You're (An Easy "Guess Who") a war-monger!

[Jaanbaz]

Wrong. No such 'loss' will take place and you can even stake your life on it.

Okay whatever you say ''Professional''.

 

[gambit]

Okay whatever you say ''Professional''.

Care to guess how many times you guys on PDF were wrong about US?

 

[Jaanbaz]

Care to guess how many times you guys on PDF were wrong about US?

I have no problem being wrong because I've never claimed to see the future just sharing my thoughts on US and its continuous war mongering foreign policy. You seem to have a problem that I have problem with your country's foreign policy, don't take it out on me mate just tell that droopy faced cunt Bolton to stop war mongering. Cheers.

 

[Three_Kingdoms]

May be the world has gotten a shade luckier or equally disastrous when Trump was elected!
"Hallelujah" or not!



Hillary Clinton: A Bigger Warmonger Than Bush/Cheney?
Par Washington's Blog
Mondialisation.ca, 02 mars 2016
Washington's Blog 1 mars 2016
Région : USA
Thème: Terrorism, US NATO War Agenda
Analyses: THE BALKANS

Bush and Cheney launched two disastrous and totally unnecessary wars which increased terrorism and undermined America’s standing in the eyes of the world.

Hillary Clinton is at least as bad …

She is largely responsible for the war in Syria, which is plunging the Middle East and Europe into chaos.

The New York Times confirms that Clinton is responsible for the violent regime change in Libya, which was also completely unnecessary.

Hillary is largely responsible for the bombing of Yugoslavia … another wholly unnecessary war. Diana Johnstone writes:

In her star-struck biography of the First Lady, Hillary’s Choice, Gail Sheehy reported Hillary’s plea in favor of bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 as a major point in her favor. According to Sheehy’s book, Hillary convinced her reluctant husband to unleash the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs with the argument that: “You can’t let this ethnic cleansing go on at the end of the century that has seen the Holocaust.”

This line is theatrical and totally irrelevant to the conflict in the Balkans. As a matter of fact, there was no “ethnic cleansing” going on in Kosovo at that time. It was the NATO bombing that soon led people to flee in all directions – a reaction that NATO leaders interpreted as the very “ethnic cleansing” they claimed to prevent by bombing.

Joshua Marshall notes:

At least 15,000 Kosovars gathered in the central square of Pristina, the country’s capital, to demand the government’s resignation. In January, thousands of protesters clashed with police, hurling Molotov cocktails, setting a major government building and armored police cars on fire, and wounding 24 police officers.

The aim of this protest was to overthrow the government with violence, as the government said in a statement. The U.S. ambassador chimed in, “Political violence threatens democracy and all that Kosovo has achieved since independence.”

This violence gets little attention from the American media in part because, unlike the Ukrainian demonstrators who overthrew their democratically elected government in 2014, Kosovo’s protesters are targeting a pro-Western government that eagerly seeks membership in the European Union.

But it’s no wonder that Kosovo’s political fabric is so rent by violent confrontations. The rump state was created by a violent secessionist movement led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That guerrilla band of Albanian nationalists was covertly backed by the German secret service to weaken Serbia. Its terrorist attacks on Serbian villages and government personnel in the mid-1990s prompted a brutal military crackdown by Serbia, followed by NATO’s decisive intervention in 1999.

During the fighting the KLA drove tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to promote independence for the majority Albanian population. It recruited Islamist militants – including followers of Osama Bin Laden – from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and other countries.

President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, called the KLA “without any question, a terrorist group,” and a Council on Foreign Relationsbackgrounder added, “most of its activities were funded by drug running.”

None of that, however, stopped Washington from embracing the KLA’s cause against Serbia, a policy spearheaded by the liberal interventionist First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Without authorization from the United Nations, NATO began bombing Serbia in March 1999, killing some 500 civilians, demolishing billions of dollars’ worth of industrial plants, bridges, schools, libraries and hospitals, and even hitting the Chinese embassy. (“It should be lights out in Belgrade,”demanded New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.”)

Following Serbia’s capitulation, according to Human Rights Watch, “elements of the KLA’€ engaged in “widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries. This destruction was combined with harassment and intimidation designed to force people from their homes and communities. By late-2000 more than 210,000 Serbs had fled the province . . . The desire for revenge provides a partial explanation, but there is also a clear political goal in many of these attacks: the removal from Kosovo of non-ethnic Albanians in order to better justify an independent state.”

Former KLA leaders, including its political head Hashim Thaqi, went on to dominate the new Kosovo state. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe declared that Thaqi, who was then Kosovo’s prime minister, headed a “mafia-like” group that smuggled drugs, guns and human organs on a grand scale through Eastern Europe. The report’s authoraccused the international community of turning a blind eye while Thaqi’s group of KLA veterans engaged in “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations” to maintain power and profit from their criminal activities.

***

In 2012, Madeleine Albright and a former Clinton special envoy to the Balkans bid to take control of the country’s state-owned telecommunications company despite widespread allegations of corruption, the attempted assassination of the telecommunications regulatory chief, and the murder of the state privatization agency’s chief.

***

In 2014, a three-year E.U. investigation concluded that “senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army” should be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”

Under tough pressure from the United States and E.U., Kosovo’s parliament finallyagreed last summer to permit a special court to prosecute former KLA leaders for war crimes. The court will begin operating this year in The Hague.

“The sad thing is that the United States and European countries knew 10 years ago that Thaqi and his men were engaged in drug smuggling and creating a mafia state,” said one European ambassador last year. “The attitude was, ‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.’”

Hillary also backed coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Haiti, Honduras and other countries.

And she helped create the idea of “humanitarian war”, where the U.S. brutally overthrows a government by military force … justifying the action by falsely claiming that otherwise civilians will be.

Hillary has also literally supported Islamic jihadis with arms, money and logistical support.

For example, the U.S. under Clinton supported Al Qaeda (and see this) so that it could overthrow Libya’s government.

And the U.S. under Clinton supported Islamic jihadis so that they would overthrow Syria’s government.

Indeed:

• The U.S. started plotting regime change and arming jihadis in Syria – in an effort to topple Assad – adecade ago

• Hillary Clinton – as secretary of state – admitted that arming the rebels would strengthen Al Qaeda

So while Bush and Cheney’s foreign policy was utterly despicable, Hillary Clinton has wreaked havoc on the world stage on a scale which is comparable … if not worse.

Postscript: It’s telling that the Neoconservative hawks – the same people who brought us the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan (which Hillary also supported) – HATE Trump and LOVE Hillary.


https://www.mondialisation.ca/hillary-clinton-a-bigger-warmonger-than-bushcheney/5511432










Beware the USA: the world's leading warmonger and terrorist organization

It would be wise for the nations currently linked to Washington through membership in NATO, to cut their ties with the world’s leading terror organization and perpetrator of violence

Source Counterpunch

There’s an old adage that goes: “You can judge a man by the company he keeps.”

If that’s the case, then applying it to nations, the world has to judge the US to be a truly wretched and repugnant country, and should be steering clear of it.

Look at the company we Americans are “keeping” these days:

* In Ukraine, the US is backing a thuggish regime, installed through a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. That regime, since taking power, been using indescriminately shelling cities, and using fascist thugs re-classified as National Guardsmen to slaughter civilians and separatist rebels in the eastern part of the country. It is also becoming increasingly clear, as even the main English-language newspaper in Malaysia is reporting, that this thuggish regime based in Kiev was likely responsible for the deliberate downing of a Malaysian airline which killed all 283 passengers and crew (though the Obama administration continues to claim, on the basis of no evidence, that it was the separatists’ doing).

* In Israel, we have a government and the ironically named Israeli Defense Force (IDF) slaughtering nearly 2000 Palestinians — over 400 of them children — trapped in the massive open-air prison and ghetto called Gaza. For over a month, the IDF has been relentlessly bombing, shelling and rolling tanks and bulldozers over the world’s most crowded prison camp and its 1.8 million people, deliberately shelling schools, hospitals, sewage treatment and water plants, and the only power generating facility, creating an incomprehensible humanitarian crisis. Israel is the single largest recipient of US financial and military aid, and most of the death and destruction in Gaza is the direct result of US-provided arms — weapons that include flesh-shredding anti-personnel shells and bombs, toxic gas and illegally used white phosphorus incendiary weapons. In fact, the US rushed more such deadly weapons to Israel as the IDF ran its stocks down in this one-sided assault on the walled-in Gaza-wide free-fire kill zone.

* Over in Syria, where the US has been covertly supplying arms to an assortment of fanatic Islamic jihadists intent on overthrowing the dictator Bashar al Assad, we now know that it was those very jihadists, and not the Assad government, that cooly launched a deadly Sarin gas attack on a suburb of Damascus last year, killing hundreds. They did this monstrous crime in an attempt to throw blame on Assad and lure the US into joining the war against his regime — and came within a day of succeeding. More recently we learn that those jihadists, many of whom were trained by the CIA at secret camps in Jordan, have been stoning women in Syria to death for “adultery,” often forcing local villagers unwilling to participate in such horrors to watch this medieval atrocity.

* Those same jihadis, trained by the US, are also sweeping across much of Iraq now, taking control of even large cities like Mosul, and slaughtering many of those in areas they conquer. There the US has been forced by this “blow-back” from its earlier support to turn on its trainees, much as it had to do a decade ago in Afghanistan, to begin bombing its wayward proteges to slow their advance. But let’s not forget that the people the US is now attacking in Iraq are the very people whom it earlier armed and trained to fight against Assad in neighboring Syria.

Of course, the US has many other vicious and unsavory “friends” all around the globe, in Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador and Bolivia, Honduras and Colombia for example. But just judging by these three groups that it is backing — the Ukraine government, the Israeli government and the Islamic rebels in Syria — one can only conclude that the US is a truly global menace and leading source of international mayhem and terror.

The countries of Europe that are still part of the anachronistic, Cold War-era North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should listen to the growing voices of anger and alarm among their citizens who recognize that the United States, far from providing them with security, is stirring up conflict all around the globe (not to mention spying on, and probably extorting, their compromised leaders). Particularly in Ukraine, along Russia’s southern border, and in Palestine, these actions pose threats that could ultimately drag Europe into violent conflagrations that have not been seen since the end of World War II, nearly 70 years ago.

Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza, and its continued brutal occupation and usurpation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, will surely lead to a new explosion of violence and anger across the Middle East, which will almost certainly spill over into Europe. Meanwhile, one push too far — and we may be nearing that point — and the US and it’s “friends” in Kiev may trigger a Russian invasion of Ukraine in defense of the embattled Russian minority in that country. With over 20,000 heavily mechanized and well-trained Russian troops already on the border with Ukraine, and a huge modern airforce at the ready, the stage is set for such a cross-border action. If the US and its NATO “allies” were to attempt to block such a Russian action, World War III would be just one incident away.

The best action to take when someone is known to consort with thuggish or unsavory friends is to cut off contact with that person. Likewise, it would be wise for the nations of the world, and especially those currently linked to Washington through membership in NATO, to cut their ties with the world’s leading terror organization and perpetrator of violence: The United States of America.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php...intervention-always-leave-havoc-in-their-wake

 

[Three_Kingdoms]

How the US Became a Warmonger Police State
By Paul Craig Roberts | Sep 22, 2017

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2017/09/22/how-the-us-became-a-warmonger-police-state/

(Photo: katesheets/CC BY 2.0)

The hoax “war on terror” has turned America into a Gestapo state that's a threat not just to American civil liberty, but to life on earth.

Professor David Ray Griffin is a tenacious person. He has written a number of carefully researched books that demonstrate the extraordinary shortcomings in the official account of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the subsequent anthrax attack. He has provided the mountains of evidence completely ignored by the US government’s account.

In his recently published latest book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Professor Griffin demonstrates how 9/11 was used by the Zionist Neoconservatives, the Cheney/Bush regime, and the military/security complex with the complicity of Congress and the US media to create Islamophobia among the American public in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, with provinces of Pakistan with Iran also in the crosshairs. These wars are based on lies and fabricated “evidence,” on determination to control pipelines and oil flows, on maximizing profits for the military/security corporations in which Cheney has a personal interest, and on extending neoconservative hegemony over the world.

One consequence has been the destruction of US constitutional protections that protect liberty and violations of US and international law such as the laws against torture.

Another consequence has been millions of displaced refugees from Washington’s wars over-running the countries of Europe.

Indeed, Europe faces a “Camp of the Saints” situation, and the US now has a police state in which all citizens are subject to indefinite detention (imprisonment) on suspicion alone without conviction or evidence presented to a court; assassination on suspicion alone without due process of law; and total violation of privacy, including body cavities, without presentation of a court warrant. American women are now subjected to having their vaginas examined by police in public on the roadside.

The hoax “war on terror” has turned America into a Gestapo state. Not many Americans directly experience the consequences, but they will be denied valid information as the Gestapo American state closes down all dissent on the grounds that it is harmful to national security. People who speak their minds will find that they no longer have First Amendment protection.

Every passing day truth is less and less prevalent in the United States. Democratic control over the government is already nonexistent. Essentially, Americans live in the Fourth Reich which has already budded and is now blossoming.

Wars and their expense will continue to multiply as the military/security complex uses manufactured “threats” to continue the excessive flow of American resources into more weapons to be used in the destruction of more countries.

Professor Griffin provides the details of the story of how the United States ceased to be a free country ruled by law and became instead a threat both to American civil liberty and to life on earth.

In world polls, 25% of the respondents recognize the United States as the greatest threat to peace in the world. This is 5 times higher than those who regard North Korea and Iran as threats, much less Venezuela, which does not even register. When Trump gave his UN speech he should have said that the United States, controlled as it is by the CIA and military/security complex, is the great threat that the entire world faces, including Americans.

But Trump has betrayed us. He accepted the aggressive militarist neoconservative line that the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us, to no avail, in 1961, 56 years ago, is the hegemonic police power chosen by History to protect the peace of the world.

It must reassure the 7 or 8 countries bombed into the Stone Age by Washington’s might that their destruction is “protecting the peace of the world.”

This article was originally published at PaulCraigRoberts.org on September 21, 2017.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Craig Roberts
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts attended four of the finest universities, studied under two Nobel Prize-winners in economics, authored 20 peer-reviewed articles in journals of scholarship, and published four academic press peer-reviewed books, including Harvard and Oxford Universities, and seven commercially published books. His most recent book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: Washington's Perilous War for Hegemony.

 

[jamahir]

Wrong. No such 'loss' will take place and you can even stake your life on it.

Democratic alliances are not based on personalities but on shared ideologies. Trump could be voted out or at best, he would be in office for a total of 8 yrs. No alliances are that fragile when it is known that a personality will not occupy an office after X yrs.

With the exception of the word "Democratic", you are correct logically.

The USA as a political entity is part of not a democracy-spreading alliance but of a Western-Christianity-propagating alliance that is led by the Anglo members.

 

[Three_Kingdoms]

Trump’s America is the greatest threat to world peace
6 November 2018, 5:16 PM | Abbey Makoe | @SABCNewsOnline

Image: SABC News Getty Images

US President Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy doesn’t make too many public pronouncements lately, but his views are still highly esteemed across Europe and the entire West.

Speaking candidly to France’s Point media outlet the former President warned: “Drop sanctions and reach out to Russia or drive it into China’s embrace.”

Sarkozy went further to describe as “counterproductive” economic the controversial sanctions against Russia. “Alienating Russia brings nothing but harm to European interests,” Sarkozy was quoted as saying, before adding: “Europe and Russia must work together in an atmosphere of trust.”

The former French leader warned that if the bilateral relations between Russia and the EU are determined in Washington, things can only get worse before they get better.

“The worst is yet to come,” he warned. “The US congress plans to asphyxiate 140 million Russians by depriving Russian banks of access to international funding,” he said.



The EU imposed economic sanctions on Russia in 2014 following its reunification with Crimea, an east Ukranian province which is 100% Russian in both culture and language.

Although the sanctions seeks to limit Russia’s access to capital markets, Moscow has demonstrated enormous resilience and strengthened ties with China, Iran, Turkey and India among others.

Europe itself has lost more than $100 billion dollars in lost trade with Russia during the period, proving that there are no winners amidst economic sanctions. In fact, to narrow it down even further, the worst losers are ordinary people.

The world celebrated euphorically when the Cold War ended and both the US and Russia signed an anti-nuclear treaty, the fall of the Berlin wall ushered in a period of hope and goodwill across Europe, the advent of the Fourth Industrial revolution weaved the universe into an inter-connected and inter-dependent world, yet mistrust persist.

The singular most dangerous phenomenon, in my book, is a world order where only one country stand as a superpower. For such extra-ordinary power in careless hands and unwise leadership poses by far the greatest threat to world peace.

A clear example of this is the latest move by the US under the leadership of president Donald Trump to unilaterally nullify a internationally recognized treaty between the US, EU, and Iranian over the development of nuclear capacity by Tehran.

All of a sudden, and the sole order of Washington, or at the behest of president Trump, sanctions are re-imposed on Iran for no credible reason and the world, almost without any option, has to dance to American tune or face the dire consequences of not doing as the US commands.

Yet we do have multi-lateral for a and the UN, home to all efforts and endeavour for world peace. No wonder a Third World War is not out of the picture. If one country is a bully to the rest of the world surely sooner or later there’s bound to be some kind of retaliation?

President Trump has exhibited propensity to unilateralism, and until someone whispers into his ears that under his policy the US is in the process self- isolation ordinary American citizens may live to regret a Trump presidency as they fall on hardship. We are all part of one global village and we need each other. There is no place for a bully.

http://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/trumps-america-is-the-greatest-threat-to-world-peace/

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[Three_Kingdoms]

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US Special Operations Forces Are Active in 70 Countries - Endless War
Brian Kalman Daniel Deiss Thu, Mar 28, 2019 | 4830 words 1,506 23
530
SHARES

Endless Wars


Introduction
With the possible U.S. military withdrawal from Syria in the news on a daily basis, the mainstream media has been quick to parrot the DOD’s claim that 2,000 troops, mostly special operations forces, are to be withdrawn from the country. Although the total number of U.S. special operators deployed to Syria may have approached as many as 5,000, the current headlines have not mentioned that the United States has special operations units deployed not just in Syria, but in a majority of the nations of the world. Over the past seventeen years, the forces at the disposal of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) have grown exponentially, more than doubling in size in numbers, with a budget that has also expanded four fold in that same period of time.

U.S. special operations forces on patrol in northern Syria. Although no concrete timeline has been publicly announced, the Trump administration has signaled its intention to pull U.S. military forces out of the country.


If U.S. SOF troops do pull out of Syria, they will still have a physical presence in over 70 nations on any given day. Although the public has an often vague and incomplete, unofficial explanation of the reasons behind these deployments, the Pentagon seems totally unwilling to explain the national defense rational or legality of these missions to anyone, including the U.S. Congress or the White House. Not only has SOCOM expanded in numbers, funding and weaponry since 2001 and the advent of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), but has acquired no small amount of political influence as well.

The U.S. special operations forces have become the darling of the military, praised by Congress, the White House, and the Media. They have willingly adopted a mythos that has been formulated and propagated by Hollywood on many levels. The U.S. public seems to worship this new class of soldier, while having little to no understanding of exactly what they do, nor any concept of how their actions might aid or hinder national security. An act has even been proposed by one state Representative to afford special income tax breaks to all SOF members.

Amidst all the praise about their prowess and successes on the battlefield, the media purposefully steers clear of reporting on their many failures. Although the U.S. has built the largest force of special operations in the world, this very fact has arguably proven to have only weakened the U.S. military as a whole. The White House, State Department and Pentagon have increasingly relied on special operations forces to bear the brunt of any and all military operations or covert actions in both acknowledged and secret areas of conflict across the globe. This over-emphasis on special operations as a military solution to all challenges has only weakened traditional, conventional forces.


While most of the public assumes that these new Spartans act to protect U.S. interests and “freedom and democracy” whenever and wherever it is deemed necessary, they have little to no understanding of how the SOF have changed since 2001, nor the increasing military and political influence that they now hold.

Even fewer Americans have stopped to ponder the illegality of much of what this expanding military force is doing on a global scale, not to mention the constitutional implications of a new Praetorian class in its midst that is growing in power and influence. If history teaches us anything, it is that shadowy and unaccountable paramilitary forces do not strengthen societies that embrace democratic or constitutional governments.

The Expansion of SOF and the Rise of SOCOM
Since the inception of the “Global War on Terror” shortly following September 11, 2001, U.S. SOF have more than doubled from approximately 33,000 to almost 70,000 today. Today, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has roughly twice the personnel at its disposal, but also four times the budget as it did in 2001. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), comprising perhaps the most elite and specialized of the SOF forces, numbered some 1,800 in 2001. Although quite secretive in nature, it is surmised by many analysts that JSOC may have grown to the size of SOCOM circa 2001, over the same 18 year period. If realistic, this estimation means that JSOC added its original number of 1,800 men each year, for eighteen years.

What reason was given by the U.S. DOD to justify such an expansion in a traditionally small and highly selective sub-set of conventional military forces? Special operations forces have existed since at least the Second World War. All major military powers, and even smaller nations that have not historically prioritized robust national defense postures, have invested in special operations forces to complement conventional military establishments. Special operations units are useful as a significant force multiplier in any conventional conflict, and are vital in responding to special circumstances such as anti-terrorism, hostage rescue, reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines, sabotage, and kill or capture missions.

The Pentagon has argued that terrorism has grown, with the number of internationally recognized terrorist organizations roughly doubling from 2001 to today, mostly due to the explosion of both al Qaeda and ISIS. Regardless of the facts that point to the CIA origins of al Qaeda, there is little argument that the organization has grown in concert with U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and Africa. The same can be said for the origin and spread of ISIS. There is also ample circumstantial evidence to support the theory that the CIA and SOCOM have both directly and indirectly supported both of these terrorist organizations in Syria. Regardless of whether SOCOM is directly or indirectly complicit in aiding the Islamic terrorist organizations it declares it is defending the nation against, there is a clear correlation between the growths of both, and surely SOCOM has benefitted on many levels from this relationship.

US Army rangers


The annual declared budget for SOCOM is in the range of $12.3 billion today, up from just $3.1 billion in 2001. There is little doubt that a healthy slice of the annual Overseas Contingency Operations and Support (OCO) budget is consumed by SOCOM, as the organization is the most heavily engaged in operations on foreign soil. In 2018, U.S. Congress approved $67 billion USD for OCO, and a further $7 billion USD in mandatory appropriations. It is unclear how much funding SOCOM receives on an annual basis, as the Pentagon has proven to be largely beyond financial questioning or audit by any office of the civilian government. After failing its first audit in decades in 2018, the Pentagon shrugged off the event with humor, and no one seemed to notice.

SOCOM numbers roughly 70,000 soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and has a declared budget of at least $12.3 billion USD. To put these numbers in perspective, SOCOM has more personnel than the entire national militaries of 120 of the 193 UN member states. Only 20 nations (including the U.S.) have a greater total defense budget than that of SOCOM. A simple cost benefit analysis would reveal that the U.S. is not making much headway in “winning” the GWOT militarily. The growth of SOCOM has done little to reduce the prevalence of terrorism in the world. It begs the question, is there any correlation at all, or is there another agenda afoot entirely?

Global Reach and Integration
The expansion in numbers and funding of America’s special operations forces is alarming in its own right, but their growing international footprint may be even more alarming. Not only were U.S. SOF deployed to at least 150 nations last year, but they have established professional alliances with national militaries in a majority of those nations.

Nick Turse has documented and reported on the growing influence of SOCOM over the past few years, with his articles being widely published in major mainstream periodicals as well as online alternative media. He has established many reliable sources within the SOF community. In regular articles posted on Tom’s Dispatch, Nick has documented the growing influence of SOCOM, its expanding power, and it’s establishing of close ties to the special operations forces of nations across the globe.

U.S. Special Forces NCO instructing Malian counter-terrorism forces in patrolling and ambush small unit tactics in that West African nation.



It seems quite logical that the main area of focus for these forces immediately prior to the declaration of GWOT in 2001 would be in the Middle East; however, since as early as 2014 the United States began refocusing its deployment of special operations personnel to the African continent. More recently, since the coup in Ukraine and the civil war that erupted as a result, SOCOM has shifted much of its efforts to Europe. Although the DOD and State Department have stated that such deployments are directly connected to terrorist activities in Africa, in Europe the goal is confronting an “increasingly aggressive and assertive” Russia.


In reality, deployments to Africa are largely responsive to an increased Chinese presence on the continent. Not publicly acknowledged until the official publication of the National Defense Strategy of the United States for 2018, the U.S. establishment had already come to view both Russia and China as the major threats to U.S. global hegemony.

U.S. special operations forces were deployed to an overwhelming majority of African nations in 2017.


In 2006, deployments to Africa accounted for a mere 1% of U.S. special operations foreign deployments. By the end of 2017 this number had jumped to almost 17%. What could account for such an increase? Spokesmen for the DOD have sighted the increased threat of Islamic militant groups such as Boko Haram and al Shabaab and their capability to disrupt and weaken local governments; however, SOCOM has not just deployed forces to Somalia, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Cameroon, the traditional territories of operation of Boko Haram and African offshoots of al Qaeda. U.S. commandos deployed to 33 African countries in 2017. 61% of the nations of Africa hosted a U.S. special operations military presence to some degree.

There is little doubt that terrorist groups such as Boko Haram present a destabilizing threat to African governments whom are hanging on by a threat in their efforts to govern in the best of times, yet there is little evidence to support the idea that the U.S. military is in Africa for altruistic purposes. The U.S. military, just like the French Military, is increasing its activities in Africa to protect their respective financial interests and maintain influence over African nations, and to increasingly confront the growing influence of China in the region.

The Chinese and Afghan governments have been engaged in the highest level negotiations regarding infrastructure development, transit rights and even the establishment of a Chinese military facility on the Afghan side of the Wakhan Corridor since at least




Between the years 2009 and 2012, Chinese overseas foreign direct investment (OFDI) grew at an annual rate of 20.5%. Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged $60 billion USD in investments in Africa at the 4th Annual Investing in China Forum held in Beijing last September.

The United States has often claimed that Chinese financial practices in Africa are predatory in nature. This is quite ironic coming from the country that has a controlling influence over the IMF and World Bank, two financial entities that have been responsible for indebting most of the developing world for the past half century. Neither nation is in Africa to help poor Africans, but to enrich themselves. The African continent is rich in rare earth minerals and metals used in the manufacture of modern electronics, batteries, cell phones and computers. China opened its first and largest overseas military base in Djibouti in August of 2017, located in the strategic Horn of Africa. It is just a stones throw from Camp Lemonnier, the largest U.S. military base on the continent. In a similar move, China is seeking to build a military base in Afghanistan, another nation rich in rare earth minerals where the U.S. military has struggled to maintain a viable presence for over 18 years.


China plans to base at least one battalion of troops at a newly constructed facility in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, ostensibly to train Afghan security forces. Located close to the Wakhan Corridor, the base will help provide security to the One Belt One Road trade corridor through the region, and help solidify growing economic and security ties with the Central Asian nation. Coupled with the base in Djibouti and a planned PLAN naval base at Gwadar, Pakistan, China is establishing a viable defense infrastructure in the region. This directly undercuts long established U.S. interests in the region.

The Wakhan Corridor is a strategically important mountain pass, the control of which is of utmost importance to the Chinese government in securing the One Belt One Road logistics network.



While SOCOM has maintained a sizeable presence in Afghanistan and Africa to confront a growing Chinese presence in Central Asia and Africa, it has also increased operations in the European theatre as well. In 2006 only 3% of all SOF units were deployed to nations in Europe. By 2018 that percentage had grown to almost 17%. According to a statement made to Tom’s Dispatch, a spokesman for SOCEUR, Major Michael Weisman stated,

“Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally of through various multinational events. The persistent presence of U.S. SOF alongside our allies sends a clear message of U.S. commitment to our allies and the defense of our NATO alliance.”

Since the disastrous failure of Petro Poroshenko’s Anti-terrorism Operation (ATO) to subdue the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine, SOF deployments to nations bordering the Russian Federation have increased notably. As it was detailed in a previous article, SOCOM has established very close ties with Ukrainian special operations forces.

Over the past four years SOCOM has repeatedly deployed forces to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, and even Finland. In 2016 alone, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) conducted no less than 37 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) exercises on the European continent, with 18 such exercises in nations bordering Russia. Is SOCOM sending a reassuring message to allies, or an ominous message to Russia, the holder of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal? Is it wise defense policy to increasingly surround Russia, and back it into an increasingly tight corner? If Russian political and military leaders have learned one lesson throughout the centuries, it is that the concentration of foreign belligerent military forces on their national borders eventually leads to conflict and invasion.

Not only has SOCOM positioned itself in a majority of the nations across the globe, but increasingly along the borders of the Russian Federation and China.



The United States has become deeply entrenched in the conflict in Ukraine, having increased military aid to the ruling regime incrementally from 2014 to the present. After the disastrous Ukrainian Armed Forces winter offensive of 2015, culminating in the encirclement battle of Debaltseve, U.S. military aid kicked into high gear. Regular rotations of U.S. Army trainers teach UAF troops at the Yavoriv International Peace Keeping and Security Center modern combat skills with an increased emphasis on making the force more NATO interoperable.

Ukrainian Special Forces have undergone a clear and striking transformation, and are now nearly indistinguishable from their U.S. and NATO counterparts. They are now wearing U.S. military issue Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP) “multicam” battle dress uniforms and gear, and are increasingly using western manufactured firearm accessories, optics, and night vision equipment. More notably, the UAF special operations units have adopted a number of small arms and sniper weapons systems that utilize NATO standard ammunition such as the 5.56x45mm intermediate rifle round and the 7.62x51mm rifle round. Sniper rifles chambered in .308 Winchester and .338 Lapua have also been adopted in limited numbers.

U.S. Navy SEALs conducted a number of exercises with the Bulgarian military in the Black Sea in 2018, a clear message to Russia that the U.S. was prepared to escalate asymmetrical warfare targeting the Crimean Peninsula.



Speaking at a GEOInt (Geospatial Intelligence) annual symposium in 2014, former head of SOCOM, General Joseph Votel opined that “We want to be everywhere, know everything.” Clearly, SOCOM has increasingly pushed for the first part of his stated goal in the intervening years; however, the increased focus and funding of special operations over the past 18 years has left the U.S. military’s conventional forces in a state of atrophy and decline. The U.S. political establishment and military leadership have come to see SOCOM as the go-to solution provider for just about any scenario where military force is seen as an option. This has increased the reputation and clout of SOCOM, but this has increasingly come at the expense and detriment to more traditional conventional forces that chiefly serve the national interests of deterrence and defense.

Conventional Warfare Atrophy
In a detailed analysis posted late last year, “Why the U.S. Military is Woefully Unprepared for a Major Conventional Conflict”, I outlined the causes and effects of the decline in U.S. conventional warfare capabilities. There is undoubtedly a direct correlation between the reliance upon and exponential growth of U.S. special operations forces, and the decline in conventional force readiness and capability. This is evident in all service branches and has had a negative effect on the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out future offensive and defensive combat operations against peer adversaries. The U.S. military will have very little hope of achieving decisive military victories in either Russia’s or China’s backyard. Any assertion to the contrary is delusory.

The U.S. military obsession with counterinsurgency and occupation stemming from one U.S. invasion or regime change operation after another, has left a once cutting edge, combined-arms conventional force gutted materially and low in morale. Special operations forces were leveraged in a fight against popular uprisings, Islamic terrorist organizations, and often an alliance between the two. The overwhelming majority of the growing names on the U.S. enemies list found their genesis as a result of U.S. military adventurism. These various insurgencies were a direct reaction to heavy-handed U.S. “foreign policy” delivered at the barrel of a gun. The resulting struggles in the so called GWOT depended greatly on an ever expanding pool of special operations forces. SOF were prioritized over other traditional, conventional forces not meant for occupation and not skilled in counterinsurgency.


While the troops at the disposal of SOCOM ballooned to almost 70,000, the U.S. Army has struggled to replace armored vehicles first fielded in the 1960’s, the Navy witnessed the utter deterioration and exhaustion of its carrier air wings, and the Air Force struggled to retain pilots to fly aircraft that fell deeper into a state of disrepair. Although achieving battlefield successes, the Armed Forces of the United States have yet to decisively win any of the numerous conflicts embarked upon since 2001. The intervening years have revealed the U.S. military of today to be an organization riddled with major material shortcomings and inferiorities, while plagued with a leadership lacking sound judgement and brimming with both hubris and an unfounded superiority complex. This leadership has repeatedly decided to invest in special operations forces that are unable to win wars on their own, at the expense of conventional forces designed solely for that purpose.

Growing Political Power
SOCOM has not restricted its influence to the many battlefields across the globe, or the forging of ties with foreign militaries through training and advisory programs. Just as the CIA has stationed personnel at most U.S. embassies oversees, SOCOM has followed suit. Special Operations Liaison Officers (SOLO) are stationed at a growing number of embassies, including the NATO member countries the United Kingdom, France, Poland, Italy, Turkey and Canada. SOLOS can also be found in U.S. embassies in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Israel, Jordan, and Kenya. SOCOM’s former head, General Joseph Votel, had announced the intention of putting a SOLO is at least forty U.S. embassies around the globe by 2019.

This statement should be viewed with some skepticism, as SOCOM rarely speaks publicly about the extent of their operations and planning, so it is likely that SOLOs are already serving in many more U.S. embassies, especially those located in flash points or trouble spots in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and nations bordering the Russian Federation and China.

Not only should this development be worrying to host nations who may not be inclined to look at a foreign military presence on their soil as acceptable, but it also clearly exhibits closer ties between SOCOM and the Department of State. Not only has SOCOM fostered closer ties with the Department of State, but with the monolithic U.S. security apparatus as a whole. In an attempt to “be everywhere and know everything”, SOCOM has moved further away from its subordinate position in the Department of Defense, and pursued a more independent and unaccountable path, similar to that of the CIA or NSA, two organizations that it has increasingly worked closely with. SOCOM has even forged close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose prevue is supposed to be limited to U.S. domestic crime investigations and the enforcement of federal laws.

There should be some apprehension at both the Pentagon and in the halls of Congress, of the growing power of this new military within the military. In a constitutional republic that clearly delineates, compartmentalizes, and limits government power, the growth of a largely unaccountable, secretive and influential new military organization should be viewed as a threat to the very foundations of political and social order. A number of former special operations members have run for political office in recent years and won. While electing retired soldiers into Congress and gubernatorial office will most likely bring a level of restraint to government military adventurism, with those individuals having seen and paid the price for war, there is also a chance that they will steer policy to aid the military industrial complex. The cautionary tale of Governor Eric Greitens is one such example that also signals another problem effecting the special operations community as a whole.

Scandals Tarnish the Mythology
A number of scandals involving U.S. special operations soldiers have hit the headlines in recent years, corresponding with the exponential growth of the force. In an attempt to expand the SOF, the Pentagon seems to have lowered physical, cognitive and moral standards in order to fill the ranks. The Hollywood-Pentagon alliance that has worked tirelessly to create and perpetuate the image of the invincibility of the Navy Seals, presenting them as modern day Spartans or Praetorians, has run into a minor set-back in recent years. The criminal conduct of the elite of the elite has recently tarnished a once proud and silent fraternity of soldiers.

On June 4, 2017 an Army Special Forces NCO was murdered by two Navy SEALs and two Marines “Raiders” in Mali. The original story put forward was that the soldiers accidentally killed their compatriot in an attempt to scare him into silence. The Green Beret, Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar, had uncovered gross criminal conduct by Chief Petty Officer Adam Matthews and Petty Officer Anthony DeDolph. The two SEALs had been embezzling money meant to pay off local informants, and had also been bringing local prostitutes back to the small unit’s “secret” safe house .

Staff Sergeant Melgar was ambushed in the safe house, beaten and choked to death. It took military investigators roughly a year and a half to finally charge all four perpetrators with felony murder, involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, hazing and burglary. The investigation found that the men killed Staff Sergeant Melgar while engaged in an act of burglary; however, it is not known if they were attempting to steal back or destroy evidence that the Army Staff Sergeant had collected against them.

Perhaps no better example of the meteoric rise and fall of a former Navy SEAL exists as a greater cautionary tale than that of disgraced former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Greitens had ridden the reputation of the SEALs into fame and political office, only to fall victim to his own despicable criminal mind.

Greitens never served in combat and was not highly regarded by most rank and file SEAL members with combat experience. Many such members speaking off the record, regarded him as an overly ambitious ladder climber that intended to ride the SEAL reputation as far as it would take him. It was largely theorized that before accusations of criminal conduct started coming to the fore, that he fully intended to launch a U.S. presidential campaign. Thankfully, investigations revealed gross corruption in his political dealings and his personal life. Geitens had been listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2013, and made the list of Fortune Magazine’s 50 greatest leaders in 2014. By May 29, 2017 he had resigned from political office in disgrace.

A still shot from a gubernatorial commercial promoting Eric Greitens in 2016. He ran on the collective reputation of the SEAL teams, much to the chagrin of many rank and file members.



A vocal critic of the new trend in special operations personnel seeking the spotlight and financial gain is Navy SEAL Lieutenant Forrest Crowell, who even wrote his post graduate thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School regarding the issue. While writing a detailed story on Governor Greitens in The New Yorker, Phil Klay summarized Lt. Crowell’s opinion put forward in his thesis:

“In it, he argued that the SEALs’ celebrity status had diverted their culture “away from the traditional SEAL Ethos of quiet professionalism to a Market Ethos of commercialization and self-promotion.” Crowell warned that the new approach incentivized “narcissistic and profit-oriented behavior” and undermined healthy civil-military relations by using “the credibility of special operations to push partisan politics. “The people of this nation should be suspicious of SEALs who speak too loudly about themselves,” Crowell wrote.”

Reversing the Trend
Although it remains to be seen whether or not U.S. special operations troops will be withdrawn from Syria or not, it is highly unlikely. The timetable for withdrawal continues to stretch into the future. It is also highly unlikely that SOCOM will reduce its global footprint, slow the tempo of joint military training with foreign militaries, or request a smaller budget for 2020. Like all U.S. federal government entities, it will promote itself at the expense of all others, and will resist any demands to lessen its power and influence.

President Trump has proven himself either incapable of challenging the military industrial complex, or totally complicit in the aim of that complex to perpetuate endless military conflict. There is very little sign that anyone in either the civilian government or the military leadership of the United States has the integrity or is willing to make the political sacrifice to alter the current course that the U.S. Armed Forces are embarked upon. The U.S. military has misallocated funds and priorities for the past two decades, engaged in misguided and disastrous regime change operations that have cost the nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. These military adventures have gutted the armed forces materially and morally. A generation of Americans have been left scarred physically and mentally. Hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians in countries across the Middle East and Africa have lost their lives, while millions of refugees have fled the resultant chaos.

By 2019, SOCOM has reached a pinnacle in power and influence within the military industrial complex. It has garnered and fostered an almost mythical status in U.S. society. Yet it has not won and is incapable of winning any conflict that the government of the United States has seen fit to employ it in. Perhaps that is the very point. Special operations forces deployed across the globe, in almost every country you can imagine can help initiate, maintain and perpetuate conflict as long as the United States stays in a position of relatively unrivaled power in the world. The U.S. military industrial complex does not desire large winnable wars, but “low-intensity” conflicts that last as long as possible. That is how the system retains power, maintains profits, and remains relevant.

A strengthened SOCOM, deployed across the planet, establishing relationships with the foreign militaries of most of the world’s nations, and stationed in an ever growing number of U.S. embassies is a dream come true for the Deep State. There is little chance that SOCOM will reverse its course of expansion and accumulation of power at the expense of U.S. national security anytime in the immediate future. Just as the FBI, NSA and CIA have grown in power, influence and unaccountability since their creation, SOCOM seems poised to follow the same model to the detriment of the Republic that it was created to serve


https://russia-insider.com/en/us-sp...s-are-active-70-countries-endless-war/ri26619

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The Expanding Global Footprint of U.S. Special Operations