The American Conservative

War Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/war-doesnt-make-sense-anymore

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America spends more on its military than all its enemies put together yet it still can’t win wars. Failed adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have drained America’s power and diminished its prestige. The bloated Pentagon budget actually makes us weaker.

Here’s the weird bit: nobody seems to care. If any other government department spent as much and accomplished as little, the populace would be in arms, complaining about wasteful government spending. Instead we mumble “Thank you for your service” and increase defense appropriations.

[...]

Maybe the extravagant expense of the Pentagon budget is a feature, not a bug. Maybe no one objects when we spend a quarter of a billion dollars ineffectually bombing Syria or several trillion ineffectually invading Iraq because these days war profiteers make their money not by looting their enemies’ cities, stealing their land, and selling their women into slavery, but from their own governments’ spending.

My own life confirms this intuition. The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster for the United States, for the Middle East, and for the long-suffering people of Iraq, but for many of us, it was a cash cow. For a decade, I earned a solid middle-class living working just four months a year as a news cameraman in Iraq. The war on terror bought me my house.

Thousands of Americans (perhaps not coincidentally mostly from red states) worked as contractors for the U.S. military and pulled down salaries much higher than they would have earned in the private sector back home. A truck driver from Mississippi made over $100,000 a year hauling in supplies from Kuwait. It is shocking how little of the money America spent in that misbegotten conflict ever trickled into the Iraqi economy.

#objectif #guerres #Etats-Unis

The War on Yemen and the Credulous Western Embrace of Mohammed bin Salman | The American Conservative

▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-war-on-yemen-and-the-credulous-western-embrace-of-moham

David Ignatius ably writes down whatever Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) tells him in a new column. This is the only mention that the war on Yemen receives:

He described ambitious plans to mobilize Yemeni tribes against the Houthis and their Iranian backers in Yemen, a war that has dragged on longer than the Saudis hoped.

Whenever MbS is interviewed by Western reporters and pundits, the subject of Yemen comes up rarely and the countless crimes committed by the Saudis and their allies are never mentioned. It is bad enough that one of the architects of a disastrous war supported by our government is never forced to answer for the war crimes committed by his military and other coalition forces, but it is even worse when the interviewer makes no attempt to put the crown prince’s statements in context. Readers should know that MbS is responsible for a war that has plunged another country into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and they should be aware that the Saudi-led coalition has committed numerous war crimes by bombing civilian targets and inflicts cruel collective punishment on millions of people through its blockade. Given the paltry coverage that Yemen usually receives in the U.S., most of Ignatius’ readers probably don’t know this. If MbS’ interlocutors aren’t willing to challenge him about this directly, they ought to be bringing it up in whatever they end up writing about the conversation. The war on Yemen hasn’t just “dragged on longer than the Saudis hoped.” It has been a complete failure in achieving any of its stated goals, and that failure reflects very poorly on the unqualified, reckless defense minister (i.e., MbS) who has overseen the debacle.

It is possible that there could be some news value in uncritically restating the things that a foreign leader says to you, but there doesn’t seem to be any of that here. MbS spins his power grabs and reckless foreign policy decisions to Ignatius, and the columnist gamely relays that spin to us. On the “anti-corruption putsch,” Ignatius tells us that MbS told him that “shock therapy” was required. The fact that MbS’s arbitrary shakedown has frightened foreign investors and undermined his own economic agenda goes unmentioned. We are later informed that the “crown prince said he had been unfairly criticized for pressuring Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign,” but of course he would say that.

Treating Saudi royals with kid gloves is nothing new in American media, but I have been struck by how positive the coverage of Mohammed bin Salman has been when his record has been almost entirely destructive and destabilizing. Were he not the Saudi heir and already de facto ruler of a U.S. client state, he could not hope to buy the friendly coverage that he is freely given in a number of American publications. That would be embarrassing enough at any time, but when the authoritarian ruler in question is also presiding over one of the great crimes of the century it is inexcusable.

Kushner Kept Tillerson in the Dark on Saudi-Lebanon Move
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/kushner-kept-tillerson-in-the-dark-on-saudi-lebanon-move

Tensions between the Lebanese prime minister and the Saudis had been festering since mid-May, when a Hariri-backed delegation of bankers arrived in Washington to lobby the Congress against imposing tough new sanctions on Lebanese financial institutions suspected of being affiliated with Hezbollah. Lebanese officials told members of Congress that increased regulatory pressure would damage Lebanon’s fragile banking sector and endanger its financial stability. Hariri himself appeared in Washington in July to buttress these efforts. As a result, Congress carefully dampened the impact of the proposed sanctions, fearing that any attempt to target Hezbollah would undermine the fragile Lebanese economy. 

“That was a final straw for the Saudis,” this diplomat says. “They were absolutely disgusted. As far as they were concerned, Hariri was caving in to the Iranians.”

(Note : ça fait quelques temps que je vois passer des articles dans le American conservative. Quelqu’un a plus d’infos sur ce média ?)

The Roy Moore Time Bomb
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-roy-moore-time-bomb

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Un conservateur US prédit que le soutien de certain·e·s évangélistes aux politiciens accusés de crime sexuels risque de leur faire perdre leur crédibilité morale, comme c’est déjà arrivé aux catholiques.

All of this is going to cement in the public’s mind that Evangelical Christians are morally bankrupt. They have learned nothing from the Catholic Church’s gutting of its own moral credibility because of its own sex abuse scandal. It is possible — unlikely, in my view, but possible — that Roy Moore is not guilty of what Corfman alleges. But the fact that so many of his Alabama Evangelical supporters are willing to stand by him anyway is a fact that will be devastating in ways that they cannot grasp.

Moon of Alabama à propos de la démission de Saad Hariri (en gros : grosse destabilisation du Liban, qui échouera et finira par renforcer intérêts russes et iraniens) :
▻http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/11/lebanon-hariris-resignation-the-opening-shot-of-the-saudi-war-on-hizb

The resignation of Hariri is intended to provoke a constitutional crisis in Lebanon and to prevent new parliament elections. The further Saudi plan is likely to evolve around these elements:

– The Trump administration will announce new sanctions against Hizbullah and against Lebanon in general.
– The Saudi government will slip some of its al-Qaeda/ISIS proxy fighters from Syria and Iraq into Lebanon (possibly via Turkey by sea). It will finance local Lebanese terror operations.
– There will be new assassination attempts, terror attacks and general rioting by Sunni extremist elements against Christians and Shia in Lebanon.
– The U.S. will try to press the Lebanese army into a war against Hizbullah.
– Israel will try to provoke and divert Hizbullah’s attention by new shenanigans at the Lebanese and Syrian border. It will NOT start a war.

The plan is unlikely to succeed:

– The Lebanese people as a whole have no interest in a new civil war.
– The Lebanese army will not get involved on any specific side but will try to keep everyone calm.
– Sanctions against Hizbullah will hit all of Lebanon, including Sunni interests.
– A new Sunni prime minister will be found and installed, replacing the resigned Saudi puppet.
– Russian and Iranian economic interests will find a new market in Lebanon. Russian companies will engage in Lebanese gas and oil extraction in the Mediterranean and replace U.S. involvement.

The miscalculated Saudi/U.S./Israeli plan against Hizbullah can be understood as a helpless tantrum after their defeat in Syria and Iraq.

Je vois qu’il y a déjà une traduction en français :
▻http://arretsurinfo.ch/liban-demission-dhariri-premiere-salve-de-la-guerre-saoudienne-contre-l

Is U.S. Congress Declaring War on #WikiLeaks? | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-u-s-congress-declaring-war-on-wikileaks

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If the United States is truly exceptional, it is no doubt due to its hubris in declaring itself to be the final arbiter of what goes on all around the globe.

#Etats-Unis #exceptionnalisme

Saudi Arabia Is Trying to Remake the Middle East In Its #Image | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/saudi-arabia-is-trying-to-remake-the-middle-east-in-its-ima

Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser degree other Gulf nations, are engaged in a kind of cultural terraforming. Centuries of diverse and divergent religious traditions within #Islam—in countries like Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—have been swept away by an influx of Saudi-educated clerics and Saudi-produced religious materials. These Saudi-influenced imams and religious literature teach the radical brand of Islam that predominates in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism.

#arabie_saoudite #wahhabisme #moyen-orient

Why the Media Really Hates ‘War Machine’ | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-the-media-really-hates-war-machine

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A major theme of the film is, after all, how mass media fails us on a moral level, always transforming events that require somber moral reflection into superficial sleaze. And so I can’t help but wonder if reviews of War Machine have been so uniformly unfavorable because of the disconnect between the ongoing war and popular culture, and how the film implicates the media in sustaining that rift.

War Machine (film) — Wikipédia
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Machine_(film)

War Machine ou Machine de guerre (au Québec) est un film américain réalisé par David Michôd, sorti en 2017 sur Netflix. Il s’agit d’une adaptation cinématographique du livre non-fictionnel The Operators de Michael Hastings.

Dispatch From the Middle East: U.S. Buildup All About Iran | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/dispatch-from-the-middle-east-u-s-buildup-all-about-iran

Why Washington Wants That Border

Re-establishing Syrian control over the highway running from Deir ez-Zor to Albu Kamal and al-Qaim is also a priority for Syria’s allies in Iran. Dr. Masoud Asadollahi, a Damascus-based expert in Middle East affairs explains: “The road through Albu Kamal is Iran’s favored option – it is a shorter path to Baghdad, safer, and runs through green, habitable areas. The M1 highway (Damascus-Baghdad) is more dangerous for Iran because it runs through Iraq’s Anbar province and areas that are mostly desert.”

If the U.S. objective in al-Tanaf was to block the southern highway between Syria and Iraq, thereby cutting off Iran’s land access to the borders of Palestine, they have been badly outmaneuvered. Syrian, Iraqi, and allied troops have now essentially trapped the U.S.-led forces in a fairly useless triangle down south, and created a new triangle (between Palmyra, Deir ez-Zor, and Albu Kamal) for their “final battle” against ISIS.

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Lire absolument: How America Armed Terrorists in Syria, Gareth Porter
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-america-armed-terrorists-in-syria

CIA involvement in the arming of anti-Assad forces began with arranging for the shipment of weapons from the stocks of the Gaddafi regime that had been stored in Benghazi. CIA-controlled firms shipped the weapons from the military port of Benghazi to two small ports in Syria using former U.S. military personnel to manage the logistics, as investigative reporter Sy Hersh detailed in 2014. The funding for the program came mainly from the Saudis.

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms shipments would have totaled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that figure.

America’s Misadventures in the Middle East - Chas Freeman
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-misadventures-in-the-middle-east

The United States is a secular democracy. It has no intrinsic interest in which theology rules hearts or dominates territory in the Middle East. It is not itself now dependent on energy imports from the Persian Gulf or the Maghreb. For most of the two-and-a-half centuries since their country was born, Americans kept a healthy distance from the region and were unharmed by events there. They extended their protection to specific nations in the Middle East as part of a global struggle against Soviet communism that is long past. What happens in the region no longer determines the global balance of power.

U.S. wars in the Middle East are—without exception—wars of choice. These wars have proven ruinously expensive and injurious to the civil liberties of Americans. They have poisoned American political culture with various manifestations of xenophobia. Islamophobia has transitioned naturally to anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and bigotry. In the region itself, American military interventions have produced more anarchy than order, more terror than tranquility, more oppression than democratization, and more blowback than pacification.

Signalé par Sophia sur Tweeter :
▻https://twitter.com/les_politiques/status/855100730809753601

Beware of Exiles and Their Promises
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/beware-of-exiles-and-their-promises

Many policymakers are so preoccupied with hostility towards a certain regime that they will be go out of their way to find and promote the exiles that share their position, and they will do so knowing that the exiles aren’t what they claim to be. They will then boast that a position held by a few Westerners and an extremely unrepresentative exile group represents “the will” of the nation in question. The support of the exiles “legitimizes” the hawks’ desire for regime change by providing “evidence” that U.S. interference will be welcomed (useful for P.R. purposes if for nothing else), and the hawks’ backing gives the exiles a stamp of approval in Washington.

Gnostic Nun, Cyborg Catholicism | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cyborg-catholicism-gnostic-nun

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The Pentagon’s Unholy Alliance with Missionaries
►http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-pentagons-unholy-alliance-with-missionaries

THE PENTAGON’S MISSIONARY SPIES
U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage
►https://theintercept.com/2015/10/26/pentagon-missionary-spies-christian-ngo-front-for-north-korea-espionag

But as the evangelical Christian Hiramine crossed the stage to shake hands with President Bush and receive his award, he was hiding a key fact from those in attendance: He was a Pentagon spy whose NGO was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.

“#ONG” #Etats-Unis “#innocents”

Aux USA suite à la décision de la cour suprême d’autoriser le mariage pour tous certains employés chrétiens décident de passer à la désobéissance civile et de ne pas distribuer de licences de mariage aux couples homosexuels.
Intéressant de suivre les réactions des conservateurs alors que la population semble être majoritairement du côté de la loi.
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/kim-davis-and-the-rise-of-conservative-civil-disobedience
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/kim-davis-shipwreck-of-religious-liberty

Échanges intéressants entre des américains religieux ou non à propos de Caitlyn Jenner
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-real-reason-for-the-caitlyn-jenner-freakout/comment-page-2/#comments

Heads LGBTs Win, Tails Christians Lose | The American Conservative
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/heads-christians-win-tails-they-lose

How the GOP Became the Israel Party
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-gop-became-the-israel-party

Lipton focuses on the new money stream. He shows that Adelson, Paul Singer, and other right-wing, pro-Israel donors, their spending unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, have pushed the GOP past the Democrats as recipients of “pro-Israel” PAC money. He uncovers some fairly shocking facts, such as the rapid infusion of “pro-Israel” funds into Arkansas freshman senator Tom Cotton’s campaigns. This detailed reporting about Israel-related money in a widely read centrist publication is an important and welcome development: until recently, it was subject hidden in whisper and awkward euphemism, as when two election cycles ago, retired general and possible presidential candidate Wesley Clark referred to “New York money people” pushing for war with Iran. Clark had to be walked through an apology with the assistance of Abe Foxman.

But important as the finance angle is, the subject has other important dimensions.

Le procès truqué du #whistleblower #Jeffrey_Sterling
▻http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-war-on-leaks-skirts-the-constitution