Bombs Away!
Two recent articles* have again demonstrated that the greatest "terrorist" entity on earth are not the bogymen - Russia, China, Iran, North Korea - so often portrayed by Western presstitutes and the American government, but the United States itself!
This is an old cartoon, but still a good one. It perfectly describes the trigger-happy Western political class and the depth of its "thinking". By happenstance we recently reviewed the Libya intervention (Libya is the failed state in the Maghreb that used to be one of the most prosperous countries in Africa). The eccentric tinpot dictator Gadaffi was not necessarily likable, although he was certainly entertaining from afar. But everything we were told by the press about his actions and plans during the "Arab Spring" that was used by Western politicians as a justification for bombing the country back into the stone age and making it a safe haven for jihadists and crazed warlords in which inter alia slave markets are thriving openly these days, was a lie. It was really nothing but lies from A to Z, essentially a repetition of the pre-Iraq war playbook. After a UK parliamentary report pointed all of this out after a comprehensive post mortem investigation (it included the evidence that was deliberately withheld in the run-up to the intervention), some apologists tried to argue that political leaders at the time were perhaps not sufficiently informed and made a few small but ultimately excusable "mistakes" in their eagerness to save innocent lives. Right - after all, they only had the most sophisticated surveillance and espionage systems in all of history at their disposal. Anyone interested in a bridge in Brooklyn? [PT]
Ever since World War II, the US has been the most militaristic, far surpassing all of the Communist and dictatorial regimes combined. A few startling and rarely reported facts:
Currently, the US drops on someone or something a deadly explosive once every12 minutesW. Bush's military dropped 70,000 bombs on five different nations during his murderous regimeNobel Peace Prize recipient, Barrack Obomber, launched 100,000 bombs on seven countriesFunding this mass murder is a reportedly $21 trillion (!) that is unaccounted for in the Pentagon's coffers
Despite all of the "America First" bluster at the start of the Trump Administration, little has changed - in fact, things have escalated. While G.W. Bush in his wicked eight years dropped over 24 bombs per day and his successor upped that total to 34 bombs per day, the current Bomber-in-Chief has, in his first year in office, averaged 121 bombs per day!
Well, we sure "bombed something" as this map indicates. Has it helped? What exactly was the upside? [PT]
For the initial year of his Presidency, 44,000 bombs were dropped on people and lands despite the fact that the US is not officially at war with a single country!
Despite these grisly statistics, which are hardly ever reported by the mainstream press, the military industrial complex and the controlled Western media outlets have propagated the lie of "precision bombing." Precision bombing has been trumpeted to minimize the effect of US aggression to the public that only true belligerents are targeted and not innocents.
When US bombing is reported by the press, the actual casualties and property damage are never accurately given. The most notorious example of this mendacity was the coverage of Bush II's Iraq war. "The US and its allies ruthlessly carpet-bombed Iraq," a UN report acknowledged, "reducing it from 'a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society' to a 'pre-industrial age nation.'"
Later accounts of what actually happened showed that "only seven percent of the 88,500 tons of bombs and missiles devastating Iraq were 'precision weapons.'"
A brief trip down the Iraq war memory lane... it is worth noting that virtually all the liars, warmongers and pundits vulgo "experts" (with their completely wrong forecasts) who were actively engaged in the propaganda drive toward this catastrophe are still around and asked for their opinions as if nothing had happened. [PT]
Despite these facts, US policy makers have the gall to call certain regimes "rogue" and/or "terrorist." Do not look for any deescalation, however, as "defense" spending for 2018 is set at $700 billion with an increase of $16 billion in the following year. Yes, more taxes extorted from the public for the pulverization of peoples and their homes across the globe!
Even if these statistics were of common knowledge, do not look for things to change. The majority of the American public loves its military and government and has been conditioned to overlook and accept nearly all of its military engagements and the propaganda that attempts to justify them.
What must change is ideology which, at one time, was strongly anti-interventionist, but gradually became pro-war. Through education, the press, books, and the electronic media, the intelligentsia was able to manipulate public opinion. Americans began to glorify war under the guise of spreading democracy and "freedom" to everyone, whether they wanted it or not.
Under current ideological conditions, a reversal of thinking to a non-interventionist foreign policy is not likely. The only way that the nation's rampaging foreign policy will be checked is through an economic collapse or a severe dollar crisis, the latter of which would end the greenback's status as the world's reserve currency.
If America no longer has the means to fund its military around the world, its imperialism will quickly come to an end. It is extremely burdensome on a domestic economy to maintain a global empire and one that is actively engaged in costly military operations.
Global war spendathon comparison and US discretionary budget priorities [PT]
If the nation's economy severely contracts or the dollar can no longer be printed with impunity, the bombing of other peoples and political involvement in overseas affairs would have to cease, or be drastically curtailed. A historical example of this is Great Britain after WWII.
As it stands now, only financial calamity will bring down the world's foremost terrorist state. If such a scenario comes about, the US may become the recipient of the destruction, loss of life, and mayhem it has unleashed upon the world.
References:
*Tyler Durden, "America's Military Drops a Bomb Every 12 Minutes, and No One is Talking About it." Zero Hedge, 6 June 2018,
Tyler Durden, "Debunking the Persistent Myth of U.S. Precision Bombing" Zero Hedge. 23 June 2018
Charts & tables by: curiousmatic.com, Peterson Foundation, nationalpriorities.org
Chart and image captions by PT
Antonius Aquinas is an author, lecturer, a contributor to Acting Man, SGT Report, The Burning Platform, Dollar Collapse, The Daily Coin and Zero Hedge. Contact him at antoniusaquinas[at]gmail[dot]com https://antoniusaquinas.com/.