10 October 2019 — WSWS
Amid the storm of denunciations—extending from right-wing Republicans to the Democratic Party, the New York Times and the pseudo-left Jacobin magazine—of his decision to pull US troops out of Syria, President Donald Trump issued an extraordinary tweet on Wednesday in defense of his policy:
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5 October 2019 — Tim Hayward
By Tim Hayward
The use of chemical weapons is a war crime. The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) – signed by almost every nation[1] – aims to expunge their use from the face of our planet. Charged with implementing the Convention is the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Part of its task is to investigate such use when alleged to have occurred. It has played a particularly prominent role in relation to Syria since the US administration under President Obama declared the use of chemical weapons a ‘Red Line’ the transgression of which would trigger military intervention in the war.
1 October 2019 — FAIR
by Joshua Cho
Newsweek (9/18/19) reports NATO is losing “superiority” over Russia, without mentioning that the alliance’s combined military budget is 17 times that of Russia.
Lazy, one-sided reports like Newsweek’s “NATO Superiority Over Russia Has ‘Eroded,’ Forcing Alliance to Create New Strategy, US General Says” (9/18/19), by David Brennan, are a major reason why US officials are still taken seriously when they demand further investments in the military/industrial complex and the strengthening of an unnecessary military alliance like NATO.
23 September 2019 — Moon of Alabama
Considerable amounts of ink have been been spent in writings about the Revolution in Military Affairs. It is a concept that claims that new military doctrines, strategies, tactics and technologies would lead to an abrupt and significant change in the conduct of warfare.
27 September 2019 — Drone Wars
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, manufacturer of the Reaper drone, has recently been awarded a US Air Force contract to demonstrate the ‘Agile Condor’ artificial intelligence system with the MQ-9 Reaper drone. According to General Atomics President David R. Alexander,
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15 September 2019 — Of Two Minds
What was “possible” yesterday is now a low-cost proven capability, and the consequences are far from predictable.
Predictably, the mainstream media is serving up heaping portions of reassurances that the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities are no big deal and full production will resume shortly. The obvious goal is to placate global markets fearful of an energy disruption that could tip a precarious global economy into recession.
4 September 2019 — Global Research
“We could win that war so fast if I wanted to kill 10 million people … which I don’t. I’m not looking to kill a big portion of that country [Afghanistan],”
“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone,”
“It would be over in — literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do — I don’t want to go that route.” (ABC July 24.2019) (emphasis added)
“As I’ve said, and I’ll say it any number of times – and this is not using nuclear – we could win that war in a week if we wanted to fight it, but I’m not looking to kill 10 million people,” (quoted by Press TV, Aug 21.2019) (emphasis added)
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2 September 2019 — Global Research
By Carla Stea
Ambassador Matjila, South Africa:
“It is indeed deeply troubling that a long-established arms control instrument such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has unraveled, placing not only the region of Europe but the whole world at risk of a nuclear war and catastrophe.”
23 August 2019 — WSWS
After withdrawing from the landmark Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, the United States has been barreling ahead with its preparations to fight a nuclear war with China, Russia, or both, by testing and stockpiling dangerous new weapons in a nuclear arms race.
7 August 2019 — This Can’t be Happening!
Hiroshima after the dropping of the first wartime atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 (Imperial War Museum photo)
Cambridge, UK, Aug. 6 — Seventy-four years ago today, the US dropped the first ever atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, a non-military target of several hundred thousand, instantly vaporizing some 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and causing the painful, slower death of another 70,000 who died of burns and radioactive damage to their bodies over the next four months. Another 60,000 died later over the years of cancers caused by the bomb’s radioactive pulse and subsequent fallout.
5 August 2019 — TomDispatch
Co-Written by Nia Harris, Cassandra Stimpson, and Ben Freeman
A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it’s not a movie star; it’s Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. In the last month, Donald Trump and Hewson have seemed inseparable. They “saved” jobs at a helicopter plant. They took the stage together at a Lockheed subsidiary in Milwaukee. The president vetoed three bills that would have blocked the arms sales of Lockheed (and other companies) to Saudi Arabia. Recently, the president’s daughter Ivanka even toured a Lockheed space facility with Hewson.
27 July 2019 — True Publica
The Anthropocene. A proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. Geologists dispute the duration, precision, relevance and even accuracy of the concept. But the term has increasingly entered the scientific lexicon as increasing numbers of experts across myriad disciplines recognise that for the first time in history, the future of the entire planet—for generations if not millennia to come—is now being fundamentally determined by the activities of the human species. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
