[Peace-discuss] AWARE on the Air, 2018 June 12

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Good evening and welcome to AWARE on the Air, presented by members and friends of AWARE, the “anti-war anti-racism effort,” a local Champaign-Urbana peace group.

I’m Carl Estabrook. My guest is our favorite Republican, Ed Mandel. We are recording this at noon on Tuesday, June 12, in the studios of Urbana Public Television.

Our subject is the wars the US government is waging around the world, and the racism we display to those we’re killing, in accord with the Latin proverb, 'Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris' - “It’s human nature to hate those you have injured.”

WHILE THE PRESIDENT IS TALKING PEACE IN SINGAPORE WITH THE LEADER OF NORTH KOREA, the US is making war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, &   Yemen - principally to control the flow of oil out of the Mideast and North Africa, which the US uses as a weapon against its economic rivals from Germany to China.

Thousands of U.S. troops are killing people in these countries, although most Americans are barely aware of it.

~ More than a quarter of a million US troops are stationed in a thousand US bases on foreign soil, most of them ringing Russia and China.

~ The 70,000-members of the U.S. ‘Special Operations Command’ are active in three-quarters of the countries of the world. Their activities include kidnapping (‘rendition’), torture, and murder. As the rest of the world recognizes - but Americans don’t - they are nothing less than American death squads.

The rest of the world recognizes that the US today is what ML King called it long ago, the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” - an international criminal surpassing all others. But most Americans don’t know that, protected as they are by government and media propaganda.

What we do here at AWARE ON THE AIR is talk about the unmentionable US government killing around the world to encourage our fellow citizens to oppose it.

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[SYRIA] Militants backed by U.S. forces plan to stage chemical attack

MOSCOW, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Militants of the so-called "Free Syrian Army" with the assistance of U.S. military special operations forces are mulling a fake chemical attack in Syria, the Russian military said Monday.

The intelligence was confirmed by three independent channels in Syria, said THE Russian Defense Ministry

The Free Syrian Army militants have brought chlorine cylinders to a settlement in the Syrian province of Deir al-Zour to fake a chemical attack by the Syrian government troops against civilians,

A video of the staged attack, after it is disseminated in the western media, will serve as a new pretext for the U.S.-led coalition to strike Syrian targets and justify an offensive by militants against Syrian government forces on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River

The ministry said it is intolerable to use such a provocation to destabilize Syria...

The United States, along with Britain and France, launched joint airstrikes on military targets in Syria TWO MONTHS AGO, in response to what they said was the Syrian military's use of chemical weapons in Douma, a then rebel-held town ... near the Syrian capital of Damascus on April 7.

However, Russia said that no traces of the chemical attack had been found and that the event was staged. THERE ARE NOW REPORTS THAT THESE US-BACKED JIHADISTS ARE ABOUT TO TRY IT AGAIN.

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[YEMEN] Hodeida [ho-DAY-da], Yemen’s major port which receives 80% of the country’s food imports, is threatened with imminent military attack by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The UAE gave aid groups 3 days to leave Hodeida before the threatened launch of this operation, putting 250,000 people under the immediate threat of being killed, and millions more at risk of starving to death.

EVEN A recent Washington Post editorial opposed such a Saudi-UAE assault, warning that the world’s worst humanitarian crisis could get even worse. The paper argued that the U.S., which supplies the Saudi-UAE alliance with arms, targeting intelligence, refueling of Saudi-UAE bombers during their bombing runs, and diplomatic protection at the UN, should use its leverage to stop this “reckless venture.”

The Pentagon has been deeply dishonest with Congress and the American people about the depth of the U.S. role in enabling this catastrophic war, which has never been authorized by Congress, in direct violation of the War Powers Clause of the Constitution and of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The New York Times reported that U.S. Army Special Forces have been directly involved in anti-Houthi military operations, blatantly contradicting Pentagon claims that the U.S. is "not directly involved.” There’s no question that Washington could stop the catastrophic UAE assault on Hodeida, if Washington saw it as a priority to do so. As Oxfam America notes, if the U.S. fails to stop the attack, "it will own the consequences."

Please urge your Representative and Senators to join CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTAIVES Mark Pocan [D-WI], Justin Amash [R-MI], Ro Khanna [D-CA], Thomas Massie [R-KY], Barbara Lee [D-CA], Walter Jones [R-NC], and Ted Lieu [D-CA] in demanding that Defense Secretary James Mattis act to stop the catastrophic Saudi-UAE assault on Hodeida by signing A petition AT change.org OR ‘JUST FOREIGN POLICY.’

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Peace is at hand - AND IT’S IN PART DUE TO NBA STAR Dennis Rodman. WHITE HOUSE SPOKESWOMAN HUCKABEE CALLED HIM TO THANK HIM FOR PUBLICIZING THE MATTER.

The deal REACHED BY PRES. TRUMP & NK LEADER KIM JONG UN is essentially the ‘double freeze” proposed by China and Russia in the UN and elsewhere...

The opposition to it comes from the Democrats (HRC campaign) and the neocons.

“Why Do Democrats Want to Sabotage North Korea Talks?” 
{by Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University} 

Amazing how partisan politics shape this country’s foreign policy. Seven Democratic senators have written the president urging that any agreement signed with North Korea must be permanent; must be subject to “anywhere, anytime” inspections of all nuclear-related sites and facilities; and must include the dismantling and elimination of all of the regime’s ballistic missiles and programs. (One thinks of Mike Pompeo’s demands on Iran to renegotiate the Iran Deal by making infinite concessions.)

It is a tit-for-tat for the solid Republican opposition to the JCPOA in 2015. Five of the seven senators (Durbin, Warner, Feinstein, Leahy, and Brown) had voted for the Iran agreement while two (Schumer and Menendez) had been among a mere four Democrats to (expressing devotion to Netanyahu) vote against. So this is a display of Democratic unity towards the end, not of bringing permanent peace to the Korean peninsula, but to make it as difficult as possible for an unpopular beleaguered president to score a diplomatic triumph (which could shift momentum to the Republicans in the interim election).

There are Democrats (and some Republicans alike) praying for failure in Singapore, worried, they imply, about an ill-prepared impetuous commander-in-chief giving up the family jewels over bulgogi and kimchee. At the same time due to calculation (Bolton) or dumbness (Pence) top Trump administration officials (plus his personal lawyer Giuliani) have worked to sabotage the summit by deliberately insulting Kim Jung-un and the DPRK in the weeks leading up to it.

The big picture is that the United States under Trump abruptly entered a period of aggressive exceptionalism involving unilateral withdrawal from treaties; provocation of trade wars; broadcast of insults against close allies; harsh measures against undocumented immigrants and the imposition of discriminatory rules on Muslim entry into the U.S.; and a general tendency to reflect the sentiments of a benighted political base. This has alienated Europe in general, as well as Mexico and Canada, the U.S.’s top two trading partners.

Meanwhile, it has positively alarmed many in the (truncated) State Department and in the U.S. polity as a whole. The “mainstream media” incessantly attacks Trump’s “foreign policy.” That is, the U.S. is in a situation we might call naiyu gaikan (troubles within and without). This is how Japanese historians describe Japan in the early 19th century, when the regime of the shogun faced both internal dissent and weakness and challenges in foreign relations. In part the latter resulted from a policy of what we might call isolationism. This period resulted in the toppling of the regime.

The U.S.’s external troubles now involve the fraying of alliances; Emmanuel Macron has actually suggested that G-7 could become G-6. The internal troubles include the Russia investigation, Trump’s (other) legal problems and the prospect of impeachment, massive disillusionment of youth by the very nature of the capitalist system, widespread if not universal contempt for Trump among women due to his manifest misogyny, widespread indignation among African-Americans at Trump’s obvious racism, widespread opposition from Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics due to Trump’s crazy wall plan and related issues, and not least the president’s inability as a manager to put together a disciplined team. Part of the problem is that the chaos which is Trump’s mind is reflected in the chaos in the White House West Wing.

In this context, seven Democratic senators—reflecting both external and internal troubles—address the president demanding that any deal he makes with Kim meet (unrealistic) specifications for their approval. They see the world they’ve known toppling around them due to Trunp’s iconoclasm, and they want to do some smashing too. And because they feel no responsibility to the planet, but merely to their own re-elections, they abet the national decline relative to the world.

Practically the only good thing the world sees in Trump is his unexpected openness to talks with North Korea, The prospect of a successful summit delights most people, including the leaders of China, South Korea, and Russia. That Feinstein & Co. should already be throwing cold water on any results shows how out of touch they are with the world, and how much they overestimate the extent of U.S. power. There seems to be a bipartisan embrace of idiocy. All the congressional bickering and the media’s incessant harping on Trump (to the exclusion of attention to matters such as war in Yemen, Italian elections, mass protests against Macron’s policies in France, horrible events in Gaza, Amnesty International’s report on the bombing of Raqqa, etc.) are a cacophony of sounds as pathetic as the strains of the Titanic ensemble as the ship went down.

You hear in those sounds two (bipartisan) choruses of discordant voices that cumulatively tell the world, “Yes, we’re sinking. But we don’t know it, or we don’t care, and if it happens we’ll take  others down.” There is no principle or decency but rather sheer opportunism. This could lead to either to an apocalypse or to ongoing imperial decay. One must hope for the latter.

{Discussion follows}