This article is published in Salon.com, which assigned it.
Last August with a chaotic evacuation by air of the last US troops in Afghanistan, President Biden effectively ended one of the country’s most embarrassing and pointless wars, leaving that battered land fully in the control of the Taliban — the same dogged AK-toting Islamic fighters it had ousted from power two decades earlier, but never successfully defeated.
While there were critics who blamed Biden for the rapid collapse of the corrupt puppet regime the US had spent over two trillion dollars propping up — critics who wanted that longest US war to continue — most Americans breathed a sigh of relief that for the first time in a generation, the US, while still sending off Special Forces “kill teams” into countries like Syria, and with Biden promising to continue using remote drone strikes in “anti-terror” operations, was not engaged in an “actual war.”
Yet now, a scant five months later, the Biden White House has ordered 8500 US elite airborne troops onto “hightened alert” telling them to be prepared for rapid deployment to “front-line’ bases in countries bordering Russia, and by this Feb. 5 had already begun dispatching nearly 5000 of them. Biden and militarists in the National Security establishment, the Military-Industrial-Media-Think Tank “blob” and militarists in both parties in Congress meanwhile are all warning darkly of Russia’s “imminent” invasion of Ukraine. They are also warning of the need for the US to “stand firm’ against Russian ‘aggression.’” Most of their alarmist talking points could be lifted from speeches made by their forebears in the Cold War ‘50s.
Incredibly, even as the US is risking war with Russia, it is also aggressively dispatching US Navy vessels, including aircraft carriers and B-52 strategic nuclear bombers, to provocatively enter or traverse disputed waters and airspace in the South China Sea claimed by China. It’s also, for good measure, making threats against Iran, promising “serious consequences” if Iran seeks to go after those US leaders who ordered the 2020 drone assassination in Iraq of Gen. Kassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s military. As a number of war critics have pointed out, the US, with its powerful navy, including Tomahawk missile equipped destroyers and a least one aircraft carrier based off Iran and troops in place in countries bordering Iran like Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and UAE, as well as attack aircraft based in those countries and nearby in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
And as if that weren’t enough, the US, under President Biden, continues to view both Iran (with no nuclear weapons) and North Korea, with a tiny nuclear arsenal and no intercontinental missiles, to be “serious threats” to the US, even as Washington steadfastly refuses to rejoin the Iranian – US negotiated agreement to abate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and to end the state of war between itself and North Korea that dates all the way back to 1950.
That’s four potential wars and nuclear confrontations — all of them being deliberately stoked by the US.
What is going on here?
Even Ukraine’s President is Asking the US to ‘Cool It”
One clear indication that it’s the US creating this sense crisis is that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, probably the least corrupt president to run that country since it gained its independence with the break-up of the Soviet Union in August 1991, is calling on Biden and the US to dial back the rhetoric, warning that all the US bluster about an “imminent invasion” by over 100,000 Russian troops could “make things worse,” threatening an already struggling economy and potentially providing a pretext for a Russian invasion….
For the rest of this article in full by TCBH! founder Dave LIndorff, please go to:
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/16/why-americas-elites-want-a-new–or-at-least-want-us-to-fear-one/