Why Are Russia and China (And Iran) Paramount Enemies for the U.S. Ruling Elite?

John V. Walsh


The Bolsheviks took Russia and then the rest of
the USSR out of the Western orbit, out of the am-
bit of the Western colonial powers. Rothschild
now wants it back. - And he wants China too...

Does it not seem strange that, with the Cold War long over, the Paramount Enemies of the United States remain Russia and China? That is not a bad question to ponder with Vladimir Putin’s visit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

And there is no doubt that Russia and China hold this pariah status in the eyes of the U.S. imperial elite. In the last months we have watched the US try to push Russia East and tear it apart. At the same time Obama traversed East Asia trying to stitch together an anti-China military and economic alliance in the Western Pacific with Japan as the linchpin.

In fact it is striking that the US has allied itself with neo-Nazism in Ukraine and Japanese militarism on the other side of Asia. This is happening despite the considerable changes that have taken place in both Russia and China, neither of which would any longer claim to be interested in an anti-capitalist crusade. The only country that comes close in the opprobrium heaped upon them by the West is Iran.

Why do these countries, especially Russia and China, remain the enemies of the West? With the struggle against Soviet-style Communism long over, the reason is certainly not ideological.

This riddle finds its answer in a suggestion by Jean Bricmont in his Humanitarian Imperialism. He observes that the main political development of the last 100 years was not the defeat of fascism nor the fall of Soviet style Communism, but the battle against Western colonialism.

And this battle is far from over, for most of the world is still subject to total or partial domination by the West, a condition that Sartre and Nkrumah dubbed neocolonialism. The colonized peoples of the world, the overwhelming majority of humanity, still live under the worst of material conditions.


U.S. Goading Japan into Confrontation with China

John V. Walsh

Just as Washington has involved NATO in its Afghanistan, Middle East and African wars, John V. Walsh explains Washington’s attempt to rope Japan into its military encirclement of China. Perhaps the Japanese will see in Washington’s effort to contain the rise of China the same policy that Washington used against Japan in the 1930s. Will Japan align with the rising power, the declining power, or stay neutral? — Paul Craig Roberts

At the height of the 2012 election campaign in late October, a U.S. delegation tiptoed into Japan and then China with scant media coverage. It was “unofficial,” but Hillary Clinton gave it her blessing. And it was headed by two figures high in the imperial firmament, Richard L. Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State for George W. Bush; and Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former Pentagon and intelligence official in the Clinton administration and Dean Emeritus of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The delegation also included James B. Steinberg, who served as the Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush Two’s national security adviser.

The delegation was billed as an attempt by the U.S. to defuse tensions between Japan and China over a number of small islands both claim. But was it? What is the outlook of these influential figures? Interestingly, Armitage and Nye provide us with a partial answer in a brief paper published the preceding August by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), entitled “The Japan-U.S. Alliance. Anchoring Stability in Asia,” the carefully crafted fruit of a CSIS Study Group they chaired. The strategy proposed therein, as outlined below, should be very distressing to the Chinese – as well as to the Japanese and Americans.


Creepy Nicholas Kristof Rejoices in Murderous Iran Sanctions

John V. Walsh

There is something more than a little creepy about Nicholas Kristof’s incessant interest in prostitutes — only out of concern for their well-being, of course — as he travels across the planet. But in his most recent trek across Iran, he abandons his obsession for a bit in order to look at the U.S. sanctions directed at the beleaguered country, which has suffered at the hands of the U.S. since the 1953 CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, who had the effrontery to claim Iran’s oil wealth for Iran.

But “Pinched and Griping in Iran,” the title of Kristof’s column, at least is forthright about the aim and effects of sanctions. We often hear that sanctions, whether aimed at Iraq as in the 1990s or at Syria and Iran today, are “targeted.” They will only affect the powerful in the targeted country, or so we are told. At times the War Party’s line crumbles, as with Madeline Albright’s infamous judgment that the death of 500,000 children at the hands of Bill Clinton’s sanctions was “a price worth paying.” But is such suffering the intent of the sanctions or “merely” accidental collateral murder?

Here Kristof is refreshingly, albeit chillingly, honest in his appraisal. Do sanctions only affect the powerful? Kristof answers: “Yet one lesson from my 1,700-mile drive around the country [Iran] is that, largely because of Western sanctions, factories are closing, workers are losing their jobs, trade is faltering, and prices are surging. This is devastating to the average Iranian’s pocketbook — and pride.” But is that the intent? The well-connected pundit proclaims: “To be blunt, sanctions are succeeding as intended: They are inflicting prodigious economic pain on Iranians and are generating discontent.” Or more pointedly, from a member of a demographic that Kristof is always eager to interview: “’The economy is breaking people’s backs,’ a young woman told me in western Iran.”


Obama’s Chokehold on Left Antiwar Activists

John V. Walsh
Antiwar

An anti-Obama manifesto of sorts, in the form of a petition, was issued this week, signed by over 150 Left antiwar activists (1). As I read the first paragraph, eager to sign, my hopes were quickly dashed. It reads:

“We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously.”

So far, so good, even admirable – although some of the signers backed Obama even as he promised more war in 2008. But perhaps disillusionment had finally taken hold. So what is to be done, according to the petitioners? That comes in the next sentence.

“We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination (emphasis, j.w.) for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them.”

“Renomination”? Many of these very people were calling for George W. Bush’s impeachment for doing what Obama is doing now, although Obama is doing more of it, as the rest of the petition makes clear.


The Pentagon's Fantasy Numbers on Afghan Civilian Deaths

Marc W. Herold


A child killed in recent airstrikes, western Afghanistan

The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage. ~Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base

"General McChrystal’s data provided an opportunity to reveal Pentagon lying (or incompetence) to all, but only the libertarians rose to the occasion. The mainstream U.S media, Obama cultists, and much of the U.S antiwar movement persist in blithely quoting UNAMA and consuming Pentagon and embedded “patriotic” U.S reporters’ characterizations of America’s War in Afghanistan."

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians: Responses by the Libertarian Right and Obama Liberals to McChrystal’s Numbers.

The ever-so-faithful stenographer of Pentagon truths, USA Today, printed numbers put forth by General McChrystal on Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of NATO.[1] The article headlined “NATO Strikes Killing More Afghan Civilians,” noted that such deaths rose from 29 during the first three months of 2009, to 72 during 2010.


Health Insurance Bonanza

John V. Walsh

Insurance Execs to Live High, While More Americans Die

Let there be no doubt about it. The health care “reform” bill voted into law Sunday in the House is a capitulation which will leave 30 million more Americans at the cruel mercies of the insurance companies – precisely what the single-payer movement had been battling against.

In the end the defenders of the legislation and those who signed on to it putting loyalty to themselves and their careers in the Democrat Party above principle, like the narcissistic twerp Dennis Kucinich, were left with only one real argument. How could anyone turn his/her back on the 30 million who would “benefit” from being brought under the control of the private insurers? The most succinct answer was given by Ralph Nader in a joint interview with him and the traitor Kucinich, who caved when his vote and a few others might have halted this legislative atrocity, conducted by Amy Goodman.

Thus, Nader:

“First of all, that (the legislation) won’t even begin until 2014, 180,000 dead Americans later (The number of unnecessary deaths over a three year period due to a lack of any insurance - jw). Second, there’s no guarantee of that. The insurance companies can game this system. The 2,500 pages is full of opportunities and ambiguities for the insurance companies to game the system and to make it even worse.

“And let’s say there are more people covered, right? Well, they’re being forced to buy junk insurance policies. There’s no regulation of insurance prices. There’s no regulation of the antitrust laws on this. Everything went down that Dennis was fighting for. There’s no regulation that prevents the insurance companies from taking this papier-mâché bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it. There’s no shift of power. There’s no facility to create a national consumer health organization, which we proposed and the Democrats ignored years ago, in order to give people a voice so they can have their own non-profit consumer lobby on Washington.

“This is really a disaster.”


Elie Wiesel’s Ignoble Recruits

John V. Walsh

Nobel laureates sign on to "harsher" Iran sanctions – and more

Is there nothing that is safe from debasement by the propaganda machine of the U.S. and Israel? A full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times of Feb. 7 provides the answer. Sponsored by Elie Wiesel’s modestly named Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and signed by 44 Nobel laureates, 35 of them in the physical sciences, it urges brutal and lethal actions against Iran.

Before getting to the cruel prescriptions that Wiesel and his recruits offer for Iran, let us consider their reasoning, such as it is. In a single brief topic sentence they assert their central claim that the Iranian government "whose irresponsible and senseless nuclear ambitions threaten the entire world continues to wage a shameless war against its own people." Two charges are fired off in this brief sentence, and it is all too easy to conflate them. So let us take them one at a time, as is the habit in science when one wishes for clarification.


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