The Cost Of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion

Marine Infantry Officer Course students stand by before a helicopter drill in Arizona. US Marine Corps photo by Cpl. James Marchetti

The cost of US war-making in the 13 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The $1.6 trillion in war spending over that time span includes the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans' medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon. The report tracks expenses through September, the end of the government's 2014 fiscal year. 

The key factor determining the cost of war during a given period over the last 13 years has been the number of US troops deployed, according to the report. The number of troops in Afghanistan peaked in 2011, when 100,000 Americans were stationed there. The number of US armed forces in Iraq reached a high of about 170,000 in 2007.

Although Congress enacted across-the-board spending cuts in March 2013, the Pentagon's war-making money was left untouched. The minimal cuts, known as sequestration, came from the Defense Department's regular peacetime budget. The Pentagon gets a separate budget for fighting wars.

In the spending bill that Congress approved earlier this month, lawmakers doled out $73.7 billion for war-related activities in 2015—$2.3 billion more than President Barack Obama had requested. As Mother Jones' Dave Gilson reported last year, US military spending is on pace to taper far less dramatically in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than it did after the end of the Vietnam War or the Cold War.

Other reports have estimated the cost of US wars since 9/11 to be far higher than $1.6 trillion. A report by Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, estimated the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as post-2001 assistance to Pakistan—to be roughly $4.4 trillion. The CRS estimate is lower because it does not include additional costs including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.

Chart by AJ Vicens.

Source: MotherJones

Islam Struggles For Unity and Independence From The West

Since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the First World War, Arab Islamic civilization has been deep in a crisis that can only be resolved from within. Its character is both political and religious and might be compared with the Thirty Years’ War in Europe that ended in 1648 in the Westphalian Settlement, which created a new international system of national sovereignties and, in religion, acceptance of the Augsburg principle (1555) of cuius regio, eius religio. Roughly speaking, these terms have prevailed in the West to the present day, notwithstanding a sinister 20th-century totalitarian interlude.

The unexpected appearance of what claims to be the new Islamic Caliphate—sweeping all before it, its atrocities demonstrating its power and ruthlessness, its avowed destiny the restoration of an Islamic Golden Age—should not be seen as anything new in imperialist and post-imperialist history. 

It is astonishing that the debate in Western circles on what (or what not) to do about ISIS has seemed largely innocent of history and indifferent to the pattern of consistent futility and failure in the West’s efforts to impose its will on the non-Western world. 

A new movement that claims to restore the lost power and glories of Islam, is actually the ultimate stage in the crisis that has afflicted the Arab Muslim civilization since its loss of unity in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the last political manifestation of a united Islam.

One is constantly told that history must be consulted in order to understand the present, but in practice that rarely is done with an open mind.

The rise of a radical popular movement demanding that a lost golden age be restored to a fragmented and culturally distraught society occurred at least twice in 19th-century China (the Taiping and Boxer rebellions) and in colonial India (the so-called Sepoy Mutiny) and Sudan (with the Mahdi Mohamed Ahmed, to take only the best known instances of such uprisings against imperial powers.

The phenomenon has appeared in post-colonial Africa: what else is the terrible Lord’s Resistance Army of children in Uganda, or other radical movements such as Boko Haram, classified in Western capitals as merely “terrorist”? Their power lies in that they are motivated by versions or perversions of religion.

All are political expressions of probably the most important recurrent phenomenon of history itself: the search for the key to the Millennium, common to sophisticated as well as simple societies throughout history. What do people think Communism was, and in fragmented forms remains today? It proposed a method for engineering what Communists—the Comintern and the Soviet and other governments—promised, and indeed believed: the coming of the Great Day when virtue incarnate would manifest itself in a transformed future condition of permanent happiness conferring justice and happiness upon an afflicted people. It is secular religion.

This is a modern phenomenon. In the West during the medieval Age of Religion the promised paradise was held to exist outside of time and would only be opened at the end of the dolor of earthly existence by the arrival of the Messiah. The Millennium marked the end of secular time, when human history would have run its course and the “Thousand Years” of heavenly reign begun—as promised in the Book of Revelation. 

Marxism was the secular translation of that religious promise, promulgated by the new prophets: Marx himself, Engels, Mao Tse-tung. A secularized prophecy was necessary because God had been assassinated in the European Enlightenment.

The contemporary crisis of the Arabs began following the Great War when the winners, the principal European imperial powers of the time, disposed of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, using their new instrument, the League of Nations, to issue mandates of supervisory control over the new monarchies and other territorial authorities recognized in the war settlements. The quest nonetheless persisted to reunite the people of Islam, united by the Koran and by the Arabic language in which the Koran was written and still is read.

The Ottoman system that had replaced the great Arab Caliphates was destroyed in the 19th and early 20th century by resistance within the Slavic European parts of the empire and then by the collision of the Ottomans with modern, industrial Europe in the World War. 

Following 1918, ageless, Islamic but non-Arab Egypt remained a monarchy, but under British “protection.” Persia, also non-Arab, another ancient independent monarchy, had fallen under an informal British ascendancy after the discovery there of oil to fuel the Royal Navy. Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan had Hashemite Arab monarchs bestowed upon them—Iraq to be ruled by Faisal, who had led the “Arab Revolt” with T.E. Lawrence as his British military counselor, and who was initially made king of Syria until displaced by the French colonial authorities.

Syria and Transjordan were made mandated states by the League of Nations, respectively under French and British control. Palestine—as everyone knows—was also placed under British Mandate but with no provision made for fulfilling Britain’s wartime promise to establish a Jewish National Home there (on condition, as the Balfour Declaration specified, that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine would be respected).

What at the time was tribal Arabia was in the course of being conquered by Ibn Saud, his conquered territories being proclaimed independent “Saudi Arabia” in 1932, while present-day Yemen remained under tribal rule.

The European colonial governments were accustomed to rule “lesser” peoples beyond Europe’s frontiers and beyond the seas in what they considered to be their subjects’ as well as their own best interests. Now they did so under the unimpeachable authority of the “international community,” as the League of Nations would be considered today, destroying the expectation the Arab peoples had of unity and genuine independence.

The new monarchies in Iraq and Syria fell to nationalist or military movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The modernizing and secular pan-Arab Baath party eventually took power in both countries. The closest thing to the pan-Arab ideal—an “Arab Nation”—was achieved after 1953 by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who introduced “Arab Socialism” into Arab politics and achieved ephemeral unions of Egypt with Syria and Yemen. 

Three decades after the Great War’s armistice, the newly created United Nations, a Western institution dominated (as still is the case) by the United States, partitioned British Mandated Palestine in order to establish the Jewish National Home promised in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of November 1917, thus creating a permanent conflict with the Palestinian possessors of the land. Since then there has been a constant struggle between American-backed Zionists and the existing Arab occupants of Palestine. 

This has inflicted a politico-psychical transformation upon the general Arab consciousness, reanimating the sensibilities of the Crusades, the great Caliphates, and the Ottoman period when Muslims ruled Balkan Europe from Greece to Vienna. 

On both sides, the Palestinian conflict has acquired the quality—to borrow the adjective contrived by Israeli politicians—of an “existential” struggle. Death to the loser.

In this political climate of Arab national failure and, as it seemed, irresolvable Israel-Palestinian conflict, the United States determined that it was capable of imposing a new order. This had been implicit in America’s overall wartime and postwar world policy. 

There were two foreign-policy objectives to achieve in the Middle East: 

The first was to assure American access to energy supplies. This had been done in a wartime agreement between Franklin Roosevelt and Arabia’s Ibn Saud, directly exchanging permanent access to Saudi oil for permanent U.S. protection. 

The second was to find an Arab-Israeli solution. Had Washington been willing to impose one in the 1950s—the creation of two permanent states underwritten by the United States—the region would have been spared 60 years of war, open and covert. That was not done. 

Israel was eventually confirmed in its impulse to possess all of the Holy Land, at whatever cost to the Palestinians, initially dismissed in Israeli propaganda discourse as an insignificant body of wandering tribesmen. 

A permanent obstacle to American regional success arose in Iran in 1951, when a popularly elected populist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized British oil interests against the will of the Shah. The Shah fled. But in 1953, a coup overthrowing the prime minister by street agitation, mustered by British and American intelligence agencies, restored the Shah. The Nixon administration later anointed him America’s ally and order-keeper in the Gulf region. However in 1979, after another period of internal disorder, he was forced to flee a Shia fundamentalist religious coup d’état, which included capture and internment of the U.S. Embassy staff and humiliation of the United States government. This produced the enmity towards Iran that has motivated American policy ever since.

The major result was Iraq’s subsequent attack on Iran, concerning territorial issues, which enjoyed unspoken American support. The war lasted eight years, and its savagery has been compared with that of the First World War. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait—another territorial claim—and a U.S.-led coalition liberated Kuwait and its oil in the so-called Gulf War. The United States then resolved to keep permanent bases in Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi objection to the presence of such installations near the Muslim holy places. 

After its 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the al-Qaeda movement, explicitly stated that its motive had been to impose God’s wrath upon the blasphemies of the United States in the Middle East. President George W. Bush reciprocated with his assertion that the jihadists of al-Qaeda embodied Evil.

The American invasions of Afghanistan and Arab Iraq were animated by revenge for the 9/11 attacks and rationalized by a fiction about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and by the self-serving American chimera of “democratizing” those two societies and eventually the rest of the region’s Arab and Central Asian Islamic states—assumed to be candidates for integration into a Washington-dominated liberal regional system.

The “New Middle East,” officially proclaimed by NATO at the end of 2003, has conspicuously failed to appear, but it remains a goal of the expansionist neoconservative visionaries among the makers of American policy. 

In Bush’s government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2008, “Democratic state-building is now an urgent component in our national interest” reflecting a “uniquely American realism” teaching that it is America’s job “to change the world,” and in its own image. 

President Obama has declared that the jihadism of the new “Islamic State” is itself an incarnation of evil that must be deterred and destroyed. 

The two sides in this renewal of George W. Bush’s War Against Global Terror—Jews and Christians in the West and their Arab enemies—both consider themselves “people of the Book” and descendants of the Prophet Abraham. They have now become in their own minds actors in the apocalyptic destiny described in the Book of Revelation. 

Many American Evangelical Protestants have convinced themselves that contemporary American foreign policy can only be understood in such a context.

Obstacles to success in Washington’s renewal of war in the Middle East are that the American political model is no longer widely convincing or respected in the region; quite the opposite is true. 

Moreover, Washington’s conduct since 2001 has undermined or deliberately subverted institutions of international order to which, in the past, the United States was a leading contributor. 

The codes of international justice and morality, developed in the Western community of nations since the 17th century, have when expedient been disregarded or rejected, with demands that the United States be exempted from the jurisdiction of international law and even from what until recently were accepted norms of international morality concerning human rights and national sovereignty.

Thus the foreign policies of the United States have been stripped of a vital part of their assumed original moral content. 

An assimilation of modern totalitarian influences, values, and practices occurred in the United States after 2001, with state assassinations, selective drone killings, disregard of due process, torture, and permanent incarceration without trial justified by American leaders in their conduct of what has amounted to a war, not really of religions, as such, but between absolutisms, the one religious, and the other, ours, a political culture of extreme and solipsistic millenarian nationalism.

One recalls the theory Samuel Huntington announced late in his career that the “next world war” would be a war of religions rather than states. The present writer dismissed this at the time as a simple projection into the future of 20th century experience and the conventional American foreign-policy thinking of the 1990s, notably that promoted by the aggressively anti-Islamic Washington neoconservatives.

The theory’s implausibility was augmented by its argument that China (regarded in Washington, then as seemingly even now, as a future enemy) was to be part of a “Confucian-Islamic military connection… to counter the military power of the West”—an alliance, if it were indeed to exist, one would think of no great use to China, a nation with a scattered and ill-treated Muslim minority of less than 3 percent of its population and little to gain from involving itself in Muslim conflicts with Washington.

The main effect of the Huntington thesis at the time it was promoted in the United States was to increase anti-Arab prejudices, especially among friends of Israel. It contributed to a climate among policymakers that made the Bush administration’s vengeance for the 9/11 attacks seem an inevitability. 

It had an even more significant influence in Islamic intellectual and ideological circles and among Arab governments because of its Harvard provenance, the eminence of Professor Huntington himself, considered the dean of the American academic specialty of political science (which emerged in the 1930s out of the behaviorist movement) and for years a leading academic influence on Washington policy-making. Was he proposing a Western attack against the Muslim world? 

While Chinese-Arab military alliance seems hardly a threat today, the Huntington thesis of a new religious war has been taken seriously in some quarters since the 9/11 attacks. 

In 2014, within days of the proclamation of the new Islamic State, the new Caliphate, the drumbeat demand had begun in congressional and think-tank Washington for an attack upon ISIS (or ISIL, or the new Arab Caliphate, or in Arabic DAESH, as it is variously known), together with criticism of Barack Obama for his initial reluctance to act. 

But why? The previous interventions in the Middle East have proven futile and damaging to both sides. 

Americans have attempted to make themselves oligarchs of the modern Arab Islamic world, introducing invasions and wars whose actual effect has been to envenom an immense part of the Arabs of the Middle East and validate the vengeance they and their leaders have sought to inflict on us. 

This is a war essentially within Islamic civilization, with religious, ideological, and political causes sprung from inside that society, as well as from the external provocations it has endured.

It can only be settled by the people of that civilization. Another foreign military intervention is the last thing it needs. 

The first of the post-1918 imperial interventions by Britain and France shattered Islamic unity as it had existed in the late Ottoman period when the Sublime Porte was a major European as well as Mediterranean power. The major nations parceled the region up until after the Second World War, when successive Arab efforts to recreate the visionary ideal of the Arab Nation were thwarted.

The American attempt to make the Shah of Iran its plenipotentiary and his state the agent of American power in the Middle East ended in provoking a fundamentalist Iran that became the most important American enemy in the region. 

The American invasions of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Sunni-ruled Iraq turned both into ruined and corrupt puppet regimes. 

One might think any new American strategy to reform the Middle East would universally be regarded as folly, even in Washington. 

What the previous attempts accomplished was destruction and the generation of seething hatred of the United States in much of the Islamic world. 

Washington has now appointed itself leader of still another and predictably unsuccessful military intervention, in which tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if this continues, may eventually die.

By joining the United States in a coalition to battle the New Caliphate, Saudi Arabia and the rest of its Arab members have once again announced their dependence upon a foreign and interventionist power to defend their own integrity, an admission of impotence to restore to the Arab Islamic world the wholeness and integrity it possessed during the Ottoman period, a confirmation of their capitulation to partition and imperialism in the 20th century, as well as their unwillingness or inability to restore the unity of the past Islamic civilization.

William Pfaff

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In this video we break down in simple terms the only way "those in power" can stay in power. It's not as complex at it may seem. They need us more than we need them.

“The race issue based on skin colour is a deeply emotional one among many, that has caused unimaginable separation and was used very craftily to position large groups of people against each other. This is a wake-up call to all those who believe they are free because of race or class or wealth. We have all been denied freedom and dignity, trapped in a life of servitude to the banking families and their economic stranglehold on our planet - no matter what colour our skin may be.”

― Michael Tellinger, UBUNTU Contributionism - A Blueprint For Human Prosperity

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The Truth About 911

It's September of 2014, the world is caught up in a whirlwind of terraranoia while global leaders posture and position themselves in preparation for the final stages in the agenda for a New World Order...with the 13th anniversary of 911 coming up right around the corner it is imperative now more than ever that we expose this event for what it was...a false flag operation designed to advance the agenda of the global elite 

The biggest threat to our freedoms is the state itself!

The Next 100 Years

Second Cold War

In the 2010s, the conflict between the US and Islamic fundamentalists will die down, and a second Cold War, less extensive and shorter than the first, will take place between the United States and Russia. It will be characterized by Russian attempts to expand its sphere of influence into Central and Eastern Europe, coupled with a buildup of Russian military capabilities. During this period, Russia's military will pose a regional challenge to the United States. The United States will become a close ally to some Central and Eastern European countries, all of whom will be dedicated to resisting Russian geopolitical threats during this period. Friedman speculates in the book that the United States will probably become a close ally of some Eastern European countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Around 2015, a Polish-led military alliance of countries in Eastern Europe will begin to form, which is referred to in the book as the "Polish Bloc."

Russian and Chinese Fragmentation

In the early 2020s, the new Cold War will end when the economic strain and political pressure on Russia, coupled withRussia's declining population, and poor infrastructure, cause the Federal government of Russia to completely collapse, much like the Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Other former Soviet Union countries will fragment as well.

Around this time, China will politically and culturally fragment as well. The book asserts that the rapid economic development of China since 1980 will cause internal pressures and inequalities in Chinese society. Regional tension in China will grow between the prosperous coastal regions and the impoverished interior. The end result will be regional fragmentation of the country. Although China will remain formally united, the central government will gradually lose much of its real power, with the provinces becoming increasingly autonomous.

In the 2020s, the collapse of the Russian government and the fragmentation of China will leave Eurasia in general chaos. Other powers will then move in to annex or establish spheres of influence in the area, and in many cases, regional leaders will secede. In Russia, Chechnya and other Muslim regions, as well as the Pacific Far East will become independent, Finlandwill annex Karelia, Romania will annex Moldova, Tibet will gain independence with help from India, Taiwan will extend its influence into China, while the United States, European powers, and Japan will re-create regional spheres of influence in China.

New Powers Arise

In the 2020s and 2030s, three main powers will emerge in Eurasia: Turkey, Poland, and Japan. Initially supported by the United States, Turkey will expand its sphere of influence and become a regional power, much as it was during the time of theOttoman Empire. The Turkish sphere of influence will extend into the Arab world, which will have increasingly fragmented by then, and north into Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Israel will continue to be a powerful nation and will be the only country in the immediate region to remain outside the Turkish sphere of influence. However, Israel will be forced to come to an accommodation with Turkey due to Turkey's military and political power.

Meanwhile, Japan will expand its economic influence to regions of coastal China, the Russian Far East, and many Pacific Islands. Friedman predicts that Japan will change its foreign policy during this time period, becoming more geopolitically aggressive, beginning a major military buildup. Friedman predicts that Japan will build military strength capable of regionallyprojecting power across East Asia during this time.

Finally, Poland will continue to lead its military alliance, the "Polish Bloc." Poland and its allies will be a major power, much like the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Now possessing substantial military strength, Poland will expand its economic influence into what was formerly European Russia, and will begin to compete with Turkey for influence in the important economic region of the Volga River Valley. Around this time, space programs for military use will begin to emerge, and Japan and Turkey will increasingly begin to develop military capabilities in space.

Tensions Build

At the beginning of this period, the United States will be allied with all three powers. By 2020, the United States will have been allied with Turkey and Japan for over 75 years. However, in the years after the end of the second cold war and collapse of Russia, The United States will gradually become uneasy as Turkey and Japan expand their military power and economic influence. Establishing regional spheres of influence, Turkey and Japan will begin to threaten American interests. The growth of Turkish and Japanese naval power, and their military activities in space will be particularly disturbing to the United States.

Japan and Turkey, having similar interests, will probably form an alliance near the end of this period, in an effort to counter the overwhelming global power of the United States. The book also speculates that Germany and Mexico may possibly join this anti-United States coalition, although it is generally unlikely. In this coming confrontation, the United States will be allied with the "Polish Bloc," probably with an unstable China, India, a reunified Korea, and the United Kingdom. By the 2040s, there will be global tension and competition between these two alliances.

Demographic Change

The book also predicts that decades of low birthrates in developed countries, especially in Europe, will result in dramatic cultural, social, and political shifts through the first half of the 21st century. These countries will experience economic and social strain, caused by an increasingly smaller working age demographic and a rapidly aging population. As a result, in the decades of the 2020s and 2030s, Western nations will begin to compete for immigrants. In particular, the United States will depart from its policy of discouraging Mexican immigration, and will begin trying to entice foreigners - especially Mexicans - to immigrate to the United States.

World War III

In the mid-21st century, around the year 2050, a Third World War will take place, between the United States, the "Polish Bloc," Britain, India, and China on one side, and Turkey and Japan on the other. Germany and France will enter the war in its late stages on the side of Turkey and Japan. According to the book, the war will probably be started by a coordinated Turkish-Japanese sneak attack against the United States and its allies. In the book, Friedman hypothesizes the attack will place on November 24, 2050, at 5:00 p.m, during Thanksgiving Day.^[1]

The Turkish-Japanese alliance's initial strike will cripple the military capabilities of the United States and its allies. The Turkish-Japanese alliance will then attempt to enter negotiations, demanding the United States accept the Turkish-Japanese's alliance's status as a fellow Superpower. However, the United States will reject the terms and go to war, refusing to accept Turkish and Japanese hegemony over Eurasia. The Turkish-Japanese alliance will initially possess a military advantage after crippling the United States' military during its first strike. However, as the war progresses, the balance of power will begin to shift as the United States rebuilds and increases its military capabilities, and pioneers the use of new military technologies. The war will ultimately end with a victory by the United States and its allies.

The primary weapons of the war will be long-range hypersonic aircraft and infantrymen with highly sophisticated, powered body-armor. Control of space will be crucial over the course of the conflict, with space-based weapons systems and military bases on the Moon playing a significant role. The war will last about two or three years. According to Friedman, the war will be a limited war, very different in its conduct than a total war, such as World War II of the 20th century. Friedman asserts that this will be due to the fact that all major powers involved in the conflict will possess nuclear weaponry, and that use ofPrecision Guided Munitions will minimize collateral damage. Friedman estimates that the war will cost somewhere around 50,000 lives.

Post War

Following the war, the United States will enjoy a new post-war boom that will begin in the 2050s following the war and last throughout the 2060s. The economic boom will come as a result of increased defense expenditures that lead to the development of new technologies, which will foster dramatic economic growth and increase American influence worldwide. In addition, the economic problems imposed by mass retirement of the baby boomers will fade away as the last of the boomers die.

The United States will continue to be militarily and politically dominant over the world, and will also cement its hegemony over space. In particular, it will work to keep other powers from developing military capabilities in space. Meanwhile, Turkey will retain the bulk of its sphere of influence, although its de facto empire will become increasingly restive as a result of defeat, while Japan will lose its own sphere of influence. Under the US-dictated treaty that will end World War III, military restrictions will be imposed on both Japan and Turkey, although in practice they will be unenforceable and "merely a gratuitous humiliation victors enjoy imposing on the vanquished".

Meanwhile, Poland's power will grow due to the expanded size of the Polish Bloc as a result of the war. Although its infrastructure and economy will have been shattered, and despite having suffered particularly heavy casualties, Poland will exploit the Polish Bloc's increased sphere of influence to rebuild its economy. The United States will begin to look at the Polish Bloc's growing strength as a potential future threat. To prevent Polish hegemony in Europe, the United States will ally with its former enemy Turkey, as well as Britain, to prevent Poland from dominating Europe, and will prevent Poland from making use of space for military purposes.

US-Mexican Conflict

According to the book, North America will remain the center of gravity for the global economic and political system for at least a few more centuries following the 21st century. However, this does not guarantee that the United States will always dominate North America. In the decades following the war, starting in the 2070s, tensions between Mexico and the United States will rise. By this time, after decades of massive immigration, many parts of the United States, especially the South West, will become predominantly ethnically, culturally, and socially Mexican. During this period, many ethnic Mexicans living in the Southwestern United States, especially those living in the Mexican Cession, will increasingly shun assimilation into American culture, due to the fact that they will live in a predominantly Mexican region, as well as the close proximity of Mexico. These demographic changes will be irreversible. Most Mexicans in the US Southwest will identify as Mexicans rather than Americans, and their national loyalty will be to Mexico and not the United States. During this period, Mexico will experience substantial economic and population growth. By the end of the 21st century, Mexico's military and economic power will have grown tremendously, and it will be in a position to challenge the United States for dominance of North America. In addition to an insurgency by Mexican separatists, political, cultural, and military tensions between the United States and Mexico will rise, and generate into a full-blown confrontation.

An extended crisis between the United States and Mexico will ensue, one that the United States will be unable to resolve through the use of military force. Most of the world, wary of American dominance, will secretly hope for a Mexican victory, especially Poland and Brazil, but no other nation will directly interfere. Friedman's final prediction is that the conflict will continue into the 22nd century.

(By  George Friedman)

Via: Wikipedia

New Powers Arise

The U.S. Navy controls all the oceans. We are an order of magnitude more powerful than anyone else. Undermining that kind of power can happen, but it normally takes wars, and it certainly takes generations.

My expectation is we’re going to see a fragmentation in China because of internal social stresses, and the weakening of Russia.

Three Powers Are Emerging On The Periphery Of Eurasia:

One is Japan, which is truly the center of gravity of Asia; it’s the second-largest economy in the world. Unlike China, Japan does not have a billion people living in sub-Saharan-type poverty. It is unified. It has the largest navy in Asia.

Second is Turkey, now the 17th- largest economy in the world and the largest Islamic economy. And whenever Islam emerges into a coherent political entity, which it hasn’t done for a century, Turkey is almost invariably at its center. Turkey has by far the most powerful and effective military in Europe and is going to be a major Mediterranean power.

The third country is Poland. Few people know that Poland is the 21st-largest economy in the world, the 8th-largest in Europe, and by far the most dynamic. It is also a country very much afraid of Germany and Russia. Russia is right now in the process of rebuilding itself. This makes the Poles very uneasy. The Germans are reaching out to the Russians. Poland feels trapped.

Japan is utterly dependent on the sea lanes for the import and export of products. And those sea lanes are controlled by the United States. The United States controls the oceans, and its view is that that is the foundation of its national security.

As Japan and Turkey become greater maritime powers, the United States will become hostile toward them. Japan and Turkey each wants to be a maritime power and each sees the U.S. as a threat. Poland has no interest in being a maritime power. It’s afraid of Turkey, and interested in the U.S. There’s a natural coalition.

The center of gravity of American military power is in space. Everything from navigation to communication to intelligence satellites operate in space. If any power were to knock out the United States, it would have to knock out those assets. If the Japanese and Turks were to take on the United States, that would be the place they would have to strike first, to blind us, to cripple us. I would expect the war to start there. 

The details may not be as I say—there may be other players, it may not happen in 2050—but every century has a war. The 21st century is not going to be the first century without major warfare.

[George Friedman]

Partners In Extermination

US-Israeli Regional Hegemony

Alliance systems can be a perfidious or at least unscrupulous thing, entered into by the parties, whether two or more, in the hope of maximizing each’s national self-interest covering a multitude of purposes–military, political, ideological, defensive, offensive, in character, addressed to power, the expansion of political economy, spheres of influence, financial-commercial penetration, frequently all of the above, and intensified under conditions of wartime—particularly perfidious or unscrupulous when the parties are unevenly matched in power, dominance by one often (but not always!) resulting to the detriment of the other(s). In the 20th century the US-British “special relationship” or, serving both in two world wars and postwar reconstruction after the second, the Anglo-American Entente, illustrates convenience in the quest for HEGEMONY, America benefiting from British military cooperation and, beyond, a world trading structure facilitating open markets, the reduction of tariff barriers, and a stable international monetary system, as meanwhile, despite this seemingly close embrace, the US, during and following the war, made steady progress in weakening then dismantling the Imperial Preference System and consequently eroded the power of the British Empire (America’s chief competitor in world trade, and a main obstacle to its leadership of capitalism as a global system). No holds barred, where power and political economy are conjoined, at which point ideology comes into play in the effort to redefine the world order, i.e., the Cold War, the Free World, American Exceptionalism in full bloom as exemplar, protagonist, vehicle for achieving Democracy in the face of the threat posed by modern day Bolshevism, Russia to the West and China to the East.

The 20th century mindset remains with us, outfitted in new clothing, yet with surprisingly little changes as viewed from the American perspective, Russia and China still demonized for purposes of maintaining the military foundations of the American polity (in spite of the capitalist inroads made into the societies and cultures of each), US hegemonic aspirations based on unilateralism still ever popular and intact, yet now facing grave obstacles, perhaps greater than at any time since the 1960s, because the world power system is becoming decentralized, manifested not only in the obvious quarters, Russia, China, the EU as a concert of powers, and the industrialization of the Third World, but also conflicting currents within the preceding and a ripening of discontent affecting the world order, which, as it shakes down, can yield any number of possible outcomes, as for example, military dictatorships, popular awakenings and overthrow of despotic regimes, the regrouping of international relations (chiefly, a rapprochement between Russia and China overcoming historical mistrust over decades, brought together through American policies and actions—most recent, Ukraine and NATO/Pacific-first strategy and TPP–directed against both), together suggesting a world in tension at knife’s point. One further constant from the American perspective is its close relationship to Israel, every way germane—more so than ever, given the reshaping of the world structure—to the attempted perpetuation of US global hegemony.

Perfidiousness still holds, on both sides, despite which, the alliance because of mutual convenience and underlying ideological propinquity, remains rock-solid, as each pursues comparable policies of military and/or political-economic conquest generally not in each other’s way (and if anything, complementing one the other). For each, the world becoming, as brought on by their actions, more menacing, has the result of creating a siege mentality elevated to matter-of-fact desensitization through colossal arrogance toward the commission of war crimes against others, increasingly taking on the proportions of genocide. America and Israel alike, one the supplier of funds, arms-and-ammunition, and diplomatic cover at the UN, the other the faithful executioner of disproportionate often overwhelming force as though in the service of a Higher Being, yet pursuant to concrete purposes of domination, exploitation, and territory, have together staked out the Middle East as a crucial sphere of influence, America piggy-backing over Israel to enlarge the sphere as in its own right making possible the exercise of control covering an arc from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and North Africa, while for Israel itself the immediate region and neutralizing prospective power-blocs will do. A perfect match-up on the altar of POWER reified to the extent of impunity in its exercise—with extermination the end point on a continuum consonant with and created for the purpose of expansion and subjugation, humans standing in the way no more than fly specks.

Domination, in its geopolitical, geostrategic, and, not usually recognized, geopsychological, form, is on a slippery slope, extermination–an outcome not predetermined, arising from historical circumstances and structural context—being the product of authoritarian values rooted in the society’s political culture and its ideological expression, in America, the hierarchical-class overlay on nominal equalitarianism, in which both wealth and power have been disguised as democratic, lending credence to and legitimating upper-groups’ superior position and right to rule, while in Israel, the formulaic hierarchy resides in a religious-sourced chosen-people doctrine overlaid on a militaristic underpinning anything but nominal, applied to the Outsider, and internally, a political-military leadership system to a large extent acting independent of, though in the name of, civil and religious institutions. In both cases, the US and Israel, counter-forces to the exercise of military power are weak to nonexistent (still retaining formalistic democracy in order, consciously or not, to hide hegemonic purpose, internal social discipline, and boundaries of dissent, as needed to ensure popular approval and/or complicity in a course of permanent war, the preparation for war, or the status of recognized command wherever its military reach extends).

For the US, as if the world could be flattened and neatly demarcated into territorial squares of varying size, control has always meant a process of as near TOTAL the coverage of these separable spheres of influence, the more secure—by definition—America would be, lest eruption, or worse, omission, in one place, lead to the toppling of predominance elsewhere. “Prestige,” that seemingly silly justification for war readiness, military budgets, enforced patriotism, is actually code for the pragmatic realization that domination, as Americans see it, is a zero-sum game, interlaced with an extreme fear of societal decline, in which the falling-domino effect is integral to the quest for hegemony, particularly its unilateral form. Thus, every square to be covered, accounted for, the Middle East especially attractive and necessary for obvious reasons, OIL, and less obvious ones, the geopolitical-geostrategic framework alluded to in that regional context, not only the territorial access from Spain to Turkey and the upper portion of Africa, but also slightly distanced pressure points on Russia and China. If for no other reason, Israel would then be seen as indispensable in completing the military paradigm of critical spheres of influences also matched elsewhere throughout the world.

But in fact there are other if not as compelling reasons for championing the cause of Israel, concretized in the near-integration of their respective military, intelligence, and planning/think tank communities. Israel behaves toward its neighbors the way America does to the world, waving an ideological banner of repression and force that gives courage, reinforcement, consolation, and legitimacy to America doing the same thing. Mossad’s skill at assassination is the envy of Washington, creating a pathway for CIA and Special Ops to act similarly; likewise, raising “collateral damage” to a high art through terrorizing civilian populations (for the US, drone warfare, even beyond casualties the constant buzzing overhead, those below not knowing where and when the sudden strike) and carpet-bombing/shelling—an uncanny accuracy in Gaza for hitting UN schools serving as shelters for a large, helpless population, a back-and-forth saga of military cruelty and destruction, first, America taking the lead, then Israel, each learning from the other and all the while improving lethality and psych ops. In this light, the US needs Israel as instructor par excellence in the ways of warfare and hegemony, a shining ideological example by which to  toughen up the American spirit, all of this in addition to furnishing a beacon of light in the ways of domination per se: how to treat those below (no coincidence that the Ferguson, MO., police had sent one of its officers to Israel for special training), a process of social control beginning seemingly to find disfavor in America, so that Israel’s own methods of crowd control, population displacement, and use of heavy-handed instruments of persuasion undoubtedly have provided a boost, a sense of psychological well-being, to those beginning to lose confidence in the majesty of force.

America has been on that slippery slope before, scorched-earth policies and programs in Vietnam perhaps compensating in full to Israelis, a quid pro quo of brutality, for the lessons they have taught, evening the scale of indebtedness so that both could proceed in friendly competition to determine who best is the practitioner of violence, each thereby giving latitude to the other in filling out the grounds of permissible torture and deprivation. How doubt, even for a moment, the benefits of such an alliance, except that each simultaneously is in pursuit of its own agenda. Although Obama and Netanyahu may be interchangeable, as for political slickness raised to the highest power (Bush and Sharon, for example, still prekindergarten by comparison), their levels of operational activity give the nod to Obama in the scope of genocide each can reasonably be expected to pursue and achieve. Presently, Israel is America in microcosm, content to create absolute devastation in Gaza (actually, not content, until every house is leveled, ditto, hospitals, infrastructure–the land vacated and rendered uninhabitable, the people, made to suffer), and America, Israel in magnification, content to bully its way back into unilateral domination of the world system, if need be, at the risk of war with Russia, China, or both, a risk that could see the planet returned to the beginning of time via nuclear annihilation.

That there is increasingly less reticence about extermination, Gaza, serving as a focal point, an emblem of human cowardice and cruelty, few in the world coming to the defense of its people, and with that as precedent for the future, America and Israel may enjoy still closer relations, vibrating as one, until the Awakening occurs, if it ever will, and social justice trumps domination. But today, nothing of the kind. I have before me Jodi Rudoren’s New York Times article, “In Torn Gaza, if Roof Stands, It’s Now Home,” (Aug. 18), which must be read with an understanding of how much America has aided Israel across the board, and here, where extermination, although not complete, has already left its dirty hands and choke hold of genocide. Her first sentence says it all: “Telltale signs of the displaced are everywhere in Gaza.” No running water, electricity; people crowded into tiny spaces, i.e., where roofs stand, and many, where they do not, 10-13 to a room. She reports: “Scores of families have hung sheets and scarves from every available tree and pole to create shady spaces on the grounds of Al Shifa Hospital; in the unauthorized camp, a 3-month-old slept one recent morning in a wire crib lined with cardboard.” “On Sunday [the 17th],” she continues, “more than 235,000 people were still crammed into 81 of the United Nations’ 156 schools, where classes are supposed to start next Sunday.” No chance of that. (As I wrote previously, these UN schools/shelters appear to be favorite targets of Israeli land, sea, and air power, with civilian casualties running high.) One mother of eight, Alia Kamal Elaf, stated, “’Our fate at the end will be in the street.’” Perhaps terms such as “extermination” and “genocide” should be applied to the living as well, when life itself becomes a living death.

No showers. Already the UN “is placing a nurse and health educator at each site in the hope of staving off outbreaks of meningitis, lice and scabies…. People at the schools complain of incessant flies and fetid bathrooms.” Elaf said, “she has but one mattress for her eight children, ages 8 to 16.” On the grounds of Shifa Hospital, Rudoren writes, “[c]onditions are worse… where neither food nor water is provided to the makeshift camp that sprawls outside the internal medicine building, next to the X-ray department, between the emergency room, the morgue and the maternity ward.” Abdullah Hamouda, in his tent: “’Here each day equals a year.’” And Adel al-Goula, who “has already pitched a tent of sorts, in front of the pile of debris that used to be the home where he lived from the age of 13…. [t]he date, grape, olive, fig, walnut and lemon trees…all gone,” put up a sign, “’Home of the al-Ghoula Family,’” and declared in the eloquent words of one who has seen suffering in the world, “’We must rent a place, but we should still come here every day and sit here. To receive people. To tell the world: We are rooted in our land, until death.’”

Norman Pollack has written on Populism. His interests are social theory and the structural analysis of capitalism and fascism. 

Here's To The Warmongers

Featuring: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Bill O'Reilly, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, John F. Kennedy, Mitt Romney, Ronald Regan, Richard Nixon, Vladimir Putin and more!

Here’s to the warmongers. The criminals. The liars. The psychopaths. The wolves in sheep’s clothing. The ones who have no integrity. They’re not fond of responsibility. And they have no respect for your rights.

You can vote for them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do, is ignore them. Because they have the guys with the guns…and they can have you thrown in a cage. 

While some may see them as responsible leaders, we see evil. Because the ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world, are always the ones who do.

"We Built ISIS" - Gen Mcinenery

The Geopolitics Of World War III

Contrary to popular belief, the conduct of nations on the international stage is almost never driven by moral considerations, but rather by a shadowy cocktail of money and geopolitics. As such, when you see the mouthpieces of the ruling class begin to demonize a foreign country, the first question in your mind should always be "what is actually at stake here?"

The U.S. dollar is a unique currency. In fact its current design and its relationship to geopolitics is unlike any other in history. Though it has been the world reserve currency since 194 this is not what makes it unique. Many currencies have held the reserve status off and on over the centuries, but what makes the dollar unique is the fact that since the early 1970s it has been, with a few notable exceptions, the only currency used to buy and sell oil on the global market.

Prior to 1971 the U.S. dollar was bound to the gold standard, at least officially. According to the IMF, by 1966, foreign central banks held $14 billion U.S. dollars, however the United States had only $3.2 billion in gold allocated to cover foreign holdings.

Translation: the Federal Reserve was printing more money than it could actually back.

The result was rampant inflation and a general flight from the dollar.

In 1971 in what later came to be called the "Nixon Shock" President Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard completely.

At this point the dollar became a pure debt based currency. With debt based currencies money is literally loaned into existence.

Approximately 70% of the money in circulation is created by ordinary banks which are allowed to loan out more than they actually have in their accounts.
The rest is created by the Federal Reserve which loans money that they don't have, mostly to government.


Kind of like writing hot checks, except it's legal, for banks. This practice which is referred to as fractional reserve banking is supposedly regulated by the Federal Reserve, an institution which just happens to be owned and controlled by a conglomerate of banks, and no agency or branch of government regulates the Federal Reserve.

Now to make things even more interesting these fractional reserve loans have interest attached, but the money to pay that interest doesn't exist in the system. As a result there is always more total debt than there is money in circulation, and in order to stay afloat the economy must grow perpetually.

This is obviously not sustainable.

Now you might be wondering how the dollar has maintained such a dominant position on the world stage for over forty years if it's really little more than an elaborate ponzi scheme.

Well this is where the dollar meets geopolitics.

In 1973 under the shadow of the artificial OPEC oil crisis, the Nixon administration began secret negotiations with the government of Saudi Arabia to establish what came to be referred to as the petrodollar recycling system. Under the arrangement the Saudis would only sell their oil in U.S. dollars, and would invest the majority of their excess oil profits into U.S. banks and Capital markets. The IMF would then use this money to facilitate loans to oil importers who were having difficulties covering the increase in oil prices. The payments and interest on these loans would of course be denominated in U.S. dollars.

This agreement was formalized in the "The U.S.-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation" put together by Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974.

Another document released by the Congressional Research Service reveals that these negotiations had an edge to them, as U.S. officials were openly discussing the feasibility of seizing oil fields in Saudi Arabia militarily.

In the United States, the oil shocks produced inflation, new concern about foreign investment from oil producing countries, and open speculation about the advisability and feasibility of militarily seizing oil fields in Saudi Arabia or other countries. In the wake of the embargo, both Saudi and U.S. officials worked to re-anchor the bilateral relationship on the basis of shared opposition to Communism, renewed military cooperation, and through economic initiatives that promoted the recycling of Saudi petrodollars to the United States via Saudi investment in infrastructure, industrial expansion, and U.S. securities.

The system was expanded to include the rest of OPEC by 1975.

Though presented as buffer to the recessionary effects of rising oil prices, this arrangement had a hidden side effect. It removed the traditional restraints on U.S. monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve was now free to increase the money supply at will. The ever increasing demand for oil would would prevent a flight from the dollar, while distributing the inflationary consequences across the entire planet.

The dollar went from being a gold back currency to a oil backed currency. It also became America's primary export.

Did you ever wonder how the U.S. economy has been able to stay afloat while running multibillion dollar trade deficits for decades?

Did you ever wonder how it is that the U.S. holds such a disproportionate amount of the worlds wealth when 70% of the U.S. economy is consumer based?

In the modern era, fossil fuels make the world go round. They have become integrated into every aspect of civilization: agriculture, transportation, plastics, heating, defense and medicine, and demand just keeps growing and growing.

As long as the world needs oil, and as long as oil is only sold in U.S. dollars, there will be a demand for dollars, and that demand is what gives the dollar its value.

For the United States this is a great deal. Dollars go out, either as paper or digits in a computer system, and real tangible products and services come in. However for the rest of the world, it's a very sneaky form of exploitation.

Having global trade predominately in dollars also provides the Washington with a powerful financial weapon through sanctions. This is due to the fact that most large scale dollar transactions are forced to pass through the U.S.

This petrodollar system stood unchallenged until September of 2000 when Saddam Hussein announced his decision to switch Iraq's oil sales off of the dollar to Euros. This was a direct attack on the dollar, and easily the most important geopolitical event of the year, but only one article in the western media even mentioned it.

In the same month that Saddam announced he was moving away from the dollar, an organization called the “The Project for a New American Century”, of which Dick Cheney just happened to be a member, released a document entitled “REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”. This document called for massive increases in U.S. military spending and a much more aggressive foreign policy in order to expand U.S. dominance world wide. However the document lamented that achieving these goals would take many years “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

One year later they got it.

Riding the emotional reaction to 9/11, the Bush administration was able to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and pass the patriot act all without any significant resistance.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and this wasn't a question of bad intelligence. This was a cold calculated lie, and the decision to invade was made in full knowledge of the disaster which would follow.

They knew exactly what was going to happen but in 2003, they did it anyway. Once Iraqi oil fields were under U.S. control, oil sales were immediately switched back to the dollar. Mission accomplished.

Soon after the invasion of Iraq the Bush administration attempted to extend these wars to Iran. Supposedly the Iranian government was working to build a nuclear weapon. After the Iraq fiasco Washington's credibility was severely damaged as a result they were unable to muster international or domestic support for an intervention. Their efforts were further sabotaged by elements within the CIA and Mossad who came forward to state that Iran had not even made the decision to develop nuclear weapons much less begin an attempt. However the demonization campaign against Iran continued even into the Obama administration.

Why?

Well, might it have something to do with the fact that since 2004 Iran has been in the process of organizing an independent oil bourse? They were building their own oil market, and it wasn't going to be tied to the dollar. The first shipments of oil were sold through this market in July of 2011.

Unable to get the war that they wanted, the U.S. used the U.N to impose sanctions against Iran. The goal of the sanctionswas to topple the Iranian regime. While this did inflict damage on the Iranian economy, the measures failed to destabilize the country. This was due in large part to Russia's assistance in bypassing U.S. banking restrictions.

In February of 2009 Muammar Gaddafi, was named chairman of the African Union. He immediately proposed the formation of a unified state with a single currency. It was the nature of that proposed currency that got him killed.

In March of 2009 the African Union released a document entitled "Towards a Single African Currency". Pages 106 and 107 of that document specifically discuss the benefits and technicalities of running the African Central bank under a gold standard. On page 94 it explicitly states that the key to the success of the African Monetary Union would be the "eventual linking of a single African currency to the most monetary of all commodities - gold." (Note that the page number is different on other versions of the document that they released.)

In 2011 the CIA moved into Libya and began backing militant groups in their campaign to topple Gaddafi and the U.S. and NATO pushed through and stretched a U.N. nofly-zone resolution to tip the balance with airstrikes. The presence of Al-Qaeda extremists among these rebel fighters was swept under the rug.

Libya, like Iran and Iraq had committed the unforgivable crime of challenging the U.S. dollar.

The NATO intervention in Libya segued into a covert war on Syrian. The armories of the Libyan government were looted and the weapons were shipped via Turkey to Syrian rebels groups working to topple Assad. It was already clear at this point that many of these fighters had ties to terrorist organizations. However the U.S. national security apparatus viewed this as a necessary evil. In fact the Council on Foreign relations published an article in 2012 stating that "The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now."

The campaign for regime change in Syria, as in Libya has been presented in terms of human rights. Obviously this isn't the real motive.

In 2009, Qatar put forth a proposal to run a natural gas pipeline through Syria and Turkey to Europe. Assad however rejected this, and in 2011 he forged a pact with Iraq and Iran to run a pipeline eastward cutting Qatar and Saudi Arabia out of the loop completely. Not surprisingly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been the most aggressive regional players in the push to topple the Syrian government.

But why would this pipeline dispute put Syria in Washington's cross hairs? Three reasons:

1. This pipeline arrangement would significantly strengthen Iran's position, allowing them to export to European markets without having to pass through any of Washington's allies. This obviously reduces the U.S. government's leverage.

2. Syria is Iran's closest ally. It's collapse would inherently weaken Iran.

3. Syria and Iran have a mutual defense agreement, and a U.S. intervention in Syria could open the door to open conflict with Iran.

In February of 2014 this global chess game heated up in a new venue: Ukraine. The real target however was Russia.

You see Russia just happens to be the worlds second largest oil exporter, and not only have they been a thorn in Washington's side diplomatically, but they also opened an energy bourse in 2008, with sales denominated in Rubles and gold. This project had been in the works since 2006. They have also been working with China to pull off of the dollar in all of their bilateral trade.

Russia has also been in the process of organizing a Eurasian Economic Union which includes plans to adopt common currency unit, and which is slated to have its own independent energy market.

Leading up to the crisis in Ukraine had been presented with a choice: either join the E.U. under an association agreement or join the Eurasian Union. The E.U. insisted that this was an either or proposition. Ukraine couldn't join both. Russia on the other hand, asserted that joining both posed no issue. President Yanukovich decided to go with Russia.

In response the U.S. national security apparatus did what it does best: they toppled Yanukovich and installed a puppet government. To see the full evidence of Washington's involvement in the coup watch "The ukraine crisis what you're not being told"

This article from the Guardian is also worth reading.

Though this all seemed to be going well at first, the U.S. quickly lost control of the situation. Crimea held a referendum and the people voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia. The transition was orderly and peaceful. No one was killed, yet the West immediately framed the entire event as an act of Russian aggression, and this became the go to mantra from that point on.

Crimea is important geostrategically because of its position in the Black Sea which allows for the projection of naval power into the Mediterranean. It has also been Russian territory for most of recent history.

The U.S. has been pushing for Ukraine's inclusion into NATO for years now. Such a move would place U.S. forces right on Russia's border and could have potentially resulted in Russia losing their naval base in Crimea. This is why Russia immediately accepted the results of the Crimean referendum and quickly consolidated the territory.

Meanwhile in Eastern Ukraine, two regions declared independence from Kiev and held referendums of their own. The results of which overwhelmingly favored self rule.

Kiev responded to this with what they referred to as anti-terrorist operations. In practice this was a massive and indiscriminate shelling campaign which killed thousands of civilians. Apparently killing civilians didn't qualify as aggression to the West. In fact the IMF explicitly warned the provisional government that their 17 billion dollar loan package could be in danger if they were not able to put down the uprising in eastern Ukraine.

While the war against eastern Ukraine was raging elections were held and Petro Poroshenko was elected president. It turns out that Poroshenko, was exposed by a leaked diplomatic cable released by wikileaks in 2008 as having worked as a mole for the U.S. State Department since 2006. They referred to him as "Our Ukraine insider" and much of the cable referred to information that he was providing. (A separate cable showed that the U.S. knew Poroshenko was corrupt even at that point.)

Having a puppet in place however hasn't turned out to be enough to give Washington the upper hand in this crisis. What does Washington do when they have no other leverage? They impose sanctions, they demonize and they saber rattle (or pull a false flag).

This isn't a very good strategy when dealing with Russia. In fact it has already backfired. The sanctions have merely pushed Russia and China into closer cooperation and accelerated Russia's de-dollarization agenda. And in spite of the rhetoric, this has not led to Russia being isolated. The U.S. and NATO have put a wedge between themselves and Russia, but not between Russia and the rest of the world (look up BRICS if you are unclear about this).

This new anti-dollar axis goes deeper than economics. These countries understand what's at stake here. This is why in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis China has proposed a new Eurasian security pact which would include Russia and Iran.

Consider the implications here as the Obama administration begins bombing in Syria which also has a mutual defense agreement with Iran.

This is not the cold war 2.0. This is World War 3.0. The masses may not have figured it out yet, but history will remember it that way.

Alliances are already solidifying and and a hot war is underway on multiple fronts. If the provocations and proxy wars continue, it's only a matter of time before the big players confront each other directly, and that is a recipe for disaster.

Does all of this sound insane to you? Well you're right. The people running the world right now are insane, and the public is sleep walking into a tragedy. If you want to alter the course that we are on, there's only one way to do it. We have to wake up that public. Even the most powerful weapons of war are neutralized if you reach the mind of the man behind the trigger.

How do we wake the masses you ask? Don't wait for someone else to answer that for you. Get creative. Act like you children's and grandchildren's futures depend on it, because they do.