Afshin Rattansi speaks to Eva Golinger about the US’ ongoing attempts at regime change in Venezuela to replace President Nicolas Maduro with Juan Guaido. She discusses the history of US regime change in Veneuela and Latin America, the Maduro premiership and attitudes in Venezuela.
Successive U.S. administrations failed to heed the lessons of a forgotten counterinsurgency success story from Vietnam.
The Trump administration is now using Henry Kissinger’s “decent interval” process of abandonment to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The strategy is simple: negotiate a peace agreement exposing an ally to certain defeat in the long run, impose it, withdraw U.S. troops, cut aid, and finally refuse to re-engage when those the United States once fought move to take over the country.
Washington didn’t get the results it wanted in Afghanistan because it used the wrong strategy. The United States never deployed an effective counterinsurgency strategy because it didn’t have one. Knowing how to kill people is far from sufficient to defeat insurgencies.
Since the Vietnam War ended, U.S. national security strategy has mostly and wrongly defined every path to victory as a technical process of removing violent actors from a tactical area of responsibility. The challenge the United States faced in both Vietnam and Afghanistan was corrupt and incompetent government more than armed insurgency. The former bred the latter.
Read the full article at Foreign Policy
The four-part Al Jazeera documentary about how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with US Jewish groups to spy on, smear, and attack critics, was blocked due to heavy Israeli pressure. It was recently leaked online by the Chicago-based Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI, and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. Joining Chris Hedges for a two-part interview are Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah and journalist and author Max Blumenthal.
Watch the full documentary here: The Lobby – USA, Episodes 1-4
In Part II of our series Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin addresses the surprise order from Trump that he was “ending the war” in Syria. Having drastically escalated the war in Syria and Iraq, find out what’s behind the supposed troop withdrawal and the hidden facts in the policies.
In the first installment of this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin debunks the notion that Trump is an anti-interventionist president, outlining his first two years of aggressive foreign policy that has expanded US wars and occupations. From the biggest military budget in history, to removing its restrictions to “bomb the hell out of” Iraq and Syria, to ramping-up brutal economic sanctions, to becoming America’s ‘Arms Salesman-In-Chief.’
Hasan Minhaj tackles the reality of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s autocratic rule and, as a Muslim and an American, breaks down why the world should reassess its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda tricked the West into the War on Terror in an effort to advance its own Islamist goals in the Middle East, the group’s former chemical weapons expert, who later allegedly became an MI6 spy, told RT’s Going Underground.
Aimen Dean, who joined Al-Qaeda in 1997, said the trick all began with a letter written by the former US think-tank Project for the New American Century, which was sent to former President Bill Clinton in 1998. It urged Clinton to invade Iraq and “make it a beacon of democracy and to establish American hegemony.”
That letter, Dean says, was signed by 18 people including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Jeb Bush, who would all “later become the architects of the Iraq war and the Bush administration.”
The next piece of the puzzle apparently lies in a line written by the same think-tank in one of its publications in 2000: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Bin Laden’s deputy seized on that notion, according to Dean. “He said, ‘we should give them a Pearl Harbor…that’s exactly where we want them to be…[the US] must smash [Iraq] in order for us to build an Islamist structure.’”
“So that was their mentality, the provocation of America as a superpower to come and do their dirty work for them.”
And so, 9/11 happened almost exactly one year later, as a ‘new Pearl Harbor’, and the invasion of Iraq took place in 2003.
Source: RT’s Going Underground
This cartoon can be freely shared/printed by anyone, anywhere, who believes and supports Palestinian people’s right for self-determination. (Latuff Cartoons)
Another war criminal and ultra nationalist has gone home to roast. The quote is from George H.W. Bush’s presidential election campaign in 1988.
See also: Oil tycoon, CIA chief, President: George H.W. Bush was the epitome of American empire and The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice.
Against the Grain 