Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- More than 3,800 U.S. troops led 30 countries' forces and observers through Cobra Gold, the Pentagon's biggest Asian military exercise, trying to keep Thailand's coup-empowered army allied with Washington while Beijing increases its political, economic, and cultural influence.

"There has been resentment among Thai military officers and conservative politicians because of what is perceived as [Washington's] high-handed, tutelary policy about what Thailand should and should not do -- with regard to coups," said Paul Chambers, a Southeast Asian Studies lecturer at Naresuan University in Thailand.

"The negative policy in Washington toward coups [in 2006 and 2014]...contributed to some extent in Bangkok moving toward a realist policy of 'hedging' whereby a state creates balance between two great powers, in this case China versus the U.S.," Mr. Chambers said in an interview.

"The Thai military establishment does not like the United States for talking and pressing about military non-intervention in politics, and for the need to return democracy to the Thai people," former foreign minister Kasit Piromya said in an interview.

Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don’t expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.

 What propelled the United States to start the war on Iraq in March 2003 were dynamics of media and politics that are still very much with us today.

It appears that the military-industrial complex has complete control of the government of the United States, which recently voted to give the Pentagon roughly a trillion dollars of the tax-payers money. This was done

by cutting back on social programs which would have helped poor working families.

Recently Joan Roelofs published a book entitled “The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States” (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2022). In this book, she points out that the U.S. military-industrial complex has located military bases in regions where the local economy is entirely dependent on them. The vast river of money flowing into the pockets of the military-industrial complex implies that very many people earn their living, directly, or indirectly, from the manufacture or use of weapons.

 Strong commitment to freedom?

I had second thoughts as I braved an atmospheric river of rain, using my periscope to drive on the freeway to Downtown L.A.’s Music Center to hear George Frideric Handel’s Solomon. But the rapturous atmospheric river of sound that awaited me made me glad that I had made the effort to hear the three-and-a-half-hour cascade of baroque instrumental music with choir and soloists regaling this heathen and a near capacity crowd with three vignettes from the Old Testament about Judea’s King Solomon set to Handel’s indelible strains.

As is the case of long wars, the warring parties and their affiliated media in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have painted each other using uncompromising language, making it nearly impossible to offer an unbiased view of the ongoing tragedy that has killed, wounded and expelled millions. 

 While it is understandable that wars of such horror and near complete disregard of the most basic human rights often heighten our sense of what we consider to be moral and just, parties involved and invested in such conflicts often manipulate morality for political and geopolitical reasons. 

 This same logic is underway in Ukraine. Both sides are adamant that nothing less than a complete victory is acceptable. The Ukrainian view is fully supported by western countries in word and deed - as in tens of billions of modern weapons that have done little, aside from worsening an already bloody conflict.