GLOBAL NEOLIBERALISM

RFK JR—Across the Mideast, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created the Islamic State. To most Americans, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering the Islamic State must have been deliberate.

In fact, many of the Islamic State fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for more than 30 years from Syria and Egypt to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. President George W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s secularist government, and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named the Islamic State.

V. BEELEY—The BBC appears to work in lockstep with US and UK deep state to facilitate a new raft of sanctions against Syria. BBC normalises a terrorist organisation to frame Syrian President Assad. (And so do the rest of the collective West’s so-called journalists.)

ED CURTIN—I have lived since birth in the United States during a period of time when it has been the world’s number one butcher, starting with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then continuing waging non-stop wars, assassinating foreign and domestic leaders, including President Kennedy, executing coup d’états, supporting and arming ruthless dictators and terrorists, and creating an economy dependent on war.

All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle-dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.

INDRAJIT—An Oreshnik could hit Berlin in 11 minutes and London in 20 (and God knows they deserve it). The warheads can be nukes, to add annihilation to injury. This is an ungodly weapon that should be banned and was banned until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the missile control treaty. Now Russia has responded and they’re proliferating the technology. Vladimir Putin updated Russian military doctrine to say that NATO can’t hide behind Ukraine anymore, and also said ‘if you’re going to arm my enemies, I’ll arm your enemies,’ ie Yemen and Iran.

MIKE WHITNEY—Moreover, in a high-intensity combat scenario in either eastern Europe, the China seas, or the Persian Gulf, the maintenance demands for US aircraft would overwhelm its proximate supply. Mission-capable rates would plummet even lower than their notoriously abysmal peacetime standards.

The US would, quite literally after only a few days, see sub-10% mission-capable rates for the F-22 and F-35, and sub-25% rates for almost every other platform in the inventory. It would be a huge embarrassment for the Pentagon … but hardly a huge surprise…..

Simply put, US air power as a theater-wide undertaking could not be sustained in the context of a non-permissive regional and global battlefield against one or more peer adversaries.