Flag fetish redux

 R_P wrote:
"Not Aware" - where were these people hiding? 

Genocide + Trump
US popularity collapses worldwide in wake of Trump’s return
The world is more divided than ever, but there’s still something (nearly) everyone agrees on: The U.S. is unloved.

Trump DISMANTLES DC Foreign Policy Dogma?

DOGE Proof
Report: Pentagon will likely fail audits through 2028
GAO says DOD still ‘faces significant fraud exposure’ and massive financial deficiencies

The Government Accountability Office conducted the report to assist the Pentagon in meeting its timeline for a clean audit by 2028. DOD has failed every audit since it was legally required to submit to one each year beginning in 2018. In fact, the Pentagon is the only one of 24 federal agencies that has not been able to pass an unmodified financial audit since the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.

For more than two decades, the GAO has given over 100 recommendations on how the Pentagon can fix its financial weaknesses. Most cases are still open, with no progress satisfied other than a “leadership commitment.” Additionally, many of the thousands of identified deficiencies found in its 2018 audit remain outstanding. (...)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised to return a clean DOD audit by the end of Trump’s administration, an outcome the GAO report and experts say is unlikely, barring significant changes.

Despite inadequate answers to these massive financial deficiencies, President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to increase its budget to over $1 trillion, up from the around $850 billion that the Biden administration requested for FY 2025.

The First Forever War
The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later
Nick Turse

When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago today, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed, and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States, came to a close.

America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.

April 30, 1975, was also, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell observed at the time, “the first day since September 1, 1939, when the Second World War began, that something like peace reigned throughout the world.”

Peace on paper, perhaps, but the violence never really ended.

The U.S. did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.

The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia.

Symposium: Was the Vietnam War a mistake or fatal flaw in the system?
It's been 50 years since the Fall of Saigon and we still haven't reckoned with the biggest question of them all. Until today.

The photographs, television images and newspaper stories make it perfectly clear: there was an urgency, a frenzy even, as the U.S. Embassy in Saigon shuttered and its diplomats and staff were evacuated, along with other military, journalists, and foreigners, as well as thousands of Vietnamese civilians, who all wanted out of the country as the North Vietnamese victors rolled into the city center.

It was April 30, 1975 — 50 years ago today — yet the nightmare left behind that day only accentuated the failure of the United States, along with the South Vietnamese army, to resist a takeover by the communists under the leadership of the North. It was not only an extraordinarily bloody chapter for Vietnam (well over 1.5 million military and civilian deaths, depending on estimates, from 1965 to 1975), but a dark episode for America, too.

Beyond the failure of Washington’s Cold War policy — that intervening in Vietnam’s post-Colonial struggles for independence was necessary to prevent the “dominoes” of communism from tumbling across Southeast Asia — more than 55,000 Americans were killed. An untold number who returned suffered lifelong injuries, impacts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and illnesses and other symptoms due to Agent Orange and other toxic exposures.

The nation had been ruptured politically and socially over the war, a divide that one could say has never really healed.

Yet ironically, Washington’s proclivity to intervene in other countries’ affairs and to use military power as the first resort has only grown. It would seem the true lessons of Vietnam were left on that iconic rooftop from which the last helicopter left Saigon 50 years ago.

Some say after WWII, U.S. power and intervention has maintained the global liberal order and that Vietnam was a “mistake” — a one-off. Others say it was a sign that the pretense of America as the "indispensable nation” was folly from the beginning, that the Cold War had blinded us to the realities of the world and the limits of military intervention.

So we asked experts, both in geopolitics and history, what they think:

Was the failure of Vietnam a feature or a bug of U.S. foreign policy after WWII?

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The Army’s XM1202 Tank Fiasco Is a Warning for Future Weapons Development

Pentagon fires Greenland base commander after she criticized JD Vance visit
Actions to “subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated,” U.S. military warns.

Inside Trump’s Plan to ‘Get’ Greenland: Persuasion, Not Invasion
The island’s population might not be easily convinced as the president tries to clinch one of history’s greatest real estate deals.

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Under Primacy, Weapons Sales Will Always Supersede Human Rights

An apology to Russia: The era of American propaganda is over
By Dr Ziad Al-Alyan, Editor-in-Chief, Kuwait Times

The future of the American Power tool was never in doubt. Just squeezing the protection racket.
Rubio recommits to NATO as peace talks flounder

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The fix is in for new Air Force F-47 — and so is the failure
Just wait for the unstoppable lobby preventing any future effort to strangle this boondoggle in the cradle.

If and when it finally comes to be written decades from now, an honest history of the F-47 “fighter” recently unveiled by President Trump will doubtless have much to say about the heroic lobbying campaign that garnered the $20 billion development contract for Boeing, the corporation that has become a byword for program disasters (see the KC-46 tanker, the Starliner spacecraft, the 737 MAX airliner, not to mention the T-7 trainer.)

Boeing, which is due to face trial in June on well-merited federal charges of criminal fraud, was clearly in line for a bailout. But such succor was by no means inevitable given recent doubts from Air Force officials about proceeding with another manned fighter program at all.

“You’ve never seen anything like this,” said Trump in the March Oval Office ceremony announcing the contract award.

Well, of course we have, most obviously in recent times with the ill-starred F-35. Recall that in 2001 the Pentagon announced that the F-35 program would cost $200 billion and would enter service in 2008. Almost a quarter century later, acquisition costs have doubled, the total program price is nudging $2 trillion, and engineers are still struggling to make the thing work properly.

Thus, succeeding chapters of the F-47’s history will likely have to cover the galloping cost overruns, unfulfilled technological promises, ever-lengthening schedule shortfalls, and ultimate production cancellation when only a portion of the force had been built. (...)

The Violence Prerogative
All oppressive, criminal, and genocidal governments cloak their atrocities in the language of virtue.
Noam Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson

Every ruling power tells itself stories to justify its rule. Nobody is the villain in their own history. Professed good intentions and humane principles are a constant. Even Heinrich Himmler, in describing the extermination of the Jews, claimed that the Nazis only “carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people” and thereby “suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.” Hitler himself said that in occupying Czechoslovakia, he was only trying to “further the peace and social welfare of all” by eliminating ethnic conflicts and letting everyone live in harmony under civilized Germany’s benevolent tutelage. The worst of history’s criminals have often proclaimed themselves to be among humankind’s greatest heroes.

Murderous imperial conquests are consistently characterized as civilizing missions, conducted out of concern for the interests of the indigenous population. During Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, even as Japanese forces were carrying out the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese leaders were claiming they were on a mission to create an “earthly paradise” for the people of China and to protect them from Chinese “bandits” (i.e., those resisting Japan’s invasion). Emperor Hirohito, in his 1945 surrender address, insisted that “we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” As the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said noted, there is always a class of people ready to produce specious intellectual arguments in defense of domination: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”

Virtually any act of mass murder or criminal aggression can be rationalized by appeals to high moral principle. Maximilien Robespierre justified the French Reign of Terror in 1794 by claiming that “terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Those in power generally present themselves as altruistic, disinterested, and generous. The late leftist journalist Andrew Kopkind pointed to “the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy.” It is hard to take actions one believes to be actively immoral, so people have to convince themselves that what they’re doing is right, that their violence is justified. When anyone wields power over someone else (whether a colonist, a dictator, a bureaucrat, a spouse, or a boss), they need an ideology, and that ideology usually comes down to the belief that their domination is for the good of the dominated. (...)

 R_P wrote:
Either he still doesn't know how tariffs work or he just thinks that repeating the fairy tale of exporting nations paying tariffs (instead of domestic importing companies and ultimately consumers) will eventually get more and more believers.  I'm sure many of his minions already believe that anyhow, but he's lied about it over and over so I guess those in the media and elsewhere, who know the truth, are getting tired of correcting him or his press secretary.