Tag: war

Mr. Buchanan’s Questions

In which I answer Pat Buchanan’s questions about the failed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The questions that need answering. Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

Yes. First, the Middle East and Near East have zero interest in Madisonian democracy. Second, what the US empire has been exporting for the last 40-50 years is not “Madisonian democracy”, but rather, a foreign imperialism that wears Madisonian democracy as a skinsuit.

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

All of them except for the Japanese armed forces. Even the highly-regarded Israeli Defense Forces are a little more than a Potemkin military, whose excellent historical reputation is primarily based, as the Israeli general Moshe Dayan observed, on the feeble capabilities of their historical opponents. And the US forces are observably inferior to the current Russian and Chinese forces, and, on the basis of their failures in Afghanistan, quite possibly to Iranian forces on the ground.

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

Democracy no longer holds any appeal anywhere, not in the Maghreb, not in the Middle East, not in Central Asia, and not in Europe. Everyone knows it is fake and gay and literally Satanic.

Who lost America’s longest war?

The neocons who have run US foreign policy since the first Bush administration did. Americans are fortunate that the neocons were unable to enmesh the US military in Syria or Iran, or the consequences would have been even worse.

To be more precise, if the Israelis are to be believed, a small group of Jewish Boomers whose fathers were followers of Leon Trotsky did.

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit.

Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don’t think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you’re scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.

“If America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East.”

  • Charles Krauthammer, 2003

It is now obvious to the entire world that these neocons are evil, incompetent idiots who did, in fact, produce an epic series of historic disasters. And they should be held responsible for the catastrophic consequences they knowingly risked.

Discuss on SG.

Run, run away

To absolutely no one’s surprise who knew the first thing about The Graveyard of Empires, the US empire is in what was always the absolutely inevitable full retreat from Afghanistan.

The Taliban seized the cities of Ghazni and Herat on Thursday, in the most dramatic string of captures since launching their offensive. Taking the strategically important Ghazni increases the likelihood the Taliban could take the capital Kabul.

There is also heavy fighting in the second largest city, Kandahar.

The insurgents have moved at speed, seizing new territories almost daily, as US and other foreign troops withdraw after 20 years of military operations.

The city of Qala-I-Naw also fell to the Taliban, who now control about a third of the country’s regional cities and most of northern Afghanistan. The group’s rapid advance has dealt a crushing blow to government security forces.

Sources have told the BBC that Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, is also now in the hands of the Taliban, though this has not been confirmed.

As it happens, Kandahar has already been taken by the Taliban, while the USA and the UK prepare to stage a recreation of the retreat from Saigon in 1975.

Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar, fell into the hands of Taliban insurgents, a spokesman for the militant group and local government officials said early Friday. A local government official later confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the militants had taken the city following “heavy clashes late last night.”

Hours before the Taliban claimed control over Kandahar, the US announced plans to deploy 3,000 troops temporarily to aid the evacuation of its embassy staff. Another 1,000 US soldiers will be sent to Qatar for technical and logistical support, and some 3,500 to 4,000 will be positioned in Kuwait to deploy if needed.

“We’ve been evaluating the security situation every day to determine how best to keep those serving at the embassy safe,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price. “We expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan in the coming weeks,” he said, adding the embassy would not be closing.

Britain is also deploying some 600 soldiers to Afghanistan to help evacuate UK nationals in the country, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said.

But the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan is just the punctuation mark. What we’re witnessing is the end of the US empire, with all the alien rulers, corrupt judges, illegitimate government, incompetent generals, foreign profiteers, and hordes of invading migrants, moral degeneracy, and declining religious faith, morale, and national confidence that customarily accompanies such events. If history is any guide, this is not going to be turned around, so it is time to stop thinking in terms of “preserving” and “conserving” and “restoring” that which is destroyed, and start thinking in terms of building anew with the benefit of the lessons learned from the decline and fall of the United States of America.

The lesson, as always, is this: sink the damn ships!

The Great Retreat begins

The Saker, more or less accurately, in my opinion, reads the tea leaves behind recent strategic actions by the United States and its armed forces:

I think that there is very strong, even if only indirect, evidence which there is some very serious in-fighting taking place in the “Biden” administration and there is also strong, but also indirect, evidence that the military posture of the United States is undergoing what might end up being a major overhaul of the US armed forces.

If true, and that is a big “if”, this is neither good news nor bad news.

But this might be big news.

Why?

Because, objectively, the current US retreat on most fronts might be the “soft landing” (transition from Empire to “normal” country) many Trump voters were hoping for. Or it might not. If it is not, this might be a chaos-induced retreat, indicating that the US state is crumbling and has to urgently “simplify” things to try to survive, thereby generating a lot of factional infighting (at least one Russian observer specialized in “US studies”, Dmitrii Drobnitskii, believes to be the case: see the original article here, and its machine translation here). Finally, the state of decay of the US state might already be so advanced that we can consider it as profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed. The first option (soft landing) is unlikely, yet highly desirable. The second option (chaos-induced retreat) is more likely, but much less desirable as it is only a single step back to then make several steps forward again. The last option (profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing/collapsed) is, alas, the most likely, and it is also, by far, the most perilous one.

For one thing, options #2 and #3 will make US actions very unpredictable and, therefore, potentially extremely dangerous. Unpredictable chaos can also quickly morph into a major war, or even several major ones, so the potential danger here is very real (even if totally unreported in Zone A). This, in turn, means that Russia, China, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela or Cuba all have to keep their guard up and be ready for anything, even the unthinkable (which is often what total chaos generates).

Right now, the fact that the US has initiated a “great retreat” is undeniable. But the true reasons behind it, and its implications, remain quite obscure, at least to me.

I believe it is option 3 – profoundly dysfunctional and basically collapsing – that is the explanation and my reasoning is fairly straightforward. The US military is in far worse shape than even its biggest skeptics comprehend, and these retreats, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, are taking place in order to hide the US military’s lack of capability. With the prospect of a vaccine mandate being forced on an unwilling military by an unelected commander-in-chief, the US military will be fortunate if it doesn’t fall apart faster than Creepy Joe’s eyes light up after catching sight of a child in the crowd. 

Any confrontation, with any enemy provided drones and missiles by either Russia or China, will reveal the US military to be not just a paper tiger, but a paper tiger who has been thoroughly immersed in water. At this point, I think it is more likely that we’ll wake up to find the USA being ruled by a USMC colonel and China in possession of Taiwan than for Creepy Joe’s anti-administration to engage in large-scale offensive operations outside the US borders.

It’s clear that the AIPACkers and ELOWs in the anti-administration desperately want war with Iran before they lose their influence over the US military. But it’s equally clear that the US military has no hope of winning any serious encounter with the China-Russia-Iran anti-imperial alliance. Hence the serious in-fighting presently taking place within Washington.

Sterilizing the soldiers

The Antipresident is reportedly going to issue a waiver that will permit the Pentagon to mandate vaccinations for the US military on Friday:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is expected Friday to announce a mandatory vaccine policy for all active-duty forces in the U.S. military, Fox News has confirmed.

The directive that all 1.3 million service members will be required to get shots in their arms comes just days after President Biden urged all federal employees to get vaccinated

In a speech last week, Biden said he was directing the Defense Department to examine how to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory. 

The Department of Justice was also asked by the president to look into the legality of mandating for the military a vaccine that has yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. 

DOJ officials said a vaccine mandate would require a presidential waiver. 

Officials told Fox News that Austin will make his recommendation to the White House tomorrow, and the formal announcement is expected to come Friday. About 64{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} of active-duty forces are fully vaccinated.

I’ll admit that I fully expect the US to collapse before the year 2034. But I didn’t seriously entertain the possibility that it might happen more than a decade prior.

What, exactly, does Mr. Austin think he is going to do if one-third of the armed forces flat-out refuses the vaccines? They’ve been under pressure to get vaccinated for months already and have stood firmly against it. And now they’re all just going to submit to an order of deeply questionably constitutionality on the basis of a waiver provided by a man suffering from dementia who they all know perfectly well was not elected their Commander-in-Chief?

Perhaps they will. Or perhaps this is really about flushing the patriots and independent thinkers out of the military and they’ll be offered easy and graceful honorable discharges. We’ll find out soon enough.

Vermont is doomed

World War III increasingly looks like it is going to be really weird.

Israel’s president has been targeted by a barrage of social media snark after he bravely compared Ben & Jerry’s decision, to stop selling its ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territories, to terrorism.

The Vermont-based ice cream brand, which has developed a reputation over the years as a champion of progressive causes, announced earlier this week that it would be “inconsistent” with its values to sell its ice cream in Gaza and the West Bank. The boycott was prompted by “concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners,” the left-leaning ice cream maker explained.

The decision sparked both applause and condemnation but, on Wednesday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog issued a uniquely extreme analysis of the move. 

“The boycott of Israel is a new sort of terrorism, economic terrorism,” Herzog said, as quoted by Haaretz. “Terrorism tries to harm the citizens of Israel and the economy of Israel. We must oppose this boycott and terrorism in any form.”

No doubt this will puzzle the historians of the future. It’s already confusing enough to try to understand how the assassination of a minor figure of the Austro-Hungarian nobility by Serbs led to war between the USA and Germany, but can you imagine trying to explain how World War III was started by an IDF attack on a pair of aging hippies in Burlington, Vermont?

USN throws out Royal Navy bait

It’s becoming clear that the US Navy is using the Royal Navy as bait in the attempt to learn just how willing Russia and China are to defend their territorial claims and what cards they have to play in that regard.

The United Kingdom has announced plans to permanently deploy a fleet of naval vessels to Japan, sailing through the South China Sea, as Western countries increase engagement in the Pacific region.

The UK announced on Tuesday that it will be permanently deploying two naval vessels to waters surrounding Japan later this year ahead of the HMS ‘Queen Elizabeth’-led aircraft carrier strike group’s arrival in Japan.

“Following on from the strike group’s inaugural deployment, the United Kingdom will permanently assign two ships in the region from later this year,” UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace said in Tokyo at a joint press conference with his Japanese counterpart, Nobuo Kishi. “We will respect China and we hope that China respects us. We will sail where international law allows.”

Wallace stated that the British vessels will not be specifically based at a Japanese port but will patrol the surrounding waters. 

Of course, this involves a redefinition of “where international law allows” in order to test the willingness of Russia and China to put their ship-killing missiles where their lines on the map are. Using the British ships as a proxy is actually a good sign, as it means the USN has an excuse to back down and avoid WWIII if either the Russians or Chinese decide to call their bluff and sink the intruding ship with something the US forces aren’t equipped to handle.

If I had to guess who is more likely to call and raise, I would think it would be China. Having successfully taken Hong Kong, the Chinese are increasingly confident of bringing Taiwan back into the fold and Xi appears to be a little bolder and a lot less deferential to the neoclowns than Putin.

And time is not on the neoclowns’ side. Every month, the China-Russia-Iran Concord grows stronger, while both the neoclowns’ grip on the North Atlantic Empire and the Empire itself gets weaker. If the neoclowns don’t make use the North Atlantic forces soon, they will lose the ability to do so, and they’ve never had more influence over an administration than they do over the fraudulent Biden one.

The problem is, the effort to use that influence risks stirring up both the American and the British people against them. It’s legitimately a difficult call, but their historical lack of risk aversion will, sooner or later, lead them to push their luck too far. This is why war is more likely than not, barring the exposure and removal of the fraudulent administration.

Please clap, or else

An Englishman has been arrested for showing insufficient enthusiasm about the failure of three African players to successfully make penalty kicks:

Greater Manchester Police have arrested the Savills estate agent who allegedly posted a racist tweet about black England football stars after the Three Lions lost the European Championship to Italy.

Andrew Bone, 37, self-presented at Cheadle Heath police station this morning and was subsequently arrested on suspicion of an offence under Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. 

It’s a good thing Shaquille O’Neal is retired. They’d have had to arrest the entire Los Angeles Lakers fan base after one of Shaq’s epic free throw performances in the NBA playoffs. 

It seems to me the intrinsic problem with declaring that there is no room for racists in society means that anyone who can be accused of racism – which is nearly everyone of European descent – are being left with absolutely no alternative but to eliminate all the anti-racists from society.

Which means, of course, that there will be war.

Remember the Yuma!

 At least we know what the name of the object of the false flag intended to start WWIII will be:

American sailors at the helm of a naval landing vessel have charted course for the Black Sea to take part in wargames alongside other NATO forces, the US Sixth Fleet has announced on Thursday, amid fears of conflict in the region.

According to commanders, the US Naval Ship Yuma, a Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport craft, “began its northbound transit into the Black Sea to operate with our NATO allies and partners.” The twin-hulled catamaran is able to transit a whole company of US Marines and is equipped with both a flight deck and a ramp to allow armored vehicles to rapidly roll into battle.

The Yuma will take part in the colossal ‘Sea Breeze’ exercises along with personnel from 32 separate nations, including Ukraine, the UK, France, Poland, Georgia, Senegal, South Korea, Pakistan, Japan and Morocco, among others.

Or perhaps it will be known as “the Black Sea Incident”. 

The clock is ticking

The imperial US slinks away from the graveyard of empires:

The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.

Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.

The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said.

Empires seldom grasp that they are in decline, even when the signs are obvious to the educated observer. I note that it took two years for the Soviet Union to fall after withdrawing from Afghanistan. 2023 would be ten years earlier than my prediction of 2033, but it’s hard to argue that it’s impossible. 

Kohistani said the U.S. left behind 3.5 million items, all itemized by the departing U.S. military. They include tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks and military ready-made meals, known as MRE’s.

“When you say 3.5 million items, it is every small items, like every phone, every door knob, every window in every barracks, every door in every barracks,” he said.

The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Kohistani said the U.S. also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not being left behind for the Afghan military was blown up before they left.

Much brave. So victory! Very pride. 

Thomas Wictor is a goofball

I know a number of people think highly of Thomas Wictor, but there is a reason you seldom see me quoting or linking to what he writes. For all his pretensions and posturings, his level of actual knowledge on subjects that can be independently checked doesn’t reach the level of Wikipedia. Consider what he wrote in his attempt to defend his Holocaustianity from the criticism of Nick Fuentes, :

There were five crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 
Crematorium I = 372,300 incinerated.
Crematorium II = 876,960 incinerated.
Crematorium IV = 443,904 incinerated.
Crematorium V = 490,752.
We’re already up to 2,529,132.

Now, we’re really not. It appears that Wictor was upset and typed that in a heightened emotional state, because he doesn’t get the math right. The total of the four crematoria he mentions is 2,183,916, not 2,529,132, and if we add the 789,120 he subsequently reports for the omitted Crematorium III, that brings the total to 2,973,036, which also isn’t 2,529,132.

Now, remember that the original “official” number of people executed at Auschwitz-Birkenau was 4 million. Over time, that estimate has been publicly reduced to 1.5 million. That’s literally the number that is on the English plaque at the site.

But the number has been further reduced based on the fact that it appears there weren’t even that many people transported to the site in the first place.

The words on the English plaque are:
FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE A CRY OF DESPAIR AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY, WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED ABOUT ONE AND A HALF MILLION MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN MAINLY JEWS FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES OF EUROPE. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU 1940-1945
But 1.5 million is not the official number of deaths at Auschwitz.  The official estimate, currently given by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, is 1.1 million deaths.
In 1980, Franciszek Piper, the former director of the Auschwitz Museum, began a study of all the available documents at Auschwitz; he calculated that 1,077,180 prisoners, of which 90{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} were Jews, had died at Auschwitz, based on his ESTIMATE of the number of ARRIVALS minus the number of liberated prisoners and the number of transferred, escaped and released prisoners. This number includes the Jews, not registered in the camp, who are assumed to have been gassed immediately upon arrival.
Franciszek Piper wrote the following in an article on the official Auschwitz web site:
After an overall analysis of the original sources and findings on deportation to Auschwitz, I CONCLUDED that a total of at least 1,300,000 people were deported there, and that 1,100,000 of them perished. Approximately 200,000 people were deported from Auschwitz to other camps as part of the redistribution of labor resources and the final liquidation of the camp.
According to the Auschwitz Museum, no records of the number of prisoners who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau have ever been found. In an article on the official Auschwitz website, the former director, Franciszek Piper, wrote the following:
When the Soviet army entered the camp on January 27, 1945, they did not find any German documents there giving the number of victims, or any that could be used as a basis for calculating this number. Such documents (transport lists, notifications of the arrival of transports, reports about the outcome of selection) had been destroyed before liberation. For this reason, the Soviet commission investigating the crimes committed in Auschwitz Concentration Camp had to make estimates.

From Wikipedia: “Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died.”

Now, keep in mind that Wictor claims that his considerably inflated numbers are based on nonexistent German records. He writes: “ALL THESE FIGURES CAME FROM THE NAZIS.”

Except they didn’t. They couldn’t have. They don’t even come close to adding up. Even the 1.1 million number assumes that every single person whose survival isn’t documented died, so it’s more of a statistical ceiling than a floor. Wictor’s claim that “Nick Fuentes is both dishonest AND ignorant” appears to be nothing more than the emotional projection on the part of someone who a) isn’t as smart as he wants to think he is, and b) isn’t able to rationally question beliefs that were successfully instilled in him. If anyone is “both dishonest and ignorant” here, it’s clearly Wictor, to which we must, in light of his grandiose and groundless posturing, add “probably not taking his meds again”.

We’ll start from the beginning.

Where does the figure of six million originate?

From the Nazis.

Game over.

The Nazis kept meticulous records of how many people they murdered.

Except they didn’t, as both the Soviets and the Director of the Auschwitz Museum have confirmed. But sure, let’s go ahead and go back to the beginning. As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.