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  Gage Skidmore/Flickr The Last Neocons On The Island MATT PURPLE Those saying all we need to do is stay in Afghanistan a little longer both tip their hands and demonstrate their lack of seriousness. The Last Neocons On The Island Those saying all we need to do is stay in Afghanistan a little longer both tip their hands and demonstrate their lack of seriousness. If you want to understand the delusions that permeated the early-stage war on terror, pick up a copy of An End to Evil by Richard Perle and David Frum. Published in 2004, it reads like a fever dream one might have after playing Age of Empires on fast mode right before bed. Iraq? Saddam indicted not just himself “but all Arab tyrannies and all of their supporters.” Syria? “Why have we put up with it as long as we have?” (The entire country, apparently.) Everyone from the South Koreans to the peacekeepers in 1994 Rwanda are presented as appeasers for having failed to sufficiently confront evil. Against all this criminality and co

  Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society By Lily Kuo September 9, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. EDT The orders have been sudden, dramatic and often baffling. Last week, “American Idol”-style competitions and shows featuring men deemed too effeminate were banned by Chinese authorities. Days earlier, one of China’s wealthiest actresses, Zhao Wei, had her movies, television series and news mentions scrubbed from the Internet as if she had never existed. Over the summer, China’s multibillion-dollar private education industry was decimated overnight by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while new regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks since a peak in February. As China’s tech moguls compete to donate more to President Xi Jinping’s campaign against inequality, “Xi Jinping Thought” is taught in elementary schools, and foreign games and apps like Animal Crossing and Duolingo have been pulled from stores. A dizzying regulatory crackdown unleashed by China’s go

  Filosofa’s Thoughts … by jilldennison I haven’t opined on President Biden’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan because I have very mixed thoughts on the subject.  Our presence in Afghanistan for these past two decades has been very costly, both in terms of money and lives.  However … there has never been any doubt that once U.S. troops left, the Taliban would move in swiftly.  We just didn’t realize, I think, how swiftly. Now, I know this isn’t a topic that is near and dear to most of you at the moment, as we are dealing with our own crises on multiple fronts at the moment:  the pandemic, political chaos, devastating wildfires, racism, and much more.  However, what happens once we leave Afghanistan IS important to us for, I believe, a number of reasons, not the least of which is humanitarianism. Displaced people in Afghanistan in a makeshift camp The Taliban has moved in much more quickly than most foreign policy experts expected, and it is now estimated that they contro

 Russia pushing Jan. 6 propaganda to undermine Biden and help GOP win midterm elections: Intel reports Travis Gettys Russia is already attempting to interfere with the 2022 midterm elections -- and their efforts have grown more sophisticated since 2016, according to intelligence reports delivered to the Biden administration. President Joe Biden two weeks ago publicly called those operations "a pure violation of our sovereignty," but sources provided further detail about those efforts to CNN. "There's definitely a spike in activity around elections — they do take an interest in down-ballot races — but the activity is sustained," said Emily Harding, the deputy staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee until this spring. "It never really stopped, and we should not be linking our attention or efforts to the election cycle, because they're not." One person familiar with the matter said intelligence reports show Russian operatives were sowing

  Pro-Israel group secures ‘stunning’ victory in US primary election by aletho MEMO | August 5, 2021 US Shontel Brown on 1 August 2021 [Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images]The Democratic primary election in the US state of Ohio on Tuesday saw pro-Israel Shontel Brown defeat progressive Nina Turner in a hotly contested race that has left a bitter after taste. It's alleged that votes were tipped in favour of Shontel with outside money poured in by the pro-Israel Political Action Committee (PAC) Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI). According to research group tracking money in US politics, OpenSecrets, DMFI, one of many pro-Israel Super PAC, raised nearly $6.5 million in funds to back their preferred candidate. It's claimed that DMFI, which has multiple ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), spent more than $1.9 million on TV ads, digital ads, and mailers that were either pro-Brown or anti-Turner. American news agency, Brick House publication reported that th

  Pentagon goes rooting for ‘extremists’ among its 3.6mn trained killers Helen Buyniskiis an American journalist and political commentator  The US military is making a big show of cleansing its ranks of ‘extremism’ – because nothing says tolerance like raining fiery death on innocent strangers at the command of a guy who just stepped down from Raytheon’s board. With “domestic extremists” now officially the enemy du jour in Washington, the top order of business has become finding some. On Wednesday, newly-anointed secretary of defense (and former Raytheon board member) Lloyd Austin ordered a two-month stand-down so that commanders could engage in “needed discussions” with their subordinates on the issue. Did we mention they have a lot of subordinates? There are 3.6 million service members in the most expensive military in the world, and evaluating every single one of them for a characteristic that lacks even a universally-agreed-upon definition is certain to be both time-consuming and f

  Why Sudan Matters NADA AHMED Once isolated globally, the African nation has become a target of interest for a variety of regional and international countries. January 29, 2021 In October 1993, Omar al-Bashir declared himself president of Sudan, imposing an authoritarian system that was dominated by Islamists until he was toppled in an April 2019 coup. The protest movement that pushed the Sudanese military to remove Bashir achieved the seemingly impossible. After years of global isolation, Sudan was removed from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism, having been on it for almost three decades. This unlocked economic aid, although the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had given Bashir’s regime billions of dollars in aid for having supported the Saudi-led coalition in the Yemen war. Bashir’s downfall signaled the beginning of a more promising era for Sudan. The country soon acquired new international and regional allies, including the United States, Israel, and Russia. They jo

  Syria: A new policy is needed, but not this one by aletho Former UK Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford on the US “responsible statecraft” under Biden: Just World Educational | January 28, 2021 Jeffrey Feltman and Hrair Balian recently argued in a piece on Responsible Statecraft for a new U.S. policy on Syria that would ostensibly be more humane and productive since it would calibrate Syria sanctions relief to changes in President Bashar al-Assad’s behaviour. This approach may appear to be an improvement on present sanctions policy, which is clearly not working and is causing immense civilian suffering throughout the country. But it could end up making things worse. We must be grateful to previous Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s point-man on Syria, Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, for having been brutally candid about the real goals of sanctions on Syria under the previous administration. In an early-December interview with Al-Monitor Jeffrey bragged openly about the hardships the sanctions had

  What Happened to JFK and a Foreign Policy of Peace? by aletho By Rick Sterling | Global Research | January 27, 2021 Sixty years ago, John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the USA. In less than three years, before he was assassinated in November 1963, he initiated major changes in foreign policy. These foreign policy changes are documented in books such as “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008) and “Betting on the Africans” (2012). One of the foremost scholars on JFK, James Di Eugenio, has an excellent new article of the Kennedy foreign policy at Covert Action: “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’Etat over Foreign Policy?”. Despite this literature, many people in the West do not realize the extent to which JFK was an exception. This article will briefly review some of the actions he took while alive, and what happened after he was gone. While JFK was a staunch advocate for capitalism and the “free world”, in competition with the Soviet Union and communism, he promoted acceptance of