Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, serving from 1963 to 1990.
His CIA career began under President John F. Kennedy and lasted through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. McGovern advised Henry Kissinger during the Richard Nixon administration, and during the Ronald Reagan administration he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief.
He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement but returned it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture.
Steve and Ray discuss:
0:00 Introduction
01:25 Ray McGovern's assessment of the JFK assassination
26:10 Hunter Biden's laptop
30:50 Ukraine and the U.S. intelligence services' role in the deep state
55:20 Strategic implications of the Ukraine war for the U.S.
Dominic Cummings is a major historical figure in UK politics. He helped save the Pound Sterling, led the Vote Leave campaign, Got Brexit Done, and guided the Tories to a landslide general election victory. His time in No. 10 Downing Street as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor was one of the most interesting and impactful periods in modern UK political history. Dom and Steve discuss all of this and more in this 2-hour episode.
0:00 Early Life: Oxford, Russia, entering politics
16:49 Keeping the UK out of the Euro
19:41 How Dominic and Steve became acquainted: blogs, 2008 financial crisis, meeting at Google
27:37 Vote Leave, the science of polling
43:46 Cambridge Analytica conspiracy; History is impossible
48:41 Dominic on Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him and the movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War”
54:05 On joining British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office: an ultimatum
1:06:31 The pandemic
1:21:28 The Deep State, talent pipeline for public service
Professor Goldstein recently retired after 20 years of service on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (NWC). During his career at NWC, he founded the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) and has been awarded the Superior Civilian Service Medal for this achievement. He has written or edited seven books on Chinese strategy and is at work on a book-length project that examines the nature of China-Russia relations in the 21st century. He has a longstanding interest in great power politics, military competition, and security in the pacific region.
Goldstein is Director of Asia Engagement at the Washington think-tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for realism and restraint in U.S.defense policy, and also a visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
He earned a PhD at Princeton, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and an AB from Harvard. He is fluent in both Chinese and Russian.
Steve and Lyle discuss:
00:00 Early life and background
18:03 Goldstein’s dissertation on China’s nuclear strategy
37:35 Pushback on “Meeting China Halfway”
41:24 Could the U.S. have prevented war in Ukraine?
46:05 How territorial conflicts are influencing China’s relationship with Russia
1:00:16 Analyzing war games with U.S., China, and Taiwan
I've been asked to write something about PRC military buildup and a potential Taiwan (TW) conflict.
1. My perspective and bona fides: My father was a KMT officer, my mother's father was a KMT general and that side of the family is related to Chiang Kai Shek by marriage. I have relatives both in PRC and TW. My wife is a graduate of National Taiwan University. I should be biased in favor of TW and against CPC but I am a realist and rationalist so I call things as I see them.
2. PRC military technology has reached parity with the US and, overall, surpassed Russia. PLARF (dedicated rocket forces) may be decisive in a conflict in the pacific. They may have achieved A2AD and can make it very costly for the US navy to operate anywhere near TW.
3. Specifically, long range missile attack on surface ships, using initial targeting via satellites and drones, and final targeting from sensors on the missile itself, is probably a mature technology now and difficult to defeat with countermeasures / missile defense.
4. US estimates of PRC nuclear weapons stockpile have barely changed in 30y and are likely highly unreliable. Based on production capabilities alone they may already have ~1000 warheads (if not now, in a few years), and the ability to target the entire US. PRC is building up its arsenal to ensure that the US understands that they have a reliable MAD capability.
5. PRC can easily blockade TW if desired, and (at cost of significant escalation) can probably also blockade Japan and S. Korea as well. All of these countries import ~90% of energy and ~50% of food calories, so a protracted blockade would have serious impact.
6. I don’t believe PRC has near term plans to invade TW, but they have to maintain the capability to deter any change in the status quo. Both sides prefer the status quo but accidents can happen.
7. Thanks to stupid US strategy re: Ukraine, PRC can rely on Russian energy in the future and will become much more resistant to naval blockade (e.g., of oil supplies transiting the Malacca Strait). In other words, dumb US neocons solved PRC’s energy security problem for them.
No one talks about this because US strategy has been brain dead for a long time. No one even talks, in the immediate aftermath, about the trillions of dollars and millions of lives wasted over 20y in the Iraq/Afghanistan tragedies. Cui bono?
8. PRC spends a smaller fraction of GDP on defense than the US, but because they have mastered the entire military technology stack cost estimates should be PPP adjusted. After PPP adjustment the PRC economy is substantially larger than the US economy. This, plus the fact that their manufacturing capacity (e.g., ship building) is far beyond that of the US, means that their overall capability to produce war materiel (i.e., to engage in a rapid buildup on, e.g., a 5y timescale) has easily surpassed ours. Anyone following their recent naval or air power or missile or satellite build up can see that this is the case.
I'll be discussing some of these topics with Lyle Goldstein (US Naval War College, Watson China Initiative at Brown University; BA Harvard, PhD Princeton) in a future podcast.
See also this documentary produced by the US Army University Press. Queued to start at discussion of missile technology and nuclear weapons.
This interview with John Mearsheimer was conducted in 2020 on the original Manifold podcast with Corey Washington and Steve Hsu. Parts of the conversation are prescient with respect to US-China relations and the situation in Ukraine.
John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.
Mearsheimer is best known for developing the theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve regional hegemony in an anarchic international system. In accordance with his theory, Mearsheimer believes that China's growing power will likely bring it into conflict with the United States.
Steve, Corey, and John discuss:
0:00 A quick message for listeners
1:21 Introduction
2:39 Realist foreign policy worldview
15:46 Proxy conflicts and the U.S.
21:31 U.S. history: a moral hegemon, or just a hegemon? Zinn and Chomsky
Theodore A. Postol is professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is widely known as an expert on nuclear weapons and missile technology.
Educated in physics and nuclear engineering at MIT, he was a researcher at Argonne National Lab, worked at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and was scientific advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations.
After leaving the Pentagon, Postol helped to build a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists to study weapons technology in relation to defense and arms control policy.
He has received numerous awards, including the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society for "incisive technical analysis of national security issues that [have] been vital for informing the public policy debate", the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for "uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses", and the Richard L. Garwin Award "that recognizes an individual who, through exceptional achievement in science and technology, has made an outstanding contribution toward the benefit of mankind."
Steve and Ted discuss:
0:00 Introduction
2:02 Early life in Brooklyn, education at MIT, work at the Pentagon
20:27 Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan
28:26 U.S. influence on Russia and China’s second-strike capabilities
Ted Postol: ... So, you've got to listen to Putin's voice dispassionately. And when you listen to him, he makes it clear numerous times, numerous times that he doesn't think American missile defense is a worth anything, but he also is worried about an American president who might believe otherwise, and who might take steps against Russia, that would then lead to an action-reaction cycle that would get us, get us all killed.
In other words, he's not just worried about the system, whether it can work, he's worried about American political leadership and what they think, or if they think, or if they know. And that was, you know, I was very receptive to understanding that because that's exactly what I went through, you know, 30 years earlier when I was at the Pentagon, looking at this dog of a missile defense.
And so, the Chinese look at this, they know the Americans are lying to them all the time. I could give you a good story about South Korea and the way we lied to the South Koreans and lied to the Chinese.
I was really furious with that. That was under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And my view is...
And my view is if you're lying to an ally and you're lying, you know, I have very good friends. I'm very, very proud to say I have some very good friends who are high-level diplomats, and I've asked every one of them, would you lie in a negotiation? And every one of them has said, no. In other words, your credibility depends on your honesty.
You might not say something that, you know, could be relevant to a negotiation relevant to your adversary's thinking, but you would never lie because your credibility will, you'll never be believed again. That's their view of this.
And here we were under Hillary Clinton lying to an ally and lying to the Chinese, who I knew through my personal contacts, understood that we were lying to them. I know from personal contacts with the Chinese.
So, how do you expect people to treat you when they know you're a liar? To me, it's just simple human relations. And, and I now understand that because I have friends who are both diplomats and soldiers, and I know, if you have to lie to make a point there's something wrong and you're, you're jeopardizing your credibility with other professionals if, if you do that.
So, we should not be surprised that the Chinese are increasing their forces.
And when Putin marched out this horrifying Poseidon underwater torpedo, could potentially carry a hundred megaton warhead. It's nuclear-powered. It can travel at some very high speed, 50, 60 knots or more, and then it can go quiet, sneak into a Harbor, know coastal Harbor and detonate underwater, and destroy out to 30 or 40 kilometers, a complete area, urban area. And he has this weapon. He made it obvious that he had it. He showed plans for it.
Ted Postol: Well, what he was doing is he was saying to an American president who knows nothing. All right, assuming that the president knows nothing, that your missile defenses will not do anything about this weapon. That's what he did it for. He was an insurance policy toward bad decision-making by American political leadership. That's why he built that weapon. That's why he ordered that weapon built.
So not because, I mean, he may be a monster. That's another issue, but it's not because he was a monster, it's because he made a strategic calculation that that kind of weapon would cause any person, even if they were totally without knowledge and thought of how missile defense could work, to understand that you will not escape retribution if you attack Russia. That's why that weapon was built.
Carl Zha is the host of the Silk and Steel podcast, which focuses on China, history, culture, and politics. He is a former engineer now based in Bali, Indonesia.
Physicist, startup founder, and polymath Steve Hsu discusses the end of the unipolar moment, the return of geopolitics, and the U.S.-China New Cold War. He believes China is not as fragile as some say. We talk Taiwan, how Beijing has caught up in military tech, and how the nature of naval warfare in the next war will be very different. On the technology and AI front, he feels the U.S. and China are at parity, but that the long-term trend is in China's favor. He feels the social credit system is advancing just as fast in the West as in China and that the digital yuan is rapidly gaining in stature. He gives his view on the Ukraine crisis and how it has been a huge strategic error by the U.S. because it has cemented the Eurasian alliance. He's concerned about a systemic financial meltdown, discusses being a victim of woke cancel culture, and knowing Richard Feynman.
I've had numerous requests to comment on the conflict in Ukraine, but have been too busy to write anything.
For background on the situation, I highly recommend the discussion in the video below, released March 3 2022.
To save time, just listen to the presentations by Mearsheimer and McGovern, and their final comments at the end of the video. Both present historical details from the last decade or so that will shock people who only pay attention to mainstream Western media. (Also in the discussion: Jack Matlock, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Ted Postol, MIT professor and missile expert.)
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. I featured another interview with him in an earlier post on the US catastrophe in Afghanistan: Tragedy of Empire / Mostly Sociopaths at the Top.
Corey Washington and I interviewed John Mearsheimer for the original Manifold, but the episode was not released. It's possible that I might release it some time in the future.
While military and diplomatic aspects of the conflict in Ukraine are worthy of attention, far more important are the long term consequences of Western hysteria and economic war on Russia. Tacit support for Russia from China, India, Brazil, Turkey, OPEC states, indeed perhaps the majority of the world population, may presage a new era of multipolarity and hard power confrontation between great powers.
Why do educated citizens of the countries listed above understand the situation better than the typical American or European? Because they are familiar with Western media propaganda and the history of US imperialism. They are much more likely to understand the facts described by Mearsheimer and McGovern about the recent history of NATO, Ukraine, and Russia leading up to this conflict.
PS I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of systemic risks from defaults of highly networked financial entities that are affected by sanctions on Russia.
This looks dangerous -- like the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. Or am I missing some structural reforms that prevent that from happening again? (Maybe the earlier round of sanctions have already decoupled Russia enough...) Or will the central banks that effectively run our economies now simply issue a blanket put, allowing all of our clever money men to go back to sleep? People used to complain about "zombie companies" in some countries with excessive state intervention in their economies. It looks to me like we've had zombie financial markets for some time now...
Of course I think individuals in TW and UKR have every right to vote / fight for the government they want.
But they are not likely to get their way as the issue is much more important to their giant neighbor (RUS, PRC) than to the USA or soft Europeans in Brussels.
They are probably better off negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the nearby great power. Finland "Finlandized" itself and that was probably the best it could do...
What you are seeing right now in UKR is what great power realists like Mearsheimer *predicted* would happen IF the West gave too much hope to UKR without being willing to actually back it up.
Now, you may say that Joe Smith in Iowa *should* want to back up UKR or TW, send his son to fight on the front lines there. But it is not the case and we know that. We also knew it 10-15y ago when NATO expansion mischief got started and Mearsheimer made his early cautionary statements on this, as did Kennan, Nitze, Perry, Sam Nunn -- all the old cold warriors who ACTUALLY DEFEATED USSR and understood things better than today's leaders.
US won't even sanction RUS energy imports to this country... How much pain are we willing to endure for UKR?
We're going to fight this war to the last Ukrainian... If there isn't a negotiated settlement soon UKR will end up like Iraq and Afghanistan -- abandoned by the US and destroyed.
I can predict something very similar for TW, even though I have extended family living there right now. Does that count towards emotional commitment / empathy? I'm descended from KMT military officers on both sides of my family tree!
TW should negotiate for the best deal it can get from PRC and not count on the US to protect it.
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US war hawks want to see PRC blow itself up fighting for TW. The conflict will destroy Asian economies and leave USA largely unscathed (just as WWII did). They don't care about the well-being of ~2-3 billion Asians.
Some of them just can't help themselves and want to see RUS blow itself up fighting in a UKR trap. But this group is very stupid as they are driving RUS into the arms of PRC and that is going to be very bad for USA.
Some US war hawks are smarter than others...
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US to Ukraine, pointing at Russia: "Let's you and him fight."
######
William Burns is Biden's CIA Director, and was Ambassador to the Russian Federation. What did he write about Ukraine and NATO expansion? From Peter Beinart's substack:
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Although Burns couldn’t have predicted the specific kind of meddling Putin would employ—either in 2014 when he seized Crimea and fomented a rebellion in Ukraine’s east or today—he warned that the US was helping set in motion the kind of crisis that America faces today. Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Were a reporter to read Burns’ quotes to White House press secretary Jen Psaki today, she’d likely accuse them of “parroting Russian talking points.” But Burns is hardly alone. From inside the US government, many officials warned that US policy toward Russia might bring disaster. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, almost resigned because of his opposition to NATO expansion. He has since declared that because of its policies in the 1990s, “the United States deserves much of the blame” for the deterioration in relations with Moscow. Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 served as US ambassador to Ukraine, has called Bush’s 2008 decision to declare that Ukraine would eventually join NATO “a real mistake.” Fiona Hill, who gained fame during the Trump impeachment saga, says that as national intelligence officers for Russia and Eurasia she and her colleagues “warned” Bush that “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
Oh, there's some historical background to all this? Some context? Wait I'm told every day this crisis just happened because Putin went crazy and wants to rebuild the USSR / Russian Empire.
Who is full of crap? Western governments and media today, or our CIA Director and former Ambassadors and Secretaries of Defense? The whole world ex-USA/EU can see this. It's only Westerners who are brainwashed.
Added March 7 2022: This is a long Chinese analysis of the military aspects of the war so far. They also cite Oryx estimates. Note comparisons near the end of Russian and PLA capabilities.
I certainly sympathize with "Putin bad", "Russia bad place for me to live", "democracy good" sentiments.
But suppose the realistic possible outcomes are:
1. Ukr is dominated by Russia but not destroyed in a war
2. Ukr is dominated by Russia after a brutal war, with its economy destroyed
3. (Low probability) Ukr escapes Russian domination thanks to strong US support (avoiding WWIII).
4. (Low probability) US strongly supports Ukr, leading to MAD, WWIII
To be very definite, suppose that
I. Given actual past US policies of ~2010-2022 probabilities are P(#1) = P(#2) = 45% and P(#3) = 9% and P(#4) = 1%
II. Following advice of Mearsheimer, frmr SecDefs Perry and McNamara, CIA director Burns, etc. etc. we have
P(#1) = 95% P(#2) = 4%, others much less than 1%. [ i.e., this is a counterfactual scenario that, in my opinion, turns out better! ]
I think this is a REALISTIC characterization. You may disagree. Under my assumptions II is better than I.
But this is not primarily a normative or moral discussion... we don't disgree there.
Note, in a standard utilitarian framework P(#4) dominates everything else!
1. The US stopped TSMC from fabbing leading edge Kirin CPUs for Huawei (designed by Huawei's chip design subsidiary HiSilicon). These were used in their smartphones. For a year or two Huawei was arguably the leading smartphone maker in the world and looked entirely capable of competing against Samsung and Apple. US Nat Sec concerns had more to do with Huawei's 5G business. But 5G infrastructure doesn't use leading edge chips (the base stations are big and don't rely on battery power the way phones do). The connection between Huawei's smartphone business and its 5G infrastructure business is very indirect -- they are entirely different businesses.
2. No sanctions were applied to ZTE which, unlike Huawei, is an actual state-owned entity and had previously been on the US entity list. ZTE also sells 5G infrastructure equipment. It is flourishing while Huawei is starting to run low on the non-leading edge chips (e.g., >20nm process) it buys for its base stations.
It's hard to explain what the US was up to with Huawei -- I would say it's a good example of the kind of incoherent "emergent" policy that Hanania writes about in his new book.
If you believe all the Western propaganda about Huawei and Xinjiang produced over the last few years you might be an NPC or at least someone who doesn't properly calibrate their Bayesian updates. As such it isn't really worth my effort to engage with you.
Regarding PRC invasion of Taiwan, missile technology, etc. see
If you are scratching your head about what happened in Kazakhstan (perhaps as you were last summer about Afghanistan, remember that?), it may be because you only look at mainstream Western sources of information. You might also be the kind of person who swallows whole US propaganda stories about Ukraine, Syria, Xinjiang, Huawei, January 6, RussiaGate, etc.
Dmitry Orlov on January 09, 2022 · at 5:22 pm EST/EDT [ Comment on this blog post by the Saker ]
What happened in KZ was a paramilitary attack meticulously organized but launched in haste by Western intelligence that had the goal of destroying the statehood of KZ. It was not an attempt to take it over (no time for that) but simply to destroy. The entire state structure was sufficiently rotten that the defense/security agencies couldn’t even pick sides and became demoralized and inactive, but once the Russians were called in to help they immediately knew which side would win and fell back in line. The West’s goal was to set KZ ablaze prior to the talks in Geneva in order to have a better negotiating position vis-à-vis Russia: “You want to divide spheres of influence? Well, we already did that for you—in Kazakhstan!” Keep in mind, the RU-KZ border is open, undefendable and almost 8000km long, running from Volgograd to Tomsk in Siberia, making KZ, as a failed state, a major headache for Russia. Obviously, Russia knew that KZ, rife with Western NGOs and accompanying corruption, and with a weakening economy, could easily be tipped over, and prepared for just this case. Now that the attack on KZ statehood has failed and a mop-up operation is in progress, this has given Russia a huge trump card for the Geneva talks. The West has played its cards and lost. There will be no more color revolutions in the post-Soviet space. Its operatives in KZ are being hunted down and eliminated. Those in positions of authority in KZ have learned the same lesson as Lukashenko: they cannot trust the West; they have to trust Moscow.
On any particular issue Orlov might be right or he might be wrong, but guaranteed on certain topics he knows a lot more than the "experts" found on television or in the NYTimes. In recent years I have spent significant time with Western foreign policy and defense "experts" in think tank settings and I have to say that they are often poorly informed or miscalibrated in the confidence levels assigned to their predictions. Sadly, elites in the West have largely been fooled by their own propaganda, and often have entirely unrealistic views of what is really happening in the world. Alternative sources of information, especially individuals with good local knowledge, are always useful.
Wikipedia: Dmitry Orlov (Russian: Дми́трий Орло́в; born 1962) is a Russian-American engineer and writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the United States", something he has called "permanent crisis".[1] Orlov believes collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system ...
Orlov was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and moved to the United States at the age of 12. He has a BS in Computer Engineering and an MA in Applied Linguistics. He was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. ...
In 2006 Orlov published an online manifesto, "The New Age of Sail." In 2007 he and his wife sold their apartment in Boston and bought a sailboat, fitted with solar panels and six months supply of propane, and capable of storing a large quantity of food stuffs. He calls it a “survival capsule.” ...
Here is a different (internal coup and counter-coup) interpretation of events which is quite unlike Orlov's. I have not seen any evidence presented yet of foreign involvement, but perhaps I am not looking at the right sources...
... The US/NATO command may be woofing just to get more ships and planes funded, but woofing can go badly wrong. The people you’re woofing at may think you really mean it. That’s what came very close to happening in the 1983 Able Archer NATO exercises. The woofing by Reagan and Thatcher in the leadup to those exercises was so convincing to the Soviet woof-ees that even the moribund USSR came close to responding in real—like nuclear—ways.
That’s how contingency plans, domestic political theatrics, and funding scams can feed into each other and lead to real wars.
Military forces develop contingency plans. That’s part of their job. Some of the plans to fight China are crazy, but some are just plausible enough to be worrying, because somebody might start thinking they could work.
... What you do with a place like Xinjiang, if you’re a CIA/DoD planner, is file it under “promote insurgency” — meaning “start as many small fires as possible,” rather than “invade and begin a conventional war.”
And in the meantime, you keep working on the real complaints of the Uyghur and other non-Han ethnic groups, so that if you do need to start a conventional war in the Formosa Straits, you can use the Uyghur as a diversion, a sacrifice, by getting them to rise up and be massacred. Since there’s a big Han-Chinese population in Xinjiang, as the map shows, you can hope to stir up the sort of massacre/counter-massacre whipsaw that leaves evil memories for centuries, leading to a permanent weakening of the Chinese state.
This is a nasty strategy, but it’s a standard imperial practice, low-cost — for the empire, not the local population, of course. It costs those people everything, but empires are not sentimental about such things.
... The Uyghur in Xinjiang would serve the same purpose as the Iraqi Kurds: “straw dogs destined for sacrifice.” If you want to get really cynical, consider that the reprisals they’d face from an enraged Chinese military would be even more useful to the US/NATO side than their doomed insurgency itself.
Atrocity propaganda is very important in 21st c warfare. At the moment, there’s no evidence of real, mass slaughter in Xinjiang, yet we’re already getting propaganda claims about it. Imagine what US/NATO could make out of the bloody aftermath of a doomed insurgency. Well, assuming that US/NATO survived a war with China, a pretty dicey assumption. More likely, CNN, BBC, and NYT would be the first to welcome our new overlords, Kent Brockman style. Those mainstream-media whores aren’t too bright but Lord, they’re agile.
... Xinjiang, by contrast, can easily be imagined as One Giant Concentration Camp. After all, our leading “expert” on the province has never been there, and neither have his readers.
... The era of naval war based on carrier groups is over. They know that, even if they won’t say it.
If there’s a real war with China, the carriers will wait it out in San Diego harbor. I don’t say Honolulu, because even that wouldn’t be safe enough.
I’m not denigrating the courage or dedication of the crews and officers of USN vessels. At any level below JCOS, most of them are believers. But their belief is increasingly besieged and difficult to sustain, like an Episcopalian at Easter. You just can’t think too long about how cheap and effective antiship missiles are and still be a believer in aircraft carriers. As platforms of gunboat diplomacy against weak powers, they’re OK.
... The thing is, and it’s weird you even have to say this: China is a big strong country coming out of an era of deep national humiliation and suffering, proud of its new prosperity. China’s success in lifting a desperately poor population into something like prosperity will likely be the biggest story from this era, when the canonical histories get distilled.
A nation hitting this stage is likely to include a lot of people, especially young men, who are itching to show what their country can do. Their patriotic eagerness is no doubt as gullible as most, but it’s real, and if you pay any attention in the online world, you can’t help seeing it.
People who mouth off about China never seem to imagine that anyone in China might hear, because as we are told over and over again, China-is-an-authoritarian-state. The implication is that nobody in China has any of the nationalistic fervor that we take for granted in our own Anglo states.
... Given the history of US/China relations, from the pogroms against Chinese immigrants to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, through the demonization of Chinese mainlanders in the Cold War (which I remember distinctly from elementary school scare movies), the endless attempts to start insurgencies in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Fujian, to the nonstop violence and abuse of Asians in America, you don’t need to find reasons for Chinese people to want a war.
The odd thing is that most of them don’t seem to. That’s a remarkable testimony to the discipline and good sense of the Chinese public…so far. And it’s also, if you’re thinking clearly, a good reason not to keep provoking China in such gross, pointless ways. A population with that level of discipline and unity, matched with zooming prosperity, technical expertise, and pride on emerging from a long nightmare, is not one to woof at.
Of course the plan in the Pentagon is not real war. The plan is to slow China down, trip it up, “wrong-foot it” as they say in the Commonwealth.
... So what will China do about Taiwan? China could take it right now, if it wanted to pay the price. Everyone knows that, though many fake-news sites have responded with childish, ridiculous gung-ho stories about how “Taiwan Could Win.”
But will China invade? No. Not right now anyway. It doesn’t need to. The Chinese elite has its own constituencies, like all other polities (including “totalitarian” ones), and has to answer to them as circumstances change.
So far China has been extraordinarily patient, a lot more patient than we’d be if China was promising to fight to the death for, say, Long Island. But that can change. Because, as I never tire of repeating, the enemy of the moment has constituencies too. And has to answer to them.
So what happens if the US succeeds in hamstringing China’s economy? Welp, what’s the most reliable distraction a gov’t can find when it wants to unite a hard-pressed population against some distant enemy?
That’s when China might actually do something about Taiwan. ...
Note Added: Some readers may be alarmed that the War Nerd does not seem to accept the (Western) mass media propaganda about Xinjiang. Those readers might have poor memories, or are too young to know about, e.g., fake WMD or "babies taken out of incubators" or the countless other manufactured human rights abuses we read about in reliable journals like the New York Times or Washington Post.
Take these recent examples of US journalism on Afghanistan:
The fake drone strike that killed 10 innocent family members, one of our last acts as we abandoned Afghanistan. (Fake because we probably did it just to show we could "strike back" at the bad guys.) Non-Western media reported this as a catastrophic failure almost immediately. But very few people in the US knew it until the Pentagon issued an apology in a late Friday afternoon briefing just recently.
The drone strike was in retaliation for the suicide bombing at Kabul airport, in which (as reported by the Afghan government) ~200 people died. But evidence suggests that only a small fraction of these people were killed by bomb -- most of the 200 may have been shot by US and "coalition" (Turkish?) soldiers who might have panicked after the bombing. This is covered widely outside the US but not here.
If you want to understand the incredibly thin and suspicious sourcing of the "Uighur genocide" story, see here or just search for Adrian Zenz.
Just a few years ago there were plenty of Western travelers passing through Xinjiang, even by bicycle, vlogging and posting their videos on YouTube. I followed these YouTubers at the time because of my own travel interest in western and south-western China, not for any political reason.
If you watch just a few of these you'll get an entirely different impression of the situation on the ground than you would get from Western media. For more, see this comment thread:
I want to be clear that because PRC is an authoritarian state their reaction to the Islamic terror attacks in Xinjiang circa 2015 was probably heavy handed and I am sure some of the sad stories told about people being arrested, held without trial, etc. are true. But I am also sure that if you visit Xinjiang and ask (non-Han) taxi drivers, restaurant owners, etc. about the level of tension you will get a very different impression than what is conveyed by Western media.
...
No nation competing in geopolitics is without sin. One aspect of that sin (both in US and PRC): use of mass media propaganda to influence domestic public opinion.
If you want to be "reality based" you need to look at the strongest evidence from both sides.
...
Note to the credulous: The CIA venture fund InQTel was an investor in my first startup, which worked in crypto technology. We worked with CIA, VOA, NED ("National Endowment for Democracy" HA HA HA) on defeating the PRC firewall in the early internet era. I know a fair bit about how this all works -- NGO cutouts, fake journalists, policy grifters in DC, etc. etc. Civilians have no idea.
At the time I felt (and still sort of feel) that keeping the internet free and open is a noble cause. But do I know FOR SURE that state security works DIRECTLY with media and NGOs to distort the truth (i.e., lies to the American people, Iraq WMD yada yada). Yes, I know for sure and it's easy to detect the pattern just by doing a tiny bit of research on people like Cockerell or Zenz.
...
Keep in mind I'm not a "dove" -- MIC / intel services / deep state *has to* protect against worst case outcomes and assume the worst about other states.
They have to do nasty stuff. I'm not making moral judgements here.
But a *consequence* of this is that you have to be really careful about information sources in order to stay reality based...
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV) The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Turn off the TV and close the browser tabs with mainstream media content produced by middlebrow conformists. Watch this video instead and read the links below.
If you were surprised by events in Afghanistan over the past weeks, ask yourself why you were so out of touch with a reality that has been clear to careful observers for over a decade. Then ask yourself what other things you are dead wrong about...
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. Prior to that he served as an infantry/intelligence officer in the 1960s.
More color here from Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, former US Army Major. Sjursen is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and later as an Army captain in Afghanistan in command of 4-4 Cavalry B Troop in Kandahar Province from February 2011 to January 2012.
Added from comments:
At the strategic level it has been clear for 10+ years that our resources were better used elsewhere. It was obvious as well that we were not succeeding in nation building or creating a self-sustaining government there. I could go into more detail but you can get it from the links / interviews in the post.
At the tactical level it should have been obvious that a quick collapse was very possible, just as in S. Vietnam (see earlier oral history post). Off-topic: same thing could happen in Taiwan in event of an actual invasion, but US strategists are clueless.
Biden deserves credit for staying the course and not kicking the can down the road, as effectively a generation (slight exaggeration) of military and political leaders have done.
The distortion of the truth by senior leaders in the military and in politics is clear for all to see. Just read what mid-level commanders (e.g., Sjursen) and intel analysts with real familiarity have to say. This was true for Vietnam and Iraq as well. Don't read media reports or listen to what careerist generals (or even worse, politicos) have to say.
Execution by Biden team was terrible and I think they really believed the corrupt US-puppet Afghan govt could survive for months or even years (i.e., they are really stupid). Thus their exit planning was deeply flawed and events overtook them. However, even a well-planned exit strategy would likely not have avoided similar (but perhaps smaller in magnitude) tragic events like the ones we are seeing now.
ISS attack on airport was 100% predictable. I don't think most Americans (even "leaders" and "experts") understood ISS and Taliban are mortal enemies, etc. etc.
There is more of a late-stage imperial decline feel to Afghanistan and Iraq -- use of mercenaries, war profiteering, etc. -- than in Vietnam. All of these wars were tragic and unnecessary, but there really was a Cold War against an existential rival. The "war on terrorism" should always have been executed as a police / intel activity, not one involving hundreds of thousands of US soldiers.
All of this is (in part) an unavoidable cost of having intellectually weak leaders struggling with difficult problems, while subject to low-information populist democracy (this applies to both parties and even to "highly educated" coastal elites; the latter are also low-information from my perspective). This situation is only going to get worse with time for the US.
BTW, I could describe an exactly analogous situation in US higher ed (with which I am quite familiar): leaders are intellectually weak, either do not understand or understand and cynically ignore really serious problems, are mainly concerned with their own careers and not the real mission goals, are subject to volatility from external low-information interest groups, etc.
The Taliban could easily turn Kabul airport into a trap, creating another Dien Bien Phu for the US. However I suspect they are advised by the Russians and Chinese to grant the Americans a peaceful exit from their 20 year disaster. The negotiations are presumably about the ~$9 billion of frozen assets in the Afghanistan treasury, future sanctions against a Taliban-led government, etc.
President Biden dispatched his top spy, a veteran of the Foreign Service and the most decorated diplomat in his Cabinet, amid a frantic effort to evacuate people from Kabul international airport in what Biden has called “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.”
The CIA declined to comment on the Taliban meeting, but the discussions are likely to have involved an impending Aug. 31 deadline for the U.S. military to conclude its airlift of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.
The Biden administration is under pressure from some allies to keep U.S. forces in the country beyond the end of the month to assist the evacuation of tens of thousands of citizens of the United States and Western countries as well as Afghan allies desperate to escape Taliban rule.
Britain, France and other U.S. allies have said more time is needed to evacuate their personnel, but a Taliban spokesman warned that the United States would be crossing a “red line” if it kept troops beyond the 31st, which he said would trigger unspecified “consequences.”
For Baradar, playing the role of counterpart to a CIA director comes with a tinge of irony 11 years after the spy agency arrested him in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation that put him in prison for eight years. ...
There are many more like Baradar. Taliban leader Gholam Ruhani (circled in the photo at top) enjoyed America's tender embrace for many years at Guantanamo.
I highly recommend The Battle of Algiers for context, as did the Pentagon in 2003 -- to no avail.
The highly dramatic film is about the organization of a guerrilla movement and the illegal methods, such as torture, used by the colonial power to contain it. Algeria succeeded in gaining independence from the French, which Pontecorvo addresses in the film's epilogue.[3]
The film has been critically acclaimed. Both insurgent groups and state authorities have considered it to be an important commentary on urban guerrilla warfare.
2003 Pentagon screening
During 2003, the press reported that United States Department of Defense (the Pentagon) offered a screening of the movie on August 27. The Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict regarded it as useful for commanders and troops facing similar issues in occupied Iraq.[38]
A flyer for the screening said:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.[39]
According to the Defense Department official in charge of the screening, "Showing the film offers historical insight into the conduct of French operations in Algeria, and was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French."[39]
Re: Dien Bien Phu, colonial wars, and Iraq / Afghanistan:
General Georges Catroux presided over a commission of inquiry into the defeat. The commission's final report ("Rapport concernant la conduite des opérations en Indochine sous la direction du général Navarre") concluded:
"... The event itself was in fact, both in terms of public opinion and of the military conduct of the war and operations, merely the end result of a long process of degradation of a faraway enterprise which, not having the assent of the nation, could not receive from the authorities the energetic impulse, and the size and continuity of efforts, required for success. ..."
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV) The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
If you are following events in Afghanistan you know that the tragedy described below will soon be repeated.
The oral histories collected in this volume are heartbreaking and real, but today the events they describe are all but forgotten.
There was never any reckoning for the crimes and stupidity of the Vietnam war, and there won't be any in the wake of our 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Our pathetic leaders and apathetic voters will find plenty of other things to distract them from a serious consideration of what happened. Strike up the band, and salute the flag.
Saigon, US Embassy evacuation, 29 April, 1975:
Kabul, US Embassy evacuation, 15 August, 2021:
From the introduction:
On March 10, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army launched what was to be its final major offensive against South Vietnam, assured that America had lost its will to fight or to finance the independence of South Vietnam. No longer fearful of American intervention, the North Vietnamese were certain that victory and the forceful unification of Vietnam was, after nearly thirty years of conflict, soon to be accomplished.
Now the social and military fabric of South Vietnam began to unravel rapidly in many places at the same time. The South suddenly began to lose the war faster than the North could win it. The military forces of the South seemed to be imploding toward Saigon. Cities and provinces were abandoned to the North without a fight. ...Victory for the armies of North Vietnam became, in many strategically important places, a mere matter of marching.
On March 29, the chaotic and desperate situation was recorded graphically by a CBS news crew that flew aboard a World Airways Boeing 727 to Danang, Vietnam's second largest city, to evacuate refugees. The plane was mobbed by soldiers who shot women and children and each other in a frenzied attempt to scramble aboard the aircraft and escape from the advancing North Vietnamese. As the plane took off with people clinging to the wheels, soldiers on the ground fired at it and a hand grenade blew up under one wing. The plane limped back into Saigon, and that evening a tape of the flight was shown on the CBS Evening News. American television viewers that Easter weekend saw the almost unbelievable horror of an army transformed into murderous rabble and a country thrashing
about helplessly in the throes of a violent death.
... As if to leave no doubt as to America's determination not to intervene again in Vietnam, on the evening of April 23, in a major address at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford announced that the war in Vietnam was "finished as far as America is concerned." The audience of students gave him a standing ovation.
... On the morning of April 29, Operation Frequent Wind began. The exercise involved the evacuation of American and Vietnamese civilians and military personnel from Tan Son Nhut Airbase and from the American Embassy in Saigon to the Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea. The operation was completed early in the morning of April 30, a few hours before the surrender of the South. When the last Marines were airlifted from the roof of the American Embassy on the morning of April 30, they left behind more than four hundred Vietnamese waiting to be airlifted out of the compound. Throughout the previous day and night those same Vietnamese had been promised again and again that they would never be abandoned by the United States. They watched in silence as the last American helicopter left the roof of the Embassy. Even the final American promise to Vietnam had been broken.
Thomas Polgar was CIA Saigon station chief. This is his last transmission from the embassy before destroying the communications equipment:
“This will be final message from Saigon station,” Mr. Polgar wrote. “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power.
“The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment... Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson.”
From his oral history:
... we got word to go, and the ambassador was finally told, ... "No, it's
going to be from the roof after all." ...
I didn't have a great emotional attachment to Vietnam like some of
my colleagues who really fell in love with the country. But in the end,
seeing how it ended, I thought that we really did a miserable job for
these people and they would have been much better off if we had never
gone there in the first place.
Our reception on the Blue Ridge [ship] showed the American military at its
worst. They started out by searching everybody. I think the ambassador
was the only one who was not searched. And in normal peacetime I far
outranked the admiral commanding the ship.
Nobody objected, though. We were tired. We were pretty placid. And
we were a defeated army.
From the epigraph:
Maybe if enough people know what happened to Vietnam, then my memories will never be lost. Maybe then they will be like tears before the rain. So listen. This is very important. This is what I remember. This is what happened to me. These are my tears before the rain. --Duong Gang Son
More from Son's oral history:
As we left Saigon, there was an American soldier standing at the back door of the plane, and he was shooting at the ground. He just kept shooting as we pulled away. And people were still crying inside the plane. I watched the soldier shooting and I wondered what he was shooting at. I think he was just trying to show American power one last time. ... But I can only guess. I don't think he knew what was happening, either. We were all confused.
Anyway, that was my last look at my country. I saw Vietnam as we
flew away and at the back door of the plane was a soldier with a gun
shooting at it.
CBS camera-man Mike Marriott was on the last plane to escape from Danang before it fell in the spring of 1975. The scene was pure chaos: thousands of panic-stricken Vietnamese storming the airliner, soldiers shooting women and children to get aboard first, refugees being trampled to death. Marriott remembers standing at the door of the aft stairway, which was gaping open as the plane took off. "There were five Vietnamese below me on the steps. As the nose of the aircraft came up, because of the force and speed of the aircraft, the Vietnamese began to fall off. One guy managed to hang on for a while, but at
about 600 feet he let go and just floated off--just like a skydiver.... What was
going through my head was, I've got to survive this, and at the same time, I've got
to capture this on film. This is the start of the fall of a country. This country is
gone. This is history, right here and now."
In Tears Before the Rain, a stunning oral history of the fall of South Vietnam,
Larry Engelmann has gathered together the testimony of seventy eyewitnesses
(both American and Vietnamese) who, like Mike Marriott, capture the feel of
history "right here and now." We hear the voices of nurses, pilots, television and
print media figures, the American Ambassador Graham Martin, the CIA station
chief Thomas Polgar, Vietnamese generals, Amerasian children, even Vietcong
and North Vietnamese soldiers.
Through this extraordinary range of perspectives,
we experience first-hand the final weeks before Saigon collapsed, from President
Thieu's cataclysmic withdrawal from Pleiku and Kontum, (Colonel Le Khac Ly,
put in command of the withdrawal, recalls receiving the order: "I opened my eyes
large, large, large. I thought I wasn't hearing clearly") to the last-minute airlift of
Americans from the embassy courtyard and roof ("I remember when the bird
ascended," says Stuart Herrington, who left on one of the last helicopters, "It
banked, and there was the Embassy, the parking lot, the street lights. And the
silence").
Kabul Update: right on schedule...
Biden, July 8: "There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan....The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely." pic.twitter.com/VO17x0wKi9
This is a good discussion of Eurasian geopolitics, Russia-China relations, decline of US empire, multipolarity, etc.
Note Diesen, originally from Norway and now a professor there, was previously professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I find his writing on Russia and Eurasian geostrategy much more realistic than what is produced by most US or European academics and analysts.
His latest book:
Will the increased economic connectivity across the Eurasian supercontinent transform Europe into the western peninsula of Greater Eurasia? The unipolar era entailed the US organising the two other major economic regions of the world, Europe and Asia, under US leadership. The rise of “the rest”, primarily Asia with China at the centre, has ended the unipolar era and even 500-years of Western dominance. China and Russia are leading efforts to integrate Europe and Asia into one large region. The Greater Eurasian region is constructed with three categories of economic connectivity – strategic industries built on new and disruptive technologies; physical connectivity with bimodal transportation corridors; and financial connectivity with new development banks, trading currencies and payments systems. China strives for geoeconomic leadership by replacing the US leadership position, while Russia endeavours to reposition itself from the dual periphery of Europe and Asia to the centre of a grand Eurasian geoeconomic constellation. Europe, positioned between the trans-Atlantic region and Greater Eurasia, has to adapt to the new international distribution of power to preserve its strategic autonomy.
Bonus: A good discussion of hypersonic missile technology and its strategic implications. See also LEO SAR, hypersonics, and the death of the naval surface ship. Effective ranges of hypersonic weapons that can be launched from land-based mobile TEL, submarine, small naval surface combatant, fighter jet, etc. are now in the thousands of kilometers. Combined with ubiquitous satellite imaging, we have a revolution in military affairs...
There are photos and video to remind us of the ignominious US withdrawal from S. Vietnam after twenty years of conflict and millions of deaths.
Over the July 4th weekend, the US military abandoned Bagram airforce base in Afghanistan, without even informing the Afghan commander and his troops.
Conveniently for our warmongering neocon "nation-building" interventionist elites, there are (as yet) no photos of this pullout.
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said.
Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America.
The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August.
“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. ...
1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era.
2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers.
3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP.
4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. ("Civilizational decline," as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.)
5. The Chinese have almost entirely closed the technology gap with the West, and dominate important areas of manufacturing. It seems very likely that their economy will eventually become significantly larger than the US economy. This is the world that strategists have to prepare for. Wars involving religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us from a possible future conflict with a peer competitor that threatens to match or exceed our economic, technological, and even military capability.
If you are young and naive and still believe that we can mostly trust our media and government, watch these videos for a dose of reality.
[ The video embedded above was a documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks on the DW channel, which I had queued to show the Collateral Murder video. It included an interview with the US soldier who saved one of the children in the rescue van that was hit with 30mm Apache fire. Inexplicably, DW has now removed the video from their channel. Click through to YouTube below for the content. ]
Some things never change. Recall the personal sacrifices made by people like Daniel Ellsberg to reveal the truth about the Vietnam war. Today it is Julian Assange...
Note Added: While it was easy to predict this outcome in 2017, it wasn't much harder to call it in 2011. See this piece from The Onion:
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—In what officials said was the "only way" to move on from what has become a "sad and unpleasant" situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan.
U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country.
"By the time you read this, we will be gone," the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. "We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever."
"We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best," the note continued. "Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future."
... After reportedly taking a "long look in the mirror" last week, senior defense officials came to the conclusion that they had "wasted a decade of [their] lives" with Afghanistan ...
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