Despite the claims of Vice President Kamala Harris that there are no U.S. troops in active combat zones today, many remain deployed abroad in dangerous and unsustainable positions across the world. This includes both Iraq and Syria.
The United States and Iraq, however, have apparently reached a deal to begin the removal of 2,500 U.S. forces still stationed in that country. Staged over the course of 2025 and to conclude in 2026, the plan would, if successful, put an end to the U.S. military presence in a nation where many of the internal problems have a direct relationship to the invasion of 2003.
Next door to Iraq is Syria, a country whose own brutal and long-running civil war has also seen over a decade of U.S. intervention, from the ill-conceived Operation Timber Sycamore, the largest known C.I.A. arm and equip program in history, to direct U.S. occupation via bases of significant parts of the east of the country. Meanwhile, a long coordinated regime change campaign targeting President Bashir al-Assad failed after exacerbating the situation on the ground.
Out of this chaotic mess would come the rise of ISIS, something unlikely to have gotten so much traction without all the non-state actors that grew up in the wake of both Iraq and Syrian wars.
But while the U.S. played a supporting role, it was actually a complex patchwork of local forces and Iranian-backed militias that did the majority of the anti-ISIS fighting in the last decade. The U.S. strongly supported the Kurds while opposing to the Syrian government which was also fighting ISIS at the time. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S. worked with Iranian-supported militias against ISIS only to then fear their influence. (...)
One more time for the insular navel-gazers. Disinformation dilemma: US hands are way dirty, too As Biden cracks down on Russian interference in our elections, a look at what the Pentagon has been doing overseas
(...) However, while the United States takes stringent efforts to combat disinformation, particularly from foreign sources like Russia and China, history shows that it plays by different rules itself. Indeed, the National Security State has at times shown a problematic tendency to dabble in the exact same kinds of tactics that they fight so vociferously from other governments.
In recent years the United States has made a number of forays into covert online influence operations. In 2011, there was Operation Earnest Voice, a military program using âsock puppetsâ (fake social media accounts) to spread pro-U.S. narratives.
Similar efforts persist to this day. In 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a study of America-based social media sock puppets. It analyzed thousands of coordinated Facebook and Twitter posts targeting people in Russia, China and Iran. Many of these posts contained sensational rumors, like stories of Iranians stealing the organs of Afghan refugees. Some accounts also impersonated hardliners and criticized the Iranian government for being too moderate. Later investigations linked a number of those accounts to the Pentagon.â
The sock puppet accounts were kind of funny to look at because we are so used to analyzing pro-Kremlin sock puppets, so it was weird to see accounts pushing the opposite narrative,â Shelby Grossman, a staffer at the Internet Observatory and a member of the research team that published the paper, told Gizmodo in August 2022.
Official U.S. documents also suggest a growing willingness to use disinformation as a tool of psychological operations (PSYOPs). An October 2022 SOCOM (Special Operations Command) procurement document requested new tools for âinfluence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levelsâ as well as the same technology used to generate online deepfakes.
To sum it all up is how many Ukranians, Palestinians and Israelis will be sacrificed at the altar of the MIC for money laundering? I am just hoping that we survive all of this considering two nuclear powers very existence is being threatened. See we are forgetting that Israel has nukes too and that is on my bingo card for where the mass destruction starts. And as far as Israel and Palestine goes I say a pox on both of their houses both of them have committed so many atrocities I can't get behind either of them, there are no innocents in that region. If we do avoid Armageddon my other hope is that all of those involved in US foreign policy and their surrogate NATO pay for their war crimes against the Ukranian people.
Hundreds of lawyers from around the world called on the US to end the use of unilateral economic sanctions, saying the tool amounts to collective punishment of civilians and is illegal under international law.
In a letter to President Joe Biden, the lawyers, legal organizations and scholars decried the USâs increased reliance on sanctions to punish and coerce its adversaries and said the measures can lead to economic instability, hunger and reduced access to medicine and essential goods.
âCollective punishment is a standard practice of US foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions,â the signatories said. While the use of sanctions is different from conventional warfare, âits collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly,â they said. (...)
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act â a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs â found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: âWe are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.â
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are âsome of the most dangerous weapons in the worldâ because they âcould trigger an accidental nuclear war.â As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet. (...)
American flags purchased by the federal government will soon be required to be completely produced and manufactured in the United States. (...)
The government had previously only been required to buy flags that contain at least 50% American-made materials.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced the All-American Flag Act. He said he believed this wasnât the law sooner because of corporate interest groups that moved jobs to China.
âThere never should be an American flag flying over a military base, whether itâs the Toledo air base or whether itâs a post office. There should never be an American flag flying over a government building thatâs not entirely made by American workers,â Brown said.
Brownâs office says in 2017, the U.S. imported 10 million American flags and all but 50,000 came from China.
How did this suddenly become the summer of âthe draftâ?
There are a number of proposals in the annual defense policy bill (National Defense Authorization Act) that deal with the subject. There is one to expand selective service registration to women. Another that would make Selective Service registration for American men âautomatic.â
Still another proposed amendment to the NDAA, which has also been introduced as a freestanding bill, S. 4881, would repeal the Military Selective Service Act entirely. Meanwhile, the Center for a New American Security just published an exhaustive blueprint for modernizing mobilization, including readiness to activate conscription.
As such, there are currently ten thousand draft board members who have been appointed and trained to adjudicate claims for deferment or exemption. As recently as this month, states have been openly seeking volunteers to fill empty slots. And both the SSS and hawkish think-tanks have been war-gaming the governmentâs contingency plans to activate a draft. (...)
