WAR Mongers & Profiteers

MOA—The reasons the WaPo editors reopen the issue has nothing to do with real concern about the origin of the pandemic. The sole purpose is to further incite hostility towards China. We can discern this from the author of the open letter which prompted the editorial:

A group of scientists, in an open letter released Friday, correctly called for a “full scientific and forensic investigation into all possible origins” of the virus, and provided a set of unanswered questions about the laboratory and its work.
The ten pages long letter lists a number of questions and makes unreasonable demands for free access to certain Chinese databases and forensic collections. It is signed by 26 ‘scientists’ only half of whom seem to be from a related medical or biological field.

Max discusses with R J Eskow the gathering storm fueled by the US and its vassals and accomplices, particularly NATO and Israel, in the Middle East, China, and the Ukraine, all and any of which could trigger a global conflagration.  Meantime, Iran, politically and economically stressed due to US sanctions, has managed to develop, despite constant attacks, its ballistic missile technology (non-nuclear), to protect itself from total assault by Israel and the West. This eminently rational position is dismissed by the Biden administration (as did Trump’s), which continues to insist on Iran practically disarming unilaterally. The prospects for peace look dim, especially since the US leadership has no real vision for an adaptation to a multilateral world.

PEPE ESCOBAR—The imperialist West and its infernal hypocrisy are driving the world toward war, suggests Pepe Escobar. And to think that in a not so distant past there used to be some flashes of lucidity emanating from the US establishment.

Very few will remember that in 1993 James Baker, former Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, advanced the idea of expanding NATO to Russia, which at the time, under Yeltsin and a gang of Milton Friedmanesque free marketeers, was devastated, but ruled by “democracy”. Yet Bill Clinton was already in power, and the idea was duly discarded.

Six years later, no less than George Kennan – who invented the containment of the USSR in the first place – determined that the NATO annexation of former Soviet satellites was “the beginning of a new Cold War” and “a tragic mistake”.

RAUL DIEGO—Despite all the glamour and fantastical riches ascribed to the Saudi royal family, their wealth is quite literally all in one basket. If the price of oil plummets, so does the ability of the Saudi princes to close billion-dollar weapons deals. In 2017, when the colossal $110 billion arms deal was made between the Trump administration and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, thanks to the work of Squire Patton Boggs, only $14.5 billion had been “earned” one year later.

The reality is that such deals are hardly worth the name. They are mostly comprised of letters of intent and proposals, which prospective buyers may or may not take up. In the case of American client states, like Saudi Arabia, there are ways to make them loosen the purse strings, but when these strings are tied to resources like oil extracted out of a foreign country teeming with armed groups intent on asserting their sovereignty, deals have a tendency to fall through.

ANDREI MARTYANOV—I hate historical parallels, I especially hate them in military history and operational art. Yes, I know–we should learn from history and I totally support that and do it myself. But for goodness sake, what is the operational and tactical value of the Battle of Lepanto for modern naval combat? What is the value of lessons of Peloponnesian War for modern world? US as Athens? Or as Sparta? Really? A collection of contrived “analogies” (same as the US being a Rome) good only for consumption of uneducated pundits. Thucydides Trap? Isn’t it all in the foundation of a disastrous US military and foreign policies written by none other than neocon “scholars” trying to find historical symmetries where there are none?