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This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au

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He condemned America to its doom loop

It’s generally considered bad form to begin any obituary of the recently deceased with a list of strikes and demerits. But with Richard Bruce Cheney, it’s a rule we must discard. Prior to Trump’s rise, “Dick” Cheney was the most reviled figure of the early 21st century — treated throughout the 2000s and early 2010s as one of America’s great home‑grown villains. He was the behind‑the‑scenes architect not only of the disastrous Iraq War, but the so‑called “War on Terror” and its attendant torture regime.

If all that weren’t bad enough, Cheney was also a chief engineer of what historians call the “Imperial Presidency” — an institutional development in which the executive office routinely ignores or exceeds constitutional limits, particularly in matters of foreign policy and war powers. That precedent was later used by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to bypass Congress and overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, sending the nation into a death‑spiral where the slave trade again became legal. Obama’s administration also invoked the Imperial Presidency to carry out extrajudicial techno‑militarist killings of “enemies of state” via drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And now, thanks to Cheney’s pioneering zeal, we have a sitting US president who uses his contempt for limits on his power to impose a sweeping global tariff regime and create a massive domestic agency that rounds up unwanted immigrants.

Cheney was indeed, as has been repeated endlessly in recent days, the most powerful vice president in all US history. It is a fact sure to appear in the opening line of every obituary, encyclopaedia entry, and perhaps even chiselled into his epitaph. But a better way of understanding his fame is that Cheney was the Rasputin of the worst US presidential administration of the modern era. While Grigori Rasputin remains perhaps the most distressingly evil, dark magicians of all time — whispering insane advice that led Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov’s to ruin — Dick Cheney had the same effect on George W. Bush, but in a far more mundane, Americana‑like manner. In the lead‑up to the Iraq War, in his seemingly humble and even‑tempered Midwestern tone, Cheney frequently made speeches and appeared on television, pushing for “preemptive” action” to address the grave threat of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

Declassified memos and later congressional testimony show that Cheney and his aides pressured not just President Bush, but the intelligence agencies to overstate Iraq’s “WMDs.” Cheney was also the one who, after September 11th, authorized the NSA’s warrantless wire‑tapping program, which made the entire US population a target of the kind of at‑scale eavesdropping that Rasputin could have only dreamed of.  In the end, as with Rasputin’s spooky mystical sway over the Romanovs, Cheney’s clandestine maneuvering resulted in a disastrous presidential administration — one that historians will likely conclude broke the American empire, wasting $4-6 trillion on an absurd quest to bring Anglo‑style democracy to the Islamic world.

Cheney’s financial ties to the American war machine were, however, more direct. Before joining the 2000 ticket, he served as CEO of Halliburton, the giant energy‑services firm. Critics frequently pointed to the overlap between his corporate past and the Bush administration’s contracting choices. Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR emerged as major recipients of lucrative, often no‑bid, contracts for reconstruction, logistics, and fuel services in Iraq — awards that watchdogs and congressional investigators repeatedly flagged for poor oversight and the appearance of favouritism.

Put simply, Cheney helped normalise a revolving door between government and corporate power that turned war into a revenue stream for his affiliated investments and contractors. The grotesque entanglement of private interest profiteering and public violence is now a permanent feature of American statecraft. Cheney was one of its primary architects. If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheney’s administration was so dreadful that it ultimately produced the Obama‑Biden counter-revolution — which, rather than correcting the economic or military disasters of the Bush years, plagued the nation with the worst aspects of progressive moralism: fixating on tone and etiquette, and insisting the working class mind its manners while recognising the alleged “plight” of elite minorities and privileged professionals.

“At least the Democrats didn’t start the Iraq War” was a line that justified this incessant fence-sitting moralising. The result is that we now inhabit a country where the collective shine on the American state has dulled to the point that many Millennials and Gen Z question the value of democracy altogether, while allied nations warn their citizens that we may no longer be a safe place to visit. Meanwhile, both major parties are run by self‑dealing opportunists, raiding the public coffers for their donors, investors, and cronies alike. Biden and Trump might have taken this approach to governance to its extreme, but Cheney, as the kids say, “hit it first”.

Thus we’re left to ask — is the tragicomedy of late‑stage American politics all Dick Cheney’s fault? Hardly. But, at the start of the 21st century, Cheney contributed more than most to the doom loop Americans now occupy. Appropriate to George W. Bush’s Austin statehouse origins, the Iraq War initiated a Texas two‑step of national self‑destruction. The first step was the war itself. The second was melting the brains of the Gen‑X Left, who would create the first iteration of “resistance” liberalism — the so‑called “Anybody‑But‑Bush” milieu.

Strange as it is in retrospect, my first real job in journalism was at the media headquarters of the 2004 “Anybody‑But‑Bush” movement, writing radio news at the notoriously unlistenable Air America Radio, designed to be a “Fox News for Democrats”. Not only did the radio network launch the coastal‑centric and insufferably elitist careers of Rachel Maddow, Marc Maron, and Sam Seder, it did something far more impactful in the long term. Along with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, the station helped establish the Democratic Party propaganda framework that would become the blueprint for most of American legacy media in the 2010s and early 2020s. And it did so — as I witnessed personally — under the very specific auspices of the Bush‑Cheney regime’s grotesqueness. The first name on the marquee was widely presumed to be little more than a figurehead for Cheney and Karl Rove, the true masterminds behind the curtain.

While sitting at my computer on election night over two decades ago now, with the outcome still in doubt, I had to look away as the station’s executives became physically aroused at the prospect of John Kerry prevailing in Ohio. Days earlier, I had placed bets with several co‑workers in the newsroom predicting that Kerry would lose to the Bush‑Cheney machine. Over and over, I’d tried to explain that there was simply no way a self‑serious, blue-blood like Kerry would ever be welcomed by Middle American voters.

None of my co‑workers considered this rationale worthy of consideration, even when it proved correct. In their minds, the only people who voted for Bush and Cheney were “racists” or “rubes”. Their white‑hot hatred for the Cheney‑run administration overshadowed any desire to treat cultural politics as something delicate and worthy of respect. It’s a mindset that’s still predominant throughout the Washington‑to‑NYC “Acela corridor” establishment media.

A decade before Trump Derangement Syndrome became a tangible phenomenon, Bush and Cheney anticipated it by dissolving the rational critical-thinking capacity of the wealthy Gen X Democratic Party apparatchiks. Despite their inability to reconcile the reality of Bush’s everyman appeal — and the abject failure of their network to turn a profit — this group of pseudo‑journalists broadcasting from the 41st floor of Park Avenue South ultimately created the partisan model that took over mainstream media in the decades to come.

Air America Radio became the prototype for MSNBC — which eventually provided the audience strategy for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and what remained of the Condé Nast media empire. A world where “conservative” is nearly as dirty a label as “pedophile”, and anyone “on the Right” is presumed to be a white supremacist. And it all started with their burning hatred for Dick Cheney. He was a conniving and duplicitous but highly effective political puppeteer who, truth be told, they all would have loved to have on their side.

After Trump’s rise, that opportunity came about — and the Democratic establishment took it. So much of the Left‑liberal media, including my former co‑worker Rachel Maddow, who had spent countless hours portraying Cheney as the literal embodiment of evil, overnight turned coat and began calling him a “hero”. Why? Because, once it became a good career move, Cheney joined his daughter in standing against Trump.

A year ago, just before the 2024 election, Cheney declared: “In our nation’s 248‑year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.” While I personally share the sentiment, it’s quite rich coming from Cheney — the man who personally designed the throne of the Imperial Presidency — to now say what America really needs is devotion to our history of republican checks‑and‑balances rule.

Now that we’ve seen its final turn, Cheney’s career arc — more than anyone’s — exposes the core absurdity of modern Democratic politics. Its deepest drive isn’t New Deal‑style liberalism, or even progressive social tolerance, but what Thomas Frank calls “anti‑populism.” An elitist impulse that exists solely to thwart the (small “d”) democratic desires of working people. Before heading to the great pasture in the sky, Cheney saw the light of anti‑populism, and that’s enough for establishment Democrats to declare him one of their own.

Original article:  unherd.com

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On August 16, my wife, Vickie, and I attended a conference at the Dulles Airport Hilton just outside Washington, D.C. It was titled “A Blueprint For Peace” and was hosted by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

This institute was started by Rep. Paul at the end of his last year in Congress in 2012. I participated in the founding press conference, and I am still on the advisory board.

This year’s conference had several outstanding speakers, such as Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Col. Doug MacGregor, and others. The first day was a scholars program for college students headlined by Kelley Vlahos, former editor of the American Conservative Magazine.

Professor Sachs is from Columbia University and has been used by the United Nations to advise countries all over the world. He is considered to be one of the greatest foreign policy experts in this country.

In his speech, he said we need to dust off the Monroe Doctrine and stop intervening in so many wars and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. He said the war in Ukraine and the slaughter in Gaza could be ended quickly if we made it clear we were no longer providing so much money and weaponry.

The Monroe Doctrine was a declaration made in 1823 by President James Monroe that basically said we would not allow political and military interference in our sphere of influence, the Americas, and in return, we would not try to run Europe.

This is not isolationism. We should have trade and tourism and cultural and educational exchanges with all nations, and we should help out during terrible humanitarian crises.

But almost all our wars over the last 60 or 75 years have been about money or power, or both. We have spent trillions and have lost many thousands of American lives to make a tiny few rich and powerful.

Most of this interventionism has been egged on by so-called Neocons, who are not conservative at all. In fact, columnist George Will wrote that Neocons were “magnificently misnamed,” and that they were “really the most radical people in this City” (meaning Washington, D.C.).

Russia and Ukraine began peace negotiations four days after their war started in February of 2022, and basically had a peace agreement worked out by April 15, 2022, until Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Great Britain, and Neocons in our own State Department, principally Victoria Nuland, urged Ukraine not to sign. Their demands have led to the spending of about $350 billion by the U.S., according to President Trump.

Even worse, it has led to hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as one million, deaths, counting all civilians and soldiers on both sides.

Victoria Nuland has led our policy toward Ukraine. She worked as chief of staff for Bill Clinton’s close friend, Strobe Talbott, in the State Department. Then she worked for Dick Cheney when he was vice president. From 2005 to 2008, George W. Bush appointed her as ambassador to NATO. Later, she was Under Secretary of State from 2021 to 2024, when she urged Ukraine not to sign the peace agreement with Russia. Now she teaches foreign policy with Hillary Clinton at Columbia.

Nuland is married to Robert Kagan. Kagan is and has been one of the leading Neocons for years. AI says he “is known for his strong advocacy of liberal internationalism” and “has been a vocal proponent of U.S. interventionism.” He was associated with the Project for the New American Century, the architects of our disastrous war in Iraq.

James Baker, then our secretary of state, gave Russia what he called an “ironclad promise” in 2012 not to move NATO further east – i.e., Ukraine – in return for Russia not contesting the reunification of Germany.

President Trump had six conversations with Putin during his (Trump’s) first term, during one or more of which Trump said he would not advocate NATO membership for Ukraine. This is why President Trump says this war would not have happened if he had been re-elected in 2020.

Samuel Charap, distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, co-authored a Foreign Affairs Magazine article entitled “The Talks That Could Have Ended The War In Ukraine.”

He wrote, “Russia agreed to have a process to diplomatically address the dispute over Crimea,” a Russian speaking area that Russia annexed in 2014.

Charap added that the concession by Ukraine “of renouncing its ambitions to join NATO was potentially enough to engender some relatively significant concessions from Russia,” possibly even “some sort of compensation” to Ukraine for the Crimean Peninsula.

President George W. Bush promised repeatedly when he campaigned in 2000 that he was going to have a more “humble” foreign policy and put an end to “nation building” (of other nations). However, he allowed himself to be horribly misled and controlled by power-mad neocons.

Original article:  www.knoxfocus.com

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

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The funeral pageantry and tributes to the late Jimmy Carter seemed a tad contrived, as if America’s political establishment was trying its best to project an image of national unity and reverential soul – at a time when the country is irrevocably, bitterly divided and its institutions are tarnished beyond redemption.

Carter died at the age of 100 on December 29 – the longest-lived U.S. president in history – and was given a state funeral on January 9 in the National Cathedral in Washington. A national day of mourning was declared, and flags flew at half mast on public buildings.

The drawn-out funeral arrangement seemed to give the media endless scope for nostalgia about a humble peanut farmer who became president for one term between 1977 and 1981. The rose-tinted view of Carter’s legacy harked to a time of supposed decency and bipartisan civility in American politics.

The contrast with the present partisan enmity in U.S. politics could not be sharper. The contempt between Democrats and Republicans could not be more vicious.

Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. He takes over from Democrat Joe Biden. The vaunted peaceful transfer of power is a charade. During the election campaign last year, Biden repeatedly called Trump the “biggest threat to our democracy.” This was a reference to Trump’s demagoguery and fascist proclivities.

Yet, at the funeral for Carter, Trump was seated beside former Democrat President Barack Obama, chatting and smiling before the service. Also sitting in the front rows were Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the election to Trump – despite her condemnations also lambasting Trump as a threat to democracy.

The contrived bonhomie between Obama and Trump was cringemaking. Trump had stoked the false claims about “Kenyan-born” Obama not being an American citizen and dog-whistled racist hatred by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama.

Two days before Carter’s funeral, Trump was mouthing off about forcibly taking back the Panama Canal and he trashed Carter for signing away American ownership of the canal in 1977.

The top mourners in the National Cathedral included former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

The church pews were more fitting of the dock at the Nuremberg Trials for war criminals.

Biden gave an oration for his “close friend” as if to grift off the image of Carter as a benign Commander-in-Chief.

Biden couldn’t resist sticking it to Trump with pointed “lessons” from Carter’s life of humility, public service and lack of ego. Biden also said Carter was an exemplar of resisting “the greatest sin – the abuse of power.”

How absurdly rich that Biden should stand up to lecture on not abusing power after he used his presidential office to pardon his convicted criminal son. Biden is rushing through preemptive pardons for people that the Democrats fear the Trump administration will go after in reprisal prosecutions.

When Jimmy Carter won the election in 1976, he was a relative breath of fresh air in the corrupt milieu of Washington. It was after the Watergate scandal of the Richard Nixon presidency, which was notorious for lies and political intrigue. It was also the end of the shameful Vietnam War – an imperialist genocide waged on lies about defending democracy against communism in Southeast Asia.

But Carter’s presidency wasn’t distinguished by greatness. He lost the 1980 election to Republican Ronald Reagan owing to a mess over the Iranian revolution kicking out the US-backed client dictatorship of Shah Pahlavi in Tehran.

Carter’s long post-presidential career as a humanitarian envoy in a private capacity did gain international respect. But in later life, he was outspokenly critical of his own nation’s politics. Carter denounced the distorting effect of big money in American elections. He said with candid truth that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but rather had become an oligarchy.

Trump’s incoming administration has more billionaires than any previous one in history. Chief among them is South African-born tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, the richest man in the U.S., who donated $250 million to the Trump campaign.

American democracy died decades ago. The exact death knell is debatable. Was it the CIA assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, or was it the vote-rigging theft of the presidential election in 1960 by JFK with the help of the Mafia?

Was it the Vietnam War that killed millions of Vietnamese that Carter’s election tried to redeem? Or was it Carter’s support for Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, a network of Islamists that evolved into Al Qaeda terrorists?

The same terrorists who Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden bombed multiple countries to supposedly defeat? The same terrorists who have taken over Syria and whom the U.S. media is busily whitewashing as a legitimate government in Damascus.

Or did U.S. democracy die when Teddy Roosevelt grabbed Panama with imperialist thuggery to construct the 80-kilometer canal (1904-1914)? The canal that Trump wants to grab back – by military force if needs be.

Or was it the failed fascist coup against another Roosevelt, FDR, in 1933, by Nazi-supporting American corporate leaders?

Or the rise of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his valedictory speech in 1961? Or the creation of the CIA assassination organization in 1947, which Eisenhower later ordered to carry out the coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 54?

Or was it slave-owning “Founding Fathers” at the birth of the United States of America who went on to exterminate native Americans to steal their lands?

The web of lies and deception in American imperialist politics runs deep and wide. All of the above is but a glimpse of the nefarious disease.

The precise date of death for American pretensions of democracy is hard to determine.

But what we see now in the present day is a moribund state of corruption, lies, and loathing where the office is an openly oligarchic plaything, where foreign policy and imperialist bullying will henceforth be conducted by billionaires via Twitter. The mutual contempt for democracy among American political puppets of the warmongering oligarchy is no longer concealed.

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

American democracy was buried a long time ago.

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The debacle of the nearly 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan continues in Joe Biden’s America today.

This disaster began when President George W. Bush — stung deeply by the intelligence that he failed to heed, thus enabling the attacks of 9/11 to take place unimpeded — convinced the American people and Congress and most of our allies that the bad guys who ran Afghanistan in the early part of this century needed to be taught a lesson, whether they personally enabled or facilitated the 9/11 attacks or not.

Here is the backstory.

Bush — knowing days after the 9/11 attacks that they had been perpetrated and paid for by his friends the Saudis — believed that by blaming the attacks on Afghanistan, destroying much of that country and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, he would somehow teach the world that no one would “mess with us” without severe consequences.

His knee-jerk reaction, and exploitation of American mass fear in the weeks following 9/11, set in motion a series of events that culminated in the triumph in Afghanistan of the very mindset Bush and his military and his 2 trillion borrowed American dollars tried to destroy.

To amass the international consents needed to produce the invasion he wanted, Bush also vowed — channeling his inner Woodrow Wilson, who killed innocents in World War I in order “to make the world safe for democracy” — to defy history by installing a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan.

Didn’t he know that tens of thousands of British troops in the 19th century and more than 100,000 Soviet troops in the 20th century had failed to bend the culture and the will of this rugged and wretched country?

President Barack Obama accepted the Bush scheme and continued the American occupation, as well as the mission-impossible task of democracy building.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump split with his own party to denounce the forever war in Afghanistan and vowed to bring the troops home. Trump’s heart was in the right place — he was sick and tired of war — but his head was not.

In early 2020, thinking he’d be reelected president that year, Trump dispatched his secretary of state to negotiate for a peaceful withdrawal of nearly all U.S. forces and a total end to the U.S. occupation. Trump’s diplomats did not negotiate with the government of Afghanistan, but with the government-in-waiting — the Taliban.

The deal they struck, which was agreed to by Trump and the Taliban leadership, required the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban soldiers/prisoners from its jails and the U.S. to complete its military departure by May 2021.

By the time Biden became president, he was faced with that deadline and the realization that the Taliban ex-prisoners, in a number that exceeded the number of American troops there, had been freed and were now armed.

We all know what happened when Biden pulled the plug and the Taliban took control of the Afghan government. Biden’s head was in the right place, but his heart was not.

He knew most Americans are, like Trump, sick and tired of war, but he failed to grasp the grave situation present in Afghan streets triggered by the sudden American departure.

Now, back to the moral monstrosity that Bush created, and why it still lives.

When Bush attacked Afghanistan, he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war, as the then-existing Afghan government did not attack the U.S.

He asked for and received instead a novel creature called the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF.

This creature is unknown to the Constitution, as it purported to authorize war without end against unknown and unnamed targets.

Congressional declarations of war historically established that once the war had been fought and the target surrendered, the declaration no longer authorized the war.

Not so with the AUMF, as its wording is so expansive and ambiguous; it authorizes any president to use military force at any time against any person or entity who arguably perpetrated or facilitated the 9/11 attacks.

All of Bush’s successors have relied on this AUMF to kill folks in the Middle East, even though many of them were infants on 9/11.

Can presidents kill whomever they wish in the name of national security?

In a word: No.

But American presidents have had their hearts set on empire building since Thomas Jefferson engineered the Louisiana Purchase.

How ironic that the man most responsible for articulating the evils of empire in 1776 would himself set about to build one in 1803.

Yet, unlike Abraham Lincoln or Wilson or Bush, Jefferson did so legally and without force or bloodshed.

The modern American empire builders surely think that they can kill any foe — real or imagined. Bush claimed that he had powers from some source other than the Constitution. And he also claimed he could strip Americans of their natural and constitutional rights by shipping them to Cuba — all for empire.

All this killing, unless in self-defense — killing for empire is not in self-defense — defies the natural law, which teaches that all aggression is illicit and every individual person, American or not, enjoys the inviolable right to live.

The lesson of Afghanistan is that American presidents had no moral or constitutional or legal authority to send troops and dollars and assets there in the first place.

Is America to go about the globe building empire under a pretext?

Don’t ask American empire builders as they already have their sights set on Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza.

Is It Aid or Global Empire Building? | Newsmax.com

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President Biden accidentally referred to Putin’s war in “Iraq” when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.

Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, “It’s hard to tell really. But he’s clearly losing the war in Iraq.”

During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:

In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.

That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.

In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”

After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.

I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation that’s been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. It’s truly a thing of beauty.

It’s absolutely ridiculous that they’re trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.

It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden — it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.

caitlinjohnstone.com

War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.

CNN reports:

Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.

“Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”

The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

NEW: President George W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will participate in the Bush Institute’s Nov. 16 event on advancing freedom.

More from @kylieatwood @CNN: https://t.co/cGvBylur7G

— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) November 10, 2022

To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.

Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the US empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.

Also appearing with Bush will be the leader who’s slated to become the face of the US empire’s next proxy war, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. CNN writes:

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will also take part in the event next week. She will deliver a recorded message, in which she is expected to underscore that the struggle for freedom is a global challenge.

And sure, why not. If you’re going to manufacture consent for proxy warfare against multiple powers as your empire flails around frantically scrambling to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, you may as well save time and promote them all on the same ticket.

Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022

Many people who support the US proxy war in Ukraine now recognize that the Iraq war was a horrific disaster, but Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war. Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed by the propaganda of today. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda.

It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.

It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Joe LAURIA

Believing that he was actually speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, former U.S. President George W. Bush has been duped by a prankster into admitting that NATO expansion eastward towards Russia had violated a U.S. promise not to do so. “Listen, times change,” Bush says in a video created by the Russian prankster duo known as Vovan and Lexus.

After “Zelensky” calls Bush “a very, very wise person,” the former U.S. president says he didn’t want Russia to become a member of NATO either, but rather, “I wanted them on the fringe of NATO. I wanted Ukraine in NATO.”

Bush tells “Zelensky” that “your mission is to destroy as many Russian troops as you can.”

He then condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin for essentially putting an end to Wall Street and Washington’s domination of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin. “I thought for a while that Russia would be more cooperative and then Putin changed dramatically,” Bush tells the fake Zelensky.

NATO’s expansion eastward is one of the causes of the Ukraine war, especially after the West in December rejected Moscow’s treaty proposals for a new security arrangement in Europe. Russian pranksters (who have been banned from YouTube) put out a short video. Here is a longer clip:

In a prank call George W. Bush admits the US broke its promise to Russia not to expand NATO eastwards because “times have changed” and the US was “adjusting to the times”. Important for all nations to know that US agreements have an undisclosed expiry date pic.twitter.com/0iAPLgpAU0

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 20, 2022

consortiumnews.com