Tag: war

The Official Story is Always Wrong

Never believe a wartime President. Especially not a would-be wartime President. Ron Unz reminds us that they are always – literally and historically always – lying to the American people about what the declared enemy has done to justify going to war with them.

During 1940 the determined efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt to involve America in the war against Hitler’s Germany were blocked by the overwhelming opposition of the American people, running at 80% according to some polls. A group of young Yale Law School peace activists had launched the America First Committee and it quickly attracted 800,000 members, becoming the largest grassroots political organization in our national history. The leadership of the AFC included many of our most prominent business and journalistic figures, and famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of our greatest national heroes, served as its top spokesman.

With American antiwar sentiment so seemingly strong and resolute, various political stratagems were employed to reduce it. In late October 1941, just few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor finally settled the issue, FDR announced in a nationwide radio broadcast that he had obtained a German map that revealed the secret Nazi plans to seize control of Latin America, which Hitler would then use as a base to attack the United States as part of his bold plan of world conquest.

Our President declared:

Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it…This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well.

Probably millions or even tens of millions of Americans believed FDR’s words about that direct threat to our national security and therefore softened their resistance to our country’s involvement in the European war. But as historians have long since acknowledged, the map was a forgery, probably produced by FDR’s own close British collaborators. In an earlier private conversation with the British ambassador, FDR had warned that his secret activities with the British would probably lead to his impeachment if they were revealed.

I think few Americans at the time were willing to publicly accuse our President of such major falsehoods, but from a distance of more than eighty years, what strikes me is the sheer absurdity of FDR’s accusation. Germany had no significant navy and had been stymied for over a year by the barrier of the English Channel, only 18 miles wide. Yet apparently a large majority of the American media and the American public were willing to believe that the Germans could easily cross the thousands of miles of the Atlantic Ocean and gain control of the countries of South America, whose total population was considerably larger than that of Germany itself. So the excitement of being privy to a secret intelligence document seems to have triumphed over rational thought in the minds of many people, including eager journalists.

FDR’s illegal efforts to involve us in a totally unnecessary war outraged many of our Military Intelligence professionals at the time, but they were bound by an oath of secrecy, and their views only became known years or decades later when they published their books and personal memoirs. Extensive archival research by Prof. Joseph Bendersky fully uncovered their extremely bitter contemporaneous sentiments, and he noted the “fierce delight” they took in FDR’s eventual death: “Finally, the evil man was dead!”

Just after the end of the war, Gen. George Patton, one of our most illustrious military commanders, told his colleagues that he intended to resign his commission so that he could begin a nationwide speaking tour to provide the American public with the true facts about the war that they had just fought. Patton soon died in a highly-suspicious vehicle accident, and decades later his self-confessed American assassin revealed that he had killed Patton under direct orders from top figures in our own government.

Government officials have long recognized that secret information, even if heavily distorted or completely false, can be used to effectively shape media coverage. Many journalists and pundits are always eager to receive leaks, confidential tidbits that they are willing to make the centerpiece of their one-sided stories, thereby allowing themselves to be manipulated.

A perfect example of this process occurred during the run-up to the Iraq War, when leaks of secret intelligence information from Bush Neocons were widely promoted in such elite media outlets as the New York Times and the New Yorker. This persuaded our gullible citizenry that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and also planned to attack our country with anthrax and other deadly biological weapons, while seemingly being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, his regional arch-enemy. As I described a decade ago, most of Congress and the American people fully accepted such obvious nonsense, resulting in our disastrous Iraq War, which began the destruction of much of the Middle East:

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

An even greater absurdity unfolded last year, after a serious of mysterious underwater explosions destroyed the $30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines, probably Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.

Numerous top American officials had publicly threatened to eliminate the pipelines if Russia invaded Ukraine, but after Russia did so and Nord Stream was destroyed, virtually all the mainstream media outlets both in America and in Europe declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin had probably destroyed his own pipelines, thereby further demonstrating his criminal insanity, and scarcely any other possibility was even considered. When Prof. Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed on Bloomberg TV and pointed to the American government as the obvious suspect, his statement was greeted with horror and disbelief and he was quickly yanked off the air.

Stop falling for the lies. You have the advantage of knowing the lies are coming, they are usual at least bordering on the absurd, when they don’t fly right past the border and into outright ridiculousness. They’re also usually championed by a small phalanx of Prometheans who provide the paper-thin “evidence” to support the President’s Daliesque whoppers.

There is no excuse for falling for this nonsense again. You’re going to hear outrageous lies about China, Iran, and quite possibly Niger or some other African nation soon. Don’t fall for them.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Kagan Death Cult

A single family is providing the intellectual justification, such as it is, for the neocon wars on Russia, China, and Iran. Notice that despite the fact that their policies appear to be based on an ideological foundation, their ideology du jour changes from Trotskyite to Reaganite depending upon whatever the geopolitical environment happens to be:

Donald Kagan, the patriarch of Kaganism, followed a similar intellectual trajectory to his colleagues Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: Marxist academics who transformed into rabid Reaganoid Cold Warriors in response to the Soviet Union’s support for Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism in the 1960s. Donald was quite clearly in the Republican camp, though his children have dropped some of the “right-wing” elements of the neo-conservative doctrine (previously used to mobilize Evangelical Christian voting blocs) and replaced it with a unified American state ideology that is as at home in the Democratic Party as it is in the GOP.

Donald’s sons, the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan and the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan, were highly influential in the George W. Bush administration through think-tanks such as the Project For A New American Century and the Foreign Policy Initiative, though today they have largely distanced themselves from the GOP following the party’s alienation of Jewish elites through Trumpification.

At PNAC, the Kagans were primarily concerned with expanding Israeli power by using the United States to topple Saddam Hussein, Bashar Al-Assad and strangling Iran, but by 2006, they grew increasingly suspicious and hostile towards Russia and China for seeking more control in how they interface with Western (read: Jewish) financial institutions and cultural values, while simultaneously choosing to pursue their own foreign policy paths independent of Pax Americana. Over time, the fears of Kaganism have been vindicated, as Russia and China have evolved from wild card United Nations votes to outright revisionist powers ready to directly confront Washington interlopers in their backyards.

The Kaganists blame the rise of China, Russia and Iran on the war and free trade weary American people, who in 2016 even managed to pressure Hillary Clinton into tactically walking back her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a move that enraged Kagan). For most Americans, the nation-wrecking trade deficits (which are in truth subsidies to buy subservience), trillion-dollar wars, and mountains of body bags required to oversee a world empire are neither necessary or worthwhile for the well-being of the geographically gifted and resource rich United States.

In 2019, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Robert Kagan, the husband Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, published an editorial excoriating the “America First” message embraced by segments of both parties and reiterated the minority Jewish-held internationalist elite consensus think-tanks have been churning out for decades. According to Blinken and Kagan, a world of realism, where countries are free of Jewish minders and American blood and treasure is exclusively reserved for the benefit of American people, is a “jungle” that allows budding Hitlers (Putin), Mussolinis (Iran) and Hirohitos (China) to spread “anti-democratic” revolution against “Anglo-American” (a term Kaganists use to identify their civilizational project even as they support demographic replacement of the European stock in English-speaking country) liberal-globalist hegemony.

The central domestic political theory of Kaganism purports that liberalism is in perpetual antagonism with “populism,” (which the Kagans view as a strain of Fascism), in other words, the will of the people. The Kaganists view the democratic accountability of political leaders, self-interested (at least in the case of Gentiles) trade-offs, and the free discussion of ideas as a distraction or minor inconvenience to suppress and push through, as shown in their latest book celebrating Franklin Delano Roosevelt for deceiving the American people into fighting a world war against Germany and Japan, two countries Kagan admits never posed a security threat to the United States but had to be lured into a confrontation anyway.

It’s really fascinating to read Donald Kagan’s books, and see how he constantly shifts his positions while never, ever, questioning his core assumptions. The sophistic rhetorical appeals to redefined words misrepresenting concepts is always interesting too, although it’s so transparent that the reader will find it astonishing that it actually works on the media and a substantive portion of the population.

DISCUSS ON SG

When Gunboat Diplomacy Fails

Apparently the Iranian military was not impressed by the overwhelming show of force by the US Navy, and now the US Navy would very much like the Iranians to please stop bullying their gunboats.

Dozens of Iranian drones and speedboats swarming two US Navy ships near the Persian Gulf after Washington sent them in to deal with Iran’s renewed threat against one of the world’s most important waterways, dramatic new footage has revealed.

Iran’s navy sent the small vessels to confront the USS Bataan and the USS Carter Hall in the fraught Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, according to a video published on Saturday.

The speedboats were manned with armed soldiers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and came within inches of the ships, while drones also taunted the ships and managed to snap pictures right above them.

Chopped up footage taken from several of the drones and speedboats showed Iranian soldiers speaking in a mix of English and Farsi, while a US soldier can be heard through garbled radio responding to the swarm of vessels, though it is unclear exactly what was said.

Iranian media outlets claimed that the confrontation forced helicopters to land back on the Americans ships. The ships, a helicopter carrier and a support vessel that were carrying more than 4,000 American troops between them, were sent to the Gulf in response to Iran’s continued threats of seizing commercial ships in the region.

NATO and the US Air Force have already been exposed as a paper tigers. It’s obviously the US Navy’s turn next. The only surprise may be that it could be Iran that sinks the first US warships, instead of China.

Or, you know, Israel.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Opening of the African Front

It’s not a true world war until there is fighting on at least three continents. It appears the African Front will be opening hostilities soon.

The military chiefs of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have decided on a date for sending troops into Niger, the bloc’s commissioner for political affairs, peace and security, Abdel-Fatau Musah, said on Friday.

“We are ready to go anytime the order is given,” Musah told reporters after a two-day meeting of the bloc’s Committee of Chiefs of Defense Staff in Accra, Ghana. “The D-day is also decided. We’ve already agreed and fine-tuned what will be required for the intervention. Let no one be in doubt that if everything else fails, the valiant forces of West Africa, both the military and the civilian components, are ready to answer to the call of duty,” Musah said.

Niger has accused ECOWAS of acting as the proxy of France, the country’s former colonial ruler. Speaking on Friday, Musah insisted that the bloc is a “rules-based organization,” ready to intervene alone or with support of “other democracy-loving partners.”

According to the French broadcaster RFI, the bloc is mustering about 25,000 troops, mostly from Nigeria and Senegal.

Niger’s neighbors set ‘D-Day’ for intervention, RUSSIA TODAY, 18 August 2023

It’s interesting to see how the servants of Clown World all use the exact same zaubersprache. Everything now is “rules-based” and “democracy” despite the observable fact that Clown World never obeys any rules and is openly anti-democratic. All you need to determine who the bad guys are in any situation is to see who a) supports the Clown World Narrative or b) uses Clown World’s terminology.

Now that the US proxies are preparing for battle, the US is getting its own troops out of harms way. It’s one thing to have one’s proxies roundly defeated by mercenary light infantry, it’s another to have one’s regulars openly humiliated by them. Regardless of whether or not the US Army and Marine Corps can successfully take on Wagner and the Chechens, much less the Russian regulars, it’s in the interest of the US to maintain the illusion of military supremacy as long as it can.

That suggests the US will not commit its own troops to battle anywhere unless and until it cannot find any European, African, or Asian proxies to fight in their staid. Believe it or not, Clown World’s war plan for Asia actually involves trying to recruit Vietnam to fight China. Because it is already apparent that Japan, South Korea, and The Philippines alone are not going to suffice.

Planning is underway for a possible U.S. military evacuation from Niger, even though a top U.S. general says any final decision is still “weeks away.” The commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and U.S. Air Forces Africa told reporters Friday his headquarters is preparing for a range of scenarios that could force some 1,100 U.S. troops to abandon two airbases that have been critical to U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

DISCUSS ON SG

Smoking Their Own Supply

The Neoclowns’ collective delusion concerning the global geostrategic situation is off the freaking charts. They actually believed the recent Jeddah conference, which accomplished precisely nothing and has already been completely forgotten, was going to be the combination of Versailles and Nuremberg.

Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently brought an American delegation to the second international peace summit earlier this month at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. India and China both sent delegations to the session, perhaps drawn to Saudi Arabia for its immense oil reserves. One Indian academic observer dismissed the event as achieving little more than “good advertising for MBS’s convening power within the Global South; the kingdom’s positioning in the same; and perhaps more narrowly, aiding American efforts to build consensus by making sure China attends the meeting with . . . Jake Sullivan in the same room.”

Meanwhile, far away on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia continued to thwart Zelensky’s ongoing counteroffensive. I asked an American intelligence official why it was Sullivan who emerged from the Biden administration’s foreign policy circle to preside over the inconsequential conference in Saudi Arabia.

“Jeddah was Sullivan’s baby,” the official said. “He planned it to be Biden’s equivalent of [President Woodrow] Wilson’s Versailles. The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive. They were even planning a Nuremberg type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more fuck-up, but who is counting?

It’s like they’re getting their strategic direction from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “We can achieve anything, so long as we do it… together!” All that’s missing is a dramatic image of Girl Power. In the meantime, here’s another fuck-up to add to the growing collection of Clown World catastrophes:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has sent letters to Denmark and Norway assuring that the Biden government would expedite approvals for all transfers of F-16s to Ukraine. In the letters Blinken said that the F-16s would transfered once Ukrainian pilots have completed the Danish and Norwegian lead training program:

I am writing to express the United States’ full support for both the transfer of F-16 fighter aircraft to Ukraine and for the training of Ukrainian pilots by qualified F-16 instructors…. It remains critical that Ukraine is able to defend itself against ongoing Russian aggression and violation of its sovereignty.

The letters from Secretary Blinken mark the first time the Biden regime has given a hard commitment to supplying the Ukrainian military with F-16s.

Keep in mind that the only way F-16s could be useful in Ukraine is if they are nuclear-armed, and even then, the chances that they would survive long enough to get in range of any strategic Russian targets is remote. This isn’t WWII and air power is now almost entirely useless. Ten more years of technological development should be enough to mark the end of manned aircraft in war due to satellite, targeting, drone swarms, and laser technology.

There is a reason Russia isn’t making much use of its air superiority, and that is because it is simply too dangerous to fly over the modern battlefield. Artillery and air defense are now the order of the day.

I suspect Blinken wrote those letters in the hopes that Russia will settle for an armistice long before the pilot training can be completed and the F-16s sent to Ukraine to be shot down… assuming they can be hidden on the ground long enough to avoid being destroyed by hypersonic missiles.

Clown World isn’t just evil, it is quite literally deranged. This is the end result of eight decades of relentless lying to everyone, including themselves. Success always plants the seeds of failure, but even a two-bit drug dealer knows better than to smoke his own supply.

DISCUSS ON SG

Reality Defeats the NATO Narrative

To the surprise of absolutely no intelligent observer, the much-vaunted Ukrainian “offensive” that didn’t even manage to reach the first Russian line of defense has proven to be a failure of catastrophic proportions. So catastrophic that even the US intelligence agencies are now publicly admitting that the Kiev regime cannot win the war no matter how much help it receives from NATO:

US intelligence agencies have made a “grim” assessment of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive, believing Kiev will fail to plunge south toward the Crimean Peninsula by the end of the year, according to the Washington Post.

Officials have voiced grave doubts about the Ukrainian mission in a classified intel report, the contents of which were relayed to the Post on Thursday, with the outlet citing Moscow’s “brutal proficiency” in defending captured territory.

“The US intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol,” the report said, adding that Kiev would then be unable to “fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.”

The Post report appears to echo recent revelations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In a story published earlier on Thursday, he cited an unnamed US intelligence official who bluntly stated that Ukraine “will not win the war.”

The CIA warned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces would fail, and that Kiev “will not win the war,” American journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Thursday. Blinken “has figured out that the United States – that is, our ally Ukraine – will not win the war” against Russia, Hersh wrote on his Substack blog, quoting an anonymous US intelligence official.

“The word was getting to him through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work,” Hersh’s source continued, without specifying when these warnings began to surface. “It was a show by [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bulls**t.”

You may recall that I told you the Kiev regime not only would not, but could not win a war with Russia. This was entirely and absolutely obvious from the start. Every single aspect of the NATO narrative was false, from Putin’s purges to Russian ammunition shortages to the existence of a popular pro-Western, anti-Putin political opposition.

In fact, the only things that have been a surprise about the war is the extent to which a) NATO countries were willing to waste money and arms, and b) Ukrainians were willing to fight and die for a foreign regime that was perfectly happy to shed their blood. If the Ukrainians had any sense of self-preservation at all, its elite 82nd Air Assault Brigade would be rounding up the NATO puppets in Kiev and putting them on trial for treason and war crimes instead of dutifully obliterating itself on three lines of sophisticated Russian defenses.

Now the Narrative is shifting, as NATO is counting on Russia’s willingness to keep what it has won and prepare to fight another war with NATO in the next ten years. One can’t discount the possibility entirely, as there might be some advantage to Russia in letting NATO pivot to China, watching the US Navy die by attrition, then rolling up what remains of Ukraine and NATO once the Europeans understand that the US military is no longer capable of bailing them out. There is a reasonable strategic case for passing the baton to China and the People’s Liberation Army while providing military aid on the African, Arabic and South American fronts.

But given the combination of future uncertainty and Russian awareness of the pure evil that drives the neoclowns, I tend to doubt that the Russians will elect to take their foot off the military gas until all of Europe has been freed from the chains of Clown World.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Neoclowns are Doubling Down

While the Typhoid Mary of geopolitics, US regime change specialist Victoria Nuland, is busy down in Niger, attempting to forestall the opening of WWIII’s second front in Africa, it appears that the pivot to China is off for now and the Poles have volunteered to become the next man up for the slaughterhouse.

Warsaw is planning to establish a regular Polish-Ukrainian union for subsequent occupation of Western Ukraine and announced its intention to build “the strongest army” in Europe, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday. Poland has become the main instrument of the US anti-Russian policy and declares its intention to build “the most powerful army” in Europe, for this purpose Warsaw has started large-scale arms purchases from the US, the UK and South Korea, Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting of the board of the Russian Defense Ministry…

“Taking into account the armed forces of the Eastern European countries, about 360,000 military personnel, 8,000 armored vehicles, 6,000 artillery systems and mortars, 650 aircraft and helicopters are deployed in the immediate vicinity of the borders of the Union State,” Shoigu said during a meeting of the board of the military department.

By “Union State”, Shoigu is referring to the borders of both Russia and Belarus. So this would tend to imply that the numbers provided include Ukrainian, Polish, and assorted NATO forces. This is clearly why the Russian generals have been keeping their powder dry and their regular units in reserve, and why they have made heavy use of the Chechen light infantry and various mercenary companies, including Wagner, as well as the Donbass militia forces, in order to spare their own for the transition of the Special Military Operation into direct war with NATO.

Those border deployments may sound like a lot, but they’re not even close to enough to defend against a Russian attack, much less launch one on either Russia or Belarus. Recall that Operation Iska, launched 19 months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, involved considerably more forces than the Germans imagined possible: 20 divisions, 15 brigades, 4,600 artillery, 500 tanks, and 900 aircraft.

While it’s almost pointless to attempt to figure out when and how the Russians are going to attack, but given their military doctrine, one can reasonably assume it is likely to be a) heavier than believed possible by the professional analysts, b) launched without any warning, and c) focused on a place that is not considered one of the most likely targets.

Consider the way in which Marshal Zhukov described the launch of Operation Iskra, which was intended to break the German siege of Leningrad.

All preparations for the operation were at last completed. The morning of January 12, 1943, was clear and frosty. General Romanovsky and I came to the 2nd Shock Army’s observation post. It was quite near the front lines, and we had a good view of the enemy’s defences in immediate depth. Columns of smoke rose here and there in the midst of the German positions. Soldiers who had been on guard duty at night when our scouts were usually active were now about to go to sleep and were lighting their stoves.

So far, silence reigned. But it was a special silence to me — the silence before an attack of historical dimensions.

In the battle, we managed to achieve a tactical surprise, though the enemy knew we were preparing to break the blockade. He may even have guessed where the Soviet troops would hit, for the shape of the front was suggestive of it. And day after day the Germans were building fortifications in the sector of the breakthrough, moving in their crack units, installing more and more guns in the bunkers built during the more than 16 months of the blockade. But when exactly we would strike, on what day and hour, and with what force, the German Command did not know.

As we learned later from prisoners, the Soviet assault which the Nazis had awaited for all of a year, came as a complete surprise to them that day, especially for its power and skill.

The Russians took 105,000 casualties in 18 days and considered it to have been a very significant strategic success.

Keep in mind that the Russians are well aware of the need to disguise the preparations and troop movements leading up to an offensive. The very successful maskirovka put into effect by the Serbian forces to hide their armor from NATO air strikes and render them generally ineffective was developed from Russian military doctrine. So even though satellite and other technologies provide massive quantities of information to NATO analysts and planners, it will not be surprising if the Russians have found a way to circumvent them somehow, at least long enough to achieve tactical surprise.

Pray for the Polish people. They don’t deserve this. They suffered enough in the last World War. But the neoclowns hate them nearly as much as they hate the German and Russian peoples, and will not hesitate to sacrifice them even more brutally than they have sacrificed the Ukrainian people.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Third Front

To be honest, I thought that Iran or Syria would be the Second Front of World War III, prior to China opening Taiwan, Korea, or even the Philippines as the Third Front. But it appears Niger may have already claimed that honor. Still, the Middle East is already drawing more US troops and ships away from the Ukrainian Front.

The US military has deployed thousands of troops and additional naval assets to the Middle East to “deter” Iranian forces. The move comes after Washington accused Tehran of harassing commercial vessels and other “destabilizing” actions.

The US Navy’s 5th Fleet announced the decision on Monday, noting that more than 3,000 marines and sailors had arrived in the Red Sea aboard an amphibious assault ship and a dock landing vessel the day before.

“These units add significant operational flexibility and capability as we work alongside international partners to deter destabilizing activity and deescalate regional tensions caused by Iran’s harassment and seizures of merchant vessels earlier this year,” 5th Fleet spokesman Commander Tim Hawkins told The Hill in a statement.

The amphibious assault ship sent in the latest deployment, the USS Bataan, also carried additional air assets, the Navy added. Though it did not specify the systems on board, the military said that the ship can carry more than two dozen rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft, including the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and AV-8B Harrier attack jets, in addition to a number of landing craft. The smaller USS Carter Hall, a docking ship, will act as a support vessel for operations involving landings or amphibious attacks.

The usual hypocrisy is on display here. The USN’s justification for this deployment is “to defend the freedom of navigation”. While just yesterday, US Senators and neoclowns were decrying the Russian and Chinese ships that were exercising the very right that the US Navy is claiming to defend in the Red Sea.

In a statement on Saturday, two Republican Senators representing the state of Alaska – Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan – said a total of 11 ships had been detected “transiting US waters in the Aleutians,” citing a classified briefing, and labeling the activities “an incursion.”

Sullivan said it marks “yet another reminder that we have entered a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Beijing and Moscow,” adding that he was pleased to see a robust US response involving four American destroyers.

Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has called the patrol “a historical first” and “highly provocative” considering tensions over Taiwan and the Ukraine conflict, the WSJ reported.

Of course, all of these actions are little more than gunboat diplomacy. A single destroyer and a single Marine Expeditionary Unit are not a serious threat to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nor are they meant to be. What really has the neoclowns alarmed is that Russia and China have sent a very clear signal to Iran, Niger, and every other country that isn’t controlled by Washington DC that they are no longer afraid of the US Navy, and that any country that challenges the globalist hegemony doesn’t need to fear US-backed regime change anymore.

DISCUSS ON SG

Past His Sell-By Date

It’s clear that NATO is preparing to jettison Zelensky and blame the Russians for his “assassination”; the neoclown media is openly discussing how Zelensky will be replaced as the head of the Kiev puppet regime in an article that reads as if it was written by Henry II.

“Will no one rid of us this troublesome beggar?”

Given the stakes, and the risk, it is little wonder Ukrainian officials tend to brush off requests to discuss what would happen were Russia to succeed — or they decline to go on the record, worrying the topic appears far too macabre.

And yet, despite the reluctance to publicly engage with the question, there is a plan in place, according to interviews with Ukrainian officials and lawmakers as well as analysts. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as much: “The Ukrainians have plans in place — that I’m not going to talk about or get into any details on — to make sure that there is what we would call ‘continuity of government’ one way or another,” he told CBS news last year.

Ukraine’s Parliament chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk | STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images
Formally, under the constitution, the line of succession is clear. “When the president is unable to fulfill his duties, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine [the Ukrainian parliament] takes over his responsibilities,” said Mykola Knyazhytsky, an opposition lawmaker from the western city of Lviv. “Therefore, there would be no power vacuum.”

The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada — Ruslan Stefanchuk, a member of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party — doesn’t have an especially high trust rating in opinion polls. It is around 40 percent, less than half of Zelenskyy’s. And he’s not popular with opposition lawmakers.

“But I don’t think it matters,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “There’s a strong leadership team and I think we would see collective government,” he added.

The governing council would most likely consist of Stefanchuk as the figurehead, along with Andrii Yermak, the former movie producer and lawyer who’s the head of the office of the president, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Valery Zaluzhny would remain as the country’s top general.

Karatnycky said he would hope to see a role for TV personality Serhiy Prytula, who now runs major charitable initiatives and has a sky-high public trust rating.

Ukraine’s plan if Russia assassinates Zelenskyy, POLITICO, 1 August 2023

Zelensky has nothing to fear from Russia. He’s one of the Russian military’s greatest assets, as he successfully convinced NATO to throw away their donated forces in a manner that has done about as little damage to Russia as possible; Faramir’s cavalry charge against the fortified position of Mordor’s archers in the Jackson film was equally well-conceived and did just about as much harm to the defenders.

Simplicius has worked out that Ukraine may be already down to as little as only 100 tanks remaining to its entire armed forces.

The offensive is now about 2 months old and was of a highly elevated intensity. That means it’s not out of the realm of possibility that their losses were double the rate at 150-200 per month, which would put us at 400 after 2 months. Finally, given that we had come to the ~500 number earlier, subtracting the new ~400 losses would mean that the AFU would be at an absolutely dire state of only 100 remaining tanks. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say perhaps it’s a bit higher at 200-300 left, this is much less than it sounds given that it represents as little as two weeks’ worth of losses in current high intensity combat levels. If my numbers are even remotely close then that is disastrous. It would mean the AFU is on the verge of collapse.

Which, of course, is why the more hawkish neoclowns have already made the decision to give up on the Russian front. So if they get their way and succeed in forcing NATO to pivot to war with China, Zelensky will be a major liability and embarrassment to the governments of the West. This very public warning shot across Zelensky’s bow may, in fact, be the first sign that the pivot to China is underway and will soon be followed by an announcement about NATO-Russian negotiations.

UPDATE: CNBC confirms the new narrative on Zelensky.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s conduct is a source of annoyance in Washington, CNBC reported on Wednesday. Zelensky angers his American backers by ignoring their orders and issuing ever-greater demands, anonymous officials told the network.

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Niger Tests Clown World

One of the inevitable consequences of the sanctions war on Russia was the realization by third parties that economic globalization is a trap that provides more external control than internal opportunity. This is why the Sino-Russian turn to Africa, Asia, and South America is significant, as it threatens to exclude the self-styled “global majority” from the greater part of the world’s population. That’s why the USA put so much pressure on African leaders to not attend the second St. Petersburg summit.

Last week’s Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg was a landmark event in Moscow’s foreign policy concept and practice. Not so much because it brought scores of African leaders and senior officials to the country. The first summit, four years ago in Sochi, featured even more African heads of state. Also, it is not solely because its agenda expanded beyond economics and included a humanitarian dimension: this is important, but this isn’t all.

Essentially, the meeting, with the bureaucratic preparation and the wide public coverage it has received within Russia, testifies to a sea change in Moscow’s worldview and international positioning toward the world’s rising non-Western majority, as laid down in the recently adopted Foreign Policy Concept.

St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century as a ‘window to Europe,’ and last week, it served the same purpose for Africa.

Eurocentrism, of course, is still deeply embedded in the Russian elite’s thinking and aspirations. Nevertheless, the failure of Russia’s long travails of Western integration in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union has now exploded into the proxy war against the United States and NATO in Ukraine. This has produced a historic shift in Moscow’s policies, comparable to the time of Peter the Great in its significance, though in a wholly different direction. For the foreseeable future, the universe of Russia’s foreign policy will remain divided in two large parts: the house of foes including Europe, North America, and the rest of the Anglosphere, and the house of friends elsewhere. The dividing line between the two is a country’s position in relation to the sanctions regime against Russia.

Africa, in this regard, is largely on the right side of that divide. 49 nations out of the continent’s 54 were represented in St. Petersburg. True, only 17 of them participated at the top level. No longer a curious and skeptical observer, as during the Sochi summit four years ago, the West this time made a determined effort, advising, cajoling or threatening African leaders against going to Russia and dealing directly with President Putin.

Russia has proven that it is possible for a nation to stand up to the US military, which from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya, had hitherto crushed every rebellion against the Clown World order. Which, one suspects, is why Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have banded together to protect the new Nigerois regime from Clown World’s regional proxies.

In a move considered a tactical way to protect the recent regime change in Niger, Mali’s military Junta said Monday that they stand to support the coup leaders in Niamey. Mali said that they stand together with Burkina Faso to defend Niger and further warned that any foreign military intervention in Niamey will be considered a declaration of war on both nations with Niger.

“I warn that any military intervention against Niger will be considered as a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali,” announce Col. Abdoulaye Maiga, State Minister for Territorial Administration and Decentralisation, Mali junta.

The announcement was in response to the outcome of a summit by regional bloc ECOWAS that gave a 7-day deadline to Niger’s coup leaders to free detained president Mohamed Barzoum and restore civilian rule or face consequences, with military force an option being considered.

The irony of the appeals to democracy by the USA and the UK, both of which are led by equally unelected heads of state, is unlikely to escape the Russians, the Chinese, and everyone else observing the matter. If the new Nigerois government finds enough support to maintain power, this will be the second significant step toward the complete collapse of the Clown World order.

And since Wagner doesn’t appear to be occupied at the moment, I expect they’ll be willing to accept gold and uranium in lieu of cash.

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