"Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy..." "Endless war and militar

"Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy..."

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=ZMPaKTQd

"Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking..."

Sat, 12/22/2018 - 18:30
204 SHARES
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

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Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.

“I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the administration and explain this policy,” Graham recently told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions.”
“It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria — and potentially Afghanistan — to understand implications to our national security,” Graham tweeted today.

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https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...shZ_normal.jpg Caitlin Johnstone https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/23f3.png @caitoz

Lindsey Graham only wants congressional oversight when it comes to decisions to pull out of wars, never to get into them.

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5:10 PM - Dec 19, 2018

In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation’s armed forces are engaged in daily military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is what’s abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.
A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese’s Pieces, hypothetical space alien.
It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending. It is absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned, but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on MSNBC.
How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?
I sometimes hear the analogy of sleepwalking used; people are sleepwalking through life, so they believe the things the TV tells them to believe, and this turns them into a bunch of mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited military bloodbaths around the world. I don’t think this is necessarily a useful way of thinking about our situation and our fellow citizens. I think a much more useful way of looking at our plight is to retrace our steps and think about how everyone got to where they’re at as individuals.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...shZ_normal.jpg Caitlin Johnstone https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/23f3.png @caitoz

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

This is the clearest I've been able to sum it all up so far.https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing-this-is-awakening-from-the-matrix-787c7e2539ae …

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7:46 PM - Aug 21, 2018
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Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What…
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We come into this world screaming and clueless, and it doesn’t generally get much better from there. We look around and we see a bunch of grownups moving confidently around us, and they sure look like they know what’s going on. So we listen real attentively to what they’re telling us about our world and how it works, not realizing that they’re just repeating the same things grownups told them when they were little, and not realizing that if any of those grownups were really honest with themselves they’re just moving learned concepts around inside a headspace that’s just as clueless about life’s big questions as the day it was born.

And that’s just early childhood. Once you move out of that and start learning about politics, philosophy, religion etc as you get bigger, you run into a whole bunch of clever faces who’ve figured out how to use your cluelessness about life to their advantage. You stumble toward adulthood without knowing what’s going on, and then confident-sounding people show up and say “Oh hey I know what’s going on. Follow me.” And before you know it you’re donating ten percent of your income to some church, addicted to drugs, in an abusive relationship, building your life around ideas from old books which were promoted by dead kings to the advantage of the powerful, or getting your information about the world from Fox News.
For most people life is like stumbling around in a dark room you have no idea how you got into, without even knowing what you’re looking for. Then as you’re reaching around in the darkness your hand is grasped by someone else’s hand, and it says in a confident-sounding voice, “I know where to go. Come with me.” The owner of the other hand doesn’t know any more about the room than you do really, they just know how to feign confidence. And it just so happens that most of those hands in the darkness are actually leading you in the service of the powerful.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...shZ_normal.jpg Caitlin Johnstone https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/23f3.png @caitoz

Life Secrets

"When it comes to the big questions, what life is all about and what’s really going on here, everyone else is exactly as clueless as you are. The only difference is that some people are better at feigning confidence than others."https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/life-secrets-fe5483653c5 …

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10:32 AM - Nov 20, 2018
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Life Secrets – Caitlin Johnstone – Medium

When it comes to the big questions, what life is all about and what’s really going on here, everyone else is exactly as clueless as you…
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That’s all mainstream narratives are: hands reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world, speaking in confident-sounding voices and guiding you in a direction which benefits the powerful. The largest voices belong to the rich and the powerful, which means those are the hands you’re most likely to encounter when stumbling around in the darkness. You go to school which is designed to indoctrinate you into mainstream narratives, you consume media which is designed to do the same, and most people find themselves led from hand to hand in this way all the way to the grave.
That’s really all everyone’s doing here, reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world and trying to find our way to the truth. It’s messy as hell and there are so many confident-sounding voices calling out to us giving us false directions about where to go, and lots of people get lost to the grabbing hands of power-serving narratives. But the more of us who learn to see through the dominant narratives and discover the underlying truths, the more hands there are to guide others away from the interests of the powerful and toward a sane society. A society in which people abhor war and embrace peace, in which people collaborate with each other and their environment, in which people overcome the challenges facing our species and create a beautiful world together.
People aren’t sleepwalking, they are being duped. Duped into insanity in a confusing, abrasive world where it’s hard enough just to get your legs underneath you and figure out which way’s up, let alone come to a conscious truth-based understanding of what’s really going on in the world. But the people doing the duping are having a hard time holding onto everyone’s hand, and their grip is slipping. We’ll find our way out of this dark room yet.
* * *
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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Did The U.S. Military Just Admit Victory In Afghanistan Is Impossible?

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Authored by Jared Keller via The National Interest,

Mon, 12/31/2018 - 18:10
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In the week before President Donald Trump’s reported decision to abruptly withdraw 7,000 U.S. service members from Afghanistan, the top U.S. commander there all but admitted that the 17-year-old war there will not end with a military victory for the Pentagon.

“This fight will go until a political settlement,” Army Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and the Resolute Support mission there, told CNN when asked whether the Afghan campaign against the Taliban had reached a stalemate.
“These are two sides that are fighting against one another, and neither one of them will achieve a military victory at this stage.”

In the same interview, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass concurred with Miller’s assessment, cautioning that U.S. and Afghan officials will face a complicated diplomatic situation given the Talian’s aggressive rejection of the current administration in Kabul.

“We have an opportunity today that we didn’t have six or 12 months ago to see if it’s truly possible to achieve that political settlement,” Bass told CNN.
“We don’t know if we’re going to be successful. We have to see if the Taliban is interested in responding to the deep desire of the Afghanistan people for peace.”

Bass isn’t wrong: Kabul’s chief negotiator had met with the U.S. special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in Abu Dhabi on Dec. 18, just days before news of a potential Afghan withdrawal broke. During his own confirmation hearing in June, Miller stated that the “military component” of the Trump administration’s conditions-based strategy is only necessary “to provide space for political progress.”
But with Trump’s reported plans to potentially remove all U.S. forces from the country by the presidential election of 2020, the prospect of an especially conciliatory Taliban now seems like a laughable fantasy without a robust, U.S.-backed Afghan security force to keep up the pressure on militants.
Indeed, Miller attempted to build up the performance of the ANDSF in his conversation with CNN.

“I like how the Afghan national security forces are performing,” he said.
“This is an Afghan fight. Resolute Support provides support, and we enable them, but make no mistake, the Afghans are in the lead.”

That statement came just weeks after the nominee to lead U.S. Central Command, Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr, told lawmakers that the ANDSF would essentially collapse in the event of a U.S. military withdrawal.

“Their losses have been very high,” McKenzie told lawmakers at the time.
“They’re fighting hard but their losses are not going to be sustainable unless we correct this problem.”

In response to news of the potential withdrawal, the Afghan government said in a terse statement it “will not affect the security situation in any way.”
Just days later, the Taliban killed 43 people at a government compound during a brazen daytime attack in the capital of Kabul.​

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...tan-impossible

Bring our troops home. No more US blood OR treasure. They will fight another 1,000 years.

Keep their people off our soil and send their refugees home and until they can live in peace. Then they can come "visit".

Terminate refugee, asylum, TPS and illegal alien programs and defund it! We are not the dumping ground for every country on the planet.

2019: 5 Places America Should Avoid Going To War

Tue, 01/01/2019 - 11:15
29 SHARES

Authored by Daniel DePetris via The National Interest,

Korea, Taiwan, Syria and beyond...

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2018 was a year of breakthrough diplomacy and proxy warfare, Trumpian chaos and unexpected U.S. military drawdowns. An American president and a North Korean dictator shook hands for the very first time since the Korean Peninsula was divided into two nations. American pilots released more munitions in Afghanistan this year than at any other time since the U.S. Air Force began collecting statistics in the country. And, in a remarkable 24-hour stretch in December, President Donald Trump ordered via tweet a complete pullout of the 2,000 U.S. ground troops from Syria.
If 2018 was a roller coaster, 2019 could be the year when the dollar-coaster breaks. International politics has a funny way of intruding into a president’s life and forcing policymakers in Washington to stumble around rapidly for a response. Some of the wars now ongoing are likely to continue while new ones could just as easily be sparked.
The Trump administration can do itself and the country a big favor if they stay away from fighting in these places:
Syria

Russia and Iran both look at Syria and see a country that is highly important to their national security interests. There was a reason why Moscow pulled the trigger in 2015 on Russia’s first out-of-area military intervention since the ten-year Afghanistan humiliation in the 1980s. Syria was an old Cold War ally in the Soviet camp sharing a frontline with American-allies Israel, and a nation that hosted Russia’s last warm-water port.
To the Iranians, keeping Syria under the Assad family’s thumb was even more imperative. The demise of Bashar al-Assad would have likely meant the demise of a four-decade strategic relationship between the two—one which lasted throughout some of the Islamic Republic’s darkest days. Assad’s death or overthrow would be the worst setback in Iranian foreign policy since perhaps Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iranian territory.
Syria, however, has never been too important for the United States. U.S. policy in the Middle East would go on regardless of whether Assad was in Damascus, dead or in exile. If U.S. troops were in Syria, it was to kill ISIS and retake the areas the group had captured. But with 99 percent of ISIS’s territory now cleared, the time has come for American personnel to pack up their belongings.
Even without ISIS lording over several million Syrians, Syria today is still a pitiful place. The once proud and nationalistic Arab nation is now an arena for foreign powers: Turkish troops are launching artillery against Syrian Kurdish fighters; Syrian Kurds are preparing to battle Syrian Arabs supported by Ankara; Israeli planes are bombing Iranian bases, Hezbollah weapons facilities and Syrian airports; Russian jets are bombing who knows what; and Iranian operatives are digging in for a long stay. If the United States isn’t off Syrian soul by the beginning of 2019, Trump should spend part of his January pushing the Pentagon to accelerate the withdrawal.
Korea

Right now, the reconciliation dialogue between North and South Korea is going well—or at least well enough. Demilitarization agreements have been signed. Landmines and guard posts are being removed on both sides of the DMZ. And North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could travel to Seoul early next year for a fourth meeting with South Korean president Moon Jae-in.
But U.S.-DPRK diplomacy is fragile, and if it gets any more fragile, the bad days of “fire and fury” and mutual threats of nuclear holocaust could return with a vengeance. It’s more than possible that a breakdown in the talks could motivate National Security Adviser John Bolton to chirp in Trump’s ear about the need to prepare for military strikes.
Under no circumstance can the president contemplate such an option. While Washington would win a war on the Korean Peninsula, the destruction would be so immense that historians decades from now would look upon all the players as reckless lunatics for instigating it. A million casualties on the Korean Peninsula is the stuff of nightmares, a nightmare that need not come true.
Yemen

Under political pressure from the brutal assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the thousands of pages from investigators detailing Saudi war crimes in Yemen, the White House in November stopped refueling Riyadh’s fighter aircraft to, during and from daily bombing missions. The termination of the mid-air refueling came after more than three and a half years of errant airstrikes from the Saudi military coalition on civilian targets as widespread as funerals, factories, bridges and school-buses. No-strike lists handed to Saudi officers have been ignored .
While U.S. pilots aren’t bombing Houthi positions, the U.S. military is a direct participant in Yemen’s civil conflict. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has committed herself to a debate and vote to end American involvement for good, and progressive and conservative politicians are promising to force a vote under the War Powers Resolution to mandate the withdrawal of all U.S. military aid to the Saudi coalition thirty days upon passage. Trump ought to end it unilaterally.
Taiwan

The “One China Policy” and the three communiques signed between Washington and Beijing from 1972 and 1982 still dictate relations between the two global economic competitors. Taipei, however, still holds people’s hearts in Washington. While the United States hasn’t recognized Taiwan since the days of Jimmy Carter, providing the island with the defense capabilities it needs to defend itself is a bipartisan priority. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act is still very much the bedrock of the U.S.-Taiwanese partnership.
Yet in 2018, Chinese president Xi Jinping became increasingly irritated with the Trump administration for selling defense equipment to what Beijing views as a lawless province of the mainland. Chinese officials were also upset about several freedom of navigation operations executed by the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait. While no one is predicting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan anytime soon, not many people are ruling it out either. If the People’s Liberation Army-Navy takes full control of the Strait or if Beijing actually invades the island, it would be a act of recklessness on par with Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
China hawks in both parties would urge a forceful response in such a scenario. Yet according to an October 2018 survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 35% of Americans would support using U.S. troops in such a contingency. U.S. Taiwan policy is one of many cases where the beliefs of foreign policy elites don’t correspond to the beliefs of the American public.
Is the benefit of protecting Taiwan and saving a democratic David from an authoritarian Goliath worth the costs of a great power naval clash between the world’s two largest economies and military spenders? Certainly not.
Afghanistan

This list wouldn’t be complete without putting America’s longest war in the mix. Everything that can be said about Afghanistan has been said before over the last seventeen years and two months.
Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Afghanistan’s soldiers and police officers are killed every week in Taliban attacks from inner Kabul to remote lands in Farah province with no end in sight. U.S. trainers continue to train and U.S. advisers continue to advise, with no end in sight. Afghan politicians in the capital continue to fight amongst themselves for prestige, power and money, with no end in sight. U.S. generals issue the same bland and eye-rolling statements about the Afghan army getting better, the Taliban getting more agreeable to negotiations, and the Afghan government getting less corrupt. And, like clockwork, independent investigators like the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction release assessments detailing fraud, abuse and misapplication of taxpayer money; systemic attrition problems in the ranks of the Afghan National Defense and Security Force; bone-headed leadership at the senior levels; and corruption in the ministries. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joe Dunford called Afghanistan a “ stalemate” last November, the same word he used to describe the situation in 2017.
2019 should be the last year U.S. troops have to deploy on behalf of an expensive stalemate.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...void-going-war

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