The year 2015 will be remembered as a year of expanding global warfare and militarism. It began with discussions of the possibility of “total war” against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, saw new provocations against China in the South China Sea, and draws to a close amid the escalation of the US and European war in Iraq and Syria and the spread of conflict to Yemen, Libya and other parts of Africa.
Originally appeared at World Socialist WebSite
The imperialist powers are determined to make 2016 an even bloodier and more dangerous year. Germany and Japan are openly remilitarizing, as their governments seek to whitewash and rationalize the crimes of the World War II era. All of the imperialist powers have seized on the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino to place their populations and economies on a war footing.
The most dangerous factor is the US drive for global domination. The United States has its hands in virtually every country, employing drone assassinations, Special Forces operations and a network of military bases and agreements aimed at establishing unchallenged military domination over the planet, along with cyberspace and outer space.
More plans are afoot. Washington is preparing to expand its global basing system through the addition of a “larger network envisioned by the Pentagon,” which will include at least four new Special Forces hubs and numerous new “spoke” bases, according to a New York Times article published Monday.
The commando network will be centered on Eurasia and Africa but will be global in scope, according to Pentagon officials. Among the new bases will be a permanent establishment in Afghanistan, which will function as “a hub for Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives throughout Central and South Asia.”
The record of the US special units, which have emerged as the spearhead of the so-called “war on terror” since 2001, makes clear the murderous nature of the escalating commando war. US Special Forces have been granted a general license to carry out violence and mayhem in every part of the world with total disregard for international law. Thousands of US commandos are already operating in between 85 and 130 countries worldwide, according to varying estimates by US media sources.
The enlarged Special Forces network is only one element of a broader strategic escalation by Washington. US weapons manufacturers are collaborating with the government to channel an expanding war chest of arms to allied governments and proxy forces, with American weapons sales surging in recent years. In 2014, total US arms sales jumped by $10 billion to a total of $35 billion, giving US corporations control over 50 percent of the world weapons market, according to a congressional report released last week.
The intensified drive for a redivision affects every region of the world.
Europe
Washington is pre-positioning military equipment and deploying conventional forces and military “advisors” and trainers throughout Europe in preparation for war against Russia.
The US Army plans to double the number of tanks it has deployed to Europe, sending another full armored brigade to the continent, accompanied by infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons as well as an additional full Army division dedicated to joint operations with NATO and European militaries.
In Ukraine, US Army forces are training five battalions of active-duty forces and US Special Forces are partnering with the Ukrainian military to develop Ukraine commando units.
Asia Pacific
South Korea, a country that has been tapped to serve as a staging area for US war preparations against China, was the leading importer of US arms in 2014, purchasing nearly $8 billion worth of American-made weaponry.
In December, the Obama administration approved the sale of $1.8 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, including warships previously used by the US Navy and several advanced missile systems. The sale was the first weapons transfer to Taiwan in years and was clearly intended as a provocation against Beijing.
In the Pacific, the US Army’s “Pacific Pathways” program is coordinating joint operations with Asia-Pacific militaries. In the course of 2015, the program saw the US conduct joint drills with units from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mongolia, South Korea and Thailand.
Middle East
Leading purchasers of US weapons in 2014 included the ultra-reactionary regimes of Saudi Arabia, which purchased $4 billion worth of TOW missiles, and Qatar, which purchased $9.8 billion worth of US arms. Qatar has been a major backer of Islamist forces in Syria in the US-backed civil war against Assad.
The US has spearheaded a new imperialist carve-up of the entire region, with Britain, France and Germany piling into the wars in Iraq and Syria toward the end of 2015 and Saudi Arabia leading a US-backed war in Yemen.
Africa
Total arms sales to Africa—particularly in the oil-rich regions—increased by 50 percent between 2010 and 2014 over the previous five-year period. Cameroon and Nigeria, which are collaborating with the growing US intervention in West Africa in the name of the “fight against Boko Haram,” were among the leading importers of weapons. Preparations are underway to relaunch military operations in Libya, already devastated by the US-NATO war that overthrew and murdered Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Cyber and outer space
Even cyberspace and outer space are not exempt from the US-led militarization drive. In November, the US was one of only four countries to vote against a United Nations resolution, “No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space,” which was supported by more than 120 member states. In a presentation earlier this year, US Undersecretary of Defense Robert Work outlined Pentagon plans to deploy a range of space weapons, which Work claimed are necessary to ensure military dominance over Russia.
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The experience of the Obama administration has underscored the impossibility of opposing imperialist war outside of a struggle against the capitalist system and all of its political representatives. Having won office in 2008 as an antiwar candidate, presenting himself as an opponent of the war in Iraq and an antidote to the militarism of the Bush administration, President Obama has presided over an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, wars for regime change in Libya and Syria, and a new war in Iraq.
Obama’s talk about ending the war in Afghanistan has been exposed by his decision to keep thousands of US troops in the country and the plans to establish permanent US bases there. All of his pledges of “no ground troops” or “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria have been exposed as lies.
The divisions that exist within the US ruling elite and the state over foreign and military policy concern the focus and methods of US efforts to dominate the territory and resources of the world, with the Obama White House arguing for a concentration on the struggle against China and his opponents demanding a larger commitment of troops and weapons to turn the Middle East into a de facto US colony. But there is no “peace faction” within the corporate and political establishment, or either of the two big-business parties.
One side of the global crisis is the slide toward a new world war. The other is the development of revolutionary struggles by the working class. Vast resources are allocated to destruction and war, while growing sections of the US population are pushed into poverty and forced to struggle for basic necessities such as housing, education, nutrition and health care.
The struggle against war can be conducted only on the basis of the independent mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally against imperialism on the basis of a socialist and internationalist revolutionary program.
Hopefully the Dollar will collapse and then the empire of stupidity runs out of money to fund its idiocy.
The only conclusion to this is a ground war and potentially a nuclear war, US has already declared war on Russia. The problem is that US is loosing the phoney war and will resort to a ground war. We have met the enemy and it is US.
Well it’s not the people, it’s the people running the puppets in DC, but that doesn’t mean lots of kids who don’t know any better can’t easily be manipulated to go find the same things the French and Germans found in Russia. Like a grave or a gulag. A person has to somehow gain an understanding that the politics is a facade, these people are mere employees of the real rulers. Freedom is an illusion without the people themselves being the physical army and the law enforcement. President Washington knew that. He tried to leave a legacy of a citizen soldier with militia instead of a professional army and he did for about a 100 years, but that’s another story altogether.
Suffice to say that I hope you are wrong, but I don’t know. I really don’t know. Much power behind another war to cull the population, to steal their wealth from their lifeless bank accounts. There are many ways to cancel debts and this too is one way to cancel the debts owed in pensions, in retirement plans, in needed jobs, and so on.
Who cares about US history at this juncture.
Boy you got that right, they care so little that they don’t even understand the Bill of Rights are what makes a democratic form of government. They would rather have an open corporate oligarchy and stuff chips in their face than to bother reading. “Lies my teacher told me.” Highly recommend that one.
I fear the East will join with Russia and decide to ‘shut down’ the American, so called, Imperialism… We are spread way to thin if they make that decision; but it looks to me like that is the will of our Admin.
Of course it will. That’s why they exported the factories to Asia in the first place, so that they Asians could be empowered enough to make their own military industrial complex. This is about population reduction. When there’s too many people then the secret police cannot identify the aware and kill them. Incidentally you are one of the aware…LOL!
My money would be on Russia and China. They don’t seem to listen in the US. The Russians have told them quite explicitly that any attack on Russia will trigger a massive response (read into that what you like). Then a conventional war will be irrelevant.
Well said, and the “U.S.” is a Washington D.C. Corporation that has taken down our country little by little over the last 100 years; enabled and funded by the Banksters and all the criminals that they produced.
So as I understand it, NATO stands for “Need Another Terrorist Organisation”. ISIS (Daesh) is past their use by date.
Hi Kids! Kool Website, good reads, and good comments. I’m a captive here in the US myself, trying to get deported to Russia Snowden Style, if not tell Putin I’m coming via a Kayak from the Bearing Sea as I’m soon to become an outlaw in my own land.
Yes the US, is a mess and promising to get a lot more messy. The Zionists are running the Nation, it’s organized crime running the media, the political parties, the education system, and the police. It’s all being funded by organized crime via their ownership of corporate not for profits because the corporations are just fronts themselves for a global crime ring whose roots go far back in time. America is a puppet state for organized crime. Some of us here know that, but unfortunately for both us here in America, as well as for the rest of the world, the vast majority here are too zombified to bother to find the truth.
Americans are swinging to the Far Right of their already fascist ideology with grass root support for Donald Trump. The other two contenders have no chance at all I think, and I don’t support Trump but I am a realist. His words we have heard before, we have seen the movie as it were. America can be great again, we are a nation of laws (after first re-writing the foundation, hence rulership over to self appointed stooges calling themselves law makers) and it’s the other people who are to blame; the mexicans, those russians, the chinese. So it’s the words of Adolf to a frustrated and angry population, a very angry population looking to take it out on someone, on anyone.
America is a mess kids, a mess because when you don’t control wealthy people with bullets they will control you with them. The cops here are murdering people daily and yet fools want to give up their rights, and the crooks and traitors in politics are helping them to overthrow the rule of law.
As far as this concerns all of the rest of you people out there in the world.
If Russia and China can manage to stave off World War III. If they can keep stalling, then provocations of the US Crime Machine will implode on lies and deceits of their own making right here in my own beloved land. They are running out of time and I think they are making critical errors.
The US is perched on the eve of societal breakdown and civil war. This idea they have of creating tension with mass shootings is one thing, but violating the American Bill of Rights with High Treason is something else altogether. They think Americans won’t react, they think they will go down the same path as the Australians, but that won’t happen. Too many people have far too much personal wealth tied up in guns in America. No on but no one is going to be handing over tens of thousands of dollars in private weapons because of an act of treason. We will now see the slow but steady destruction of America by individual acts and reprisals, this is what I think right now, but it could go very fast to a full blown revolution with mass mayhem on every single street corner in America.
There are of course other issues. Pay special attention to potentially explosive gas in California, mass flooding near a nuclear waste dump ( because the political system is manned by the stooges of organized crime the nuclear waste here is left in 55 gallon drums) America may have to evac to Canada, for real if this gets out of hand, and it looks like that’s possible.
So cross your fingers and say a prayer because America is at a crossroads and once the people here decide someone else is to blame they are going to come at them with everything they got, but it’s not like WWII where people really were patriotic, many people here hate the gov-corp so who knows, maybe they will decide to bomb the Jewish Capital flat, after all we are pretty sure they are doing a lot of crap here.
It’s was quite something reading your reasonable, unpassionate comment. I learnt a lot, thanks. One for sure, I don’t like to witness turmoil in America. Yet judging on the proposals of the long term policy of American elites, it would be the best for humanity to sort out all the problems on American soil by the very people of America. Simply, ordinary Americans must redeem their country to themselves. By doing that, they’ll save America and the world of looming thermonuclear annihilation.
Oh no, it is you all who do me the honor for having read such drivel. My idea is that you should understand the Patriotic American, who gulps down what they are feed, and though this is slowly changing, the average being is still very unawares, as naive as a babe in the woods in reality.
They are subject to forms of propaganda and mind control from birth. They go to schools operated by the corporate crime cabal, they go to churches whose pastors are in contact with the police/state security and corporate stooges who provide them money and tax free shelters in exchange for the information and influence they can render, as well as quite possibly the most unsavory forms of human vice for personal consumption.
http://www.pravdareport.com/society/stories/29-12-2015/132958-heroin-0/
http://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?s=dd91ee5b091332d7c9e676eaa19309c4&t=303161
Yeah, it’s bad, very bad. Can you believe during late sixties and early seventies Western world was a spark in the dark (as for me, indeed); a gleam of hope that can make all of my dreams of living without oppression, borders, poverty and hate come true? :-))
We have lot’s of work for you cleaning up the tar sands-after we put a large electric fence around it. Welcome to Canada. NOT!
Hence my clever ruse of escape via the Bearing Sea. Ya know I can see Putins house from the Space Needle here in Seattle right? So not too far to go. No, I’m gonna leave the tar pit cleaning to the deserving brain dead here who love living in a police state. I’m sorry Canada, I love you very much, I can’t change what will be. I can only tell people what will be. I’m rarely in error on that account btw. Maybe you care to join me. We could meet with Snowden and have coffee.
St. Herman of Alaska did the Bearing sea in a Kayak, read of his exploits and you may choose a more solid foundation.
Thanks for the tip. Seriously, if I was like in my 20’s I’d have abandoned this corrupted nation of fools and stupid housewifes long ago. Very old now, paddling will take a long time. Russian friends said I sounded like a Georgian with a very thick accent. I will be lost Georgian then, lost at sea and slightly disoriented if discovered.
There are quite a few who see the writing on the wall and are moving there.
Yep, that’s how I read the riddle myself.
In reality is that NATO is a military joke run by deluded and degenerate people. The idea that 28 disparate, flabby and soft countries are going to fight as a block is a joke. Much of the military capability of the UK, Germany, France, etc. has been significantly degraded over the last 20 or so years. The UK has scrapped its armor or has put it in storage. The Germans struggle to put aircraft in the field. It would be a shambles.
The idea that the US is going to invade and subjugate Russia and China is laughable. Even with full mobilization that would not be possible. The advantage is with the Russians and Chinese as they would be defenders and would benefit from ‘force multipliers’. As General Montgomery stated – the first rule of war is don’t march on Moscow and the second rule of war is don’t invade China.
I can’t recall who said it but it went something along the lines that the victors from the last war always fight the next war using the lessons of the previous war. Very dangerous given the speed of technological advancement (WW1 is a good example of redundant tactics used against industrialized weapons such as the machine gun). My take is the aircraft killed the battleship and the missile and submarines will kill the carrier. The carrier only worked for a period during WW2 as it could attack beyond the range of any attacking warship with its aircraft. The other major threat at the time was other carriers. Now missiles (many of them) have a launch point way outside the defense limits of the carriers (including air cover). Carriers only have a value when bullying small defenceless nations.
I imagine General Montgomery was also aware that both China and Russia ARE PREPARED to save their people from the Nuclear Winter and/or other affects of Nuclear War — who else is?