More came up the so-called ratline from Gaddafi’s former arsenals in Benghazi through Turkey. And still more came through Jordan from the “moderate” opposition trained there by the CIA, which more often than not sold them or defected to the other side.
So, that the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein monster became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene 30 months ago. But even then the Washington War Party could not resist adding fuel to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the third time in a quarter century.
But if bombing really worked, the Islamic State would be sand and gravel by now. Indeed, as shown by the map below, it is really not much more than that anyway.
The dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the Euphrates River and in the bombed-out precincts of Anbar province do not attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the Middle East and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate offers prosperity, salvation or any future at all.
What recruits them is outrage at the bombs and drones being dropped on Sunni communities by the U.S. Air Force and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels of the Mediterranean that rip apart homes, shops, offices and mosques containing as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.
The truth is, the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. It was contained by the Kurds in the North and East and by Turkey with NATO’s second-largest army and air force in the Northwest. And it was surrounded by the Shiite Crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower Syria and Iraq.
So absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiescence in their horrific rule in due course.
But with the U.S. Air Force functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell have been opened wide. What has been puked out is not an organized war on Western civilization as Hollande so hysterically proclaimed in response to the recent episodes of mayhem in Paris.
It was just blowback carried out by that infinitesimally small contingent of mentally deformed young men who can be persuaded to strap on a suicide belt.
Needless to say, bombing won’t stop them; it will just make more of them.
Ironically, what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. It’s time to let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s business anyway.
But Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it cannot see the obvious.
And that is why a quarter century after the Cold War ended, peace still hasn’t been given a chance, and it is the reason that horrific events like last November’s barbarism in Paris still keep happening.
Even the so-called “inspired” terrorists, like the pair who attacked San Bernardino and the wackjob who besieged the Orlando night club, emerge episodically because the terror that the American military visits upon Mus-lim lands is, apparently, what finally triggers their underlying pathologies.
After all, whatever the Koran has to say about purging the infidel, it inspired no attacks on American soil until Imperial Washington went into the regime-change and military-intervention business in the Middle East after 1990.
ANOTHER FALSE DEMON—PUTIN’S RUSSIA
At the end of the day there now exists a huge irony. The only force that can effectively contain and eventually eliminate the Islamic State is the so-called Shiite Crescent—the alliance of Iran, Baghdad, Assad and Hezbollah. But since they are allied with Putin’s Russia, still-another unnecessary barrier to peace on earth comes into play.
The fact is, there is no basis whatsoever for Imperial Washington’s relentless campaign against Putin, and Washington-NATO’s blatant intervention in Ukraine.
Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America has no interest in the current spat between Putin and the coup that unconstitutionally took over Kiev in February 2014.
As we outline below, for several centuries the Crimea has been Russian; for even longer, the Ukraine has been a cauldron of ethnic and tribal conflict, rarely an organized, independent state, and always a meandering set of borders looking for a redrawn map.
Like everything reviewed above, the source of the current calamity-howling about Russia is the warfare state—that is, the existence of vast machinery for military, diplomatic and economic maneuvers that is ever on the prowl for missions and mandates and that can mobilize a massive propaganda campaign on the slightest excitement.
The post-1991 absurdity of bolstering NATO and extending it into Eastern Europe, rather than liquidating it after attaining “mission accomplished,” is just another manifestation of its baleful impact. In truth, the expansion of NATO is one of the underlying causes of America’s needless tension with Russia and Putin’s paranoia about his borders and neighbors.
Indeed, what juvenile minds actually determined that America needs a military alliance with Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and now Montenegro!
So the resounding clatter for action against Russia emanating from Washington and its house-trained media is not even a semi-rational response to the facts at hand; it’s just another destructive spasm of the nation’s warfare state and its Beltway machinery of diplomatic meddling, economic warfare and military intervention.
Not only does Washington’s relentless meddling in the current Russian-Ukrainian food fight have nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people, it also betrays woeful disregard for the elementary facts of that region’s turbulent and often-bloody history.
MEMO TO WASHINGTON: IT’S THEIR RED LINE
In fact, the allegedly “occupied” territory of Crimea was actually annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian czars for a warm-water port. Over the subsequent ages Sevastopol then emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean Peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the czars and, at length, the commissars.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds the 166 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the U.S. Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego.
While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian rifles, artillery and blood that famously annihilated the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; these stalwart patriots were Russians defending the homeland from Turks, Europeans and Brits.
And the portrait of the Russian “hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas I—whose brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith, and who was revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he eventually lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans.
At the end of the day, it’s their red line. When the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, he—unlike Obama and the neocon claque that has bamboozled him—did at least know that he was in Russia!
Moreover, Washington’s current historical ignorance is actually worse. That’s because Crimea became part of the Ukraine in recent times only by the caprice of the long-gone Soviet empire.
To wit, maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Cr
imea to his subalterns in Kiev in honor of the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept the inevitable and become a vassal of Russia.
Self-evidently, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of the Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the 65 years before America got its Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year interval since then, its national security has depended not one whit on the status of the Russian-speaking Crimea.
That the local population of Crimea has now chosen fealty to the grand thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev is their business, not ours.
The real threat to peace is not Putin, but the screeching sanctimony and mindless meddling of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland. Obama should have sent them back to geography class long ago—and before they could draw any more new red lines.
The one in the Ukraine has been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of our damn business.
The current Ukrainian policy farce emanating from Washington is not only a reminder that the military-industrial-beltway complex is still alive and well, but also demonstrates why the forces of crony capitalism and money politics that sustain it are so lamentable.
The fact is, the modern warfare state has been the incubator of American imperialism since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal containment, even in the face of a $20 trillion national debt.
So 102 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth.
And the long-suffering American taxpayers, who foot the massive bills generated by the War Party’s demented and destructive policies, have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.
CHAPTER 21
A Peace Deal for the Donald—Go to Tehran, Bring Home the American Troops
ANY HOPE OF ARRESTING THE NATION’S DRIFT TOWARD FISCAL CALAMITY must start with a Peace Deal. That’s the right thing from a national security standpoint, but it’s also the secret to unlocking Washington’s intractable budget gridlock—a destructive paralysis that has essentially been in place since 1982.
Back then, megascale budget deficits exploded for the first time in peacetime history on the heels of a collapsing economy and the giant tax cuts enacted during Reagan’s first year. In theory the desperate need to curtail the hemorrhage of red ink—still a frightful development at the time—provided the greatest opportunity since the New Deal to shrink the welfare state, and especially the middle class social-insurance entitlements.
But the White House’s modest assault on the welfare state got stopped stone cold by a revolt of middle-of-the-road Republicans and conservative Democrats. They simply couldn’t countenance the simultaneous eruption of military appropriations for the Reagan defense buildup while taking the carving knife to food stamps, Social Security and every manner of benefits in between.
And Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup was truly a fiscal eruption. The plan was to increase military spending from Jimmy Carter’s outgoing budget of $140 billion to $350 billion within four or five years. While the buildup was eventually slowed down slightly and stretched out into the future, one thing never changed.
To wit, an invincible coalition of military hawks, pork barrel politicians and social-welfare liberals found a modus vivendi that kept the welfare state virtually intact, while the defense spending climbed steadily higher and never looked back, and for an ironic reason.
The rationale for Reagan’s defense buildup was the Soviet Union’s purported nuclear first-strike threat—a chimera that was vastly exaggerated and lied about by the president’s neocon advisers in the early 1980s. But since there was no real strategic nuclear threat to counter, 85% of the massive buildup over the next decade went to the conventional forces.
That is, the 600-ship Navy, the M1 tank program, upward of 10,000 new helicopters and conventional aircraft, vastly augmented capacities for air- and sealift and logistical support, and cruise missiles and smart munitions of every type.
In short, the Reagan defense buildup morphed into a conventional-warfare armada. Accordingly, it was irrelevant to the nonexistent Soviet strategic nuclear threat and too late to harry a Soviet conventional military that, in any event, was sold for scrap when the Soviets disappeared from the pages of history.
But it was a godsend to the Bush and Clinton clans in their pursuit of regime change and wars of intervention and occupation. Without Reagan’s mistaken conventional-warfare machine, there would have been no Gulf War in 1991, no crusader (American) boots on the holy lands of Arabia and no spring-training interventions in Bosnia and Serbia/Kosovo.
That’s because no Congress would have voted for the massive new conventional-force procurements that enabled these pointless interventions. Once the Soviet Union was no more, even the porkers of Capitol Hill would have seen that they had nothing to do with the security and safety of the citizens of Lincoln NE and Springfield MA.
But once the tank-, ship- and aircraft-production lines had been opened in congressional districts across the land, it was an altogether different political dynamic. The congressman from the Lima, Ohio, M1 tank line, for example, was more than eager to repudiate John Quincy Adams’ injunction about not searching the earth for monsters to destroy; to get more tanks and jobs at home, he needed to find more monsters abroad.
At length, the monsters materialized, and as we have seen they were of Washington’s very own making.
As we indicated in Chapter 20, Osama bin Laden was the leader of the mujahideen fighters that Washington recruited, transported, trained, armed and provisioned to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Afghanistan was surely none of our business—crumbling Soviet empire or no—but the mujahideen quickly morphed into al-Qaeda when 500,000 U.S. forces entered the lands of Arabia in 1991.
The fluke catastrophe of 9/11 followed, and the real wars of invasion and occupation erupted from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and beyond, but once again enabled by Ronald Reagan’s grand conventional armada.
At length and after decades of pointless wars Reagan’s armada had metastasized unrecognizably. Obama’s third budget, in fact, brought defense and security spending to $750 billion, or 2.5X Jimmy Carter’s last budget in inflation-adjusted dollars.
So now in the fullness of time, Barack Obama—the “peace candidate” of 2008—is leaving office with a $20 trillion national debt. Jimmy Carter, of course, left one of less than $1 trillion. And what happened in the interim is the reason why a peace deal is so urgently needed.
THE GLOBAL FISCAL CRUNCH AND A NEW CHANCE FOR PEACE
A peace deal would permit at least $200 billion to be wacked out of the defense budget. In turn, that would break open the post-1982 fiscal deadlock, paving the way for entitlement reform and revenues, too. It would also close the doors to future neocon-style interventions and adventures abroad.
A propitious opportunity for peace, in fact, is emerging worldwide owing to the Great Deflation. This historic reversal of the great credit boom of 1995–2015 is shaking the very foundations of China’s Red Ponzi already and is administering the coup de grâce to Russia’s third-rate energy-, mineral- and wheat-based economy.
At the same time, the next U.S. administration will be grappling with recession-generated trillion-dollar annual deficits while the socialist enclaves of European NATO face fiscal burial in a renewed eruption of public debts that already average nearly 100% of GDP.
The key to a global peace deal is renunciation of Washington’s encroachment on Russia’s backyard in Ukraine and the former Warsaw Pact nations. As we indicated in the last chapter, it would open the door to a Russian/Washington/Shiite allian
ce to encircle the Islamic State and enable Muslim fighters from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah to finish off the butchers of the mutant Sunni caliphate.
The NATO-renunciation part of the deal is in Donald Trump’s wheelhouse because he thinks he can make a deal with Putin anyway, and has had the common sense to see that NATO is obsolete. What he needs to further understand is that Russia—with a GDP about the size of the New York City metro area—is incapable of threatening Europe and has no designs to do so.
Moreover, it is Washington, not the Europeans, who insisted on the pointless expansion of NATO. And it was Washington that betrayed George H. W. Bush’s sensible promise to Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence to the reunification of Germany, NATO would “not be expanded by a single inch.”
There is even a bonus presidential-debate point for The Donald on the latter matter. The betrayal of Bush the Elder’s pledge was initiated by none other than Bill Clinton in the midst of his political crisis during the blue-dress affair. The Donald needs to put that one straight to Hillary.
A LEAF FROM EISENHOWER’S NOTEBOOK—TRUMP SHOULD PLEDGE A TRIP TO TEHRAN
Likewise, Trump is already halfway there on the ISIS threat. Unlike the neocon adventurists of Washington, he has welcomed Putin’s bombing campaign against the jihadist radicals in Syria and recognizes that the enemy is headquartered in Raqqa, not Damascus.
So it is to be hoped that he somehow comes to understand that Imperial Washington considers Iran to be part of the axis of evil for one principal and wholly invalid reason. Namely, because the neocons leading the Never Trump movement put Tehran in that box 25 years ago, as outlined in Chapter 20, in order to justify their imperial agenda.
The true history is far different. As we have explained, the Iranians have a justified grudge against Washington for its historic support of the shah’s plunder and savage repression; for CIA aid to Saddam’s brutal chemical warfare against Iran during the 1980s war; for Washington’s subsequent demonization of the regime and false claims that it is hell-bent on nuclear weapons—a charge that even the nation’s top 16 intelligence agencies debunked more than a decade ago; and most especially for the brutal but pointless economic sanctions that were imposed on the Iranian people by Washington’s imperial bullies.
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