RNA - The US government has signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill which is a big windfall for the Pentagon regime and the militaristic hordes, who will be getting the majority of the money in the realm of $700 billion.
This $700 billion does not include other military-related spending. This is part of a $61 billion spending increase over the previous year, and virtually every aspect of the Pentagon regime is getting more money, more equipment, higher pay, and just general boosts in funding. Which isn’t to say they are actually going to achieve anything on the ground, particularly in the Middle East.
This budget, which is nominally for war, won’t help the regime changers to impose regime change in Syria War II. It won’t help to end America’s longest war in Afghanistan, much less to help the Saudis win their disastrous war on Yemen, among others. However, this budget will ensure the United States remains the world’s greatest threat to world peace. And guess what? This perception doesn’t come from Trump, though he has surely increased this perception with his bellicose rhetoric and threats against Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.
In reality, the United States has an appalling record of violence and aggression dating back to long before Iran had its revolution back in 1979 that toppled America’s favourite dictator Shah, especially since the end of World War II, when the US emerged as the world’s leading superpower.
This record in modern times consists support in the Middle East for numerous dictatorships that suppress the aspirations of the local population for freedom and democracy, as well as supporting numerous terrorist and insurgent groups against independent governments. The pretext given for US military and so-called “humanitarian interventions” is to prevent the spread of real democracy in the region, supposedly a conspiracy directed from Tehran to dominate the region and wipe out the American-Israeli-Saudi dominance.
In reality, most of the movements labelled as pro-Iran or pro-Shiite by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are largely concerned with achieving independence and democratic control over local resources and are usually represented by the vast majority of each respective country’s population. In its quest to stop this modern aspiration for self-determination, the US continues to increase its military budget by the year to actually wage new wars against democratic independence - in many cases like Syria, Yemen, and Egypt literally overthrowing democratically elected governments - to serve its own interests and those of Israel.
Syria has been particularly devastated by the US-led regime-change war during the past 7 years or so. The same is true in Yemen where thousands have been killed and a whole nation is under siege - which includes the killing of defenceless women and children by airstrikes; the targeting of schools, hospitals, power plants, ports, and markets; and mass starvation by means of blockade that prevents international aid from reaching the most affected areas.
The pattern repeats itself elsewhere in the region: In Syria, and with a helping hand from its fanatical extremists that are allied with ISIL and Al-Qaeda, the United States has begun a new campaign of sabotage, economic strangulation, and military occupation after its regime-change campaign failed and Syria and its Iranian-Russian allies managed to dislodge foreign-backed terrorist groups from key cities and towns. Peace talks have similarly been derailed because the US and its junior partners don’t want to see Syria at peace with itself.
Perhaps no country was ruined by US intervention during modern times as Syria. But that’s not the point. Beyond the direct devastation the regime-change campaign has caused (the interventions in Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya have been similarly devastating), America’s endless war of aggression and deceit is far from over and it has the necessary means for it:
According to Fars News Agancy, the system of American hegemony is maintained in various ways. First, the United States maintains a massive military budget that far surpasses any other country’s on the planet - $700 billion this year, more than the next eight highest spenders combined (most of which are US allies anyway) and accounting for more than a third of the total worldwide military spending.
Second, the US maintains a system of military bases around the globe – a modern empire of bases - that allow the US to bully others. According to the Defense Department’s Base Structure Report, the US maintains 587 military bases in foreign countries and the number is increasing.
Another way the US dominates the world is through arms exports. The US exports more weapons to others than any other country, accounting for 33 percent of the world’s total. Its chief client is the theocratic dictatorship Saudi Arabia, which has been using American weapons since March 2015 to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians in Yemen.
True, the US system of global hegemony might have been able to achieve results through military dominance and violence - but in horrendous consequences for innocent people as well as potentially destabilizing the entire Muslim world in even worse ways. And we haven’t even started talking about American actions and the flow of events that often elevate the authority of terrorist groups, much less the trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program that will create exactly what one would expect to see: A nuclear war on a global scale that will have no winners and many potential losers, one being the United States. Given the immense costs and the terrible consequences, the sound minds in Washington must ask themselves if this is the moral and wise thing to do.
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