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Feb. 7, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
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Pro-War Propagandists: How Bloodthirsty Media Push US Toward Every New War | SYSTEM UPDATE #35

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Good evening, it's Monday, February 6th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, that the U.S.
media is biased and pursues a political agenda rather than truthful reporting is hardly in dispute these days.
But less obvious is exactly what that agenda is.
There are many ways to express it, but often the overarching allegiance is not so much to any political party or even the left versus right wars, but rather status quo power, subservience to the U.S.
security state, and especially a virtually reflexive craving For more U.S.
war.
With the U.S.
already involved in a dangerous and still escalating proxy war with one new war on power, that one based in Moscow, and talk increasingly of the potential possibility of war with another, that one based in Beijing, understanding the role the media plays in America's posture of endless war is more vital than ever, and we'll delve deeply into that topic tonight.
A new study by the Pentagon's all-but-official think tank, the Rand Corporation, shows some serious changes in how Washington is now thinking about the war in Ukraine, and whether it is in Americans' interest to continue to pursue that war.
The problem, though, War propaganda was so effective in working Americans into a neocon frenzy where they really believed full victory over Moscow was possible and that the real U.S.
goal there is fighting for Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy that it is now a real challenge for Washington how to rein in that war fervor.
We'll look at this new round report and all of its broad implications.
As we announced last week, our live after show on Rumble will now air twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, so look for that tomorrow night right after our live show on Rumble.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
That the American media is heavily biased barely requires debate at this point.
There are few political beliefs these days which command widespread consensus among Americans.
But contempt for the corporate media, and a recognition that they are more guided by a political agenda than a desire for truthful reporting, are beliefs most Americans share.
As a Gallup 2022 survey found under the headline Americans trust in media remains near record low quote at 34 percent Americans trust the mass media to report the news quote fairly accurately and and and fully is essentially unchanged from last year and just two points higher than the lowest that Gallup has recorded in 2016 during the presidential campaign.
Just 7% of Americans, 7%, have, quote, a great deal of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have a, quote, fair amount.
Meanwhile, 28% of U.S.
adults said they do not have very much confidence, and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV, and radio.
Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.
But the question of which political agenda they serve is a bit more elusive.
Many conservatives insist the answer is easy.
The media is devoted to political liberalism.
Rush Limbaugh spent decades ranting against what he called the liberal media.
And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative perception of the corporate media was rather straightforward and clear.
The narrative went, journalists are Democrats, they believe in liberalism, they are devoted to the advancement of the political left.
Whether that was really as true then is more a question for history.
I would submit that, like most things these days, a simple, traditional left-versus-right framework is really not the best metric for understanding the media's allegiances.
It is definitely true, clearly so, observably so, that employees of American media corporations support the left-liberal views on culture war issues.
That's not hard to understand why that is.
Employees of NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the like live in big blue cities on the East Coast.
They attend the same schools as each other and circulate in the same social enclaves.
So on standard culture war questions, LGBT rights, abortion, gender ideology, and gender roles, Dogma about race and racism.
There's almost certainly an overwhelming consensus in favor of left verbal politics.
That is almost certainly why the small amounts of lingering trust the U.S.
media has managed to preserve come overwhelmingly from American Democrats.
and liberals as the 2022 gallup report found quote america's trust in the media remains sharply polarized among partisan lines with 70 percent of democrats 14 percent of republicans and 27 percent of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence there has been a consistent double-digit gap in trust between democrats and republicans since 2001 and that gap has ranged from 54 to 63 percentage points since 2017.
the accompanying chart from gallup is remarkably illustrative and it reveals the following quote Quote, as you can see, basically the approval of corporate media is now almost entirely dependent on Democratic Party voters.
If we can bring back that chart, there you see that starting essentially in 2016, there was a radical jump in trust that Democrats have for the corporate media, largely because they perceived correctly That the corporate media was almost entirely on their side in trying to sabotage Donald Trump and advance the interests of the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, the trend line of both independents and Republicans when it comes to trust in the media has steadily declined since 1974 and is now basically in full-scale collapse.
It is hard to overstate how dependent the corporate media now is on Democrats when it comes to retaining any degree of trust.
If not for Democrats, these numbers would be way, way worse, drastically lower.
70% of Democrats trust the corporate media in the United States.
So out of every 10 Democrats, 7 of them trust the corporate media.
Compared to 2.7 independents out of every 10, and 1.5 Republicans.
People trust media when they perceive that they're on their side or at least trying to do a fair job.
And since the emergence of Trump, that is true only of Democrats.
But on questions of economic policy, and especially foreign policy, the bias that shapes corporate media is not really so much about Left vs. Right or Democrat vs. Republican.
To begin with, the establishment wings of both parties are far more driven by agreement with one another on fundamental economic and foreign policy questions than they are in disagreement.
Both parties, for example, were highly in favor of and excited by shooting down the Chinese balloon hovering over the United States despite not really knowing for sure what it was.
With the only difference being, although it was fervently expressed, that conservatives were angry at Biden for allowing the military to wait until it was over water rather than immediately shooting it down without regard to the rest of the people on the ground.
Why Republicans wanted it shot down immediately upon detection.
These are not exactly fundamental and radical differences when to shoot down a Chinese balloon.
And that repeats itself across the major debates over economic and foreign policy.
As President Obama said in one of his most perceptive and astute speeches about the maximalist narratives coming from the Republican Party, he said, The script against me is wildly overstated because essentially we're all guardians of the status quo.
As he put it, we're all playing within the 40-yard lines of the establishment wings in the Republican and Democratic Party establishment.
He was often confounded and actually sad that the Republican Party looked at him as what he most definitely was not, which was a radical.
When he was essentially saying, look, the differences between us, between me and Mitch McConnell, between me and Paul Ryan, are not radical at all.
They're small and even trivial.
We're all fighting within the 40-yard line.
A little bit more of this, a little bit more of that.
But in essence, we agree on our foundational views on foreign and American policy.
And for that reason, Far more than liberalism or conservatism or devotion to one of the two political parties has become the main ideology of the media.
It's really driven instead by allegiance to status quo power and institutional authorities.
Above all else what the corporate media wants is the agenda of institutions of authority and major power centers to be preserved and protected That is one of the major reasons why one of the most important events in the history of media took place in the 1950s and 1960s when major media outlets became corporatized.
They were no longer owned by trusted families who had newspapers passed down throughout the generations.
Instead, they became swallowed up by gigantic corporations.
And that's what large corporations do more than anything else.
They are, by definition, inside the halls of power.
They are aligned with governments and aligned with corporate agendas.
They worship credentialism and authority.
To thrive in corporations, in large corporations, the characteristic you most need is not that you are a dissident to establishment orthodoxies, but that you are there to prove that you can efficiently advance it.
Those are the personalities and characteristics which cause you to advance and succeed in any large corporation.
And when media became a part of large corporations, the media itself became corporatized.
It adopted, even more so than ever before, a pro-authority or pro-status quo perspective to the extent That there is any real Democratic versus Republican allegiance that drives the media, it was almost entirely due to Trump.
The media has largely been fine with standard Republicans in the past, people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, or even going back before that.
They never liked Barry Goldwater because he was too extremist, he was a threat to establishment orthodoxies, and that's the same reason why they hated Trump.
The media hated Trump not because he's a Republican, But because he ran on opposition to Republican orthodoxy and therefore institutions of authority and power hated Trump and therefore these journalists inside media corporations did as well.
That is how they think about the world.
But above all else, their real allegiance is to U.S.
security state and therefore to more war.
That is the one common denominator that they all have.
There was a perception back in 2001 and 2002 that the media was anti-Bush and anti-Cheney.
And again, I'm going to leave that to history.
I think it's quite disputable.
If you look at the 2000 election, for example, the media loved to try and turn it into a question of, with whom would you rather have a beer, George W. Bush or Al Gore?
They kind of liked Bush, just they found him a more likable person.
Gore was notoriously kind of and alienating, he had a very cold personality the media disliked, and they often openly acknowledge that they found Bush more appealing, that they had a warmer sensation to George Bush.
But when it came to the war on terror and the Iraq war, I think people have forgotten how quickly the US media united behind that entire Bush-Cheney agenda.
A very big reason why the war in Iraq and the war on terror generally was able to be sold, not only to conservatives who naturally supported it because it was being sponsored by the Republican Party under Bush and Cheney, but large numbers
The sector of American liberalism to the point that 80% of Americans approved of George W. Bush throughout the end of 2001 and into 2002 and 70% or more of Americans supported the Iraq War at the time that it was launched was because there had been so much penetration of support for the Bush-Cheney-Neocon war on terror and Iraq War
into sectors of American liberalism and that was led by the American liberal media.
It would have been impossible to convert 70% of Americans into supporters of the war on terror in the Iraq war without having not Fox News behind that agenda, although they certainly were, but without having the most trusted liberal voices, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the journals that liberals trusted the most were completely unified behind every proposed new war.
They loved it.
And to this day, that more than anything is their most predictable attribute.
Outside of the culture war, where they're reliably left liberal, For the reasons I described, the demographic reasons, when it comes to the more substantive questions of economic policy and foreign policy, they're not leftists as much as they are devotees to status quo power and institutional authority.
And it's almost impossible to overstate how pro-war the employees of large media corporations have always been And that's the reason why the only place one can now find dissent and opposition to things like the war in Ukraine and even the attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and before that the regime change operation undertaken by NATO to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya came from Fox News.
There's a sector of the American right, the populist right in media, That is more anti-war than any other sector of the media which continues to be as fervently and passionately in favor of any new war that's on the table.
And to demonstrate just how impossible it is to overstate that, I want to show you an interview that Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky did with CNN host Kate Baldwin in 2017 when the media was indignant over Donald Trump's refusal to do much more than he was doing to engage in regime change in Syria.
They had watched what happened in Iraq.
Where we overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein and in its wake brought nothing other than extreme chaos and instability in the region that even Tony Blair acknowledges is what gave rise to ISIS.
It brought almost no benefit to the United States.
The Iraqi governments that were elected were far more favorable to Iran than they were to the United States.
They were far more favorable to Iran than Saddam Hussein was.
They strengthened Iran, they strengthened ISIS.
Even after watching Everything that happened in that Iraq war, they were desperate.
Due to Syria, what they did to Iraq, which was overthrow Bashar al-Assad, even though obviously Assad was not in any way threatening the United States.
And anybody who even expressed any kind of hesitation was despised openly By the media.
So let me show you this interview.
It was actually Congressman Massey himself who reminded me this weekend of this interview.
I don't remember having seen it the first time, but it's very common and illustrative of just how explicit they are.
Let's take a look.
Congressman, you are against intervention.
You say that is what you hear from your constituents and you say that's what you heard from your constituents previously.
But as you sit here today and you see these images coming out of the slaughter of innocent children, does that change your view?
Well, with all due respect to the Senator from Arizona, he's wrong.
The context was that John McCain, as always, and this was the reason he was the most beloved figure by the media, had come out, along with Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and his standard crowd, along with neocons like Joe Lieberman, And they were demanding that the U.S.
should engage in regime change.
There you see on the screen McCain has said that the U.S.
should dedicate itself to removing Assad.
This is in April 2017, so less than three months after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, John McCain was already undercutting him saying that we should immediately go, despite all the problems that the United States had, despite McCain having watched the havoc that he and his friends wreaked in Iraq, and then in Libya, and go and do the same thing to Syria.
The U.S.
should dedicate itself, not to helping the American people, but to removing Assad.
So that was the context, and they were throwing that in Thomas Massie's face, like, John McCain, the good Republican, says that this is what we should do.
Expressing the will of the American people.
But I hope that the Senator and I can agree that President Trump cannot You see how she just ignored that?
She's not the slightest bit interested in what he said.
It's kind of an important point.
There's this thing we have in the United States called the Constitution.
at this point, if they want it-- - If the president of Syria is committed-- - Do you see how she just ignored that?
She's not the slightest bit interested in what he said.
It's kind of an important point.
There's this thing we have in the United States called the Constitution.
It governs how our government is supposed to function.
And the decision about whether to go into a new war, which obviously is what this would be, it would be a regime change war in Syria, is not left unilaterally to Donald Trump.
It's a vote that is supposed to be undertaken by the Congress.
You can't just demand that Trump go and start a new war in Syria, even though that is how our government works.
In 2011, 2010-2011, when Obama finally got persuaded by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power and Susan Rice to join the French-German, or rather the French-British war in Libya, the regime change operation in Libya, to overthrow Gaddafi, there was no vote in the Congress to authorize that war.
In fact, there was a vote.
About whether that war should be authorized and the Republicans who had the majority in the House voted against its authorization.
Obama went ahead and did it anyway.
So it's not even just that he lacked the congressional authority to fight that war in Libya.
It's that the House actually voted against it.
Now if the House really meant it, they could have and would have done a lot more.
They could have defunded that war.
They didn't do any of that.
But nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
You see what he just said.
You're demanding Trump start a war, but he doesn't actually have that power.
And all she wants to say is, but what about these images of these children?
She just wants this war at all costs.
... crimes against humanity, slaughtering his own people.
Do you think there is something short of going to war with Syria that you can support?
Your fellow Republican, Adam Kitzinger, says yes, there is something short of that.
You can ground Assad's Air Force.
You can crater the airstrips that the Air Force is taking off from to commit these atrocities.
Look at how excited she was there.
This was Adam Kinzinger back in 2017 saying, we don't have time to go to war with Syria.
We don't have to have a full-scale war yet.
Instead, let's just kind of crater their runways and create a no-fly zone in Syria, telling Assad where he is and isn't permitted to fly within his own country, which obviously means two things.
One, that you have to back up that direction so that if Assad does decide to go fly where the United States government has somehow told him he's not allowed to fly, you have to then go and shoot down his planes, which means you're, of course, involved in a war.
When you impose a no-fly zone on another country, automatically you're at war with that country.
But also, Assad's key ally, Syria's key ally for decades, has been Russia.
And Russia was their ally at this time.
So you would not only be risking war with Syria, but also with Russia.
And over what?
Who governs the question of Syria?
But you listen to her, and she doesn't care about any of this.
She says, OK, well, if you won't give me my full-scale war yet, let's just go and do some minor things that Adam Kissinger suggests.
Like, crater their runways and tell Assad that if we see him flying in places we told him he can't, we're going to shoot down his planes.
Well, I can't speak about classified information on TV, but I can tell you, according to the Washington Post, we've been spending a billion dollars a year in funding the rebels in Syria to no good effect, frankly.
But that's not funding the rebels.
What do you think about grounding Assad's air force?
Well, you know, we had testimony from a military expert in front of Congress that said that's a virtual act of war in Syria and that we would be at war with the Russians at that point.
I think it's a bad idea.
Earlier today, Congressman... Just watch as this interview unfolds, too.
She doesn't even bother to hide with her facial expressions, with her tone of voice, how disgusted she is by his... Now, she's somebody who, if you went up to her and said, well, you clearly wanted this war, she would say, I don't want war.
I don't want or not want war.
That's not my job.
I'm a reporter.
I don't have political opinions.
I'm just there to report facts.
And all you have to do is look at this one interview to see how much that's a fraud, what a farce that is for CNN's reporters to make that claim.
I mean this is nothing, she's berating him.
And it gets worse and worse as we go through the interview that she can barely contain her disgust.
And all he's really saying is, I don't think we should start a new war with Russia over Syria, and I don't think it would help the Syrian people if we did, and I think we should focus on our own problems at home.
That's not exactly a radical...
Viewpoint, although in this world, where she's just so hungry for war.
It's the only reason people watch CNN is if there's a war.
It excites people to get to talk about war.
She's not going to go fight in it, of course.
No one in her family is going to go fight in it.
That's for a different kind of American to go do.
But she's in her studio.
She wants that war.
She wants those ratings.
She loves it.
And she's furious that he won't give it to her.
Okay, so she's gonna now whip out the big gun.
She's gonna show us a Syrian child and make him tell this child that he won't give her war.
The virtual act of war in Syria and that we would be at war with the Russians at that point.
I think it's a bad idea.
Earlier today, Congressman Bonna, she's a little Syrian girl who's become really the voice of all Syrian children in this war.
She spoke to CNN and here's what she said that her wish is.
Listen.
She's the voice of all Syrian children, says the CNN host.
She speaks for every lost child in Syria.
All of them were craving the United States to come and save them.
I want stop the war and I want the The children of Syria play and go to school, live in peace.
Together, we can help them.
Together, we can save them.
To be clear, what she said right there is that's all she wants.
She wants for the children of Syria to be able to play and go to school.
She's pleading for help.
What do you say to her, Congressman?
I think what she's asking for is something that all...
Children should enjoy and I think that our intervention in Syria has prolonged the civil war and it is not helping there.
President Trump campaigned on a more restrained fiscal or I'm sorry a more restrained foreign policy and I hope that's what we see and you know we haven't created a better school environment for the children in Iraq.
Apparently, the United States is supposed to go to war.
that country and I don't think it serves the children of Syria or anybody in the United States to further destabilize Syria.
So you say, you see these, you hear that plea from her, you see the images coming out of Syria and you think the best policy for the United States right now is to do nothing?
What I'm saying...
Apparently the United States is supposed to go to war anytime they can find a child in some country to say we don't like our government, our government is repressing us and we want you to come and invade our country and to save us.
That's the standard she's creating.
You can pick a child in any country.
You can put a Yemeni child on the screen and say we want the United States to stop arming the Saudis.
Or you can find another Yemeni child and say we want the United States to come and prevent Iran from arming our country.
You could manipulate the public discourse in any way like this.
You could find a child in eastern Ukraine to say, we don't like President Zelensky.
We don't feel like we should be subject to the rule of this pro-EU government that was installed by the West.
We want to be a part of Moscow.
Or you could put a different kid on in Ukraine to say, We want the U.S.
to come and help us fight.
This is grotesque, this kind of propaganda, but that's how desperate they get.
We might end up making the situation worse if we launch airstrikes against their airplanes, against hard targets on the ground.
So we really need to step back and take a good look at this.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
And it's hard to know exactly what's happening in Syria right now.
I'd like to know specifically how that release of chemical gas, if it did occur, and it looks like it did, how that occurred.
Because, frankly, I don't think Assad would have done that.
It does not serve his interests.
It would tend to draw us into that civil war even further.
Who do you think is behind it?
You know, you've got a war going on over there.
Supposedly that airstrike was on an ammo dump.
And so, I don't know if it was released because there was gas stored in the ammo dump or not.
That's plausible.
I'm not saying that's what I think happened, but I think... You're more inclined to believe the position of...
of what the charliss on a saying what the russians are saying right now then more inclined to agree with believe what your even your colleagues here in the united states believe is true that this is a side and what human rights observers over there say is a side i don't think it would have served a sod this is to do a chemical attack on uh...
on his people so i you know it's hard for me to understand why he would do that if he did mean to these people live through the iraq war Do they remember that all the people that were supposed to blindly believe the CIA, the Pentagon, America's newspapers, all of these Western institutions of authority said that Iraq had
Weapons of mass destruction, they all got it wrong either by wanting to lie on purpose or just by being horrifically mistaken about one of the most important questions, if not the most important question of that generation.
And less than 15 years later, she's disgusted by the fact that he won't blindly swallow whatever claims are made by the Pentagon or the CIA Which wants to lead the United States into another war.
Just how can you question what your own government is telling you?
Even though less than 15 years earlier, we all know that they deliberately deceived us that they have so many times throughout history.
But this is the mind of a journalist.
That says you don't question what the United States government tells you when it comes time for them to want a new war.
You just get into line behind it.
Now, Congresswoman Massey did allude to the fact that it wasn't like the United States was doing nothing under President Obama.
The Obama administration authorized at least a billion dollars every year to the CIA to engage in clandestine activity designed to destabilize the Assad government and to try and facilitate his removal.
They were arming the Free Syrian Army, which ultimately gave way to the real fighters against Assad, which happened to be ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
So the United States happened to find itself on the same side of a war as Al-Qaeda.
Less than 13 years earlier, having said that our arch enemy, to which we're completely devoted to its destruction, is Al-Qaeda.
Now the United States wanted to go and fight on the same side of the war as Al-Qaeda, and risk a direct war with Russia over Syria.
So just by questioning that, she's earning his disgust.
Just to underscore how common this was, I mean, by no means was she alone.
A separate reporter from CNN, Clarissa Ward, actually admitted how enraged she was under the Obama administration that they refused to do more to have a full-scale war to take out Bashar al-Assad.
Here you see the headline from CBS News, author and war correspondent Clarissa Ward on reporting from conflict zones in her new book, Intelligence Matters.
Here she admits the following, quote, I wrote Ben Rhodes, that's Obama's senior national security official, an email to his official White House account and I said, quote, Dear Ben, I hope you're sleeping soundly as Aleppo burns.
At least we have the Russians to sort it out.
Best wishes, Carissa.
Does that sound anything remotely like an objective journalist to you?
got goading him and expressing hatred for him because the Obama administration didn't start a full-scale new war in Syria, just funded the CIA at a billion dollars a year to do it.
She then said in this interview about her book, quote, As I sent it, there was a voice saying, you know, this is really not a very professional thing to do, you think?
But I think you're allowed in the course of your career one story, or you know, where you can just be a human being as well.
And I just got sick of hearing the Obama administration trying to pretend that this policy was some kind of a stroke of genius, and that it was sort of very well thought out and an intentional policy.
When I knew from having interviewed Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State from having had previous conversations with Ben Rhodes, I knew this wasn't a well thought out policy but rather a kind of series of improvised decisions to try to avert, you know, getting sucked into a quagmire.
By the way, Intelligence Matters is the name of the podcast, not the book.
Isn't that something that you actually should want the U.S.
government to do?
Avoid getting sucked into a quagmire?
Because if you get sucked into a quagmire, it means that hundreds of billions of dollars get lost, thousands of American lives get lost, you end up killing the children of those countries.
And she's, like her CNN colleague, the one we just watched, so disgusted at the idea that the Obama administration was trying to avoid getting sucked into a quagmire in Syria the way we did in Iraq.
Remember, Obama was elected based on a promise not to repeat the mistakes of Iraq.
Just like, as Congressman Massey said, Trump was elected on a platform to avoid these kinds of regime change wars.
She doesn't care at all what the American people want.
None of these people in the media do.
They want their wars.
And I forgot how explicit they were about admitting how hungry and desperate they are for it.
Now, again, let's go back to the Iraq War for a second and look at the key role that the corporate media played in disseminating those lies.
We all know the New York Times every day put on its front page lies about the nuclear program of Saddam Hussein, that Jeffrey Goldberg lied about al-Qaeda being in an alliance with Saddam Hussein.
I'm going to show you those in a second, but let's look at the psychology of it.
Adam Smith warned about this in 1776.
I've shown you this quote before where he talked about the dangers That people who can read about a war, who can watch a war off in the distance, far away from the dangers of the war theater, derive a kind of excitement, a kind of sense of purpose, and a sense of strength, even though they're not doing anything powerful.
They're not risking their own lives for the war, they're sending other people to go fight.
But getting to read every day in the newspaper, as he put it, about the conquest of your army, gives you this pulsating sense of excitement.
It's exciting war!
And he said that oftentimes it's very difficult to get out of a war because people are addicted to the excitement that it brings, especially those in imperial capitals who get to always watch it from a safe distance, like these CNN reporters who are so desperate to send American soldiers who aren't in their family or in their neighborhoods to go fight
In the middle of an Al Qaeda and ISIS and Assad civil war where Russia is to change the government of that country or to do the same with Iraq.
Now, in 2003, the then PBS host Charlie Rose interviewed Tom Friedman of the New York Times.
Tom Friedman was probably the single most influential liberal journalist.
He had spent 20 years covering Israel and Palestine for the New York Times, went around the world as this foreign correspondent, and then became a writer on their op-ed page.
And everybody, every good liberal read Tom Friedman to know what was going on in the world, to tell them what they should think about war.
And Tom Friedman was a very vocal booster of the Iraq War.
Which is a major reason why liberals got on board with it.
That the New York Times institutionally was behind it, but so was Thomas Friedman.
And in May of 2003, by which point we knew, number one, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and number two, the whole thing had turned out to be completely different than what was predicted.
It wasn't going to be this quick war.
It was going to be exactly the kind of quagmire that Obama was eager to avoid in Syria and that Trump was eager to avoid in Syria as well.
It was already clear that there was a serious and very elusive insurgency that this war was going to go on for years, that it had nothing resembling this two-week quick victory that the Tom Friedmans of the world were telling us We were going to enjoy, and there were no weapons of mass destruction, which was supposed to be the whole reason we went to war in the first place.
And so Charlie Rose asked Tom Friedman, knowing all this, do you think it was a mistake?
Do you regret having advocated it?
And I find Tom Friedman's answer here so extraordinary, because he gives up the idea that there's any geostrategic or any foreign policy goals, which he had been pretending, and he really just talks about the psychology The need for Americans to see their country at war.
The war is over and there's some difficulty with the peace.
Was it worth doing?
I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
And I think that looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about.
And it's interesting to talk about it here in Silicon Valley because I think looking back at the 1990s, I can identify that there were actually three bubbles of the 1990s.
There was the NASDAQ bubble.
There was the corporate governance bubble.
And lastly, there was what I would call the terrorism bubble.
And the first two were based on creative accounting.
The last was based on moral creative accounting.
The terrorism bubble that basically built up over the 1990s said, flying airplanes into the World Trade Center That's okay.
Wrapping yourself with dynamite and blowing up Israelis in a pizza parlor?
That's okay.
Because we're weak and they're strong and the weak have a different morality.
Having your preachers say that's okay?
That's okay.
Having your charities raise money for people who do these kinds of things?
That's okay.
And having your press call people who do these kind of things martyrs?
That's okay.
And that built up as a bubble, Charlie.
And 9-11 to me was the peak of that bubble.
And what we learned on 9-11, in a gut way, was that that bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society.
Because there is no wall high enough, no INS agent smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough, to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble.
And what we needed to do, Was go over to that part of the world, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble.
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and, um, uh, take out a very big stick, um, right in the heart of, of that world, and... What we needed to go do, this is why he's in favor of the Iraq War, and he's saying what we needed to go do, He was very, very far from that war zone.
He was sitting in a studio in New York, in the PBS building.
I went to that show once, I know exactly where it is.
So he's saying, we need to go to this part of the world, and we need to take out a very big stick.
I mean, if that isn't a confession, that this is all psychological, and about his insecurities as a person.
He's saying, they think we're weak and they're strong, and we need to show that we're strong too.
And so how do we show that we're strong?
We sit in a TV studio, and we send other people's kids to go fight in wars, people who haven't had the educational opportunities that we have, or haven't had the socioeconomic privilege that we have.
They tend to be working class people.
Not all, but by and large, there were a lot of people who volunteered for that war because they got convinced Going to Iraq was something noble.
I heard a right-wing commentator this week talk about how he used to work in Guantanamo and he believed that changing the regime of Iraq would actually make Americans safer.
And now here you are 20 years later, no one knows who the leader of Iraq is, no one cares.
And he realizes that he was deceived, like so many people, by the likes of Tom Friedman, who sent other people's kids over to this war so that he, Tom Friedman, could feel strong because he thought he was taking out his big stick.
Let's listen to this part, because this is actually psychopathic.
Um, and, um, uh, take out a very big stick, um, right in the heart of, of that world, and, um, and burst that bubble.
And there was only one way to do it.
Because part of that bubble said, We've got you.
This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don't care about money.
We're ready to sacrifice and all you care about are your stock options and your hummers.
And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, which part of this sentence don't you understand?
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society?
You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow?
Well, suck on this, okay?
That, Charlie, was what this war was about.
We could have hit Saudi Arabia.
It was part of that bubble.
Could have hit Pakistan.
We hit Iraq because we could.
That's the real truth.
So, after spending a full year Concocting all kinds of lies to manipulate people into believing that we need to go to Iraq because doing so was necessary to keep us safe.
Lest we saw the proof of the case for war in a mushroom cloud, as Condoleezza Rice said.
Then, after spending a year manipulating people's kids and families, American families, to believe that going to Iraq was necessary for our safety, he admits, now that the war is in process, The real reason we had to go there was because we needed to feel strong.
Tom Friedman needed to feel like he had taken out his big stick and told Iraqis and other enemies of the United States and Israel, suck on this, on the big stick that I've just taken out.
This is psychosexually perverse.
But it is absolutely why so many of these people sitting in studios crave new wars all the time.
He's admitting it here.
And he says, there was nothing specific about Iraq.
We could have done it in Saudi Arabia, you know, the country that actually had some kind of a relationship to 9-11.
But we just picked Iraq because we could.
And just the psychopathy as well of spending a year pretending that you're offering a case to people, a serious geostrategic case, about why we need to go to fight a war in Iraq, only to admit three months later after the whole thing came down, crashed down as a house of lies, that the real reason was this need for psychological fulfillment.
That in itself is perverse, but this is how the media thinks.
And I show you this because these are liberal journalists.
We just watch these Journalists at CNN.
They're not conservatives.
They're not neocons.
They just talk all day to the U.S.
security state.
This was Tom Friedman, the preeminent liberal journalist in the United States when it comes to foreign policy at the time.
He speaks to Upper West Side liberals and liberals across America, admitting that the reason that they had to go to war was because of this psychological reason.
Now, I think it's really worth remembering as well, speaking of liberal journalists, that The real reason that Americans got convinced to go to war in Iraq was because they actually believed that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attacks.
Something that everybody admits is a lie.
And that lie was most aggressively circulated, not in Fox News or the pages of the New York Post or National Review, but here in the New Yorker.
The New Yorker, the most beloved liberal journal.
From March of 2002 by Jeffrey Goldberg, who was then a star reporter.
He had worked in a Israeli prison, overseeing Palestinian prisoners, and then came back to the United States and got this perch at the New Yorker.
And he was obviously a vehement supporter of the war in Iraq.
And he knew that to convince Americans that it had to be done, he wanted to tie Saddam Hussein to 9-11.
And so five months after, four months after the 9-11 attack, he wrote this article in the New Yorker that won journalism awards.
And you see in the sub-headline the point of the article.
In Northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocidal war on the Kurds.
That wouldn't be enough to get Americans to want to go to war.
Genocidal war on the Kurds.
And of his possible ties to Al-Qaeda by Jeffrey Goldberg, March 17, 2002.
Again, this is a liberal newspaper, a liberal magazine, by a liberal reporter.
Supporting George Bush and Dick Cheney's war in Iraq.
This is why I'm telling you it's not about conservatism versus liberalism or Democrats versus Republicans.
They were fully behind the Republican war.
It's about their allegiance to the U.S.
security state and the benefits they get from endless war.
He then went on NPR.
I don't think I need to convince you that NPR is not a conservative outlet.
And he was interviewed, there you see, on All Things Considered, February 4th, 2003.
And that was because Jeffrey Goldberg had published a second article telling Americans that there was this link between Saddam Hussein and 9-11, or Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
And this is right before the word was about to launch.
And here you see NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Jeffrey Goldberg about his New Yorker article entitled, quote, The Unknown.
The CIA and the Pentagon take another look at al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Goldberg describes the radical Muslim group called Ansar al-Islam, which operates in northern Iraq and is thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda.
He also talks about his interviews with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet about interpretation of intelligence which may or may not link Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.
So for those of you who believe the U.S.
media is always biased against Republicans, does this look to you like liberal reporters and liberal magazines were working to subvert the foreign policy of George Bush and Dick Cheney in 2002?
Of course not.
These are neocons working at liberal journals.
They're Democrats.
Jeffrey Goldberg not only went on to become the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, but also Barack Obama's favorite journalist.
Obama said that often.
He gave his most in-depth foreign policy interview to Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016.
These are all people, like Obama said, who work within the 40-yard lines.
They're not hostile to one another.
They're all on the same page, the same side, the side of U.S.
institutional authority, centers of power, and this militaristic foreign policy that comes at great cost to the American people and benefits nobody except this tiny sliver of American elites.
Now, the reason this is so important, we think a lot about weapons of mass destruction, but the reason this linkage was so important was because, of course, Americans wanted a war against anyone they blamed for the attack on the United States on September 11th.
You had to link Al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein to justify in the minds of Americans a war on Iraq.
Americans wanted a war against those who did 9-11.
And so they invented this fake link.
And it was, when I say they, it wasn't the American right.
It was American liberals, establishment liberals, doing this work for George Bush and Dick Cheney.
So here you see in September of 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S.
public thinks Sodom had a role in 9-11, which of course they would.
If you were reading The New Yorker and you're an American liberal and were told that you should believe them and not Dick Cheney, Why wouldn't you reach that conclusion?
You're hearing it on NPR and laundered by the New Yorker.
Quote, 7 in 10 of Americans continue to believe, 7 in 10, that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the September 11th attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.
The Bush administration didn't need to say it.
They relied on these liberal journalist liars to do it for them.
Quote, 69% of Americans said they thought it least likely that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to a Washington Post poll published yesterday.
That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers are mostly Saudi nationals acting for Al Qaeda, is broadly shared By Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, the main reason for the endurance of the apparently groundless belief, experts in public opinion say, is a deep and enduring distrust of Saddam that makes him a likely suspect in anything related to Middle East violence.
Quote, it's very easy to picture Saddam as a demon, said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and an expert on public opinion and war.
Remember, Saddam Hussein was a close American ally throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, in part because he was an enemy of Iran.
And the minute we needed to, we just turned on a dime and took our ally and turned him into a demon.
When they wanted to do the first Gulf War over Kuwait, they created false stories about how Saddam and his closest militias were ripping babies out of incubators just to try and generate all kinds of horror.
Total lies!
Only for that CNN host to turn around to Congress and Massie and say, how can you not believe what our own government is telling us?
They just invented those lies about Saddam Hussein ripping out incubators.
Then they went back to getting along with him for a while, and then overnight they turned him into a demon who had strong ties to the 9-11 attack, even though it wasn't true.
And again, this was done by journalists and not only by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Now, at the Washington Post, there was a longtime liberal columnist, Richard Cohen, Who has also had his neocon tendencies, but he was the kind of token American liberal, like the real American liberal, like the guy who loved kind of like left-wing figures like George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.
He was there to be the Washington Post liberal.
And on February 6, 2003, so just the month before the war, he wrote a column after Colin Powell had gone to the UN and held up those grainy satellite photos and those test tubes to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And the headline was, A Winning Hand for Powell.
And this is what the liberal media columnist at the Washington Post wrote, quote, "It is time once again to quote my favorite philosopher, Tabe, the lead character from Fiddler on the Roof.
It was his habit to weigh his options by saying, quote, "On the one hand, and then on the other hand until he confronted a situation where there was no other hand." This is where Colin Powell brought us all yesterday.
The evidence he presented to the United Nations, some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in his detail, had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction, but without a doubt still retains them.
Only a fool, or possibly a Frenchman, could conclude otherwise.
You may recall at the time, the most hated group was the French, because they were trying to get Americans to see the truth, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that invading Iraq was an insane thing to do.
So the worst insult was to call someone a Frenchman.
There was the congressman from, I believe, North Carolina or South Carolina, who wanted to switch the name of French fries to Freedom Thighs, because nothing good could be called French, because they were opposed to this noble war.
So here you have the liberal columnist, The Washington Post, craving war, And he says only an idiot would have doubts about whether Colin Powell was telling the truth.
Of course, Saddam Hussein not only is seeking nuclear weapons or biological weapons and chemical weapons, but no doubt still retains them.
That's what was in every major newspaper.
Now the role played by the New York Times was particularly critical because what they would do is they were the dumping ground for anonymous sources usually from Dick Cheney's office and from his ring of neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and that whole gang that came that worked with Donald Rumsfeld as well, Doug Feith, A lot of these names, thankfully, are out of my brain.
But what they would do is they would go to the New York Times, to Judy Miller and Mark Gordon, and they would say, we have really serious intelligence.
And the New York Times would put it on their front page, designed to scare every American liberal into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, or was about to get them.
So here's just one example, and what would happen is Cheney's office would link it to the New York Times, the New York Times would then dutifully serve Dick Cheney's agenda, and then Dick Cheney would go on public and he would cite the New York Times article as proof for what Dick Cheney was saying, even though it came from Dick Cheney himself.
The New York Times laundered it for him.
So here on September 8, 2002, one of the notorious New York Times articles helping George Bush and Dick Cheney in their war, and the neocons, quote, "Threats and responses, the Iraqis.
U.S. says Hussein intensifies quest for A-bomb parts." More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specifically designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
This is what the New York Times is doing every day, on their front page, in big headlines, uncritically and mindlessly publishing whatever Dick Cheney and his band of neocons were telling them to say to convince liberals in New York and throughout the country that we were in danger if we didn't go and stop Saddam Hussein.
And then what would happen is Dick Cheney would go on programs like Meet the Press.
And I know people think that Tim Rustert was some sort of classical tough guy adversarial journalist.
That was a complete myth.
Tim Rustert had that demeanor.
They pretended that's what he was.
But Tim Rustert gave everyone a platform in government to spread lies all the time.
He would kind of grumble in that Buffalo persona.
But he would never really challenge anyone.
And watch what Dick Cheney did.
This was on September, just days after the New York Times article.
It was on September 8, 2002.
I believe it was Sunday morning, the day that the New York Times published this article about aluminum tubes.
He then went on and watched what he did with that New York Times article.
What specifically has he obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program?
Well, in the nuclear weapons arena, you've got sort of three key elements that you need to acquire.
You need the technical expertise.
You need to have a group of scientists and technicians, engineers who know how to put together the infrastructure and to build a weapon.
He's got that.
He had it because of his program that was there previously, which I'll come back and talk about in a minute, but we know he's been working for 20 years trying to acquire this capability.
He's got a well-established, scientifically, technically competent crew to do it.
Second, you need a weapons design.
One of the toughest parts about building a nuclear weapon is knowing how to do it.
They've got that.
He had it back prior to the Gulf War.
We know from things that were uncovered during the course of the inspections back in the early 90s that he did in fact have at least two designs for nuclear weapons.
The third thing you need is fissile material, weapons-grade material.
In the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
And what we've seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire The equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium.
Aluminum tubes.
Specifically aluminum tubes.
There's a story in the New York Times this morning.
This is, and I want to attribute to the Times, I don't want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel.
Okay, what you see here is an alignment, a complete integration of the liberal part of the corporate media and Dick Cheney's agenda.
Which is why I say I know a lot of you were Taught to believe.
A lot of you grew up believing that the corporate media in the United States is always on the side of the Democrats and hostile to the Republicans.
They hated George Bush.
It wasn't true.
It was not true.
It was true on culture war issues, as I said, but when it came to all of this, the U.S.
media was fully on board.
They were the partners of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons.
They were the reason these wars were able to happen.
You saw them doing it In Libya, you saw them doing it in Syria, and they've been doing it over the last year in Ukraine as well.
No bigger cheerleaders for the idea that the US should be escalating its war policy and war role in Ukraine against Russia than the American media, and really not the conservative wing.
Which has been more anti-war than anyone but the liberal wing of the media.
That's what they do.
They crave war.
Let's look at Rachel Maddow.
She's the highest paid journalist of NBC News.
She gets paid at least $30 million a year by the Comcast Corporation that owns NBC.
In other words, every 30 days, Comcast wires into Rachel Maddow's bank account, every 30 days, $2.5 million.
$2.5 million just goes into Rachel Maddow's bank account, every 30 days, every month, a sum of $30 million a year, beyond her book income and speech income and all the other money she makes.
And here she is talking about how angry she is that people are suggesting there start to be an attempt at diplomacy when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine.
You tell me, is her allegiance to the Democratic or the Republican Party as she says this?
Or is it to the U.S.
security state and a reflexive craving of war?
This was not a meeting of two clashing forces.
This was not, you know, Ukraine provoking Russia when they knew they ought not to, but blah, blah, blah.
You know, like, the Russian mindset, like, people who are like, oh, we need to facilitate peace talks here.
Really?
Do you see that mocking tone she uses for people who think there should be diplomacy and peace talk?
Oh, we need to facilitate peace talks.
Like, she's, she's, she's disgusted by the idea, just like that CNN person was with Congressman Massey.
This is American liberalism.
They think it's absurd that you would try and end a devastating war through diplomacy.
What does she want instead?
I don't know because it kind of seems like Ukraine was minding its own business and Russia came in and stomped into their house and started setting things on fire.
So there's not like a negotiation between the homeowner and the home invader at that point.
So the outcome has to be specific to Russia.
And we need to do our best to save the Ukrainian people to the extent that they can be saved and protected, and to help the Ukrainian government and military stand up what they need to do to take care of their own people.
But Russia needs to lose.
Because otherwise, the lesson of this is that Putin can keep doing this.
It's not like this is his first invasion, and it won't be his last.
Now, she works alongside of, and continuously heaps praise on, the person who was the spokesperson for the Bush White House at the time that they were disseminating these lies, Nicole Wallace.
She is a supposedly left liberal democrat.
These people are all part of the same ideology.
They're all part of the same system.
And that more than anything, they don't care about Republicans and Democrats.
Unless it's a Republican who's really in their minds out of bounds like Donald Trump, but if it's like Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio even or Nikki Haley.
They're totally fine.
They'll oppose the Republican on social issue ground, but they're not going to care much because it's the same.
What Rachel Maddow just said, if you ask Marco Rubio or Nancy Pelosi or Nikki Haley or Mike Pompeo about Ukraine, this is exactly what they're going to tell you.
And this is the reason why all these wars keep happening.
Because the media craves it.
And they act as spokespeople on behalf of those who want it most.
Now, one of the really interesting parts of what has happened in Ukraine is that in some sense the propaganda has worked too much, where the perception that Americans have of what's happening in the war in Ukraine is so radically different from the reality.
So while Rachel Maddow is saying Oh, we need to make Russia lose.
How are you going to make Russia lose?
These people have this fantasy that the Ukrainians are going to go and take away Crimea from Russia.
They're going to eject Russia from eastern Ukraine, even though they have a ton of popular support there.
Meanwhile, the people who are actually dying in the war in Ukraine, the people Rachel Maddow says she wants to protect, Are starting to conclude that this war is not worth it.
They want it to be over.
They want this war to end.
I'm talking about Ukrainians.
From the beginning of this war, Zelensky had to lock the doors around Ukraine.
They prevented people from leaving.
Men between 18 and 60, that's what's considered fighting age in Ukraine.
This is not a volunteer army of Ukrainians rising up and saying, we're going to go and bravely defend our country.
They don't want to go fight the Russian army, people who aren't trained militarily.
They're just citizens, average citizens, who don't want to be put in a meat grinder, the way we did in World War I and World War II, just sending people into machine gun fire for inches or yards of territory.
So while Rachel Maddow gets to feel so good about herself and wants to see Russia brought down, mostly because she blames Russia still for the defeat of Hillary Clinton, that's what this is really about for American liberals.
In Ukraine, a much different thing is happening, which is that Zelensky is now desperate to punish deserters even more so because this is a conscript army.
These people don't want to fight for Ukraine.
They don't think it's worth it to die.
They'd rather have negotiations.
So here is an article from Politico from just from yesterday.
The headline of which is, Ukraine Army Discipline Crackdown Sparks Fear and Fury on the Front.
Critics say new legislation that punishes deserters and rule breakers more harshly contravenes human rights and demotivates military personnel.
Remember, I mean, forcing people to fight a war against their own will?
I'm not going to say it's never justified, but the true test of whether a country wants to fight a war is whether the people in that country are willing to die for that cause.
We fought Vietnam with a conscript army because there weren't enough people willing to volunteer.
We didn't need that after 9-11.
A lot of people were willing to go and fight when they saw the United States attack.
But to go over to Vietnam and fight over who should rule places like Saigon and other parts of Vietnam, a country most Americans had never really paid any attention to, required forcing people by law to go and fight.
It was a conscript army.
And that's what Ukraine has, even though it's their own country that's been invaded.
In part because many believe that Putin only wants parts of eastern Ukraine that are Russian-speaking, that identify as Russian culturally, and who want to be part of Moscow, and they're not willing to die to keep those people subject to the rule of Kiev.
But also because they don't believe they can defeat the Russian army.
They believe they're being sent to their deaths for nothing, so that Rachel Maddow and other people in the media can feel good about themselves.
And so that's why Zelensky has to enact this law to make it much more difficult for people to flee.
Quote, President Vladimir Zelensky refused to veto a new law that strengthens punishment for wayward military personnel on Thursday, rejecting a petition signed by over 25,000 Ukrainians who argue it's too harsh.
Quote, the key to combat capability of military units and ultimately of Ukraine's victory is compliance with military discipline, Zelensky said in his written response to the petition.
Ukrainian soldiers have stunned the world with their resilience and battlefield successes, withstanding a year-long onslaught from Russian troops.
But among Kiev's forces, made up largely of fresh recruits lacking previous military experience or training, some are struggling to cope.
There are those who have rebelled against commander's orders, gotten drunk or misbehaved, others running low on ammunition and morale, have fled for their lives, abandoned their positions.
Seeking to bring his forces into line, Zelensky in January signed into force a punitive law that introduces a harsher punishment for deserters and wayward soldiers and strips them of their right to appeal.
So you have the Rachel Maddows of the world demanding glorious victory against Russia as punishment for what they did in 2016, but the people of Ukraine, on his behalf, were supposedly acting, don't even want to fight the war themselves.
Now, A new study, as I mentioned at the top of the show, from the RAND Corporation, which is the think tank that the Pentagon funds and is designed to analyze wars and international conflicts from a perspective of the U.S.
military, just issued a new report worried that essentially the government, the people of the United States and its media have been worked into such a frenzy That they're now demanding an endless war that people in Washington know is not in America's interest.
Ukrainians want the Russians out of their country.
Ukrainians want all their territory back.
That's not necessarily why the United States, from the beginning, backed this war, even though that's what they claim.
Can you imagine anything like U.S.
officials lying when it comes to a war?
We would never see that before.
That's why it would be outrageous, as that CNN host noted, to even think about questioning the truthfulness of statements from U.S.
officials.
But here's this fascinating report, a couple excerpts.
Entitled, Avoiding a Long War, U.S.
Policy in the Trajectory of the Russian-Ukraine Conflict, RAND Corporation, January 23rd.
They want to avoid a U.S.
long war.
The one-year anniversary of this war is next month, February 24th.
It's rapidly approaching.
It's kind of already a long war.
But it's certainly going to be a much, much longer war if the Rachel Maddows and Bill Kristols of the world get their way.
And that's what this report is worried about.
quote, some analysts make the case that the war is heading toward the outcome that would benefit the United States and Ukraine.
Ukraine had battlefield momentum as of December 22nd, December 22nd, sorry, December 2022, and could conceivably fight until it succeeds in pushing the Russian military out of the Proponents of this view argue that the risk of Russian nuclear use or a war with NATO will remain manageable.
They argue that the risks of Russian nuclear use or a war with NATO will remain manageable.
Once it is forced out of Ukraine, a chastened Russia would have little choice but to leave its neighbor in peace and even pay reparations for the damage it caused.
This is them describing the pro-war view.
And then they say, however, studies of past conflicts and a close look at the course of this one suggest that optimistic scenario is improbable.
Improbable.
That word improbable is a masterclass, an understatement.
That the Russians are going to accept being kicked out of Crimea, giving all the land back, paying reparations.
This is insane fantasy of the kind we were told was going to happen in Iraq.
We're going to go there.
We're going to win in a month, as Bill Kristol said.
The Sunnis and the Shia were going to unite in support of getting rid of their hated dictator, along with the Kurds.
There was going to be democracy and a pro-US government in Iraq.
This is the insanity they sell to people who don't know better.
And that's what this report is saying, that that optimistic outcome they've sold to the American public is, quote, improbable.
These are people who speak in very muted language.
But that is a strong word in this context.
They then add, quote, an important caveat.
The perspective, this perspective, meaning the report, focuses on US interests, which often align but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests.
That's a really important statement.
They're saying sometimes United States interests align with Ukrainian interests, but they're not the same.
We acknowledge that Ukrainians have been the ones fighting and dying to protect their country against an unprovoked, illegal, and morally repugnant Russian invasion.
Their cities have been flattened, their economy has been decimated, they have been the victims of the Russian army's war crimes.
However, just did a little throat clearing there to make sure that you know which side they're on.
However, the US government nevertheless has an obligation to its citizens Not to Ukraine, Ukrainians, but to its citizens, to determine how different war trajectories would affect the U.S.
interests and explore options for influence in the course of the war to promote those interests.
The debate in Washington and other Western capitals over the future of the Russian-Ukraine war privileges the issue of territorial control.
Hawkish voices, like Rachel Maddow and Bill Kristol, and pretty much everyone else in media, hawkish voices argue for using increased military assistance to facilitate the Ukrainians' military reconquest of the entirety of the country's territory.
Their opponents urge the United States to adopt the pre-February 2022 line of control as the objective, citing the escalation risk of pushing further.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated that the goal of U.S.
policy is to enable Ukraine, quote, to take back territory that's been seized from it since February 24th, meaning all of eastern Ukraine.
Our analysis suggests that this debate is too narrowly focused on one dimension of the war's trajectory.
Territorial control, although immensely important to Ukraine, is not the most important dimension of the war's future for the United States.
In other words, Ukraine cares if they get to rule their eastern provinces of their country, but we in the United States, we don't care about that.
We conclude that, in addition to diverting possible escalation to a Russian-NATO war or Russian nuclear use, avoiding a long war is also a higher priority for the United States than facilitating significantly more Ukrainian territorial control.
In other words, I think from an American perspective it's kind of more important to avoid a nuclear war with Russia or a full-blown NATO war with Russia than it is to fight to the last day over who controls the Donbass.
That's what this report is saying.
Furthermore, the U.S.
ability to micromanage where the line is ultimately drawn is highly constrained since the U.S.
military is not directly involved in the fighting.
Enabling Ukraine's territorial control is also far from the only instrument available to the United States to affect the trajectory of this war.
We have highlighted several other tools, potentially more potent ones, that Washington can use to steer the war toward a trajectory that better promotes U.S.
interests.
Whereas the United States cannot determine the territorial outcome of the war directly, it will have direct control over these policies.
What the United States wanted with this war, obviously, from the beginning, was twofold.
It was not to protect Ukrainian democracy and to ensure that the Ukrainians rule Eastern Donbass.
Instead, it was to separate the Russians from Europe.
Particularly in terms of selling gas, cheap gas, through Nord Stream 2.
They achieved that objective.
Within a month, Europe buckled to the pressure Trump had been applying to them for years, and saying you can't keep buying gas from Russia, you should buy it from us instead, even though it's more expensive.
We provide you with Protection through NATO.
We're the ones whose military saves you from invasion.
And then Trump's argument was, as a result, you should buy oil from us, not from Russia.
The Germans obviously wanted the cheapest gas possible, but the invasion of Ukraine by Russia made that impossible.
Within a month, Germany and every other European country said, we're no longer going to buy Gas from Russia.
We're gonna get off of our addiction to Russian gas as soon as possible.
And then they also made it so that the climate in Europe was no one could be in an alliance with Russia anymore.
No one could even be seen as having ties to Russia.
They completely separated Russia and Europe.
Europe over here, Russia over here.
That was the main goal.
And the other goal was to weaken Russia as much as possible.
Ensuring that countries that would never previously considered it started to sanction them, to move away from them, to weaken their economy, to weaken their military.
All that was achieved.
They don't care about who runs the eastern provinces of Ukraine.
That was the pretext for the war.
We're fighting for Ukrainian democracy.
We're fighting for Ukrainian sovereignty.
There's always a pretext for the war.
That's what neocons do.
They say, we're going to Iraq because we want to liberate Iraqis.
We're going to Syria because we want to protect that seven-year-old girl.
We want to go do regime change in Libya because we want to save Libyans from the tyranny of Muammar Gaddafi that has been in place for 30 years and that we never had a problem with before.
These are the pretexts for war to make Americans feel good about it.
That's not the real reason the United States goes to wars, and that's what the RAND report is saying.
They understand the real reasons.
They're saying, look, we already achieved our goals.
We don't really care whether Ukraine gets all its territory back.
It then goes on, quote, President Biden has said that the war will end at the negotiating table, but the administration has not yet made moves to push the parties toward talks.
That's really important.
They're saying, look, President Biden's saying, oh, this war's going to end through diplomacy, but up until now, there's been no U.S.
pressure for the Ukrainians to negotiate with the Russians to end the war, almost like the U.S.
wants the war to go on.
Although it is far from certain that a change in US policies can spark negotiation, adopting one or more of the policies described in the perspective could make talks more likely.
We identify reasons why Russia and Ukraine may have mutual optimism about war and pessimism about peace.
The literature on war termination suggests that such perceptions can lead to protracted conflict.
Therefore, we highlight four options the United States has for shifting these dynamics.
Clarifying its plans for future support to Ukraine, meaning don't keep telling Ukraine we're going to be in this forever.
Making commitments to Ukraine's security.
Oh, you don't need to keep fighting the Russians until the end.
We'll guarantee your safety against another Russian invasion in the future.
Issuing assurances regarding the country's neutrality.
To Russia, meaning Russia, Ukraine won't be part of NATO.
There'll be a buffer between the West and Russia, which is what Russia said it wanted from the beginning.
The Rand Corporation is saying it's time to do that to end the war.
And then setting conditions for sanctions relief for Russia, that they're laying out what a diplomatic solution would look like.
It would be that the Ukrainians get guarantees of future security, so they don't need to keep fighting.
They would also be told we're not going to support them until the end of time.
And then what Russia gets is relief from sanctions and an assurance that Ukraine, right on their border, the most sensitive part of their border, is not going to be used as a NATO or EU country.
That's the diplomacy that they see as the way to end the war.
And the concern is, they've worked up so many people like Rachel Maddow into saying, Russia must lose.
Ukraine must get every inch of their territory back, including Crimea.
Things that Russia would rather use a nuclear weapon than permit.
And so how they're going to kind of weed Americans off of this addiction to this narrative that was sold to them by the media from the beginning.
Slava Ukraine and all that stuff Nancy Pelosi was saying.
All glory to Ukraine.
Let's fund and arm the Azov battalion until the end.
We need to now start introducing, says the Rand Report, not me, more realistic ways to think about this conflict from the perspective of U.S.
interests because it is not in the interest of the United States or the American people to fight an endless war in Russia, in part because it's dangerous, in part because it's costly, and in part because they want to focus on China.
And the RAND report has a whole variety of charts here about weighing the benefits and costs to the United States for continuing to have this war guided by the objective of getting full Ukrainian territory back.
And they kind of weigh the costs and benefits.
I'm not going to go through these.
But essentially, what the RAND report is saying is that We gotta wean people off this narrative that the only reason for this war is because Ukraine deserves all of its territory back, including Crimea, and we're gonna fight this war for the end.
This is the media narrative that is arguing that.
Now, let me show you a video here, which has been something that was suspected all along.
It's from the former prime minister of, do we have this video?
Oh, there was a video that I thought we had that I'm gonna just tell you about, but the former Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, was interviewed and he said, and there have been reports about this for a while now, that the negotiations were underway early on in this war between Kiev and Moscow.
Both wanted to cease fire, both wanted to sit down at the negotiating table, and it was the United States and the British That told them they couldn't do that.
The United States didn't want a quick end to this war because they wanted to achieve their objectives of splitting apart Europe and Russia and of weakening Russia as much as possible.
You couldn't have a one-month war in order to achieve that.
So what we're seeing now is what I wanted to get you to see from the beginning through this entire timeline.
Which is that it is easy to try and think that the American media is biased based on it's a love for one of the two parties.
The problem is the parties aren't divergent enough for that to really matter.
That's not the lens through which the United States media looks at most things.
What they look at most things through is who their sources are and what their sources are saying.
They spend all day talking to the CIA, the Pentagon, the U.S.
security state.
And both because it gives a sensation of personal fulfillment, like Tom Friedman was saying, that we had to take out our big stick and tell Arabs to suck on it.
That was the reason for the Iraq War, why thousands of Americans died while we spent almost a trillion dollars.
In part it's because their allegiance is to status quo authority and that is served by having United States always go to war while they sit in air-conditioned studios while Rachel Maddow collects 30 million dollars a year and she wants to send Ukrainians to die for a war not even they believe in?
Or other people to go fight these wars for her excitement and her political agenda?
The real reason is that war is really good for big business in the United States and it's really good for media.
That's when people watch.
CNN was born as a result of its coverage in the first Gulf War.
That's when CNN became famous.
That's when Wolf Blitzer became a household name.
People watch these networks when there's a war on.
It's fun and exciting to cover war from a distance.
And so the ideology of the U.S.
media is not left versus right, except in very rare cases where those differences matter.
The ideology is they are part of large corporations, and as a result, like all large corporations, they are part of institutions of authority, want its perpetuation, and want to defend its agenda.
And that's why in every one of these wars, just from the last 20 years, never mind going back further, you see the videos, you see the text.
That the American media's job is to support every proposed war, to attack anyone on the left or the right who opposes it, and to ensure that America's war machine continues endlessly.
That's not done for your benefit, but for theirs.
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