US dispatches 100 troops to Niger to support "Predator Drone Base"

President Obama told Congress on Friday he had dispatched 40 more American troops to Niger this week, bringing the total U.S. military presence in the west African country to 100.

The troops have been deployed to support the intervention in neighboring Mali, where French troops have been helping local forces rout Islamist militants from the country's north since last month.

The Obama administration is also planning to build a base in Niger for unarmed Predator drones to conduct surveillance on militants in the region, The New York Times reported last month.
On Wednesday, “the last elements of a deployment of approximately 40 additional U.S. military personnel entered Niger with the consent of the Government of Niger,” Obama wrote to the House and Senate leaders.

“This deployment will provide support for intelligence collection and will also facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region. The total number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Niger is approximately 100. The recently deployed forces have deployed with weapons for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security.”
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Congressional Hawks Want War With Iran

Stephen Lendman
Congressional hawks want war. Bipartisan support backs it. Moderates outnumber hotheads. At issue is for how long. Saber rattling, fear mongering, and bogus accusations persisted for years. Now it's showing up in legislation.

Possibly a false flag will ignite another Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States."

At high-anxiety times, options often dwindle to war. Knee-jerk congressional support authorizes it with no formal declaration. The Constitution's Article 1, Section 8 mandates it.

It hasn't been declared since December 8, 1941. Why bother when presidential diktats send Americans to war with no congressional opposition. Threats don't exist so they're invented. False flag attacks masquerade as real ones. Body counts rise exponentially. Buildings and other facilities topple like tenpins.

When people realize they've been had, it's too late. They never learn. No matter how often they're fooled, they're easily deceived again. Once a damn fool, always one. Relying on scoundrel media for news and information makes it easy.

There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe

Image via WikipediaRecently, the Pentagon updated its numbers on bases and other sites, and they have dropped. Whether they’ve fallen to the level advanced by Kristof, however, is a matter of interpretation. According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. Dig into that report more deeply, though, and Grand Canyon-sized gaps begin to emerge.

Today, according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories abroad. This figure does not include small foreign sites of less than 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million. In some cases, numerous bases of this type may be folded together and counted as a single military installation in a given country. A request for further clarification from the Department of Defense went unanswered. More...

U.S. Military War Gaming for Large Scale Economic Breakdown and Civil Unrest

Mac_Slavo
The majority of Americans believe that recent government intervention into financial markets, the economy and corporate insolvency has reversed the economic downturn which was described by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as being “on the brink” in 2008. The stimulus, bailouts and unrelenting quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve have thus far been perceived as having averted the further erosion of the U.S. real estate and equities markets. And though the Federal Reserve and economic analysts have recently readjusted their economic growth forecasts downward for the next six months, Americans no longer have to worry about, as Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said on the house floor in October of 2008, the sky falling, multi-thousand point drops in stock markets and martial law in America.

The recovery - if our government, the Federal Reserve and mainstream media are to be believed - is on the road to recovery - albeit slowly and with some more pain ahead.

If we’ve “prevented economic collapse” and “avoided the depression many feared,” according to President Obama, inquiring minds are asking why the Pentagon and US Military are actively and aggressively engaged in planning responsive action to large scale economic breakdown and civil unrest scenarios:

Ever since the crash of 2008 the defense intelligence establishment has really been paying a lot of attention to global markets and how they can serve as a threat to U.S. national security interests. At one upcoming seminar next month they’re taking a look at a lot of the issues.

According to the report, the Army has spent time on financial market trading floors with JP Morgan and others, in the hopes that they can learn more about how a financial and economic attack may occur, and what the ramifications of such attacks on US stocks and bonds may be.

The Army, in a year-long war games series called Unified Quest 2011, is looking at a variety of possibilities and how to deal with them, including:

* the implications of “large scale economic breakdown” inside of the United States
* how to maintain “domestic order amid civil unrest”
* and ways to deal with fragmented global power and drastically lower budgets

Clearly, the U.S. government is making contingency plans to deal with a worst-case, all-out-collapse scenario of not only the economy, but our social and political systems. More...

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Have a Nice World War, Folks

John Pilger
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and, now, the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the Secretary of "Defense" Robert Gates complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember this is the month of the March hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception." Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marja" from the Taliban's "command and control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if "The Hurt Locker" were real, and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

"War is fun," the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms, such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today's public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the antiwar instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.

Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and, now, Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of Western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On January 22, 1991, the US defense Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease." So, the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted UNICEF, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.

Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era." Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent."

This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys." The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a bit too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a "partner." We should interrupt their fun.

The Pentagon’s Runaway Budget

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Carl Conetta
With his decision to boost defense spending, President Obama is continuing the process of re-inflating the Pentagon that began in late 1998 — fully three years before the 9/11 attacks on America. The FY 2011 budget marks a milestone, however: The inflation-adjusted rise in spending since 1998 will probably exceed 100 percent in real terms by the end of the fiscal year. Taking the new budget into account, the Defense Department has been granted about $7.2 trillion since 1998, when the post-Cold War decline in defense spending ended.

The rise in spending since 1998 is unprecedented over a 48-year period. In real percentage terms, it’s as large as the Kennedy-Johnson surge (43 percent) and the Reagan increases (57 percent) combined. Whether one looks at the entire Pentagon budget or just that part not related to the wars, current spending is above the peak years of the Vietnam War era and the Reagan years. And it’s set to remain there. Looking forward, the Obama administration plans to spend more on the Pentagon over the next eight years than any administration since World War II.

Why should the Pentagon budget rise so much, so fast? Why should it be exempted from the recently announced discretionary spending freeze? And why should it be stabilizing at levels above the highest years of the Cold War?

The most ready explanation is that the War on Terrorism, and especially military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the cause. But these activities presently claim less than 20 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. For the period 1998-2011, overseas contingency operations have consumed less than 17 percent of all funding. Take today’s wars out of the picture entirely and the rise since 1998 is still 54 percent in real terms.

Why More Than the Cold War?

Our recent study of the post-1998 defense spending surge, An Undisciplined Defense, set out to identify the factors driving Pentagon costs upward. Much of the post-1998 surge can be attributed to a mix of policy choices and policy failures. And this belies the notion that today’s high level of spending simply reflects hard and fast security “requirements.” In short: If America’s leaders can find the will, then there is a way to substantial savings.

Four features of post-Cold War U.S. security policy have been especially important in driving putative “requirements” upward — and all admit alternative action.

• Beginning in the 1990s, successive U.S. administrations have adopted goals and missions for the armed forces that are vaguer and more ambitious than those of the Cold War period.

• Military modernization efforts have suffered from especially weak prioritization and poor integration. They have been distinctly undisciplined, leading to higher research, development, and equipment procurement costs.

• Planned efforts at defense reform have been insufficient and weakly prosecuted. Thus, the savings they achieved fell far short of what was needed and possible.

• The United States has undertaken and persevered in protracted wars of a type for which the U.S. military was ill-suited and improperly equipped.

Goal Inflation and Discordant Modernization

Following the collapse of Soviet power, America’s leaders set more ambitious goals for the U.S. military, despite its smaller size. This entailed requiring the armed services to sustain and extend their continuous global presence, improving their readiness and speed, increasing peacetime engagement activities, and preparing to conduct more types of missions quickly and in more areas. Recent U.S. strategy has looked beyond the traditional goals of defense and deterrence, seeking to use military power to actually prevent the emergence of threats and to “shape” the international environment. U.S. defense planners also elevated the importance of lesser and hypothetical threats, thus requiring the military to prepare for many more lower-probability contingencies.

These ambitions have led to the rise in Pentagon operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures, as well as a larger-than-necessary force structure and greater equipment requirements.

One ongoing goal of the Pentagon has been to modernize forces. This ambitious modernization between 1990 and today has reflected three different imperatives or directions, and these have been poorly integrated.

1. Big-ticket “legacy” programs conceived during the Cold War and enjoying considerable institutional momentum;
2. New programs, like Predator drones, reflecting the potential of information and other emerging technologies; and
3. “Adaptive” programs like mine-resistant armored vehicles, which correspond to new mission requirements, such as counterinsurgency.

The Pentagon has failed to adequately integrate these trends or prioritize among them. Instead, they have all gone forward in parallel, competing for funds. This situation puts unrelenting upward pressure on the budget. Legacy programs, which tend to be backward-looking, have predominated. Thus, despite the Pentagon’s spending $2.5 trillion on modernization between 1989 and 2003, there was a lack of preparedness for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism tasks after 2001. Notably, the decisions to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan by military means entailed a new wave of equipment purchases.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised to impose stricter priorities on defense acquisition. But this isn’t the first time an administration announced a “get tough” policy in this area. For instance, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also vowed to tackle the dysfunctional acquisition process, lopping off the Army’s Crusader artillery system and Comanche helicopter program along the way. This latest reform cycle will not likely accomplish more than swapping out a few disfavored systems for a few favored ones. No actual savings will leave the Pentagon orbit.

Shortfalls in Defense Reform

Reforming the post-Cold War military was supposed to enable it to “do more for less.” Preserving the “peace dividend” — a reduction in the military budget and the application of the savings to other pressing needs — depended on it. Structural reform also was necessary because the military suffered a decrease in efficiency when it got smaller. This was due to some loss in economies of scale in support and acquisition activities.

Options for reform were plentiful. These included reducing service redundancies, streamlining command structures, and consolidating a range of support and training functions. Other worthwhile targets of reform were the Pentagon’s acquisition, logistics, and financial management systems.

But reform efforts fell short of their promise, due to institutional resistance and bureaucratic inertia. Only two initiatives — competitive sourcing and military base closures — were pursued vigorously enough to yield significant annual savings. And these savings have amounted to less than 4 percent of the current defense budget — clearly not enough to save the “peace dividend.”

The difficulty of defense reform goes to the heart of governance problems in the defense area. There is an imbalance between effective civilian and military authority, between “joint” and individual service authority, and between public and special interests. In some respects, the system is a feudalistic one. Its functioning normally depends on largesse and a fair amount of deference to “subordinate” offices. Civilian authorities might challenge and alter this configuration, but that would entail considerable political risk.

Increased Labor Costs

Why have today’s wars been so inordinately expensive in relative terms? Measured in 2010 dollars, the Korean War cost $393,000 per year for every person deployed. And the Vietnam conflict cost $256,000. By contrast, the Iraq and Afghanistan commitments have cost $792,000 per year per person.

This is due partly to America’s reliance on high-cost “volunteer” (professional) military labor, which began after the Vietnam War. This type of military is susceptible to steep increases in personnel costs if it gets bogged down in large-scale, protracted, labor-intensive wars of occupation and counterinsurgency. Combat pay, retention bonuses, and recruitment costs soar.

Overall, military personnel costs rose 50 percent in real terms between 2001 and 2010, although the military labor pool grew by less than 2 percent. This dramatic increase in labor costs calls into question any potential large-scale counterinsurgency operations, which require more, not fewer boots on the ground — unless, of course, cost is no object.

Because of the costs involved, the Pentagon has been reluctant to permanently increase the number of full-time military personnel, despite high levels of activity even before the current wars. Thus, increases in ground troops have been largely counterbalanced by reductions in Navy and Air Force personnel. Instead, the Pentagon has turned increasingly to private contractors, whose employees have assumed many of the support functions previously performed by Pentagon personnel. Since 1989, the pool of Pentagon military and civilian employees has shrunk by more than 30 percent, while the number of contract workers has probably grown by 40 percent. As a result, the total Pentagon workforce may have been re-inflated to its Cold War size, but with contract labor playing a much bigger role.

Contract labor is generally cheaper than Pentagon in-house labor, military or civilian. However, a problem routinely noted by the Government Accountability Office is that Pentagon’s financial management of contracts is weak. At any rate, whatever savings have been realized by replacing in-house labor with contract labor has been overshadowed by the overall increase in the Pentagon’s total workforce.

The re-inflation of the workforce partly registers in the budget as an unusually steep increase in operations and maintenance spending, because this account covers much of contract labor. Calculated in inflation-adjusted per person terms, operations and maintenance expenditures are 2.5 times higher today than in 1989. In absolute terms (also corrected for inflation), O&M spending has risen 75 percent since the Reagan years.

The Primacy of U.S. Military Spending

The factors outlined above have converged to give America a historically unique predominance in military spending. The United States today is responsible for nearly half of all military expenditure worldwide. In 1986, it claimed only 28 percent.

Especially notable is the changed balance between U.S. spending and the total amount spent by potential adversary states. The United States has gone from spending one-third less than its adversaries in 1986 to spending 150 percent more than potential adversary states in 1986. Had Ronald Reagan sought to achieve the ratio between U.S. and adversary spending that existed in 2006, he would have had to nearly quadruple his defense budgets. And, of course, the 2006 Pentagon’s budget hasn’t receded but instead grown by another 20 percent in real terms.

These calculations suggest that the United States’ recent levels of defense expenditure are largely detached from other nation’s efforts to build military power. And the wars explain only a small part of the difference. Instead, the divergence points to a change in what the US defense establishment hopes to accomplish by means of military power, how fast, and how far afield.

Can We Roll Back Pentagon Spending?

America’s singular investment in the means of war hasn’t purchased clear and sure progress toward a more secure and stable world. Nor has it purchased an efficient military closely adapted to the current security environment. That the nation should persist down this road for more than a decade suggests a lapse in attention to the strategic costs and benefits associated with its chosen defense posture. It’s as though the nation had trillions to burn.

The road not taken during the past 15 years would have involved a more forceful and thorough-going approach to defense reform. A more sensible Pentagon strategy would take a more disciplined approach to equipment acquisition that better integrated the various trends and service plans, and tailored them more closely to new conditions. And the United States as a whole would have demonstrated greater restraint and greater specificity in defining post-Cold War military goals and missions.

A permissive spending environment has been a necessary precondition for Pentagon bloat, which several political realities have helped generate and sustain. First, and obviously, the September 2001 attacks overrode any tendencies to suggest economizing on defense. Curiously, though, Gallup polls show that public support for increased defense spending was higher in the two years prior to the attacks than in the two years after. Support has receded significantly since then, but this hasn’t spurred a serious re-evaluation of the budget.

At present, both Democratic and Republican leaders are disinclined — each for their own reasons — to press for Pentagon budget reform and restraint. There is little political gain in it, and much political risk. In this calculation, the balance of raw public opinion is less important than the capacity of the contending parties to excite and mobilize it.

Emerging fiscal realities may soon focus more critical attention on how the nation allocates its resources among competing goals, military and non-military. And the recent freeze on most discretionary spending suggests the contours of the coming battle: It will be the Pentagon versus everything else. In this light, our most important finding is that much of the surge in Pentagon spending since 1998 has been a matter of choice and will, not a matter of national security “requirements.” This puts the ball back in the political court, where it belongs. If there is to be progress in rebalancing our budget, it will depend on pressuring the administration and Congress to deliver real change that matters.

This article is an updated summary of An Undisciplined Defense: Understanding the $2 Trillion Surge in US Defense Spending. The report, with complete citations, is available at the project’s website.

Carl Conetta is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

US monopolizing Haitian airfield to evacuate their own citizens

Deborah Pasmantier (AFP)
Anger at US builds at Port-au-Prince airport
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Anger built Saturday at Haiti's US-controlled main airport, where aid flights were still being turned away and poor coordination continued to hamper the relief effort four days on.

"Let's take over the runway," shouted one voice. "We need to send a message to (US President Barack) Obama," cried another.

Control remained in the hands of US forces, who face criticism for the continued disarray at the overwhelmed airfield.

Dozens of French citizens and dual Haitian-French nationals crowded the airport Saturday seeking to be evacuated after Tuesday's massive 7.0 earthquake, which leveled much of the capital Port-au-Prince.

But at the last minute, a plane due to take them to the French island of Guadeloupe was prevented from landing, leaving them to sleep on the tarmac, waiting for a way out.

"They're repatriating the Americans and not anyone else," said Charles Misteder, 50. "The American monopoly has to end. They are dominating us and not allowing us to return home."

The crowd accused American forces, who were handed control of the airport by Haitian authorities, of monopolizing the airfield's single runway to evacuate their own citizens.

The US embassy denied it was putting the evacuation of the approximately 40,000 to 45,000 American citizens in the country first.

Others waiting for a way out were taken aback by the chaotic scenes confronted them when they arrived at the Toussaint L'Ouverture airport.

"I haven't been able to tell my family that I'm alive. The coordination is a joke," said Wilfried Brevil, a 33-year-old housekeeper.

"I was at the Christopher Hotel," said Daniele Saada, referring to the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

"I was extremely shaken up. I was pulled out, the others weren't," added Saada, 65, a MINUSTAH employee.

"I decided to return to France. I have nothing and now I am stuck," she said, caught between fury at the chaos and sheer exhaustion.

The disorder even appeared to cause diplomatic ripples, with French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet telling reporters he had lodged a complaint with the United States over its handling of the Port-au-Prince airport.

"I have made an official protest to the Americans through the US embassy," he said at the Haitian airport after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away.

A spokesman for the French foreign ministry later denied France had registered protest, saying "Franco-US coordination in emergency aid for Haiti is being handled in the best way possible given the serious difficulties."

The US ambassador to Haiti defended American efforts at the small airport, which was up-and-running 24 hours after the massive quake, even though the air traffic control tower was damaged.

"We're working in coordination with the United Nations and the Haitians," said Ambassador Kenneth Merten, though he acknowledged some difficulties.

"Clearly it's necessary to prioritize the planes. It's clear that there's a problem."

Despite the chaos, a group of French citizens was eventually able to take off on Saturday, and the French plane carrying a field hospital landed safely around noon.

Still, with aid continuing to flood into the quake-stricken country, concern remains about the lack of coordination at the airport, and across devastated Port-au-Prince.

"The Haitians haven't been notified about the arrival of planes. And when they do land, there's no one to take charge and a large amount of goods are arriving without coordination," said Haitian government official Michel Chancy.

On Port-au-Prince's streets, the consequences of the coordination breakdown are clear, as traumatized and starving quake survivors approached passing foreigner and begged them for food.

The history that “binds” the US and Haiti

Bill Van Auken
In his statement on the Haitian earthquake Wednesday, President Barack Obama referred to the “long history that binds us together.” Neither he nor the US media, however, have shown any inclination to probe the history of US-Haiti relations and its bearing on present catastrophe confronting the Haitian people.

Rather, the backwardness and poverty that have played a substantial role in driving the death toll into the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are presented as a natural state of affairs, if not the fault of the Haitians themselves. The United States is portrayed as a selfless benefactor, ready to come to the aid of Haiti with donations, rescue teams, warships and Marines.

In a cynical and dishonest editorial, the New York Times Thursday began, “Once again the world weeps with Haiti,” a country which it goes on to describe as characterized by “poverty, despair and dysfunction that would be a disaster anywhere else but in Haiti are the norm.”

The editorial continues: “Look at Haiti and you will see what generations of misrule, poverty and political strife will do to a country.”

In a background article on the Haitian disaster, the Times adds that the country “is known for its many man-made woes—its dire poverty, political infighting and proclivity for insurrection.”

In a shorter and even more dismissive editorial, the Wall Street Journal celebrates the fact that the US military will play the leading role in Washington’s response to the earthquake as “a fresh reminder that the reach of America’s power coincides with the reach of its goodness.”

It goes on to draw an obscene comparison between the Haitian earthquake and the one that struck southern California in 1994, in which 72 people died. “The difference,” the Journal declares, “is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes.”

The message is clear. The Haitians have only themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, because they failed to create sufficient wealth and lacked respect for law and order.

What is deliberately obscured by this comparison is the real relationship, which has evolved over more than a century, between “wealth generation” in the United States and poverty in Haiti. It is a relationship built on the use of force to pursue US imperialism’s predatory interests in a historically oppressed country.

If the Obama administration and the Pentagon carry through with reported plans to deploy a Marine expeditionary force in Haiti, it will mark the fourth time in the past 95 years that the US armed forces have occupied the impoverished Caribbean nation. This time, as in the past, rather than aiding the Haitian people, the essential purpose of such a military action will be to defend US interests and guard against what the Times refers to as the “proclivity for insurrection.”

The roots of this relationship go back to the birth of Haiti as the first independent black republic in 1804, the product of a successful slave revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, and the subsequent defeat of a French army sent by Napoleon.

The ruling classes of the world never forgave Haiti for its revolutionary victory. It was subjected to a worldwide embargo that was led by the United States, which feared the Haitian example could inspire a similar revolt in the southern slave states. It was only with southern secession and the outbreak of the Civil War that the North recognized Haiti—nearly 60 years after its independence.

From the dawn of the 20th century, Haiti fell under the domination of Washington and the US banks, whose interests were defended by sending Marines to carry out an occupation that continued for nearly 20 years, maintained through the bloody suppression of Haitian resistance.

The Marines left only after carrying out the “Haitianization”—as the New York Times referred to it at the time—of the war against the Haitian people by building an army dedicated to internal repression.

Subsequently, Washington backed the 30-year dictatorship of the Duvaliers, which began with the coming to power of Papa Doc in 1957. While tens of thousands of Haitians died at the hands of the military and the dreaded Tontons Macoute, US imperialism saw the murderous dictatorship as a bulwark against communism and revolution in the Caribbean.

Since the mass upheavals that brought down the Duvaliers in 1986, successive US governments, Democratic and Republican alike, have sought to reconstruct a reliable client state capable of defending the markets and investments of US firms attracted by starvation wages, as well as the property and wealth of the Haitian ruling elite. This entails preventing any challenge to a socio-economic order that keeps 80 percent of the population in dire poverty.

This effort continues today under the tutelage of Bill and Hillary Clinton—respectively the UN’s special representative to Haiti and the US Secretary of State—who together have Haitian blood on their hands.

Washington has backed two coups and sent US troops back into Haiti twice in the past 20 years. Both coups were organized to overthrow Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first Haitian president to be elected by popular vote and without Washington’s approval. Together, the coups of 1991 and 2004 claimed the lives of at least 13,000 more Haitians. In the 2004 overthrow, Aristide was forcibly transported out of the country by US operatives.

Needing them in Iraq, the US withdrew its troops in 2004, contracting the job of repression out to a United Nations peacekeeping force of 9,000 under the leadership of the Brazilian army.

Despite Aristide’s capitulation to the demands of the International Monetary Fund and his willingness to compromise with Washington, the mass support he attracted with his anti-imperialist rhetoric made him anathema to the ruling elites in both Washington and Port-au-Prince. On the orders of the Obama administration, he is barred from returning to Haiti and his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, remains effectively outlawed.

This is the real and continuing history that, as Obama put it, binds Haiti to US imperialism, which bears overwhelming responsibility for the desperate conditions that have compounded the carnage inflicted by the earthquake.

There are, however, other ties that bind and are deeply felt, as the immensity of the tragedy in Haiti unfolds. There are over half a million Haitian Americans officially counted in the US and undoubtedly hundreds of thousands more who are undocumented. Their presence concretizes the class interests and solidarity that unite Haitian and American workers. Together, it is their task to sweep away the conditions of poverty and devastation in both countries, along with the capitalist profit system that has created them.

WAR - TAXES - ECONOMIC DECLINE - LIES - HOMELESSNESS - REPRESSION

bigeye.com
We can break the mainline media's strangle-hold on the American people by PAMPHLETEERING -- The American Revolution's 1st Strategy. Transcribe, layout, print, and distribute the below:

What is happening here in (insert your area here) is happening all across America. Older persons who planned and looked forward to secure and peaceful retirements have seen pensions, savings accounts, and incomes sharply reduced. Their futures and those of their children and grandchildren seem increasingly bleak.

Working Americans who depend upon steady paychecks to meet living expenses for themselves and their families have been hit hard. Unemployment eventually spells disaster for them. Rising living costs, uninsured medical expenses, and temporary layoffs have swelled the ranks of families dependent upon social welfare. Those still employed have a huge bulk of their earnings confiscated in the form of 'income taxes' and retain barely enough to support their families. Having nothing left to spare, they are financially unable to help less fortunate neighbors.

The social 'safety net' for Americans is breaking as financial programs, states, cities, and more and more people approach financial bankruptcy. Social service agencies, churches, and private charities are stretched very thin. Money taken from Americans together with huge sums created through inflating the nation's money supply is spent on wars waged after bullying public support through scare tactics accompanied by governmental propaganda that later proves to have been blatant lies.

American armed forces, instead of being used for the nation's defense, are employed to protect and to further financial interests of a wealthy few, bankers and multi-national corporations. Young Americans die or are critically injured in this charade. Surviving veterans return home to little in the way of opportunity. Largely overlooked, many become part of our nation's huge and growing homeless population.

Misinformation continues to be spread by mainline media which now speaks incessantly of foreign countries, tribesmen, terrorists, trivia, and celebrities instead of addressing critical issues facing the lives of Americans, our reputation as citizens of a responsible nation, and critical issues faced within our own communities.

Such problems have not been created by you and by me. They are the result of policies arrogantly and unlawfully implemented by only a very few. A handful of men and women, raised in and belonging to a privileged minority, now control the reins of a government that has now fully discarded Constitutional precepts upon which America was founded.

These few pursue a policy of aggressive warfare and of world conquest for the purpose of militarily and financially subjugating humanity worldwide. Their goal is to gain full access to the entire resources on this planet and to control existing governments.

Rationalizing such a policy by invoking a vision of world peace through their own one-world government, what Bilderbergers now define openly as a "new world order", is the height of hubris and personal hypocrisy. It is simply the ages old lust of a few for ultimate power, a natural failing understood by the founders of our country.

Wielding unbridled power, with the conviction that they alone have the intelligence and the vision required to lead and to control mankind, they have foolishly 'killed the goose that laid the golden egg' in the United States. They are today creating havoc, both here and abroad.

We are not fomenting violent revolution. It is our goal to inform and to recommend ways in which We the People of this nation, under our Constitution, and given more than two-hundred years of experience, can begin to solve these problems before they overwhelm us completely.

If we wish to do this peacefully and intelligently we need your involvement. We, right here in this community, can join hundreds of other like-minded groups. By forming a huge coalition, overlooking differences and focusing on areas in which we agree, we intend to do this job democratically. We need your support and cooperation. this is a battle that we MUST win for ourselves and our descendants. PLEASE JOIN US NOW.

(INSERT YOUR GROUP'S CONTACT DATA HERE)

US Steps up Drone Attacks, Assassinations in AfPak “Surge”

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December 28, 2009
Bill Van Auken
Missiles from US Predator drones struck a village in Pakistan over the weekend, killing at least 13 people. The attack coincided with reports of intensified operations by US Special Forces killing squads on the Afghanistan side of the border.

Amounting to targeted assassinations, these forms of warfare are the most evident feature in the first stages of the “surge” ordered earlier this month by President Barack Obama, who is sending at least 30,000 more US troops into Afghanistan.

The methods are indicative of a dirty colonial-style war to suppress resistance to an occupation that is aimed at establishing Washington’s dominance in the energy-rich and strategically vital region of Central Asia.

Citing Pakistani officials, the Lahore-based daily The Nation reported Sunday that the death toll in a drone attack on a village in North Waziristan had risen to 13. Two missiles reportedly struck a compound in Saidgi village, about four miles from North Waziristan’s principal town, Miranshah.

The drones continued hovering over the area, while a US B-52 bomber also conducted over-flights, terrorizing the local population, according to Pakistani media reports.

The missile strike marked the third such attack on North Waziristan since December 17. The area is part of Pakistan’s northwest tribal region, which has been used by elements of the Afghan resistance, backed by fellow Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan, to launch attacks on the US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan.

The deadly drone campaign has been directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency, using a clandestine airfield in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and with CIA operatives sitting in front of video screens in Langley, Virginia, directing the missiles to their targets. The Pentagon is reportedly conducting its own drone attacks.

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages.

As with virtually all of these attacks, the US media parroted unnamed intelligence officials in claiming that the victims of the latest missile strike were all “militants,” without any corroboration of who had been killed.

The Lahore newspaper The News, citing figures supplied by Pakistani officials, reported in April that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes that had been carried out since January 2008. Given that fatality rate, with nearly 30 drone attacks having been launched since, the number of Pakistani civilians slaughtered in this fashion could easily have topped 1,000.

Over the last two years, the Pakistani government—both that of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and that of his successor, Pakistan People’s Party President Asif Ali Zardari—had worked out a modus operandi with Washington whereby Pakistan publicly protested the drone attacks and demanded that they cease, while behind the scenes giving them a green light.

US officials had portrayed the missile strikes as an attempt to kill leaders of al Qaeda. The latest series of attacks, however, has been launched specifically against Afghanistan resistance elements that US military and intelligence agencies refer to as the Haqqani network, named for its leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who operated out of the same North Waziristan sanctuary in the 1980s. Then he was one of the principal recipients of US arms and aid in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet-aligned regime in Kabul.

Since the announcement of the Afghanistan surge, Washington has been pressing the Pakistani government to send its troops against the Haqqani group and other forces aligned with the Afghan Taliban operating out of North Waziristan, just across border from Afghanistan. Islamabad has refused, however, citing its ongoing military campaign in South Waziristan, which is part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

The campaign in South Waziristan is directed against Pakistani Islamist insurgents blamed for a series of attacks across the northwest of the country.

As the Washington Post pointed out, the Pakistani government concluded a truce with the local warlord in North Waziristan, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in return for his forces keeping out of the fighting in the south.

“Missile strikes on his territory could endanger that deal,” according to the Post, which added, “However, the United States has indicated in the past that it will not hesitate to launch the drone-fired missiles if it tracks down an important target.”

In recent weeks, US officials and military commanders have ratcheted up the pressure on the Pakistani government, warning that if it did not act in North Waziristan, the US military and CIA would intervene unilaterally.

The New York Times reported Monday that the US military is making increasing use of its secretive Special Operations units as a key component of Obama’s Afghanistan “surge.” These forces—including the Army Delta Force and Navy Seals—are employed in finding and killing Afghans who are identified as leaders or supporters of the fight against the US-led occupation of their country.

Raids by Special Operations forces had been halted last February on the orders of the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Vice Admiral William McRaven. The raids were inflicting so many civilian casualties that they were generating popular support for the insurgents that outweighed the military importance of killing supposed leaders of the resistance. The suspension of these operations lasted only two weeks.

Now, General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, has ordered that these attacks by Special Operations troops be greatly expanded. Before assuming command in Afghanistan, McChrystal had been McRaven’s predecessor as head of JSOC, where units under his command were implicated in the torture of detained civilians in Iraq.

The unleashing of these clandestine units against suspected leaders of the Afghanistan resistance will undoubtedly mean another sharp increase in the killing of civilian men, women and children.

The Times also reported that similar death squad operations are being mounted across the border in Pakistan, under the direction of the CIA.

Citing an unnamed official in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Times reported that there have been “more than 60 joint operations involving the ISI and the CIA in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in the past year.”

According to the paper, “the missions included ‘snatch and grabs’—the abduction of important militants—as well as efforts to kill leaders.”

The surge ordered by Obama will mean a sharp escalation of the violence on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, as well as an intensification of the social and political crisis gripping the entire region as a result of the US war.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan were included among the countries confronting the 10 worst humanitarian crises in an annual listing released by the French-based medical aid group, Doctors without Borders.

“Afghan civilians endured increasing levels of violence throughout the country” over the past year, the group reported. The fighting has brought the country’s health care system to the brink of collapse, and Afghans needing medical care “must now make an impossible choice: risk traveling hundreds of miles through a war zone to seek a medical care or allow a condition to worsen until it becomes life-threatening only to arrive at a health structure where services are greatly diminished.”

US-led occupation forces, the report said, “have co-opted [medical] assistance for ‘hearts and minds’ initiatives, occupied hospitals, and arrested patients in their beds.”

Pakistan “was convulsed by intense violence throughout 2009,” the report stated, worsening an already desperate situation. “Across the country, people suffer from a general lack of health care, and Pakistan features one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the region.”

The campaigns by the Pakistani military, egged on by Washington, created more than 2 million refugees from the Swat Valley and another 300,000 from North Waziristan, according to Doctors Without Borders. The military offensive forced the group to halt its medical assistance in Swat Valley, where it had supported the local hospital and provided ambulance services.

Hospitals and health clinics set up in displacement camps in neighboring districts were “overwhelmed,” the group reported, with patients suffering from “serious war-related injuries, among them children with gunshot- and explosive-related wounds.”

The past year has also seen a precipitous rise in the number of US troops killed and wounded. Fatalities in Afghanistan for US occupation forces have reached 310 since the beginning of 2009, double the number killed last year. Roughly 2,500 American troops have been wounded during the same period, many of them suffering amputations and severe burns and head injuries resulting from roadside bomb attacks.

As US military commanders readily acknowledge, the pouring of 30,000 more American troops and tens of thousands more private military contractors into Afghanistan will mean a dramatic increase in the killing and dying produced by the eight-year-old US war.

Also see The NY Times purified report: "CIA takes on expanded role on front lines"

US armed forces personnel and weapons stationed at 820 installations worldwide

Rick Rozoff
World's Sole Military Superpower's 2 Million-Troop, $1 Trillion Wars

With a census of slightly over 300 million in a world of almost seven billion people, the U.S. accounts for over 40 percent of officially acknowledged worldwide government military spending with a population that is only 4 percent of that of the earth's. A 10-1 disparity.

In addition to its 1,445,000 active duty service members, the Pentagon can and does call upon 1.2 million National Guard and other reserve components. As many as 30% of troops that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are mobilized reservists. The Army National Guard has activated over 400,000 soldiers since the war in Afghanistan began and in March of 2009 approximately 125,000 National Guard and other reserve personnel were on active duty.

The Defense Department also has over 800,000 civilian employees at home and deployed worldwide. The Pentagon, then, has more than 3.5 million people at its immediate disposal excluding private military contractors.

After allotting over a trillion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone and packing off more than two million of its citizens to the two nations, the U.S. military establishment and peace prize president have already laid the groundwork for yet more wars. Boeing, Raytheon and General Electric won't be kept waiting.


In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10 the president of the United States appropriated for his country the title of "the world's sole military superpower" and for himself "the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars."

This may well have been the first time that an American - and of course any - head of state in history boasted of his nation being the only uncontested military power on the planet and unquestionably the only time a Nobel Peace Prize recipient identified himself as presiding over not only a war but two wars simultaneously.

As to the appropriateness of laying such claims in the venue and on the occasion he did - accepting the world's preeminent peace award before the Norwegian Nobel Committee - Barack Obama at least had the excuse of being perfectly accurate in his contentions.

He is in fact the commander-in-chief in charge of two major and several smaller wars and his nation is without doubt the first global military power which for decades has operated without constraints on five of six inhabited continents and has troops stationed in all six. United States armed forces personnel and weapons, including nuclear arms, are stationed at as many as 820 installations in scores of nations.

The U.S. has recently assigned thousands of troops to seven new bases in Bulgaria and Romania [1], deployed the first foreign troops to Israel in that nation's history to run an interceptor missile radar facility in the Negev Desert [2], and last week signed a status of forces agreement with Poland for Patriot missiles (to be followed by previously ship-based Aegis Standard Missile-3s interceptors) and U.S. soldiers to be stationed there. The troops will be the first foreign forces based in Poland since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.

The U.S., whose current military budget is at Cold War, which is to say at the highest of post-World War II, levels, also officially accounts for over 41% of international military spending according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's report on 2008 figures: $607 billion of $1.464 trillion worldwide. On October 28 President Obama signed the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act with a price tag of $680 billion, including $130 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That figure excludes military spending outside of the Department of Defense. The American government has for several decades been the standard-bearer in outsourcing to private sector contractors in every realm and the Pentagon is certainly no exception to the practice. According to some estimates, American military and military-related allotments in addition to the formal Pentagon budget can bring annual U.S. defense spending as high as $1.16 trillion, almost half of official expenditures for all of the world's 192 nations, including the U.S., last year.

With a census of slightly over 300 million in a world of almost seven billion people, the U.S. accounts for over 40 percent of officially acknowledged worldwide government military spending with a population that is only 4 percent of that of the earth's. A 10-1 disparity.

The U.S. also has the world's second largest standing army, over 1,445,000 men and women under arms according to estimates of earlier this year, second only to China with 2,255,000. China has a population of over 1.325 billion, more than four times that of America, and does not have a vast army of private contractors supplementing its armed forces. And of course unlike the U.S. it has no troops stationed abroad. India, with a population of 1.140 billion, has active duty troop strength smaller than that of the U.S. at 1,415,000.

The U.S. and Britain are possibly alone in the world in deploying reservists to war zones; this last February the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen acknowledged that 600,000 reserves have been called up to serve in the area of responsibility of the U.S. Central Command, in charge of the Afghan and Iraqi wars, since 2001. In addition to its 1,445,000 active duty service members, the Pentagon can and does call upon 1.2 million National Guard and other reserve components. As many as 30% of troops that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are mobilized reservists. The Army National Guard has activated over 400,000 soldiers since the war in Afghanistan began and in March of 2009 approximately 125,000 National Guard and other reserve personnel were on active duty.

The Defense Department also has over 800,000 civilian employees at home and deployed worldwide. The Pentagon, then, has more than 3.5 million people at its immediate disposal excluding private military contractors.

In the last 48 hours two unprecedented thresholds have been crossed. On the morning of December 19 the U.S. Senate met in a rare Saturday morning session to approve a $636.3 billion military budget for next year. The vote was 88-10, as the earlier vote by the House of Representatives on December 16 was 395-34. In both cases the negative votes were not necessarily an indication of opposition to war spending but part of the labyrinthine American legislative practices of trade-offs, add-ons and deal-making on other, unrelated issues, what in the local vernacular are colorfully described as horse-trading and log-rolling among other choice terms. A no vote in the House or Senate, then, was not automatically a reflection of anti-war or even fiscally conservative sentiments.

The Pentagon appropriation included another $101 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Obama signed the last formal Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations, worth $106 billion, in July), but did not include the first of several additional requests, what are termed emergency spending measures, for the Afghan war. The first such request is expected early next year, more than $30 billion for the additional 33,000 U.S. troops to be deployed to the war zone, which will increase the number of American forces there to over 100,000.

On the day of the Senate vote Bloomberg News cited the Congressional Research Service, which had tallied the numbers, in revealing that the funds apportioned for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have now pushed the total expenditure for both to over $1 trillion. "That includes $748 billion for spending related to the war in Iraq and $300 billion for Afghanistan, the research service said in a Sept. 28 report."

The new Pentagon spending plan "includes $2.5 billion to buy 10 additional Boeing Co. C-17 transports that weren't requested by the Pentagon. Chicago-based Boeing also would benefit from $1.5 billion for 18 F/A-E/F Super Hornet fighters, nine more than the administration requested."

Funding for military aircraft not even requested by the Defense Department and the White House or for larger numbers of them than were is another curious component of the American body politic. That arms merchants (and not only domestic ones) place their own orders with the American people's alleged representatives - the current Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Lynn, was senior vice president of Government Operations and Strategy for Raytheon Company prior to assuming his new post - is illustrated by the following excerpts from the same report:

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended April 6 that the C-17 program be terminated once Boeing delivers the last of 205 C-17s in late 2010. Boeing, the second-largest defense contractor, has said its plant in Long Beach, California, will shut down in 2011 without more orders.

"The budget also includes $465 million for the backup engine of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The engine is built by Fairfield, Connecticut-based General Electric Co. and London-based Rolls Royce Plc. The administration earlier threatened to veto the entire defense bill if it contained any money for the engine." [3]

The Pentagon and its chief Gates may win battles with the Congress and even the White House when they relate to the use of military force abroad, but against the weapons manufacturers and the congressmen whose election campaigns they contribute to the military brass will come off the losers.

In addition to the nearly two-thirds of a trillion dollar annual Pentagon war chest, the ongoing trillion dollar Broader Middle East war is a lucrative boon to the merchants of death and their political hangers-on.

On December 18 a story was posted on several American armed forces websites that U.S. soldiers have been sent to Afghanistan and Iraq 3.3 million times since the invasion of the first country in October of 2001. The report specifies that "more than 2 million men and women have shouldered those deployments, with 793,000 of them deploying more than once."

The break-down according to services is as follows:

More than 1 million troops from the Army.

Over 389,900 from the Air Force.

Over 367,900 from the Navy.

More than 251,800 Marines.

This past October alone 172,800 soldiers, 31,500 airmen, 30,000 sailors and 20,900 Marines were dispatched to the two war zones. [4]

The bulk of the U.S.'s permanent global warfighting force may be deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, but enough troops are left over to man newly acquired bases in Eastern Europe, remain in Middle East nations other than Iraq, be based on and transit through the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, take over seven new military bases in Colombia, run regional operations out of America's first permanent base in Africa - Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where 2,400 personnel are stationed - and engage in counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines, Mali, Uganda, Yemen and Pakistan.

Recently a U.S. armed forces newspaper reported in an article titled "AFRICOM could add Marine Air Ground Task Force" that "A 1,000-strong Marine combat task force capable of rapidly deploying to hot spots could soon be at the disposal of the new U.S. Africa Command."

The feature added that a Marine unit previously attached to the newly launched AFRICOM has "already deployed in support of training missions in Uganda and Mali," whose armies are fighting the Lord's Resistance Army and Tuareg rebels, respectively. [5]

In Yemen, Houthi rebel sources "accused the U.S. air force [on December 15] of joining attacks against them, and killing at least 120 people in a raid in the north of the poor Arab state."

Their information office said "The savage crime committed by the U.S. air force shows the real face of the United States." [6]

According to ABC News "On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. military launched cruise missiles early Thursday [December 17] against two suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen," [7] to complement mounting missile attacks in Pakistan.

The Houthi rebels are religiously Shi'ia, so any attempt at exploiting an al-Qaeda rationale for bombing their villages is a subterfuge.

At the same time the Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and NATO Allied Air Component, General Roger Brady, fresh from a tour of inspection of the Caucasus nations of Azerbaijan and Georgia, was at the Adazi Training Base in Latvia to meet with the defense ministers of that nation, Estonia and Lithuania and plan "closer military cooperation in the security sector between the Baltic States and the USA which also included joint exercises in the Baltic region." [9] All five nations mentioned above - Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia and Lithuania - border Russia.

During the same week's summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in Havana, Cuba, the host country's president Raul Castro said of the latest Pentagon buildup in Colombia that "The deployment of [U.S.] military bases in the region is...an act of aggression against Latin America and the Caribbean." [9]

Less than a week later the government of Colombia, the third largest recipient of American military aid in the world, announced it would construct a new military base near its border with Venezuela. "Defense Minister Gabriel Silva said [on December 18] that the base, located on the Guajira peninsula near the city of Nazaret, would have up to 1,000 troops. Two air battalions would also be activated at other border areas....Army Commander General Oscar Gonzalez meanwhile announced [the following day] that six air battalions were being activated, including two on the border with Venezuela." [10]

After allotting over a trillion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone and packing off more than two million of its citizens to the two nations, the U.S. military establishment and peace prize president have already laid the groundwork for yet more wars. Boeing, Raytheon and General Electric won't be kept waiting.

Iranian arms merchant says 'war is coming'

John Shiffman
On a grainy undercover videotape recorded in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia, an Iranian arms merchant chats with two Philadelphia salesmen who have brought samples of their military wares.

The merchant, Amir Hossein Ardebili, who has flown from Tehran to make a deal, patiently answers the Americans' questions. The radar microchips? Needed for antimissile protection. The sophisticated computers? Essential to "launch the F-4" fighter.

All of it, he says flatly, is destined for the Iranian military "because they think the war is coming." Against the United States.

The videotape, recorded in October 2007 by undercover federal agents from Philadelphia, was released yesterday as the case against Ardebili was unsealed in federal court in Wilmington - nearly two years after the Iranian was secretly brought to the United States.

U.S. officials said the case, first reported by The Inquirer on Wednesday, offers a window into Iran's covert effort to obtain U.S. military technology to bolster its armed forces.

"There is no question that there is an orchestrated effort by the government of Iran to acquire weapons in violation of our laws," said John Morton, assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). "This is serious business, not a flash in the pan. Unfortunately, there's a whole network of these guys out there trying to get weapons and sophisticated technology, and not just for Iran."

ICE undercover agents in Philadelphia and Europe ran the three-year sting, which was kept secret as federal agents used data retrieved from Ardebili's laptop to launch dozens of Iranian arms-sales investigations against U.S. and overseas companies.

The court filings unsealed yesterday, including the videotape, show that Ardebili, a former Iranian government procurement officer, was arrested in Georgia in early October 2007. After legal proceedings in Georgia, Ardebili was secretly extradited to the United States in January 2008 and quietly jailed in Philadelphia. A prominent Wilmington defense lawyer, Edmund D. Lyons, was appointed to represent him.

During a closed hearing in Wilmington in May 2008, Ardebili pleaded guilty to violating the arms embargo, the arms export control laws, conspiracy, and money laundering.

He is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 14 before U.S. District Judge Gregory M. Sleet in Wilmington. According to federal sentencing guidelines, Ardebili could face more than 10 years in prison.

Lyons, his lawyer, has argued in a court filing that Ardebili should be sentenced to time served. He said Ardebili had admitted he broke U.S. law but did so while in Iran, where his actions are not considered a crime.

Lyons also said the Iranian had suffered in U.S. custody because he is housed in a special unit of the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center, where he is confined 23 hours a day. He has lost teeth and suffers from depression, the lawyer said.

Federal officials characterized the case as serious enough to warrant more prison time.

"Ardebili's job was to illegally" acquire military gear "in preparation for war with the United States," said Ed Bradley, the Philadelphia agent in charge of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

Ardebili negotiated the purchases of 1,000 state-of-the-art radar shifters, 10 gyro-chip sensors used in advanced aircraft applications, and two digital air computers for an F-4 aircraft, prosecutors said.

In addition, according to a court filing by U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall, Ardebili made "tens of thousands" of requests via e-mail for American-made military hardware, from "aviation to sonar to radar."

The prosecutors said the Iranian arms merchant had acquired roughly $1 million worth of American hardware annually, most of it from U.S. companies.

Ardebili was lured by two ICE undercover operations, one based in the United States and one in Europe, U.S. officials said.

Much of the negotiation was done via e-mail or instant message.

In May 2006, for example, an ICE agent e-mailed Ardebili, writing in broken English to disguise himself: "What you can say can perhaps be good business, but I stress to you what we are do is ILLEGAL in US."

Ardebili replied the next month. To avoid the U.S. embargo law, he suggested that the military parts be shipped to Europe, then forwarded to Iran. "This is long time we are in the business and working in full security system. . . . [No one will] know end user located in Iran."

By 2007, Ardebili was negotiating by e-mail to buy the radar components and night-vision equipment, the U.S. government said. The undercover agents offered to sell more than 1,000 radar microchips for use in Iran through a shipping company in Azerbaijan. After protracted negotiations, Ardebili agreed to make a deposit on the radar components and wired $3,000 to the ICE undercover company's bank in Delaware, which is why the case was prosecuted in Wilmington.

Although Ardebili wanted to meet the salesmen in Dubai, the undercover ICE agent lured him to Georgia.

In one of their last instant-message chats, the ICE agent wrote to the Iranian arms merchant: "Our future is going to be big. I sometimes believe you do not know how big will our deals be."

Fourth Generation war on American soil

Image via Wikipedia

William S. Lind
One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight. Those who won’t do not remain gang members.

The November 15 Washington Post had a story about gangs in Salinas, California, that deserves close attention from 4GW theorists. Salinas is reportedly overrun with Hispanic gangs. The Post wrote that its homicide rate is three times that of Los Angeles. It quoted a Salinas police officer, Sgt. Mark Lazzarini, on one of the classic results of state breakdown, chaos:

“Only half of our gangs are structured; the Norteños,” he said. “The southerners are completely unstructured. Half of our violence is kids who get into a car and go out and hunt. These kids don’t know their victims. How do you stop that? It’s very chaotic.”

Salinas’s new slogan might be, “Salinas: where even the lettuce has tattoos.”

But what is interesting in the Post’s article is not the gangs themselves. It is a new response to the gangs. Salinas has brought in the U.S. military to apply counter-insurgency doctrine to a situation on American soil. The Post reports that:

Since February combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city…

“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students (from the Naval Postgraduate School), mostly naval officers…

Rothstein…notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.”…

Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing…an opportunity for a school “in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution.”…

“The idea was, not just Salinas,” Ferrari said, “but is there a national model for this”

From the perspective of 4GW theory, this is an important development. The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government’s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a “national model” to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities. Again, the significance is that this is now formally admitted by the U.S. government, not merely noted by “outside the beltway” observers of 4GW.

The U.S. military officers advising Salinas on how to wage an anti-gang counterinsurgency are doing so as volunteers, according to the Post, to avoid Constitutional issues. But the camel’s nose is obviously inside the tent. Many wars have begun by sending “volunteers.” If, as likely, the volunteers prove insufficient, regular troops will follow.

As someone who believes in a strictly limited federal government, the government envisioned by our Founders, I find this troubling. But from a 4GW perspective, I also know it is inevitable. As I have said time and again, the main Fourth Generation threat we will face will be on our own soil, not halfway around the world, where we are currently pouring our strength out into the sand. We will come to regret that waste bitterly.

Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.

Note: Regrettably, the d-n-i website, which had become the worldwide “go to” forum on 4GW, is shutting down. It is a major loss. Fortunately, John Robb has agreed to carry all my columns on his website, Global Guerrillas. All my archived columns will also be moved there from d-n-i, as will the important K.u.K Austro-Hungarian field manuals on Fourth Generation war.

"Yes, There’s Racism in the Pentagon"

Hersh/Image via Wikipedia

Neil Offen
DURHAM — The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.

The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”

In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.

“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”

The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.

“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

Hersh called the “Af-Pak” situation — the spreading conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Obama’s main challenge.

The war in Afghanistan has destabilized Pakistan, which has 80 to 100 nuclear weapons, said Hersh, who recently returned from a visit to South Asia. “And the nuclear situation [in Pakistan] is more dire than you could know. It sucks.”

The only way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the conflict, Hersh said, is to negotiate with the Taliban.

“It’s the only way out,” he said. “I know that there’s a lot of discussion in the White House about this now. But Obama is going to have to take charge, and there’s no evidence he’s going to do that.”

While critical of the president on Afghanistan, Hersh, who travels to the Middle East three or four times a year, did praise his foreign policy initiatives toward Iran.

“When it comes to Iran, he’s changed the paradigm,” he said. “[President] Bush always said we’ll negotiate with those duty Iranians about their nuclear enrichment plans when they stop enriching nuclear material. Obama understands there is some room there to maneuver. That’s a huge change.”

He also praised Obama for also changing the paradigm with his decision to shelve plans for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Doing that, he said, would help U.S. relations with Russia.

“It’s about time we realize we have a lot in common with the Russians, like worrying about China and global terrorism,” Hersh said.

The missiles, he added, were just a continuation of the Cold War, and “it’s about time for us to capture some of the benefit we were supposed to get from ending the Cold War.”

An American Armageddon

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Jack D. Douglas
Chuck Baldwin's excellent essay below gives some more details on recent moves by the Obama forces to seize direct control over U.S. police, quasi-private military forces, and to create new forces under control of the Party.

Bill Marina and I paid a great deal of detailed attention to Bush's explosive use of the Blackwater, etc., private armies in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. There are now a few good books on them. In general, these mercenaries – highly paid, mostly former Special Forces from the U.S., Israel, South Africa, etc. – outnumber the regular military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond. The statement that the U.S. forces in Afghanistan are 65,000 is a preposterous Big Lie to hide the reality and the vast costs. These forces are the ones that use hollow point sniper bullets for long-range murders of civilians, etc. They probably use other war crimes materials like white phosphorus against personnel, depleted uranium shells in Iraq, etc.

There is a long history of their use by the U.S. – going back certainly to the Privateers; but those operated under prize-taking rules that were international and provided incentives to minimize death and destruction, not maximize them. The U.S. Navy started a few decades ago using private, contracted ships working with the Navy ships to carry fuel, food, etc., to keep the official number of ships down, so the public would not know how huge the Navy really was when the contract ships were counted. [I started seeing gray painted ships in the San Diego harbor with colored stripes along their sides and found out from Navy men they were the contract ships. They looked like regular Navy ships except for the colored stripe, which was small and could only be seen up close.]

Bush started using secret Special Ops masquerading as employees of Big Corps., notably Halliburton's KBR, very early in Afghanistan, as we learned from a very close professional friend and co-worker of a very old friend of mine. He was a great sniper who was called up overnight and sent off to shoot peasants in Afghanistan suspected of being Taliban, etc. [The U.S. mercenaries guard Karzai in depth and are everywhere in Afghanistan and I expect are now used in Pakistan.]

Blackwater tried a few years ago to build a huge international training camp for their mercenaries in San Diego County. That led to a huge outcry and struggle. As far as I know, it remains on ice. The details of that are in The San Diego Union-Tribune archives.

I believe the crucial, secret part of McChrystal's New Plan is to vastly increase the use of drone Hellfires, Special Ops air strikes, and secret sniper murders in Afghanistan and Pakistan against suspected al-Queda and Taliban forces and sympathizers. McChrystal was the head of U.S. Special Ops "black ops" [murder squads of snipers, etc.] when Obama appointed him to be the head of all U.S. forces in Afpak. I believe Obama appointed him for the purpose of increasing the Murder Squad programs and this has led to an explosion of Afpak support for the guerillas and rage against Karzai and the U.S. Pakistan is fiercely resisting this, but that just means the U.S. has to vastly increase the bribes.

I just got an e-mail in response to one of my Afpak essays Lew Rockwell posted in which the writer says he is SF [Special Forces] and has worked in eleven countries propping up dictators for the U.S. [He objects to my calling these "black ops programs" of the Special Ops "Death Squads" – which has never been any official term used by anyone but is the unofficial term used since Vietnam, the CIA's vast Phoenix Program, John Kerry's "fast boats" running agents up the Mekong, etc.] I think most of these former SF mercenaries are totally cynical like mercenaries throughout history. They know it's all Big Lies and BS, but they get paid vast sums to sign up, reenlist, annual salaries, bonuses, expenses....

They are like the Condotierri in the Italian City States, totally mercenary and very dangerous.

The SF guy who wrote me was morally outraged that I oppose the SF executions by snipers. He insists that this is better than bombing the whole house or village but will not consider the possibility it might be best to work morally and legally to root out murderers on all sides. I told him about the U.S. military commander in San Francisco in 1906 who moved his 1,700 troops into the streets after the earthquake to maintain law and order, pushing aside the police trained to do these things. Some of his men wound up executing supposed looters and then doing the looting themselves.

I certainly think Obama's Civilian Defense Force is intended to be an auxiliary Party force, very similar to the Sturmabteilung [the infamous SA] of the Nazi's that grew out of the Freikorps and became the Party's private army, as Trotsky's Red Army was the private army of the Bolsheviki, not of the state. Hitler was himself eventually threatened by the SA and killed off the leaders and folded the troops into the new SS, which became the private army of Hitler, swearing allegiance to him personally in the Nuremberg Sportsplatz ceremonies, rather than being subject to the orders of the German General Staff, the Wehrmacht. The Soviet Party always maintained heavily armed special forces around Moscow responsible to the Party. They also had their own more loyal Spetznetz forces, very much like the US Special Forces, and the Party-controlled Cheka-NKVD-KGB, GRU, and MVD. Putin came from the KGB but controlled all of them in the new regime. [He still does informally.] The US Imperial President controls the 19 [plus secret-secret units] secret police from the FBI and CIA to DEA and BATF, but they do not have heavy weapons. They have more direct control of some of the Special Forces for that but I do not know the details of such secret matters.

The U.S. Constitution provides for the state-controlled reserves, national guards for emergencies, etc. The federal government is moving to take control of the state military forces upon command of the President.

Obama's military and secret police forces are moving very fast and across the entire spectrum of forces to get direct control of all major forces in the U.S. and around the world and to create new ones under direct control from the beginning of the Party. Hitler had to move slowly over several years because the General Staff hated him. The Obama police and military czars are moving extremely fast and across the whole spectrum of forces. They are running great risks of a catastrophic showdown with Iran and Pakistan and other nations to build their military image as Winners. Iran alone can shut down the Persian Gulf oil and cripple the U.S. economy already in Depression II. They have also seized control of all of the top of the vast U.S. financial system, plan to impose the Fed as a totalitarian czar over finance permanently, have seized the biggest insurer – AIG, the biggest manufacturer – GM, and are planning to seize the vast power industry, health care, education, the internet ["in times of emergency declared by Obama"], and no doubt any other great concentrations of power. All U.S. concentrations of power will be under the direct control of Obama through the Party political commissars, popularly known as "Czars" because they have under the Emperor totalitarian powers. Ravenwood may be fictional. These are brutal facts.

I assume Obama and The Party have only the "best of intentions." They apparently want to save us from all the agonies of real freedom and leave us only with the mundane choices among tooth paste brands manufactured by Big Corps. working under the direct Consumer Protection Czar in the White House.

Being an unregenerate, old-fashioned American I fear that all of their best intentions will not save us in the short run from the agonies of Imperial and bureaucratic tyranny and that in the long run they will discover as the Soviets did that central-planning does not work. Their goal, like that of Lenin, is Utopia Today, but I fear they will produce very soon the awful reality of Systemic Implosion and an American Armageddon. The Soviets had the U.S. and the Europeans to hold them up while they divested themselves of the most awful concentrations of central planning power, but the U.S. is too big to be held up. We will implode.