by James Hickman via Schiff Sovereign

By 1970, US commanders in Vietnam were optimistic that they had “functionally severed” North Vietnamese forces.

The generals were particularly boastful about their taking out the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a sprawling network of roads, footpaths, and tunnels through Laos and Cambodia that let North Vietnamese forces move troops and supplies into South Vietnam, bypassing the fortified border.

After bombing it into oblivion, a senior US Air Force general declared, “Gentlemen, what we have here is the end of North Vietnam as a viable fighting power.”

Unfortunately, the ‘experts’ were wrong again.

Only weeks after declaring victory, US forces found themselves locked in a brutal and unexpected battle at Fire Support Base Ripcord— a base the US was constructing as a launchpad for future operations.

The North Vietnamese brought in artillery, mortars, rockets, anti-aircraft weapons, and wave after wave of ground troops. All of that firepower, manpower, and ammunition moved hundreds of miles through dense jungle terrain, across borders, and into South Vietnam—right under the nose of US airpower that had supposedly rendered the the Ho Chi Minh Trail defunct.

Their ability to move silently helped the Viet Cong guerrillas wage a shadow war of ambushes, sabotage, and infiltration—blending into the population by day and striking by night.

The Viet Cong’s psychological victories eroded US public support. Morale among American troops declined, and political dissent at home surged.

US troops at Fire Support Base Ripcord held out for nearly a month under constant bombardment and ground assaults. But by late July, with casualties mounting, the last Americans were airlifted out under enemy fire.

It was a scene that foreshadowed what would play out in Saigon just a few years later as the US abandoned the war.

And it was through the use of these guerrilla tactics— Distract. Disrupt. Discourage. Dismay.— that a substantially weaker force was able to defeat a much more powerful army.

China is starting to do the same thing in this economic war with the United States. And they’re targeting America’s youth.

For example, TikTok’s ‘Blackout Challenge’ encourages the app’s young users to asphyxiate themselves until they lose consciousness, which led to the death of a 13-year old California boy in February of this year.

A 15-year old in Oklahoma died from the ‘Benadryl Challenge’. Concussions and other serious injuries have resulted from the ‘Skullbreaker Challenge’ where kids ‘prank’ others by kicking their legs out from under them as they jump.

Curiously, Chinese teens haven’t succumbed to the same contests. Instead, viral math problems challenging users’ problem-solving skills regularly trend on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.

One popular influencer is a 12-year-old girl who has gone viral for teaching college-level math, explaining complex problems in a simplified manner.

Last week, we got another look at how TikTok figures into China’s guerrilla economic warfare arsenal.

Chinese influencers began pointing American consumers toward a new app: DHgate— a Beijing-based e-commerce platform that sells items directly from the Chinese factories which manufacture brand-name goods.

Their pitch: why pay $120 for name-brand yoga pants when the same exact item, just without a brand label, can be yours for $15?

Within days, DHgate exploded in popularity—climbing to the #2 spot on Apple’s App Store in the US, just behind Temu (another Chinese-owned e-commerce app) and ahead of ChatGPT.

Yoga pants, handbags, sunglasses, sneakers, you name it—products stripped of their logos and exposed for what they are: glorified drop-shipped Chinese goods with a 700% markup.

Of course, the sudden surge in popularity wasn’t organic; it was orchestrated. Chinese influencers produced videos explaining how major Western brands were bilking their consumers and outsourcing production to these very same factories.

TikTok made sure those videos went viral in the US.

Even 145% tariffs would only push the price of $15 yoga pants up to $36.75— still much less expensive than buying from Lululemon.

China’s guerrilla strategy is clear: They want US consumers to question who is the enemy— the ones selling you affordable clothing, or the ones increasing your cost of living?

This drives a wedge between consumers and the US government— why would my government prevent me from buying affordable goods? Tariffs could quickly become as unpopular among Americans as the Vietnam War was in the 1960s.

China is weaponizing TikTok to turn US consumers against the government… and against major US brands.

They pulled back the curtain on how the economy really makes the sausage—exposing that a $2,000 handbag comes from the same factory, made of the same materials, with the same quality stitching as the $40 knockoff. Americans are paying thousands for a label, not for a superior product.

You can bet that all the data that has been gathered from TikTok has been sent back to the mothership to be analyzed and weaponized. China clearly understands how to use that information for marketing and messaging in ways that could give them a huge edge in the escalating economic warfare.

American consumers may quickly feel that China is not the enemy robbing them blind; instead, they may view China as the ones offering a better deal.

The US government, on the other hand, suddenly looks like the bad guy for keeping prices high and products out of reach.

And this is just the beginning.

What happens when a billion-dollar marketing machine—fueled by foreign data, run through a CCP-influenced algorithm, and distributed on the most addictive app in the world—starts targeting not just consumer wallets, but the foundations of America’s consumer-centric economy?

An erosion of trust in American brands. A growing resentment toward US trade policy. A subtle, creeping, deliberate narrative that China gives you value, while your own government gives you inflation.

This is now the guerrilla phase of the economic war.

Authored by Balaji Srinivasan on X

AI Overproduction
China seeks to commoditize their complements. So, over the following months, I expect a complete blitz of Chinese open-source AI models for everything from computer vision to robotics to image generation.

Why? I’m just inferring this from public statements, but their apparent goal is to take the profit out of AI software since they make money on AI-enabled hardware. Basically, they want to do to US tech (the last stronghold) what they already did to US manufacturing. Namely: copy it, optimize it, scale it, then wreck the Western original with low prices.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed. But here’s the logic:

• First, China noticed that DeepSeek’s release temporarily knocked ~$1T off US tech market caps.
• Second, China’s core competency is exporting physical widgets, more than it is software.
• Third, China’s other core competency is exporting things at such massive scale that all foreign producers are bankrupted and they win the market. See what they’re doing to German and Japanese cars, for example.
• Fourth, China is well aware that it lacks global prestige as it’s historically been a copycat. With DeepSeek, becoming #1 in AI is now something they actually consider possibly achievable, and a matter of national pride.
• Fifth, DeepSeek has gone viral in China and its open source nature means that everyone can rapidly integrate it, down to the level of local officials and obscure companies. And they are doing so, and posting the results for praise on WeChat.
• Finally, while DeepSeek was obscure before recent events, it’s now a household name, and the founder (Liang Wengfeng) has met both with Xi but also the #2 in China, Li Qiang. They likely have unlimited resources now.
• So, if you put all that together, China thinks it has an opportunity to hit US tech companies, boost its prestige, help its internal economy, and take the margins out of AI software globally (at least at the model level).

They will instead make their money by selling inexpensive AI-enabled hardware of increasing quality, from smart homes and self-driving cars to consumer drones and robot dogs.

Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed at the app layer. But it could be hard for closed-source AI model developers to recoup the high fixed costs associated with training state-of-the-art models when great open source models are available.

Last, I agree it’s surprising that the country of the Great Firewall is suddenly the country of open source AI. But it is consistent in a different way, which is that China is just focused on doing whatever it takes to win — even to the point of copying partially-abandoned Western values like open source, which seemed like the hardest thing to adopt.

On that point: they did build censorship into the released DeepSeek AI models, but in a manner that’s easily circumvented outside China. So, you might conclude they don’t really care what non-Chinese people are saying outside China in other languages, so long as this doesn’t “interfere with China’s internal affairs.”

Anyway —this is an area I’ve been watching, and my reluctant conclusion is that China is getting better at software faster than the West is getting better at hardware.

People ask: so that what is the solution? There is no solution. The US is disintagrating as we speak.

The problem with Trump is that his intellectual message is that of a 12-year-old to his cheering crowd fantasizing a 12-year-old’s solutions to very complex situations. 

While it stuns everyone in the first minute,  it proves untenable a minute later. Why are millions of illegal immigrants in the US? Because they are in high demand by businesses, from the agro business to the homeowners landscapers. 

Why are Chinese products invading the American consumers? Because they are in demand as the only available products, never mind for a good price.

Are tariffs on such products going to make America rich again, as Trump sings the song of MAGA? No, they are only going to raise the inflation rate, making foreign companies richer and impoverishing the American nation, etc, etc.

The solution?! There is no solution. At least no magic solution. A huge long depression might help restructure American economic culture. But in the short term, there is no solution.

This channel is run by Kevin Walmsley, a US marine veteran, and a financial consultant who helps American businesses find resources in China.

His knowledge of real China is astonishing. He is way more valuable than Chas Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ted Postol, Ray McGovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Douglas Macgregor not only to the Americans but to everybody else too. His channel is :

Inside China Business

Here is one video:

Updated:

If there is any doubt as to where we are heading, where the future lies, here is a peek at that future.

Is it Russia? Mocking the West from an inferiority complex: “we are just as good or rather better than you”. Imperial claims but no practical, entrepreneurial spirit, the prevailing national aspiration is for a sinecured job (plus paid expenses).

The US? Once upon a time, the land of the free, is now showing as the brutal colonizer and the mass killer in its projections on the world.

Israel is the new hyena concocting big designs on how to turn the rest of us into the planet of the apes.

What else? China! – – Read and especially watch these videos below and see the achievements of China. It is mind blowing. From “one bowl of rice for everyone” to science-fiction-living in one generation. Like it or not, that is the future! It is worth taking the time to read and watch.

American Pravda: Propaganda-Hoaxes vs. Chinese Reality

by Alastair Crooke via Strategic-Culture

Trump may not appreciate just how isolated the U.S. and Israel are among Israel’s Arab and Sunni neighbours.

Israelis, as a whole, are exhibiting a rosy assurance that they can harness Trump, if not to the full annexation of the Occupied Territories (Trump in his first term did not support such annexation), but rather, to ensnare him into a war on Iran. Many (even most) Israelis are raring for war on Iran and an aggrandisement of their territory (devoid of Arabs). They are believing the puffery that Iran ‘lies naked’, staggeringly vulnerable, before a U.S. and Israeli military strike.

Trump’s Team nominations, so far, reveal a foreign policy squad of fierce supporters of Israel and of passionate hostility to Iran. The Israeli media term it a ‘dream team’ for Netanyahu. It certainly looks that way.

The Israel Lobby could not have asked for more. They have got it. And with the new CIA chief, they get a known ultra China hawk as a bonus.

But in the domestic sphere the tone is precisely the converse: The key nomination for ‘cleaning the stables’ is Matt Gaetz as Attorney General; he is a real “bomb thrower”. And for the Intelligence clean-up, Tulsi Gabbard is appointed as Director of National Intelligence. All intelligence agencies will report to her, and she will be responsible for the President’s Daily briefing. The intel assessments may thus begin to reflect something closer to reality.

The deep Inter-Agency structure has reason to be very afraid; they are panicking – especially over Gaetz.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have the near impossible task of cutting out-of-control federal spending and currency printing. The System is deeply dependent on the bloat of government spending to keep the cogs and levers of the mammoth ‘security’ boondoggle whirring. It is not going to be yielded up without a bitter fight.

So, on the one hand, the Lobby gets a dream team (Israel), but on the other side (the domestic sphere), it gets a renegade team.

This must be deliberate. Trump knows that Biden’s legacy of bloating GDP with government jobs and excessive public spending is the real ‘time bomb’ awaiting him. Again the withdrawal symptoms, as the drug of easy money is withdrawn, may prove incendiary. Moving to a structure of tariffs and low taxes will be disruptive.

Whether deliberate or not, Trump is keeping his cards close to his chest. We have only glimpses of intent – and the water is being seriously muddied by the infamous ‘Inter-Agency’ grandees. For example, in respect to the Pentagon sanctioning private-sector contractors to work in Ukraine, this was done in coordination with “inter-agency stakeholders”.

The old nemesis that paralysed his first term again faces Trump. Then, during the Ukraine impeachment process, one witness (Vindman), when asked why he would not defer to the President’s explicit instructions, replied that whilst Trump has his view on Ukraine policy, that stance did NOT align with that of the ‘Inter-Agency’ agreed position. In plain language, Vindman denied that a U.S. president has agency in foreign policy formulation.

In short, the ‘Inter-Agency structure’ was signalling to Trump that military support for Ukraine must continue.

When the Washington Post published their detailed story of a Trump-Putin phone call – that the Kremlin emphatically states never happened – the deep structures of policy were simply telling Trump that it would be they who determine what the shape of the U.S. ‘solution’ for Ukraine would be.

Similarly, when Netanyahu boasts to have spoken to Trump and that Trump “shares” his views regarding Iran, Trump was being indirectly instructed what his policy towards Iran needs to be. All the (false) rumours about appointments to his Team too, were but the interagency signalling their choices for his key posts. No wonder confusion reigns.

So, what can be deduced at this early stage? If there is a common thread, it has been a constant refrain that Trump is against war. And that he demands from his picks personal loyalty and no ties of obligation to the Lobby or the Swamp.

So, is the packing of his Administration with ‘Israel Firsters’ an indication that Trump is edging toward a ‘Realist’s Faustian pact’ to destroy Iran in order to cripple China’s energy supply source (90% from Iran), and thus weaken China? – Two birds with one stone, so to speak?

The collapse of Iran would also weaken Russia and hobble the BRICS’ transport-corridor projects. Central Asia needs both Iranian energy and its key transport corridors linking China, Iran, and Russia as primary nodes of Eurasian commerce.

When the RAND Organisation, the Pentagon think-tank, recently published a landmark appraisal of the 2022 National Defence Strategy (NDS), its findings were stark: An unrelentingly bleak analysis of every aspect of the U.S. war machine. In brief, the U.S. is “not prepared”, the appraisal argued, in any meaningful way for serious ‘competition’ with its major adversaries – and is vulnerable or even significantly outmatched in every sphere of warfare.

The U.S., the RAND appraisal continues, could in short order be drawn into a war across multiple theatres with peer and near-peer adversaries – and it could lose. It warns that the U.S. public has not internalized the costs of the U.S. losing its position as the world superpower. The U.S. must therefore engage globally with a presence—military, diplomatic, and economic—to preserve influence worldwide.

Indeed, as one respected commentator has noted, the ‘Empire at all Costs’ cult (i.e. the RAND Organisation zeitgeist) is now “more desperate than ever to find a war it can fight to restore its fortunes and prestige”.

And China would be altogether a different proposition for a demonstrative act of destruction in order “to preserve U.S. influence worldwide” – for the U.S. is “not prepared” for serious conflict with its peer adversaries: Russia or China, RAND says.

The straitened situation of the U.S. after decades of fiscal excess and offshoring (the backdrop to its current weakened military industrial base) now makes kinetic war with China or Russia or “across multiple theatres” a prospect to be shunned.

The point that the commentator above makes is that there are no ‘easy wars’ left to fight. And that the reality (brutally outlined by RAND) is that the U.S. can choose one – and only one war to fight. Trump may not want any war, but the Lobby grandees – all supporters of Israel, if not active Zionists supporting the displacement of Palestinians – want war. And they believe they can get one.

Put starkly and plainly: Has Trump thought this through? Have the others in the Trump Team reminded him that in today’s world, with U.S. military strength slipping away, there no longer are any ‘easy wars’ to fight, although Zionists believe that with a decapitation strike on Iran’s religious and IRGC leadership (on the lines of the Israel’s strikes on Hizbullah leaders in Beirut), the Iranian people would rise up against their leaders, and side with Israel for a ‘New Middle East’.

Netanyahu has just made his second broadcast to the Iranian people promising them early salvation. He and his government are not waiting to ask Trump to nod his consent to the annexation of all Occupied Palestinian Territories. That project is being implemented on the ground. It is unfolding now. Netanyahu and his cabinet have the ethnic cleansing ‘bit between their teeth’. Will Trump be able to roll it back? How so? Or will he succumb to becoming ‘genocide Don’?

This putative ‘Iran War’ is following the same narrative cycle as with Russia: ‘Russia is weak; its military is poorly trained; its equipment mostly recycled from the Soviet era; its missiles and artillery in short supply’. Zbig Brzezinski earlier had taken the logic to its conclusion in The Grand Chessboard (1997): Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.. That was ‘then’ (a little more than a year ago). Russia took the western challenge – and today is in the driving seat in Ukraine, whilst the West looks on helplessly.

This last month, it was U.S. retired General Jack Keane, the strategic analyst for Fox News, who argued that Israel’s air strike on Iran had left it “essentially naked”, with most air defences “taken down” and its missile production factories destroyed by Israel’s 26 October strikes. Iran’s vulnerability, Keane said, is “simply staggering”.

Kean channels the early Brzezinski: His message is clear – Iran will be an ‘easy war’. That forecast however, is likely to be revealed as dead wrong. And, if pursued, will lead to a complete military and economic disaster for Israel. But do not rule out the distinct possibility that Netanyahu – besieged on all fronts and teetering on the brink of internal crisis and even jail – is desperate enough to do it. His is, after all, a Biblical mandate that he pursues for Israel!

Iran likely will launch a painful response to Israel before the 20 January Presidential Inauguration. Its riposte will demonstrate Iran’s unexpected and unforeseen military innovation. What the U.S. and Israel will then do may well open the door to wider regional war. Sentiment across the region seethes at the slaughter in the Occupied Territories and in Lebanon.

Trump may not appreciate just how isolated the U.S. and Israel are among Israel’s Arab and Sunni neighbours. The U.S. is stretched so thin, and its forces across the region are so vulnerable to the hostility that the daily slaughter incubates, that a regional war might be enough to bring the entire house of cards tumbling down. The crisis would pitch Trump into a financial crisis that could sink his domestic economic aspirations too.

China has completed the world’s first fully unmanned paving construction project!

Unmanned construction drone swarms paved and rolled across a 157.79km stretch on the Beijing-HK Expressway, completing the world’s first fully unmanned road paving project!

Humans were there to secure and observe in case something goes wrong, as with all autonomous projects in the beginning.

High-speed surface construction has extremely high requirements for rolling equipment and operation technology.

This time, multiple Sany high-end unmanned road equipment were used, including a 20-meter wide paver, six 13-ton double steel wheel rollers, and three 30-ton rubber wheel rollers.

The 1+3+3+3 lineup formed a huge construction fleet, and the standardized operation of the fleet was achieved by relying on intelligent scheduling algorithms.

Beidou’s centimeter-level high-precision positioning system and the self-built low-latency communication network implement real-time optimal path planning for the fleet in strict accordance with the rolling process requirements, achieving “close following and slow rolling”, avoiding missed pressure or under-pressure, and ensured rolling quality.

What is particularly striking is that the SAP200C-10 large-width unmanned paver deployed by Sany this time achieved one-time paving with a paving width of 19.25 meters in actual construction, which is the first time in the field of domestic and even international road construction.

The SAP200C-10 paver is a construction tool designed for wide-width asphalt construction on high-speed 2-lane to 4-lane roads. In this project, the SAP200C-10 large-width paver not only greatly improved construction efficiency and reduced the number of joints, but also effectively improved the flatness and durability of the road surface.

The Sany drone swarm used in this project, through high-precision path tracking algorithms and self-developed fusion high-precision self-sensing positioning systems, can accurately identify and locate the curbstones, truly achieving “0” edge-to-edge operation. No small roller is needed for edge trimming, and the road surface is formed in one step, greatly improving the work efficiency and quality.

Construction site safety is a top priority, and safety is even more important for drone swarms. The unmanned spreading machine swarm obtains the full operating status of all equipment and surrounding obstacle information in real time.

The drones are equipped with multiple redundant safety protection strategies such as collaborative safety, electronic fences, emergency stop systems, perception and obstacle avoidance systems. According to the risk level, the equipment can be decelerated, paused, and emergency stopped in real time to ensure operation safety.

This attempt is undoubtedly a major breakthrough in traditional paving technology, marking a double leap in China’s road construction technology in terms of width and efficiency.

On the afternoon of the 27th of september, the paving project controller Hubei Communications Investment, the project general contractor China Railway 11th Bureau & the construction unit Liaoning Guotai Road and Bridge jointly completed the unmanned clustered intelligent paving and rolling operation on the large-width road surface. All of these groups are state owned.

The machinery was provided by Sany Group, a mixed ownership firm, successfully completing the industry’s first unmanned paving construction demonstration on the largest width road surface and the largest scale, marking a new step in the level of intelligent construction of China’s highway construction.

by Gilbert Doctorow

The Israeli rampage in the Middle East is in fact a new U.S. proxy war to avenge its humiliations there in the last two decades

Today I was given the opportunity to set out a very different explanation of U.S. policy in the developing regional war in the Middle East/West Asia from what my peers are saying, or from what I myself would have said two weeks ago.

The generally accepted view on the U.S.-Israeli relationship in this war was repeated earlier today by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a widely watched military expert.  He said that it appears the U.S. is now flying blind in the region, or to put it another way is on auto-pilot, following two steps behind Israel.

However, by his own acknowledgment, the successful Israeli bombing of the Hezbollah headquarters and decapitation of its leadership in downtown Beirut was made possible only by direct United States  support. The 86 two-ton bombs dropped on the residential buildings to tear deep underground and do the job were American supplied. The intelligence on the whereabouts of the intended victims was provided by the United States, which also brought its AWACS into play off the coast of Lebanon long enough to provide actionable information to the Israelis for their strike.

Let us put it another way:  the United States provided Israel with what it needed to do what the United States wanted done. After the confirmed killing of the 30 years plus leader of Hamas, US. officials said the dead man had the blood of American servicemen on his hands and it was good that he had been eliminated.

Then let us consider what Western media are reporting about the limits that Washington is putting on Israel’s coming retaliatory strike at Iran for the ballistic missiles that Iran fired at military targets in Israel a day ago. We are told that Joe Biden has warned Netanyahu against hitting any nuclear sites in Iran. That radical solution to the Iranian nuclear weapons program would surely bring the Russians directly into the conflict given that they are about to sign a comprehensive cooperation agreement later this month with a defense component that effectively makes the countries allies. Since the Americans are duty bound to defend Israel, they would then be fighting Russia, the nuclear superpower, something that the Biden administration is loathe to do. The Israelis are also being instructed not to hit oil and gas installations in Iran since that would drive up global energy prices and do great harm to the chances of the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Does this not sound like Washington’s prohibition on Kiev’s use of ATACMS, Storm Shadow and other long range Western supplied missiles against the heartland of Russia?  In both cases, the beneficiary of U.S. military support is being deprived of the possibility of doing great harm to its enemy in a war for survival. The explanation for this similarity is ready to hand: the Israeli rampage in the Middle East is being directed from Washington in the same way as Kiev’s invasion of Kursk and other military operations against Russia are directed from Washington.

Washington is now ready to see Netanyahu fight to the last Israeli to tame the neighborhood for the sake of its Big Brother across the Atlantic.  The destruction of the neighborhood by ‘our boy’ in Jerusalem is surely seen by the Neocons who still control the levers of power in Washington as suitable retribution for the humiliations the United States experienced in each of the wars it has ignited or joined in the Middle East over the past two decades. Clipping the wings of Iran has been not only an obsession of Netanyahu; it has been an obsession of successive U.S. administrations since that of Jimmy Carter.  Let us remember that the USA is a vengeful and cruel superpower.

I say the Jewish State is being asked to fight to the last Israeli in the knowledge that Israel is being destroyed economically and politically while committing genocide in the neighborhood. The Israeli economy is taking enormous losses from this war which has barely begun, not from destruction of infrastructure by the enemy, as in the case of Ukraine, but by loss of access to shipments of essential raw materials inputs for production, in loss of manpower to operate production since the Israeli army is a nation at arms.

                                                                                   *****

I take the analytical approach to the Middle East conflict set out above following the logic that the Kremlin used to explain its decision to change its nuclear doctrine a week ago. They have lowered the threshold on use of nuclear weapons and specifically state that they may respond with nuclear arms if attacked by a non-nuclear power that is assisted in the aggression against Russia by a nuclear power.  That overturns the normal prohibition on use of these weapons against non-nuclear states and moves the threat also to the nuclear co-belligerent, meaning the USA.

The reason for this change is that the Kremlin sees that the United States has moved away from its longstanding doctrine of global nuclear attack using its triad. With the advances of Russian weaponry, the States understand that an attempted decapitating blow would not prevent Russia from still launching a massively destructive counter blow using unstoppable hypersonic missiles. So, instead, Washington is pursuing proxy wars aimed at decapitating the nuclear capabilities of an adversary like Russia but leaving the States at one remove and claiming to be uninvolved.

                                                                                *****

I fully understand that the contrarian view of the relationship between Israel and the USA set out above will meet objections from those who insist that Israel has bought up Congress through its lobbying activities. Reconsidering the actual relations today is only held up by the vanity of these objectors.

There are also other objectors to what I have proposed who ask incredulously how the USA could approve of the Israeli genocide in Gaza which has killed over 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.  To this I answer firstly that the continued supply by Washington to Israel of the munitions necessary to carry out the genocide speaks for itself.

But I have another argument to add to this. I ask the objectors to open their minds to the reality of a vengeful superpower that has itself committed mass murder of civilians on a far vaster scale. We may put to a side the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as something from the distant past.  But what about the entirely illegal invasion of Iraq undertaken by George Bush which killed perhaps as many as 1,000,000 civilians when the American forces stormed through the country on a wave of ‘shock and awe.’ Or what about the way tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq were allowed to die in the decade before the invasion for lack of medicines caused by U.S. sanctions on the Hussein regime?

Scott Ritter is no stranger to speaking truth to power. Here is a video of him staring down then Senator Joe Biden over US WMD in Iraq claims. History would prove Ritter right and Biden wrong.