The Afghanistan Papers Confirm America's Longest War Is a Lie

The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, detailing a true history of the nation’s longest official war, reveals nothing new about the war’s futility or about the fact that it was doomed to failure from almost the beginning. The Post fought a legal battle for three years to obtain the documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog agency that interviewed hundreds of officials about their honest assessments of the war.

What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply destructive at worst.

More than 10 years ago I wrote, together with James Ingalls, a critical assessment of the Afghanistan war. The title of our book was Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Those last three words, “the Propaganda of Silence,” are a direct reference to poor media coverage and the irresponsible manner in which the press took an uncritical view of the war. The evidence was there for all to see that the U.S. war was doomed to failure once you scratched beneath the surface of officials’ rosy rhetoric.

The most important function of the Afghanistan Papers is to confirm that government officials have been utterly dishonest with the public about U.S. achievements and progress in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General at SIGAR, admitted to the Post that the documents prove that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The picture that emerges of how insiders have viewed the war is startlingly similar to how critics have portrayed it over the years. Earlier this year I wrote a “Brief History” of the Afghanistan war for Truthdig in which I assessed the early years of the conflict:

The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

In comparison, one economist told SIGAR, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, that he:

… blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

In my history of the war, I also wrote: “Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick.” But, I continued, “The Taliban appears to have had a ‘wait it out’ strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power.”

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that “Obama’s strategy was also destined to fail,” as it relied on “a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” In the end, I concluded: “Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.”

In 2015 I wrote in another piece for Truthdig titled “We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again,” that:

Despite spending billions of dollars—the U.S. offered its largest share of foreign aid to Afghans last year—there is little to show for it. Nearly $10 billion was spent on arming and training Afghan forces. But as the dismal state of the Afghan National Army shows, that money may as well have been poured down the drain.

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers reveal that officials privately knew they were fueling corruption, and that “Much of the money … ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.”

The U.S. has also been lining the pockets of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, who have a long and bloody history going back to the era of Soviet occupation, when the CIA doled out cash to fight its Cold War enemy. In my 2006 book, my co-author and I warned against this practice, devoting a whole chapter to it, titled “Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another.” We suggested that instead of rewarding them with cash and government positions, the U.S. ought to disarm the warlords and help Afghans bring them to justice. The U.S. did the opposite, and the result was entirely predictable.

The Afghanistan Papers confirm that:

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years.

One senior government official told SIGAR, “We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.” American tax dollars have lined the pockets of mass killers to an unimaginable extent. In my 2015 article, I referred specifically to Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was elevated to the position of vice president even though he had been “implicated in numerous atrocities and mass killings.” Among the few new revelations from The Washington Post’s investigative report is the assertion that “the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month ‘to not cause trouble.’ ”

Now the Trump administration is hoping to resume peace negotiations with the Taliban with a plan to reinstall the very regime the U.S. claimed was harboring terrorists and harming Afghans. If the point of the war was to go from point A to point B and then back to point A, with an unimaginably high death toll in between, then by that measure alone the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been a success.

What American officials and the mainstream media has consistently failed to do in Afghanistan is actually pay attention to what ordinary Afghans say and want. The biggest toll of the failed American war has been the death and destruction of lives in a country that was already torn apart by years of war in 2001. We may never get a full accounting of how many Afghans have died or been maimed for life as a direct result of a war that insiders knew was a mistake.

But what we do know is all armed forces in Afghanistan are implicated in war crimes. In 2018, in a little-covered story, Afghans submitted a whopping 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court that “include accounts of alleged atrocities, not only by groups like the Taliban and the ISIS, but also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies.”

The Post’s investigative series is a welcome addition to mountains of evidence that the Afghanistan war is a failure. But it was clear to those of us who had been paying attention that U.S. officials were lying about the war for nearly two decades. The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?

Sonali Kolhatkar

Columnist

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV,…

A new world order with changes in power balance: Dividing the world into opponents and friends

By Morteza Khansari

TEHRAN - By withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the United States and Russia finally pulled away the iron curtain of the cold war. Seemingly, the two countries want to change the common defensive methods and are now unveiling their high-tech nuclear weapons and missiles and have started threatening each other with nuclear weapons.

With suspension of INF by U.S. and Russia, the world will be officially divided into two opposing military poles. With increasing tensions and development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on one hand and renovation of Russian missile defense system on the other hand, the world will face bigger security threats than before and will have to yield in to a new order that is based on arms race.

 In this new bipolar world, however, Russia has not the power to drag the world into a new cold war because it has no choice but to surrender to the economic and cultural power of western countries.

From now on, the world will no longer be a global community that complies with the international laws and regulations that were set after the cold war, on the contrary, it will become the battle field of the countries that are only thinking about their own national benefits and are not afraid of doing anything to gain their goals, even starting a nuclear war.

After the suspension of INF, the power balance between different countries is starting to change; to make the matters worse, NATO has now adopted a new policy for launching pre-emptive attacks on other countries; in this situation, the world will be divided into two poles of friends and opponents.

Is such a world, only the countries that have nuclear weapons might be able to provide their citizens with partial security; other countries, on the other hand, are pushed to become dependent on big powers in order to protect their national security.

U.S. is now focused more than ever on gaining advanced military technologies and investing on new offensive systems; the country has now entered a new round of arms race and is threatening its competitors with war and annihilation in the new “star wars” atmosphere that has been created by U.S. in the first place.

Trump’s new invasive strategy in 2019 is now combined with NATO’s new military strategy passed in 2018 that makes U.S. NATO’s world leader and Germany the Europe’s leader so that they can quickly respond to Russia and China. This new combination will surely increase the military conflicts and future threats and will make the “political militarism” a priority for everyone.

According to NATO plans, U.S. nuclear weapons, including 20 atomic bombs, will stay in Bushel in Germany and NATO’s military bases in North Atlantic Ocean and Germany will restart their activities. The nuclear weapons kept in Bushel, are of type B61-4 and each of them has a power four times greater than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. Anyway, by 2020, U.S. will replace these weapons with more modern nuclear weapons.  

The new decisions made in NATO will surely change the general, long-term policy and strategies of this treaty; this will change NATO’s defensive mode into an offensive mode and will expand its activities beyond the boundaries of it member countries; an example of this interregional approach is a new scheme for setting up an Arab NATO.

Over the last few years, Baltic States were also among the regions that had to endure the most hostile and violent military actions of both U.S. and Russia. In fact, after NATO prolonged the deployment of its forces in the Baltic area and enhanced its weapons and facilities in this region, Russia felt compelled to unveil its future nuclear weapons and missiles.

In late 2016, Pentagon official announced that Baltic region is strategically important because from a geostrategic point of view, if Russia occupies the southern border of Lithuania, Europe will lose its on ground connection with the Baltic States including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

According to NATO, in 2016, there was an unprecedented increase in the number of Russia’s “hostile” and “provoking” activities in Baltic area and the number of alarms given by NATO. Over this period, NATO’s navies sent 870 alarms to Russian fighters in Baltic area; such a large number was never witnessed even during the peak of the Cold War.

Instead of being concerned about Russia’s activities and security issues that might occur, NATO is now prepared for a possible military clash with Russia. The political concerns has now turned into real military threats and operations, in an environment that is even more hostile than that of the Cold War.

Clearly, these security changes are not in favor of Russia, therefore, the country can only face NATO’s constant threats if it cooperates with the major powers of Asia and Middle East.  
Up to now, Russia has been able to give a firm response to such threats by testing its super-advanced weapons and running arms races, but in future, if it wants to maintain the power balance and subtract the huge costs of defense systems, it has to find strategic, powerful allies both among its neighboring countries and in other parts of the world.  

Amid all these tensions and conflicts, Europe will be in the front line of war and peace between U.S. and Russia. Like a “security hostage without a free will”, Europe will be a bystander and might even a victim if any of two sides decide to use banned weapons.

Despite all its political and economic capacities, Europe will be buried in the arms race between U.S. and Russia and will only be a target, even more at danger than it was during the Cold War.

This is why Europe is worried about Iran’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as this would disrupt Europe’s power in the Middle East, increases the tension and makes Europe even a bigger target of threats.

Therefore, it seems that in near future, we will see a new order in the world. This new order definitely depends on the destiny of the JCPOA, the Deal of the Century and the military clashes in the Baltic area. The results will come about soon, but at a great expense.

U.S. and Russia are already squandering a lot of money on nuclear weapons and missiles; seemingly they think that their possible clash will come about with a great cost and will cause a severe damage and threaten the lives of many people.

Recently, NATO’s Secretary General threatened Russia with a nuclear defensive and received its response from Russia by deployment of short-range and long-range missiles in European countries that member states of NATO.

How the US Created the Cold War

There was a speech that the smug Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the US aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,217,326 views. The transcript is here. His speech said that the US must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the US regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide US foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population.Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over. First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is notthe propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re also supposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why? Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, very limited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

PS: To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did). For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarizedthat, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.” Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said“Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945 said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government) “It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse. If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were. Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

Eric ZUESSE

American writer and investigative historian

Russia warns Bolton over insulting remarks to Latin America

The Trump administration is re-deploying old and fatal Cold War warriors, elevating them to high positions. The same people who were murdering, plotting and cheering assassins. The list reads like a “Wanted for Genocide” catalog: Elliott Abrams, Michael Pompeo and yes: John Bolton.

These were the remarks of Andre Vltchek, a USSR-born American novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, in his article for the ‘NEO’ website, titled: “Russia warns Bolton over insulting remarks to Latin America”.

What is the ‘Monroe Doctrine’? In brief, it is a document which defines the entire Western Hemisphere as a ‘backyard’ of the United States. It ‘philosophically’ justifies Washington’s neo-colonialism, and the most barbaric coups it has been triggering, as well as covered and open interventions in the Caribbean, and in Central and South America.

And now, National Security Advisor John Bolton, is using this term in connection with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, outraging those who are opposing the US foreign policy in the region. What he means is clear, although it is never pronounced as bluntly as that: Countries in the Western Hemisphere should never be allowed to go socialist, and they should be prevented from disobeying Western dictates.

Recently, in Doha, capital of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, expressed his outrage over Bolton’s evoking of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ now, when the West is doing all in its power to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government of Venezuela: “The theory and the practice of “backyards” is generally insulting…”

Sergei Lavrov also added that: “Since 1945, when the UN was founded, the international law is being regulated by this universal and the most legitimate organization.”

This is, however, obviously, not how the United States sees the world. Maybe it never even considered such an approach – since it adheres to the outdated Mondroe Doctrine of 1823 when President James Monroe, a decade after Britain reluctantly recognized US independence, declared opposition to European colonialism in South America.

It was not always intended to intimidate and brutalize independent and progressive Latin American nations. According to the definition of the United States Department of State: The Monroe Doctrine was a United States policy of opposing European colonialism in the Americas beginning in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to take control of any independent state in North or South America would be viewed as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

So, in theory, at least, this policy was supposed to be putting the brakes on European colonialist expansionism. This may sound almost unbelievable now.

How very unfortunate that it has evolved into one of the most unscrupulous tools of oppression in modern history!

Contradictory to its original meaning, the United States used the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ in order to overthrow basically all patriotic, progressive and left-wing governments in the Western Hemisphere; governments that resisted the selfish geo-political interests of Washington, or the interests of US corporations, including the infamous United Fruit Company which was notorious for treating virtually all Central American countries as if they were its private plantations.

Then during the Cold War, US foreign policy towards Latin America was built on the belief that the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ should be invoked in order to prevent the spread of Soviet-backed Communism in the region.

What followed is well known: massacres in Central America, brutal coups and fascist dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and elsewhere; tens of thousands of men, women and children ‘disappeared’. Death squads murdering, raping and torturing everywhere, from Guatemala and El Salvador to Argentina and Chile.

The fight for US hegemony was basically and cynically named as a ‘fight for democracy’. Slavery was defined as ‘freedom’. The ‘Monroe Doctrine’ became synonymous with Plan Condor, with monstrous torture chambers and with people being thrown alive into the sea from helicopters.

Now the Trump administration is re-deploying those old and fatal Cold War warriors, elevating them to high positions. The same people who were murdering, plotting and cheering assassins. The list, as said earlier, reads like a “Wanted for Genocide” catalogue: Elliott Abrams, Michael Pompeo and yes: John Bolton.

These individuals are, of course, unapologetic. Just recently, John Bolton declared: “In this administration we’re not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’. This is a country in our hemisphere and it’s been the objective of American presidents going back to Ronald Reagan to have a completely Democratic hemisphere.”

He was talking about Venezuela, of course.

And so, the almost 200-year-old ‘Monroe Doctrine’ has been revitalized; put to deadly work once again.

As reported by the Daily Star: “Mr. Bolton said the Donald Trump administration was “not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’,” when asked why it was targeting Venezuela while maintaining close alliances with tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia. The doctrine, dating back to the 1820s, denoted the Western hemisphere as a zone of US influence.”

It is clear that this time, what Mr. Bolton envisions under the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ has nothing in common with the fight against European colonialism. It is a bellicose ‘modern-day’ interpretation of the doctrine: the justification for Western imperialism all over the Hemisphere. And perhaps, all over the world.

Sergei Lavrov correctly defined Bolton’s remarks as ‘insulting’. They are also deadly. As they are indicative of what Western foreign policy may soon become, or has already become: an unapologetic and uncompromising return to the harshest form of expansionism.

What the US tried to avert (perhaps) some 200 years ago, it at some point joined, and then ‘perfected’. Now, it is trying to bring it to an absolute extreme.

Iran is being used as a bargaining chip by East and West

(persia Digest) - A university professor in the US believes: Under these circumstances, Iran should not put all its hopes in one or two countries. Instead, it should have acceptable relations with all major players and thus improve its bargaining position.

Some experts in Iran believe that power and wealth are shifting from West to East and the world is on the threshold of a historic transfer of power. Furthermore, the attitude of the West towards Iran in general, and following Trump coming to power in particular, strengthens the viewpoint that Iran must pursue the look to the East strategy more vigorously. Others believe that the East is still unable to stand up to the West. Regarding Iran, the East is not only thinking about its maximum interests, it is even taking advantage of Iran’s limitations. This claim can be seen in Russia's decision to increase oil production in the current situation or China's conditions for settling Iranian oil money with Chinese goods.

Persia Digest (PD) has conducted an interview on this topic with Shireen Hunter who is a Research Professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and she has published many books and articles on Iranian issues.

You can read the interview here:

Can the strategy of looking to the East be in Iran’s interest under the circumstances?

Iran's strategy of "Looking to the East" is nothing new. It experienced with it in the 2000s. A major problem with this strategy is that it still conceives of East and West in Cold War terms, whereas the dynamics of international relations have fundamentally altered. Unlike the Cold war era, inter-state relations are far more asymmetrical and a mixture of conflict and accommodation. Under these circumstances, states cooperate with others on some issues while disagree on others. This applies both to Western states as well as to other countries, including Russia and China. By not having constructive relations with the West, Iran puts itself in a position of disadvantage vis a vis Eastern states and enables them to take advantage of it.

Do countries such as China, Russia, India…change the quality of their relations with Iran to its detriment due to US sanctions, or are the sanctions a pretext to use Iran’s particular circumstances to their own benefit?

China, India, Russia and other states are after their own interest. In relations with Iran they want to maximize their own profits and not help Iran economically or otherwise. For example, neither China nor India want Iran to become a powerful state economically and thus compete with them. They also have no intrinsic strategic interest in Iran. For example, China still sees Pakistan as an important part of its security strategy, but it does not have the same view of Iran. China and India want to sue Iran to their own interest. As Iran has narrowed its options through hostility towards the West, these countries have treated Iran unfairly. Sanctions have given them an added excuse to try to gain advantages at Iran's expense.

If Iran, for any reason, does not choose to change its relationship with the West, especially the United States, and follow the strategy of looking to the East, what would be the requirements of such a strategy?

If Iran does not improve its bargaining position by resolving its problems with the West, especially America, Eastern states will continue to take advantage of it. But if Iran comes out of its isolation, then Eastern states would have to compete with the West in gaining Iran's cooperation on many fronts, and they would be more willing to invest in Iran and otherwise help it.

Some in Iran call Russia a strategic partner and cite the two countries’ cooperation in the Syrian crisis as an example. Can the Iran-Russia relations be strategic?

Russia has never considered Iran a strategic ally. On the contrary, throughout the post-Soviet years it has used Iran as a bargaining chip in competition with the West and as an instrument of its regional policies. Russia has treated Turkey much better than Iran and has even sought cooperation with Saudi Arabia on oil issue at Iran's expense. On the Caspian. it has sided with Azerbaijan and the Central Asian states. It has not even gotten Iran into the Shanghai treaty organization, while because of the Chinese support Pakistan is a full member. This, too, is natural since Iran has narrowed its option by its hostility towards the West. Russia has felt that Iran has nowhere else to go, Thus, the idea of Russia as a strategic ally is worse than an illusion. In general, in the post-Cold War era there are not many strategic alliances. Even US-Europe alliance is fraying.

From an American perspective, China and Russia are among the most important threats to its national security. To the contrary, Iran is trying to establish a link between itself and these two countries. Will such a link increase Iran's security? To what extent will the China-Russia-Iran triangle be a danger to the US?

In the foreseeable future, I do not see any coming together of China and Russia to counter America on the pattern of Cold War era politics. The relations among these states will be competitive but far from full scale conflict. Iran's participation in a so-called triangle will not have much impact, since neither China nor Russia will provide Iran with sufficient capacity to challenge America say in the Persian Gulf. If Iran were to do such a thing it would suffer total devastation. To protect its interests, Iran must finally realize that the Cold War distinctions between East and West are no longer valid. China and Russia do not have ideological dispute with America. Theirs is more of a classic great power rivalry. Under these circumstances, Iran should not put all its hopes in one or two countries.

Instead, it should have acceptable relations with all major players and thus improve its bargaining position.

Donald Trump publicly humiliates Saudi Arabia

US President Donald Trump has humiliated Saudi Arabia by saying the country’s King “might not be there for two weeks” without Washington’s support.

This is not the first time Trump has highlighted the kingdom’s reliance on Washington. The US is one of the main suppliers of arms and ammunition to Saudi Arabia. Regional and international media have widely discussed the report.