat Buchanan). The new Republican candidates who embrace this pro-America foreign policy, and there are several of them poised to win in November, will be vilified as merely "MAGA" zombie-bots, but in fact the tired old neocon ideology that has dominated the Republican party is played out. It has no more energy. It is in a wheelchair on life-support.

Washington already has a pro-war, pro-police state, pro-tyranny party and it is called the Democratic Party. Can Republicans read the writing on the wall? Hopefully Roberts at Heritage will stand his ground and lead the way!



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'Regime Libertarians' Go Neocon on Ukraine

By Daniel McAdams - March 24, 2022 at 12:40AM



It seems like only yesterday, but it was in fact 19 years ago almost to the day. Nasty little Canadian neocon David Frum scribbled the infamous cover story for the National Review titled "Unpatriotic Conservatives." It was a catchy title and its purpose was to read all non-"regime" conservatives out of the conservative movement.

If you were skeptical about the Iraq war, about bogus claims of Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda and his mobile weapons labs that would lob nukes over to New York, you were not really conservative but rather an unpatriotic traitor.

Frum and his neocon buddies had a problem at the time: Conservative opposition to non-defensive wars went back decades - at least to Sen. Robert ("Mr. Conservative") Taft, who foresaw the nightmare we are now facing in east Europe and eloquently argued against the US joining NATO at all back in 1949. Even in 2003, prominent conservative intellectuals and a broad grassroots of Americans were still steeped in the advice of John Quincy Adams that we must not go abroad seeking monsters to slay.

So in one corner you had actual conservatives, who understood how nations were destroyed by endless wars of aggression and conquest.

In the other corner you had the neocons, who had only recently shuffled over to the "conservative" side after spending decades lurking in the fetid bowels of Trotskyism. 

What to do? Smear, baby, smear!

Wrote Frum at the time:

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.

Yes, we do know those names. Some of the greatest writers on the American Right for the past hundred years. And it turned out that each and every one of them was absolutely correct about Iraq, while Frum and his slithering neocon snakes were dirt wrong. 

These days, neocons have been replaced by "regime libertarians," who carry the same water for the warmongers but instead of bludgeoning the Right have chosen to bludgeon actual libertarians who refuse to adopt the CIA talking points about conflicts such as the Russia/Ukraine war.

Thus just a few days ago, Reason Mag's Steven Greenhut penned a broadside against anyone who refused the pro-war Langley talking points on the conflict, titled, clunkily, "Opposing War With Russia Doesn't Require Excusing Putin's Aggression."

The content is pretty predictable with a title like that, but here's a synopsis:

Greenhut is dismayed by the lack of "moral clarity" (which itself is a copyrighted neocon phrase - look it up) among some libertarians because they have insufficiently, in his view, adopted the talking points of literally every mainstream media outlet from Fox to CNN about the conflict. 

In fact, Greenhut has the gall to demonize some of the same paleocon/libertarian writers who were attacked by Frum - but proven right by history!

Thus Lew Rockwell is derided as "er, libertarian 'anti-war'" for featuring a piece by Paul Craig Roberts that accurately pointed out that if Russia had adopted US tactics and gone in for full scorched earth in Ukraine the conflict would have been over very quickly thus reducing the possibility for a wider war, as we are seeing today. 

As we read in Newsweek, the US dropped as many bombs on Iraq on the first day as the Russians have dropped on Ukraine in 24 days:

As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war).

Surely a quick strike, leveling Ukraine as the US leveled Fallujah and Sirte and much of Baghdad would have rapidly established facts on the ground and we would not be reading about insane Polish proposals to send NATO "peacekeepers" into Ukraine.

Similarly, Pat Buchanan (who founded an entire magazine to push back against Frum and the neocon comrades) is attacked by Greenhut for making the accurate observation that Russian President Putin is, "a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again."

Surely Greenhut prefers the CIA/MSNBC/Lockheed/Raytheon/Fox/CNN description of Putin as a "maniacal madman hellbent on incinerating us all in nuclear hellfire!"

You can still poke your Putin voodoo doll and understand that, objectively, Buchanan is right and Greenhut has seen too many Marvel movies. Understanding the nature and motivation of an adversary or potential adversary is not per definitionem agreeing with that person. Ask the military about that.

In fact, we can go back to the "Giuliani Moment," where Ron Paul himself was demonized by the former NYC mayor for suggesting that we have a look at the motives of those behind the 9/11 attack. In every crime the police doggedly search for motive, but for a massive crime like 9/11 that all goes out the window.

They hate us because we are good and free.

As Greenhut demands we conclude about Putin: "he attacks because he is bad and evil."

Bumpersticker stuff. Low intelligence.

Greenhut also does not spare Ron Paul in his tirade (which by the way was not very well-received even by his own readers).

Yes, Dr. Paul was also singled out for attack for his perfectly reasonable assertion that:

(L)obbyists for the military-industrial-complex are already 'explaining' to a very receptive Capitol Hill audience why the Ukraine crisis justifies increasing the military budget to 'counter the threats' from Russia, China, and whoever else can serve as a convenient boogeyman.

How controversial. Who's going to tell Greenhut that...it's true?

At the end of the day, one cannot help but suspect that Greenhut - no dummy when it comes to journalism - drew the short straw at some ghastly Reason Magazine editorial meeting (the horror!) and was forced to do a "Frum 2.0" hit piece on anyone from the libertarian camp who was not signing up to be propaganda mouthpieces for the war lobby.

As progressive antiwar journalist Caitlin Johnstone pointed out in a column and I amplified in a speech to the Mises Institute, if you are repeating the pro-war talking points about any regime Washington wants changed or any war Washington wants to drum up support for, you are not on the side of peace, even if you preface your recital of regime talking points with "I'm not in favor of sending in troops, but..."

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Biden's Cuban Missile Crisis

By Jeff Deist - February 25, 2022 at 05:13PM



Joe Biden's perverse legacy, if that term even applies anymore, may well be determined in the coming weeks by his handling of events in Ukraine. He can improve it by showing restraint against the relentless neoconservative chorus. One wonders what the results of a pure popular vote on the question of going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be, versus a vote solely within the DC beltway. 

Note: Biden was silent on the recent imposition of emergency martial law by the Trudeau government in Ottawa (a few hundred miles from Washington, DC), but has plenty to say about Kiev (4,881 distant miles). This is not coincidental. As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, we are required by Western propaganda to denounce actions by Vladimir Putin (such as freezing the bank assets of political opponent Alexei Navalny) while cheering the same actions taken by the Canadian government against money donated to truckers. Crackdowns in "democracies" are subject to a more enlightened standard:

[W]hen these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West's official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.1

Much of today's Western rhetoric about the former USSR employs this language of treason, accusing war skeptics of siding with Putin. American politicians and media often veer into outright Russophobia, sometimes with a not-subtle racial animus. This flows in large part from the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which somehow had to be the result of Russian interference and not Hillary Clinton's shortcomings. It was remarkable to see so many politicians and pundits risk resurrecting a Cold War with a nuclear power simply to hurt Trump politically. But it worked: they got rid of Trump, and now the Cold War is back.

At this writing, Putin has declared the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and autonomous from Ukraine. Russian forces have entered Ukraine and launched missiles; deaths and injuries are reported. Those troops reportedly have control over the Chernobyl power plant. Ludwig von Mises's birthplace, today called Lviv, is threatened. 

In response, Biden today announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia and promised severe economic consequences for Putin's actions. Military and aerospace technology will be blocked, while Russian banks will be shut off from international markets. US and EU officials also have considered the more severe option of removing the country from the SWIFT system of international payments, which would cut off foreign-currency purchases of oil, gas, and other Russian exports. 

Still, Biden has shown restraint. Let's hope he keeps to this commitment made earlier today:

'Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict,' he said. 'Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but defend [sic] our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.'

There will be plenty of voices in Biden's ear demanding more, much more. The subcurrent to Biden's election in 2020 was the return of neoconservatism with a vengeance. Many of the worst foreign policy hawks, from David Frum to Max Boot to Bill Kristol, have found their home in the Democratic Party. The GOP, for its part, is scrambling to outdo the Democrats in their bellicosity for Putin in a nauseatingly transparent effort to make Biden look weak for the upcoming midterm elections. Hence the sorry spectacle of former Trump national security advisor John Bolton—among the worst war promoters in modern history—solemnly lecturing us on MSNBC about Biden's failure to have placed US troops in Ukraine weeks ago. Unless Putin's foray is short lived, rest assured that Congress, the Pentagon, the spy agencies, Biden's cabinet, and his own party leaders (mindful of polls) will call for US military strikes. Some will call for American troops to defend Ukraine on the ground.

President John F. Kennedy faced similar pressures in his brief years as president. Regardless of one's views on Camelot, Kennedy was a New England liberal and idealist—not a neoconservative. He sincerely abhorred the possible use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviets. He communicated clandestinely with Nikita Khrushchev to avoid just such a conflict and managed to bring the US back from the brink of an ugly tank standoff in Berlin during 1961—stating, to the chagrin of the Cold Warriors, that the Berlin Wall was "a hell of a lot better than a war."

Kennedy similarly resisted calls by the Pentagon, CIA, and Joint Chiefs for the US to back a puppet government in Laos. He was reasonably firm in his opposition to escalations in Vietnam, denying repeated Pentagon requests for thousands of ground troops. Time and again he imagined his reelection in 1964 would free him politically to remove America completely from Southeast Asia.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the pressure on Kennedy to use nuclear missiles against that tiny, impoverished country was intense. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA deputy Richard Helms, the Joint Chiefs, and one particularly bloodthirsty general named Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay all pressed hard for action. They considered JFK's Cuban blockade disastrously weak. One CIA operative called his failure to launch a nuclear strike "treasonous." LeMay compared it to appeasement in Munich. And of course his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was never an ally when it counted. Kennedy's only firm and trusted confidant throughout all of it was his own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Like Trump, JFK faced almost mutinous attacks and subterfuge from within: by his own cabinet, administrative agencies, military commanders, and especially the CIA. 

Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy's intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.

1.Glenn Greenwald, "The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West," Glenn Greenwald, Feb. 21, 2022, https://ift.tt/lKFZBw4.

Reprinted with permission from Mises Institute.

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Hawks Smear War Opponents Again

By Ted Galen Carpenter - February 08, 2022 at 03:09PM



Advocates of an aggressive US foreign policy are again smearing their antiwar opponents. In his latest article on Substack, iconoclastic journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that he "cannot count the number of times" that he has "been accused of being a Kremlin agent or asset, not by random social media trolls but by prominent Democratic Party and liberal media and political figures for expressing those views." Greenwald emphasized that he is hardly alone in receiving such treatment. "That is now, by far, the favorite attack against anyone who believes that Ukrainian borders are not important enough to US interests to involve the US in a war." He proceeds to document a number of ugly smears impugning the loyalty of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others who dare question the wisdom (or sanity) of adopting a dangerous, hardline policy toward Russia.

From personal experience, I can confirm Greenwald’s observation. In an article on the Atlantic Council’s blog, responding to an earlier article of mine in National Interest Online, German analyst Andreas Umland embodied that tactic. After asserting that "an ideologically diverse range of Western sources" have "echoed many of Moscow’s more outlandish claims," Umland "peppered his op-ed with other "Russian tool" innuendoes and singled me out for special criticism. Carpenter’s "talking points would be instantly recognizable to Russian TV viewers, who have encountered similar disinformation on a virtually daily basis for the past seven years. One can only guess at Carpenter’s motives."

Umland amplified his guilt-by-innuendo campaign in a subsequent, much more detailed article in Eurasia Review. The following captures his argument: "Here comes a senior American commentator working at a leading Washington think-tank, publishing in one of the most influential US political magazines, and repeating exactly those talking points that the Kremlin has been spreading to justify its thinly veiled hybrid war against Ukraine for seven years now. This not enough, Carpenter uses the Kremlin’s favorite narratives to unapologetically call for an end of US support for Ukraine. What more could Moscow hope for?" The ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy likely is beaming at the audacity of that passage

As Greenwald points out, several characteristics provide the cohesion for pro-war types, both neocons and hawkish liberals. "Two of the most toxic of these have been on full display over the last month. The first is that they are always – in every case – in favor of any opportunities for the US to involve itself in a new war. You wind up a neocon, and they start inventing excuses for why the US must either bomb and invade other countries or enter a new proxy war to arm and fund other countries to do so for it. It is, therefore, unnecessary to point out that they are all not just in favor of US involvement in a potential war between Russia and Ukraine but fanatical and giddy about it."

The pro-war faction’s invocation of Vladimir Putin’s alleged threat to the entire international order, especially by seeking to "evict the United States from Europe," confirms Greenwald’s conclusions. Chronic war advocate Max Boot asserts that Putin’s goal is nothing less than the re-establishment of the Soviet empire. Such threat inflation throughout the American foreign policy community and news media is intensifying. For hawks willing to have America risk a nuclear war with Russia, their portrayal of the current NATO-Russia confrontation resembles the culminating portions of Lord of Rings, in which brave defenders of freedom must risk all to bring down the supremely evil Sauron.

The other element of cohesion for pro-war lobbyists, Greenwald emphasizes, is the way neocons and their liberal hawkish allies "smear anyone who opposes their plots to involve the US in new wars as traitors, on the side of whichever Bad Leader they want (others) to fight."

It is not a new phenomenon. Pro-war types routinely excoriated opponents of the Vietnam War as being advocates of appeasement at best and outright communist sympathizers at worst. That pattern appeared again in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. When Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) voted against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (the only member of the House to do so), numerous conservative publications vilified her. John Fund’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was typical of the treatment. "One wishes Ms. Lee were just a clueless liberal," Fund stated, " but her history leads me to conclude that she is the kind of ‘San Francisco Democrat’ that former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized in 1984: someone who ‘always blames America first.’" He harped on the point of Lee’s alleged special aversion to America’s role in the world: "America has been attacked, and while pacifism has an honorable tradition in this country, Ms. Lee seems to use it as a cloak for her belief that when it comes to the use of American power, her country can never do right."

That same ugly tactic was pervasive during the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. David Frum’s infamous article in National Review, "Unpatriotic Conservatives," was the most flagrant example, but there were many others. Frum is back to his usual tactics, impugning the loyalty of individuals who criticize the attempt to stampede America into a military confrontation with Russia. In a January 23 tweet, he thundered: "You’re going to hear a lot of lying about Putin’s War from Putin apologists on the [Tucker] Carlson right and the [Glenn] Greenwald left. Don’t let them get away with it. Putin is plotting this conflict, only Putin, and any excuse for Putin is an excuse for a war wanted by nobody in the West."

Policy toward Russia seems to be an especially prominent lightning rod in bringing out the worse features of the vocal neo-McCarthyites. Moreover, that pattern emerged long before the concerted effort to promote allegations about supposed collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government. People who dared oppose a belligerent response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, or who made the case that Washington’s meddling to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine’s pro-Russia president provoked the annexation, found themselves targets of vitriol from a de facto alliance of neocons and liberal hawks.

Indeed, some of the nastiest allegations from both camps were directed against individuals who not only had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s presidential bid but were outright critics of Trump. Princeton University Professor Stephen F. Cohen, a longtime distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union and its successor states, was a prominent early target. Critics impugned Cohen’s motives and sullied his reputation long before the 2016 election, because he advocated a less confrontational policy toward Russia. Such epithets as "Putin’s American apologist" and "Putin’s pal" were among the routine labels they applied to Cohen.

People who argued that NATO’s expansion eastward to Russia’s border had needlessly provoked Moscow, or that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were more defensive than offensive, received the same treatment. Epithets such as "Putin’s apologists," "stooges," "Russian trolls," "patsies," and "useful idiots" laced such denunciations. Matters have not improved since then. A Yahoo "news" story referred to Tucker Carlson as a "Russian stooge" just days ago. Writing in Slate, William Saletan labeled Carlson "America’s most watched Kremlin propagandist." The leftist Media Matters branded him a "Putin apologist."

The purpose of such slimy tactics is readily apparent: intimidation of war opponents and the suppression of debate about US foreign policies. Too often, hawks have succeeded in achieving their objective, and the United States has blundered into unnecessary wars that caused widespread havoc in and around the targeted countries. The conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq are the most illustrative examples, but unfortunate outcomes on a smaller scale also occurred in places such as the Balkans, Libya, and Syria (in part because of a stifling of meaningful debate about those dubious policies.) The potential for a disastrous outcome of a confrontation between the United States and Russia is far greater. We must not let the David Frums of the world prevail this time.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

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CATO Hires a Neocon Bigot

By Daniel McAdams - January 14, 2022 at 12:25AM



Neocon stench is not confined to the sweaty flatulence of Bill Kristol's writing chambers. Yes it's true that neocons at AEI and Brookings and Heritage and The Free Bacon, etc are all to be expected. It's like going to the zoo and looking into the chimp enclosure: you expect to see chimps and so you see chimps. But imagine going to the marmoset enclosure and also seeing chimps. Hmmm...what's going on here? We didn't expect to see chimps here.

We've never had high hopes for the Beltway "libertarian" dogs who dutifully abide the intellectual leashes of their (pay)masters. There are some good pups out there and I'm the last guy to kick someone for trying to earn a buck while retaining as much integrity as possible given the rotten situation.

But come on, man! CATO Institute has hired that wretched neocon freak Cathy Young as a senior fellow?

Cathy Young that "Russiagate" dead-ender (holding on to the lie longer than anyone on earth except for Adam Schiff). Yes, she has a few quibbles with those low-born blue unwashed who viewed the Steele Dossier as a kind of Dead Sea Scroll detailing Trump's potty-philia, but...but... but...wait! - as she writes herself: don't get bogged down in the salacious, man, there's plenty of good evidence that all of it's true! There's plenty of evidence that, as disgraced CIA thug Mike Morrell famously lied, Trump is an "agent of the Russian Federation."

Forget the Steele Dossier, Young wrote, there are...

...plenty of reasons to investigate, from Trump’s just-kidding-or-maybe-not public invitation to Russia to hack into his rival Hillary Clinton’s emails to the fact that his campaign was swarming with people who had ties to Russia or to pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. And let’s not forget that later on, Trump acted in ways that stoked suspicion — such as firing FBI director James Comey, openly admitting that he did it to stop the Russia investigation, and bragging about it in a private meeting with top-level Russians.

Come on, people! Get with the pogrom!

"Libertarian" Cathy Young is no doubt pleased as punch that journalist Julian Assange is rotting away in a British prison for the "crime" of reporting the truth. After all, she still professes the laughable lie that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton's computer and passed it to the Russians via Wikileaks!

She wrote:

...there is little question that the Kremlin meddled in the election with the goal of hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances. Mainly, this was accomplished by stealing Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails and releasing them via Wikileaks.

Little question? There is NO EVIDENCE! For normal people that means BIG QUESTION.

But that doesn't work for Cathy Young. She has an agenda and she's just sure that Putin is infecting our precious bodily fluids.

Why is the CATO Institute hiring "experts" who espouse the most outlandish conspiracy theories?

Before his untimely death just over two years ago, Antiwar.com founder Justin Raimondo nailed the anti-libertarian, interventionist duplicity of the rotten Cathy Young:

While distancing herself from the 'more extreme' anti-Russian narratives, which she admits are conspiracy theories with little evidence to support them, Young weaves a 'moderate' conspiracy theory of her own – with just as little evidence to support it. She claims that the Russians are supporting the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party of Greece, and Hungary’s 'quasi-fascist' Jobbik movement, although no evidence of this is presented. She says in several instances that the National Front party of France’s Marine Le Pen is a Russian front: her 'evidence' is that a Russian bank with 'links to the Kremlin' provided the party with a loan. One wonders if, say, a British bank (with undefined 'links' to Westminster) loaned money to an America political party, would that make them a tool of Perfidious Albion? 

Who needs actual evidence, anyway, when writing about Russia? After all, as computer security expert Jeffrey Carr points out, there is exactly zero public proof that the Russians 'hacked' the 2016 elections – and yet the media 'reports' this as undisputed fact.

So what really motivates Cathy Young to hate Russia - the land of her birth - so much? It is her own anti-Christian bigotry (hardly a live-and-let-live libertarian attitude). As the cover art for her cover story about Russia betrays, Young and Reason are the antithesis of libertarians in that they despise anyone with values different than their own.

In fact they represent an even more Stalinist intolerance than their caricature of Putin!

They are the Soviets they pretend to despise. 

If Russians who have re-established their freedom of choice (a libertarian concept) after 70 years of communist government-forced atheism decide of their own free will to return to the Christianity established in Kievan Rus by the Apostle Andrew, they must be punished for their choice.

That is the essence of Cathy Young and Reason...and now CATO.

For Cathy Young and the Reason/CATO crowd, libertarianism and liberalism shares a lot in common with Soviet communism: you are free to choose as long as you choose the ideological vanguard which will ultimately rule history for all time.

Cathy Young is a rigid communist and everything she writes should be laughed at. CATO should be forced to eat its own barf.

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Washington Free Beacon's Hilarious Meltdown Over Afghanistan

By Daniel McAdams - August 17, 2021 at 02:57PM



I admit I've always had a soft spot for the Washington Free Beacon. Not because I am attracted to their puerile content, mind you, but because I've always associated the name "Free Beacon" with "free bacon," a proposition I believe every American could get behind.

Unfortunately, porcine mis-associations are not enough to palliate the reader from the agony of reading the steaming pile of pig feces they shat out today, blaming the Quincy Institute for the sudden evaporation of the puppet Afghan government after 20 years, two trillion dollars, and thousands of lives lost.

Yes, these are the same people who urged the war to continue forever, who urged more trillions to be taken from middle America and shoved into the pockets (and helicopters) of corrupt elites inside the Beltway and abroad, who urged that just one more bombing run would bring us - finally! - a victory for US interventionism. 

It's easy to understand why the Beaconers and the rest of the neocons are a bit sensitive about all of this. Their track record is something I'd be ashamed of: they're batting exactly...zero. There has not been one single US war, regime change operation, bombing run, sanctions regime, or any other intervention that they've called for or supported that has left the US or the recipient country better off in any shape or form.

They're lucky they have no shame. Most decent people would think about a different line of work when their incompetence - or more accurately malevolence - was exposed for all to see. Think of a surgeon who kept cutting off the wrong limb or a truck driver who kept delivering the wrong load to the wrong location.

But no, it's all Quincy's fault. Finally removing US troops from a 20 year open wound was "precipitous" wrote the Beaconers. 

But what's funny is nowhere in their hissy fit is any bill of particulars laid out. It's simply a kid-in-a-sandbox argument: Quincy applauded the announced end of what seemed like an endless war, the war ended and predictably there was chaos in a country that had been occupied for decades by a foreign power, and it's now all Quincy's fault.

The Beaconers were tossing expensive chinaware around in a china shop, the Quincy-ites told them that would be a bad idea, they did it anyway, the chinaware broke, and the Beaconers cried all the way home that it was all Quincy's fault. Boo hoo hoo!

There is a reason "Ron Paul was right" was trending all day on Twitter as the Taliban took Kabul. Ron Paul warned about this 20 years ago when he saw a limited mission to avenge the 9/11 attack morphing in classic Washington-style into a mega-gravy train for the military industrial complex and its pens-for-hire at the think tanks and Beltway rags like the Free Beacon.

"Bill Kristol was right" never trends on Twitter because Bill Kristol is never right. And that goes for his neocon son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, who co-founded the Free Beacon.

I write this not as a Quincy partisan, but as one who has been critical of the Quincy Institute for a number of reasons. And indeed by trying to play footsie with the interventionists while making sure their statecraft is "responsible" they do bring much of this on themselves.

That is why our position is so simple and defensible: we are non-interventionists. The US government can't organize a free lunch here at home, yet somehow we are supposed to believe they can organize entire societies thousands of miles away about which they know nothing and whose language they cannot utter a syllable. 

Nevertheless, I believe most of those associated with Quincy have their hearts in the right place and genuinely wish to see a more peaceful world.

That is why it is so hilarious to see the Beaconers convulsing uncontrollably as another one of their adventures has gone so catastrophically wrong. "I could have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you pesky kids" is not a viable argument to having one's mask removed.

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Should We Celebrate Rumsfeld's Death?

By Daniel McAdams - July 01, 2021 at 12:31AM



Career neocon and warmongering monster Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88, the news media has reported. Rumsfeld was kind of the Fauci of the early 2000's, a relatively faceless bureaucrat who circumstance selected to serve in a glamorous role as a symbol of the zeitgeist of his time. Rumsfeld became the rock star of George W. Bush's 2002 Iraq war.

He warmed to the camera, after spending many years in relative obscurity in the revolving-door world between highly-paid positions in the "private sector" and battery-recharges back in senior government positions.

To keep your value to the weapons manufacturers you must constantly re-steep yourself into the world of the bureaucracy and also the world of the Congressional-military-industrial complex. You have to dip your beak into the endless river of military appropriations and the (deep state) people who grease the skids of billions of dollars to the war industry. 

Otherwise you do not know what buttons to push to deliver billion dollar contracts in exchange for million dollar salaries.

In this endeavor, Rumsfeld was not the worst offender, it must be said. He was, unlike our current Defense Secretary, never on the board of missile-maker and death-dealer Raytheon. In fact his credentials in the war industry were paltry compared to the new breed of "public servant" in Pentagon leadership.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld took on the job of selling the monstrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq as "the good war" and he made sure he was the face of the marketing campaign.

The one thing the US mainstream media agrees on is the promotion of the US global military empire, and thus Rumsfeld's follies in front of the camera were for the most part presented to Red and Blue America as wholesome evening entertainment.

Known unknowns and unknown knowns and etc. It was all gobblygook but Rumsfeld delivered it with a smile and bravado and it sure beat having to watch video clips of innocent children slaughtered by America's "shock and awe" bombing orgy against a country that did not threaten us and could not have threatened us if it wanted to do so.

Yes, much more enjoyable to watch the Rumsfeld follies than to watch Iraqi children burning to death and fatally radiated under the terrorism of US bombs.

So, many antiwar allies are tonight dancing on the perhaps sulfuric-smelling grave of Donald Rumsfeld, but I will not be joining them.

Rumsfeld was all-powerful for a brief time, when the machine had selected him for the role. He was the face of the "good war" against the "demon of the day," Saddam Hussein. And there is no doubt that he relished his emergence from the bowels of the war apparatus to the poetry of the Pentagon daily briefing.

But in the end, Rumsfeld was just another tool of the bigger beast. In that way his death is pathetic. Just another traveling salesman of a product that had already been bought and sold many times over: Death.

God have mercy on Donald Rumsfeld's soul. Let's pray he converted to actual Christianity and thus saved himself from eternal horror. To hope for less is to descend to the level of the neocon demons themselves.

At the end of the day, yes Rumsfeld helped sell a war that killed a million people and did not in any measurable way make us more safe. But he's a mere piker in our current far more murky world of deep state murderers like Austin, Nuland, Powers, Blinken, and so many others who will never appear before the camera because they are too busy manning the killing machine.

Rumsfeld was a monster 20 years ago. Today compared to his competition for neocon monster murderer he is a mere footnote in the book of US foreign policy murder history.

Rest in Peace Donald Rumsfeld. May God have mercy on your soul (and on all of our equally sinful souls). Amen.



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Life After Death for the Neoconservatives

By Spengler (David P. Goldman) - March 25, 2021 at 09:55AM



Delusions die hard. The obsession of American foreign policy after the fall of communism was pro-Western democracy in Russia, and the foreign policy establishment has never forgiven Vladimir Putin for returning Russia to the sort of authoritarian governance it has endured for all but a few brief years of its history.

The obsession is back with Joe Biden – and, with it, the neoconservatives who dominated the failed administration of George W Bush.

For several reasons, President Biden’s March 16 denunciation of Putin as a “killer” without a soul ranks among the dumbest utterances ever by an American leader – and that’s a crowded field. To begin with, heads of state do not insult each other this way, except in wartime.

Secondly, the Biden administration proclaims its concern about competition from China, but American pressure has pushed Russia into a reluctant but resilient alliance with the Middle Kingdom.

Third, Washington will need Moscow’s tacit cooperation to revive the Iran nuclear deal, a key Biden foreign policy objective, and calling Putin out hardly furthers this objective.

Fourth – and most important – Western Europe is determined to improve its relations with Russia. Biden’s outburst will persuade Paris and Berlin that this administration is as loopy as the last one.

The “Russia question” appears to have surfaced in response to a March 16 US intelligence community assessment that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy, and the Democratic Party.”

The 15-page public document is fluff. We heard it all before in December 2020, when fifty former intelligence officials denounced news reports of Hunter Biden’s corrupt ties to Ukrainian oligarchs as Russian disinformation.

The New York Post claimed to have gotten hold of a laptop with smoking-gun emails to and from Biden’s son. The voters never were allowed to consider the evidence, because the rest of the media suppressed the report and Twitter blocked reposting of the Post expose. In a December 4 column, I called this the “Treason of the spooks.”

By way of tying up loose ends, the intelligence community has now delivered an “assessment” claiming that “a key element of Moscow’s strategy was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.”

Those are weasel words. The Post published the text of Hunter Biden emails that, strictly speaking, were “unsubstantiated” to the extent that the geek squad had not proven their provenance and the younger Biden hadn’t owned up to their authenticity. But that does not prove they were false, much less justify employing extraordinary means to suppress the reports.

Apart from Biden’s ABC interview, the nomination of Victoria Nuland as undersecretary of state for political affairs has sent an unmistakable signal to Moscow and, more importantly, to America’s European allies.

In early 2014 Nuland was taped on a cell phone call with America’s ambassador to the Ukraine ordering the composition of the next Ukrainian government after the Maidan coup, in the tone of a colonial viceroy.

Told that there might be some difficulties, Nuland explained that the UN was being enlisted in support and said, “That would be great, I think, and help glue this thing.” She added, “And, you know, fuck the EU.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the time denounced the remark as “unacceptable.” That sort of faux pas normally would rate being assigned a diplomatic mission to the South Pole, but such is Washington’s ideological fervor that Nuland survived and resurfaced.

Nuland is a neoconservative, a former deputy national security adviser to then-vice president Dick Cheney, as well as the spouse of Robert Kagan, one of the most persistent advocates of global transformation via the projection of American power.

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Biden Taps Architect of 2014 Ukraine Coup for State Department

By Dave DeCamp - January 06, 2021 at 09:32AM



According to a report from Politico, Joe Biden’s transition team is expected to nominate Victoria Nuland to be the under secretary of state for political affairs for the incoming administration’s State Department.

Nuland, who is married to neoconservative Robert Kagan, is known for her role in orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine while she was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration.

A recording of a phone call between Nuland and then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked and released on YouTube on February 4th, 2014. In the call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was forced to step down on February 22nd, 2014.

The US-backed coup sparked the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and led to the Russian annexation of Crimea. Both regions have a majority ethnic-Russian population who rejected the nationalist, anti-Russian post-coup government that even had neo-Nazis in its midst.

In a 2020 column for Foreign Affairs titled, “Pinning Down Putin,” Nuland said Russian President Vladimir Putin “seized” on the 2014 coup and other “democratic struggles” to “fuel the perception at home of Russian interests under siege by external enemies.” She also cited the war in the Donbas and annexation of Crimea as examples of Russian aggression, as most in Washington do.

Currently, Nuland is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and works for the Albright Stonebridge Group. She is also a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US-taxpayer funded nonprofit that funds “pro-democracy” movements across the world.

Nuland worked in the Bush administration from 2005 to 2008 as the US ambassador to NATO. From 2011 to 2013, she served as the spokesperson for Barack Obama’s State Department, and from 2013 to 2017, Nuland was the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs.

Politico also reported that the Biden administration is tapping Wendy Sherman to work directly under Secretary of State-designee Anthony Blinken. Sherman worked in the Obama administration’s State Department and played a crucial role in negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

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Senators Liken Hack to Russian Invasion Despite Lack of Proof Moscow Was Involved

By Dave DeCamp - December 18, 2020 at 11:08AM



Despite the lack of evidence that Russia was behind a massive hack that appears to have targeted several US government agencies, US senators are calling for retaliation against Moscow, even likening the cyberattack to an invasion.

“This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. On Thursday, Durbin called for a response against Moscow on the Senate floor, describing the hack as a “virtual invasion.”

“No, I’m not calling for an invasion myself or all-out war. I don’t want to see that happen, but it’s no longer a buddy-buddy arrangement between the United States and Vladimir Putin,” he said on Thursday. “When adversaries such as Russia torment us, tempt us, breach the security of our nation, we need to respond in kind.”

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) chimed in on Thursday and said in a statement on Twitter that there has been “inexcusable silence and inaction from the White House” over the hack.

In a radio interview, Romney said: “I think the White House needs to say something aggressive about what happened. This is almost as if you had a Russian bomber flying undetected over the country, including over the nation’s capital, and not to respond in a setting like that is really stunning.”

The hack of the software company SolarWinds was discovered by the cybersecurity firm FireEye. SolarWinds software is used by various US government agencies and hundreds of corporations. When FireEye first reported the hack, the firm said it was carried out by a “nation-state” but did not specify which one.

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Charles Carmakal, a leading incident response expert for FireEye, said the firm had “not yet seen sufficient evidence” to name the actor responsible for the hack.

Since Russia is a favorite bogeyman of US media outlets, speculation that Moscow was involved began almost immediately. Anonymous sources speaking to several media outlets pinned the blame for the hack on Russia, and mainstream reporters followed their lead, repeating the claim as fact.

The Washington Post published a story on Thursday that said federal investigators discovered evidence of previously unknown tactics while investigating the cyberattacks. The Post described the hacks as “Russia’s recent intrusions,” only offering claims from unnamed officials to back up the assertion that Moscow was responsible.

The Post story reads: “The US government has not publicly blamed Russia for the hacks, but US officials speaking privately say that Russian government hackers were behind the operation.”

Other media outlets have been more careful, leaving room for doubt about Russia’s culpability. Politico reported that the Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration have been added to the list of US government agencies that were hacked. In the story, Russia is only mentioned once, and the claim that Moscow was responsible is much less definitive.

The Politico story reads: “The US government has not blamed any particular actor for the hacks yet, but cybersecurity experts have said the activity bears the hallmarks of Russia’s intelligence services.”

Joe Biden released a statement on the cyberattack, although he refrained from blaming Russia. “We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place,” he said. “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

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Trump (Finally) Hires Neocon Slayer

By Daniel McAdams - November 11, 2020 at 07:08PM

In what may go down in history as a tragic example of "a day late and a dollar short," President Trump today named US combat veteran Col. Douglas Macgregor to be senior advisor to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Trump's recently-fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper was another in a nearly four-year-long line of terrible personnel choices that together with the ongoing Democratic party-led slow-motion coup has crippled the Trump Administration in its most important mission: Putting America first when it comes to foreign policy.

Col. Macgregor is one of the most highly decorated US combat veterans, who unlike those officers with high political ambitions has actually smelled the stench of war. After blazing through Iraq in a tank in the first Gulf War, Col. Macgregor began to question the wisdom of a US global military empire that was emerging to take the place of the massive anti-Soviet machine that had sustained the mestastatic growth of the very military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address.

There is a good argument that men of war are among the best allies in the fight against war, and Macgregor is no exception. His experience in the unwise application of massive US military force steeled him against those who would unleash those dogs too readily and with little consideration given to the actual interests of the United States.

As might be expected, Macgregor's hesitation to sign on to the US global military empire made him public enemy number one to the Beltway neocons, who've never seen a war they don't like but who have also never seen a day in military uniform. These are the wimps like Max Boot, who lob their scribbled missiles from the safety of their well-paid sinecures but who would need a change of skivvies at the slightest belch from an actual weapon.

One can only sit back and ponder what might have been, as we witness the culmination of nearly four years of a slow-motion coup against the duly-elected President of the United States, if President Trump had brought on board a full slate of men and women like Col. Doug Macgregor, who were living and breathing Trump's campaign slogan of putting America first when it comes to foreign policy.

With perhaps weeks left in the Trump Administration (barring the miracle of actually counting valid votes), there is still a great deal that Trump and Macgregor can achieve. Bring troops home from Afghanistan now. Esper reportedly quit over that issue. Bring troops home from Syria. Defund NATO. Declassify all the "Russiagate" documents. Declassify everything that exposes the deep state coup against Trump.

Col. Macgregor is, full disclosure, a cherished friend of your author. He spoke at Dr. Paul's Congressional Liberty Lunches and no doubt had great influence on Republican Members who were skeptical of endless war but also cautious over sounding too peacenik. Macgregor embodies the idea of a muscular defense of the United States that rejects the siren song of the neocons and globalists.

We are grateful that Col. Macgregor has spoken at two Ron Paul Institute conferences. Each time he outlined what would have been a highly successful Trump foreign policy. What an historic tragedy that Trump only paid attention to this far too late. Unless...

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Alliance of Liberals, Neocons Set to Shape US Foreign Policy

By - September 02, 2020 at 09:16AM



The emergence in recent weeks of a coalition of neoconservative Republicans and former US national-security officials who have thrown their support behind the Democratic candidacy of Joe Biden is an ominous development to those who believe US foreign policy should be guided by the principles of realism and military restraint, rather than perpetual wars of choice.

In early June, a group of former officials from the George W Bush administration launched a political action committee (PAC) in support of Biden’s candidacy. The group, 43 Alumni for Biden, boasts nearly 300 former Bush officials and is seeking to mobilize disaffected Republicans nationwide.

The mobilization appears to be having an impact: More recently, “more than 100 former staff of [the late US senator John] McCain’s congressional offices and campaigns also endorsed Biden for president,” according to NBC News, as well as dozens of former staffers from Senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

That Republican support comes in addition to the more than 70 former US national-security officials who teamed up and issued a statement urging Biden’s election in November.

Citing what they believe is the grave damage President Donald Trump has done to US national security, the group does include some mainstream Republicans like Richard Armitage and Chuck Hagel, but also features notable neocon hardliners like Eliot Cohen, John Negroponte and David Kramer, who, perhaps not incidentally, played a leading role in disseminating the utterly discredited Steele dossier prior to Trump’s inauguration.

These are not merely grifters or desperate bids for attention by unscrupulous and avaricious Beltway swamp creatures. Though there are those too: the so-called Lincoln Project, helmed by neocon operative Rick Wilson, which is an outside group of Republicans (including former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele) devoted to defeating Trump in November.

As historian David Sessions recently tweeted, “Basically nobody in liberal circles is taking seriously the consequences of the fact that the exiled cadre of the Republican Party are building a massive power base in the Democratic Party.”

The merger between Democrats and neocons is not merely confined to the world of electoral politics; it is already affecting policy as well.

Over the summer, in response to The New York Times’ dubious “Russia bounty” story, Democratic congressman Jason Crow teamed up with Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (daughter of former US vice-president Dick Cheney) to prohibit Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee also collaborated to pass an amendment that imposed restrictions on Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Germany, showing, if nothing else, that the bipartisan commitment to the new cold war is alive and well.

It is noteworthy that while there has been considerable pushback to economic neoliberalism within the Democratic Party in recent years, thanks, mainly, to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the advocacy of reformers like Elizabeth Warren and the increasing popularity of economists like Stephanie Kelton, the same cannot be said for foreign policy.

Biden has evinced an openness to being “pushed left” on social and economic policies if he is elected president, but on external affairs he still largely operates within the standard Washington foreign-policy playbook.

If anything, on foreign policy Democrats have moved rightward in recent years, having fallen not only under the spell of “Russiagate” but also increasingly under the influence of neocons and other former Bush officials who have pushed that discredited narrative for their own ends.

The Democrats have also displayed a rather supine obeisance in regard to the country’s intelligence community, in spite of a multiplicity of well-documented lies or half-truths that would at the very least justify some skepticism about their claims or motivations.

Nobody should be surprised.

The neocons had been signaling their intention to flee the Republicans as early as 2016 when it was widely reported that Robert Kagan had decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president and speak at a Washington fundraiser alongside other national-security fixtures worried about the alleged isolationist drift within the Republican Party.

Indeed, the Democrats welcomed the likes of Kagan and fellow neocon extremist Max Boot with open arms, setting the stage for where we are today: a Democratic presidential nominee running to the right of the Republican nominee on foreign policy.

Missing: whither the progressives?

Over the past few US election cycles, progressive Democrats have increasingly challenged the party’s prevailing neoliberal bias on domestic economic policy. Equally striking, however, is that they have been delinquent in failing to provide an alternative to the hegemonic influence of militarists and interventionists growing within their party regarding foreign policy.

As it stands today, the so-called progressive foreign-policy alternative is really no alternative at all. To the contrary, it evokes Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s seminal work, The Leopard, whose main character, Tancredi, sagely observes to his uncle, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

So it is with much of what passes for a genuine foreign-policy alternative: The rhetoric slightly changes, the personnel certainly change, but in substance, the policy status quo largely remains.

Consider a recent interview with the socialist Jacobin magazine featuring Matt Duss, a foreign-policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Duss, who seeks to articulate the foundations of a new “progressive” foreign policy, told the Quincy Institute’s Daniel Bessner:

“We have neither the right nor the ability to transform other countries, but we should do what we can to protect and expand the political space in these countries for local people to do that work. We can also provide funding or resources for American civil society actors to work in solidarity with their international counterparts.” [emphasis ours]

That sounds anodyne enough, but in reality, it is nothing but a form of liberal imperialism. Historically, seemingly benign initiatives conducted under the aegis of local people backed by so-called democracy-building programs have often planted the seeds for more malign military intervention later.

Who makes the decision as to which local people to support? How does one (purportedly) protect and expand that political space? We have seen how well that worked out in Afghanistan, Iraq, or, indeed, in the mounting human tragedy that is Syria today.

Comments like that of Matt Duss amount to this: “We don’t have the right to transform other countries … but we’re going to try anyway.” Forswearing pre-emptive military action (wars of choice) isn’t enough. Change will only come about when US foreign policy adheres to the principles of the UN Charter, and above all, the ancient Westphalian principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. American policymakers need to learn that less is more.

That used to be a guiding principle of Democrats, for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “good neighbor policy” that repudiated intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin America.

Of course, as subsequent events such as World War II illustrated, there may be a point at which external assistance/intervention in other parts of the world might become necessary; but the United States should not perpetually arrogate to itself the role of sole judge and jury in determining when that line should be crossed, no matter how benign its intentions might appear.

The broader point is that explicating a foreign policy somewhat less hawkish and merely paying lip service to international law that transcend the norms established by the Bush-Cheney neocons isn’t enough.

That is the foreign-policy equivalent of the Republican-lite economic agenda embraced by “New Democrats” such as Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner, whereby the Democrats internalize the Republican Party’s market-fundamentalist paradigm, but simply promise to implement it more fairly, rather than do away with it altogether.

That appears unlikely to change under a future Biden administration. As American Conservative editor Kelley Beaucar Vlahos has noted, “Democratic interventionists and Blob careerists now [sit] at the right hand of [Biden] … like [Antony] Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Michele Flournoy, who has been touted as a possible secretary of defense.

“They would sooner drag the country back into Syria, as well as position aggressively against China if the military pushed hard enough and there was a humanitarian reason to justify it.”

Nowhere in Biden’s foreign-policy ambit do we find mainstream figures warning about the dangers of a new cold war with Russia or China, nor to the broader problems posed by America’s overall propensity toward militarism. In fact, Biden does just the opposite.

The shape of things to come?

With the notable exceptions of a few anti-war Democrats like Barbara Lee, Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna and Jeff Merkley, the opposition party has spent much of the Trump era turning itself into the party of war.

Meanwhile, one could envisage a future where the Republicans, under the influence of “national conservatives” such as Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, or even Trump advisers such as retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor (recently nominated to be US ambassador to Germany), becomes the party of realism and restraint abroad.

To the limited extent that President Trump has been guided by any kind of restraint (which has been capricious at best), it has paid dividends for the United States. In the Middle East, for example, given that the United States is now largely energy-self-sufficient, it no longer needs to play policeman in that part of the world.

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