What's the Empire to do? Iran, Iraq and a US-Iran alliance? Geo-politics makes the strangest of bedfellows!!

Invading Iraq, a nation with a 60-70% Shiite majority, was one of the most monumentally stupidest things the US ever did.  Saddam Hussein was a Sunni strongman and really no different than any of the other psychopaths in the region that the US eagerly endorsed, bribed, supported, funded and armed. However, Hussein was no Sunni Islamist, he feared them and he kept them out of Iraq.  It has been reported that Hussein enjoyed drinking western whiskey and watching Godfather movies, activities decidedly deemed un-Islamic.  I don't even know why the US invaded and occupied Iraq except that the Bush Crime Family and the military industrial complex was obsessed with flexing its military muscle by waging war on SOMEBODY. In any event, my best guess for invading Iraq is that the American crime syndicate that lords over the District of Crime in DC was absolutely obsessed with destroying Iran, a Shiite nation with a 90% plus Shia majority.

To begin to understand the situation one has to first understand the petro-dollar.  When Nixon made the unilateral decision to destroy the dollar and its purchasing power by de-tethering the dollar from gold in 1971 via an Executive Order that bypassed Congress, the dollar became a petro-dollar.   But for the dollar to become a petro-dollar and maintain its world reserve currency status, the world's oil supplies had to trade exclusively in dollars.  Once oil traded in any currency other than dollars, the dollar would become toast and America would become just another bankrupt banana boat republic.

The cost of maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency came with a whopper of a price tag, a real compact with Satan and that deal was cut with Saudi Arabia and other oil rich Sunni nations.  They agreed to forever trade oil in dollars in exchange for having the power of the US military at its fingertips to advance the most vile, the most intolerant and the most evil form of Islam ever to exist - Sunni Salafist Wahabbist Islam - and Sunni nations have reportedly dumped over $100 billion into radicalizing Muslims everywhere, including Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia and many other nations with significant Sunni populations.  On a side note, Bill Clinton was tight with his Sunni masters, as is the Bush Crime Family, and Bill Clinton advanced the cause of Sunni Salafist Wahhabism in the Balkan by invading, bombing and destroying Serbia and other Balkan nations.  In exchange for his loyalty to advancing radical Sunni Islam, Clinton was rewarded with millions from the Sunni Arab world for his presidential library.  Also, Saudi Arabia is reported to be one of the biggest financial contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), here, which states "One of the Clinton Foundation’s largest donors is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

Back to Iraq.  It was impossible for the US not to know that invading Iraq and imposing a US styled 'democracy', complete with purple fingers no less, would result in Shiite majority rule.  Was the US and its neocon MIC so desperate to use Iraq as a forward base for invading Iran that it risked achieving the probable, namely pushing Shiite Iraq further towards its natural ally of Shiite Iran?  The whole thing makes no sense except in the context that the Sunni Muslim world fully expected the US to bomb and destroy Shiite Iran or even ordered the US to do it.  Bear in mind that those who control the world's reserve currency (the petro-dollar) also controls the world, US foreign policy, the Federal Reserve and the entire US government.

However, things began to unravel.  From the Sunni Salafist Wahhabist terror attacks on 911, the bombing of 2 US embassies in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, the London bombings, the Madrid bombings, the Mumbai bombings, the Moscow bombings, the Bali bombings and numerous other Saudi engineered Sunni terror attacks, the western world in general became horrified and experienced their WTF moment by implying "what have we done".

Iraq is in shambles and that's no surprise because it's been a fictitious nation ever since British aristocrat Gertrude Bell galloped through the region as the female Lawrence of Arabia and literally drew Iraq's borders with a pencil on a piece of paper and created for the British Empire modern day Iraq, complete with installing a British lackey on the throne.  Besides the perpetual Sunni-Shiite conflict, the Kurds are also victims in the never ending Shiite-Sunni-Kurd conflict.

Heck, even Joe Biden said in 2006 that Iraq should be divided into 3 separate regions, here.  But Biden's idea was insanely foolish because he still wanted centralized control in Baghdad and any centralized government in a nation torn by civil war and constant internal feuding is a guaranteed disaster.  And then there is Iraq's immense oil reserves so the fight isn't just about religious and ethnic differences, it's also a battle for control of Iraq's vast oil wealth.

The Sunni world is paranoid that the Shiite world, namely Iran and Iraq, will become the new kingpins of middle east oil and the Sunni world definitely wants control of that oil and will do anything to achieve that goal. Oil is wealth and wealth is power.  With the OPEC Sunni oil oligarchy already being challenged by Russia, now a major global oil and gas producer, OPEC and its Sunni chieftains are becoming unhinged as they rightfully perceive that their cozy cartel is threatened by significant oil discoveries in other nations as well as chronic Sunni-Shiite feuds in the middle east.

It's a good damn thing that 'bomb, bomb, bomb Iran' McCain never became president because, astounding, the unthinkable is being openly discussed - the possibility that the US might consider allying with Iran.  I know it's an utterly preposterous idea but the idea is surfacing.

Iran open to shared role with US in Iraq CNBC

US airstrikes to support Iranian Revolutionary Guard's offensive in Iraq? Russia Today

Exclusive: Alarmed by Iraq, Iran open to shared role with U.S. - Iran official Reuters

Iran Deploys Forces to Fight al Qaeda-Inspired Militants in Iraq WSJ

Now what?  Iran also supports Syria and Assad who the US and radical Sunnis have vowed to destroy.

Is it even likely that the US would consider ending military aid to Sunni Salafist Wahabbist terrorists simply because the fate of the dollar is at stake?

With Russia also emerging as a major oil-gas power, pissing off Russia by supporting the neo-Nazis regime in Kiev has driven Russia and a neurotic China to cut energy deals that will not be dollar dominated, a situation that directly threatens the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

As with any dying empire on life support, it grows more violent as its extinction is glaring them in the face. The US is accustomed to barking orders and having folks all over the planet just humbly genuflect before DC and comply.  But no more.  The barking dogs of the US Empire have resulted in absolute and raw hatred toward the US, its murderous wars, its bloody interventions, its foreign policy and its profound arrogance. Folks all over the planet are rising up and barking back and they are not content to just bark, they fully intend to bite the vermin that has been biting them for decades and sucking the life and liberty out of their people and nations.

For a recap of what is currently happening in Iraq, Drudge 6/13/14 headlines  provides just about everything you need to know about the current situation in Iraq.

BAGHDAD FALLING
Exodus from Iraq as chaos spreads...
UN: 800k refugees...
CHRISTIANS ON THE RUN...
Terrorists 'full-blown army'...
Medieval Sharia Law Imposed...
'Roads lined with decapitated police and soldiers'...
Iraqi government 'paralyzed'...
Army Collapses...
VIDEO: Thousands of soldiers captured by ISIS...
Iran Deploys Forces...
Americans evacuated...
USA Secretly Flying Drones...
ISIS terror leader released from U.S. custody in 2009...
Pentagon: Rebels may have captured military equipment...
PAPER: 'Worst case scenario'...
FLASHBACK: Biden: Iraq One of Obama's 'Great Achievements'...
Vets in Congress: 'What was point of all that?'...
Oil Soars...
OBAMA HINTS AT ACTION...

What is the Empire to do?  Ally with Al Qaeda and Sunni Salafist terrorists?  That's precisely what America has been doing for so long that it's ingrained as a foreign policy imperative, despite all the propaganda that America marched off to war to fight Al Qaeda and similar Sunni terrorist groups.  Americans are no longer buying into the War on Terror phony baloney talking points propagated by the government and its partner in crime, the US media.  Sane folks on the right and left fully comprehend that they were lied to and duped.

Geo-politics is profoundly complicated which why most folks avoid it because it involves an eternal quest for knowledge and truth, especially in  history and economics.  It's where history, resources, religions, cultures and empires have always collided. More information on these issues for those folks who do search for truth:

A Guide To Understanding the Middle East, Syria, The West and Oil

Why Sunni Islam is Crucial to World Peace and Crushing the NWO

Why Syria is Serious - It's Where Oil, Monetary Power and Religious Feuds Collide

The Making of the Modern Middle East

A Cruise Through History: Islam, the West and the Rest of the World

With Charity Toward None, A History of Israel

America's $2.3 Trillion Dollar Foreign Aid is Mostly a Defense Contractor Subsidy

The Cost of America's Wars - $3 Trillion, $4 Trillion, $5 Trillion, $7 Trillion, $8 Trillion, Going Once, Going Twice, SOLD

Let's Talk Unemployment Benefits

As the Senate considers a $6.4 billion extension of unemployment benefits, here, the right winger are stroking out over such a gargantuan public expenditure.  Congress is a crime syndicate where bribery (pay to play) divvies up nearly $4 trillion a year to powerful special interests.  Yet, there is hardly a peep from the Republican wing-nut camp over Congress polishing off its $1 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill that is loaded with special interest corporate welfare.

K St. pushes to shape $1T spending bill

Lobbyists and advocacy groups are working furiously to make their mark on an upcoming $1 trillion spending bill...

Defense lobbyists are seeking to make sure their pet programs are safe...

Congress is also finalizing a $1 trillion agricultural bill that generously rewards corporatist sugar barons and other corporate pigs lined up at the public feeding trough.

Sushi Aid in $1 Trillion U.S. Farm Bill Irks Watchdogs

Tucked deep in the 629-page U.S. House agriculture policy legislation is an initiative to guarantee prices for sushi rice....

 So too is insurance for alfalfa and a marketing plan for Christmas trees. Catfish farmers also get a morsel...

 The farm bill, which benefits crop-buyers such as Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. (ADM), grocers including Supervalu Inc. (SVU) and insurers including Wells Fargo & Co. and Ace Ltd (ACE), has been working through Congress for almost two years.

Recently, Congress had no problem whatsoever passing a $625 billion military spending bill to fund The Empire, its endless wars and the military industrial complex.

Really, in the grand scheme of the grand theft that is perpetrated upon the American people by Congress Critters, $6.4 billion is a small drop in the nearly $4 trillion bucket of bucks that rains like manna from the heavens upon well connected insiders who fill campaign coffers.

Yeah, unemployment benefits are abused.  But the poor smucks who snag a few crumbs from a corrupt to the core political and economic system that is stacked against them are petty thieves compared with the grand larceny that permeates America's political system.

Want to really cut spending?  Then start with big cuts in the hundreds of billions that go to the military industrial complex (murdering for defense contractor profits), assorted corporate welfare queens from Big Sugar and sushi,  and NSA contractors who grow filthy rich by eviscerating the 4th amendment.

Progressive/Liberals/Dems are the Original Neocons

I've literally spent years and years pondering "How in the heck did the Republican Party morph into the warmongering, big spending and anti-liberty nightmare that it is today?"

Who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars? All progressive liberal Democrats - Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton.

How much blood is on the hands of the Democrat warmongers?  A lot and they left a bloody trail of carnage that consumed over 100 million lives.

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

WW I resulted in the deaths of 35,000,000...

Of course, WW I only set the stage for WW II that killed at least another 50,000,000 folks (many historians put the WW II death toll at 60-70 million)....

Wikipedia estimates the deaths from the Korean War at 2,500,000 – 3,500,000 and the deaths from the Vietnam War at 2,500,000-6,000,000...

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

It was Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats who gave us the Federal Reserve and the 16th Amendment (income tax) in 1913. It was no accident that WW I broke out in 1914 and the details of that sordid 'bailout the rich' scheme are well documented.  Without the Federal Reserve, there would have been no WW I.  Moreover,  the Federal Reserve Act was indeed the enabling legislation that actually birthed the military industrial complex and not by accident.  It was all about war profits for America's wealthiest families and the 1% (the only beneficiaries of any war).

World War I, the Banksters, the Lusitania and Bailing Out America’s Wealthiest Families

Interestingly, I witnessed my own Democratic Irish Catholic family abandon the Democratic Party and become Reagan Republicans, largely because blue collar working class families such as mine were sick and tired of having their kids who were drafted into the US military come home from Vietnam in body bags or badly mangled from combat and war injuries.  They not only feared Democrat foreign policy, they were also extremely fearful of the growth in government power and spending.

When the Republican Party was pro-peace and anti-foreign intervention, it experienced the support of the people. How much support? Reagan's 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49 in 1980 and a 51% to 41% victory speaks volumes!

Source: US Election Atlas

Reagan was viewed as the great hope to restore America to fiscal and foreign policy sanity. Unfortunately, he was a big fail. Few Americans are even aware of the extent to which taxes and the Federal Reserve fund the wars and foreign policy.

Taxes are US. The Biggest Tax Increases in US History

The largest tax increases were imposed by Truman (Revenue Act of 1950, Revenue Act 1951 and Excess Profits Tax of 1950) to fund the Korean War. Johnson's two taxes, the Temporary Surcharge of 1968 and the Tax Increase of 1966, were imposed on the American people to fund the Vietnam War.

Reagan, revered by Republicans for his extensive taxation and spending, piled on 5 new and substantial tax increases and is probably the biggest taxing president in US history.

Reagan taxes:

Tax Increase of 1983

Deficit Reduction Act of 1984

Tax Reform Act of 1986

Budget Reconciliation of 1987

The largest Social Security Tax Hike in US history - the Reagan Social Security Tax of 1983.

While taxes are a direct hit to the American people that comes right out of their paychecks, by far the biggest tax is the hideous, invisible and unnoticed inflation tax that gave us this:

If America is ever going to be restored to peace, liberty and prosperity for the people, we need drastic changes, starting with severely cutting spending, ending the damn wars that are bankrupt us and reducing government power at all levels. Meanwhile, I'll be pondering why the warmongering foreign policy hawk Mitt Romney, who has vowed to spend trillions more on foreign policy, isn't sending his own sons off to die in neocon wars or come home limbless and minus their junk.

The Empire Really Does Strike Back: Americans are Idiots and Will Go Down With the Empire

Yes, the empire really does strike back but ultimately the joke will be on Americans who are slowly being delivered into a totalitarian Nazified hell.

Elections in America are never about foreign policy which, of course, keeps defense contractors and the military industrial complex fat, happy and murderous. In fact, foreign policy is so irrelevant to Americans that politicians can safely ignore the issue.

A recent poll indicated that only 4% of American registered voters even consider foreign policy an election issue, as disclosed in a recent CBS/New York Times poll, here.

Most Important Issue in the Presidential Election (Among registered voters)

Economy and jobs 62%
Federal budget deficit 11
Health care 9
Same-sex marriage 7
Foreign policy 4
Immigration 2

Americans proudly wave the flag and scream from the highest rooftops about American exceptionalism. But what are we exceptional at? Murdering folks all over the planet?

Is America a Nation of Bloodthirsty Warmongering Savages? For Americans, the Wars are Just Another TV Reality Show

For the vast majority of Americans, the damn wars really are nothing more than a murderous TV reality show.  It's entertainment.

That speaks volumes about us as a people in a nation that was founded on the principle of steering clear of foreign wars and interventions.

When one makes the decision to worship the state and all the evil that accompanies it, one tends to acquire the diseases that are spread by the state, notably poverty and oppression.

Americans seem to think that our reality show wars are simple cost free entertainment that is included in our cable TV packages and endorsed by CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. After all, the media is the government's most powerful and effective propaganda vehicle.  The media and the entertainment industry propel our culture of violence.

Americans and taxable entities are currently paying about $2.2 trillion a year in federal taxes. It's been recently reported that 56 cents out of every tax dollar collected goes to the military and the wars, here.

Last year we taxpayers were charged 56 cents of every dollar we sent to Uncle Sam for military spending.

CNN recently reported that the cost to maintain one US soldier is between $850,000 and $1,400,000 a year (and rising), here.

Keeping one American service member in Afghanistan costs between $850,000 and $1.4 million a year, depending on who you ask. But one matter is clear, that cost is going up.

When Americans can no longer afford the popcorn to go with the cable TV's and visits to the movie theaters to gorge on louder and bigger violence, perhaps they might pause and notice that the military industrial complex has eaten them alive and left them with nothing but acute impoverishment and militarized police state tyranny.

It's practically a law of physics that every empire in human history is destined to bite the dust.  The evil US empire is no different.  When Americans have no jobs, no food on the table to feed their families and no shelter, they can ponder where their prosperity went.

United Bases of America

For America and Americans to be restored to liberty and prosperity, the military industrial complex must die.  

Reflections on Vietnam and its Iconic Napalm Girl 40 Years Later

Americans: We love the smell of napalm in the morning. We love defense contractor profits. We love killing for profit. We pledge allegiance to the military industrial complex and all the evil it represents.

The above photo is suddenly a red hot story this week because Napalm Girl, Kim Phuc, was interviewed 40 years after the famous photo was taken, a photo that managed to go viral at the time the event occurred.  Then, as now, the US media continues to be the propaganda arm of the government.

Thirty percent of Phuc’s tiny body was scorched raw by third-degree burns, though her face somehow remained untouched.

After multiple skin grafts and surgeries, Phuc was finally allowed to leave. For a while, life did go somewhat back to normal. She was accepted into medical school.

But all that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value of the “napalm girl” in the photo.

Read the rest here

New York Post 

Why is it 'enemy' propaganda for the America people to see the true face of the human agony caused by U.S. foreign policy?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial lists the names of the 58,261 members of the armed forces who died in that war. During JFK’s presidency, Vietnam combat deaths were 182 (16 in 1961, 53 in 1962 and 118 through 11/22/63). On 10/11/63, JFK issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 making it official that the US would withdraw from Vietnam. On November 21, 1963, JFK was given a list of the recent Vietnam casualties and he told his Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. Vietnam is not worth another American life”. The next day, JFK was dead.

After JFK was murdered by the CIA and military industrial complex for the crime of promoting peace and opposing murderous genocide, the low level, low death Vietnam conflict massively escalated.  LBJ became the obliging Murderer in Chief and drafted young men to march off and die in senseless wars.  Peak Vietnam years for US combat deaths are:

1965   1,863
1966   6,144
1967 11,153
1968 16,589
1969 11,614
1970   6,083
1971   2,357

There were millions of US soldiers who returned home with lifelong debilitating combat injuries (not including Senator John Kerry who was scratched in the ass and demanded medals for his few short weeks of combat duty).

Millions of Asians from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were slaughtered. We bombed these nations into oblivion and doused them with poisonous Agent Orange. None of these poor third world nations posed any threat whatsoever to America.

Why did we do it? We march off to war for one reason and one reason only: defense contractor profits. The military industrial complex rules America, defense contractors own nearly 100% of Congress and the American Sheeple People are notorious for turning a blind eye to the crimes of the government they elect.  They'd rather be waving American flags on Memorial Day and July 4th while wallowing in the delusion that America is a great and free nation that spreads good cheer upon the planet.

Vietnam was a very expensive war.  The Congressional Research Service puts the cost at $686 billion, here.  Other estimates of the cost of the Vietnam War range from $700 to $900 billion.

If suffering Americans are wondering why the American economy lies in ruins, they only need to look at the gargantuan cost of our never ending wars.  In fact, most of our $15 trillion plus mountain of debt is war related.