Author: Keith Preston

All Posts by Keith Preston

US forces entering Iraq from Syria seek to foment civil unrest Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

There is growing concern that US forces that have entered Iraq after retreating from northern Syria seek to destabilize the country and foment civil unrest, says an American political analyst.

Iraq on Wednesday rejected any long-term presence of US troops in his country after their withdrawal from neighboring Syria. Baghdad said American forces crossing into Iraq could only be there in transit.

“it’s not surprising that the government of Iraq would make a decision not wanting American troops to be positioned within Iraq,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“We have to consider that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and there was a very bloody war took place…so the Iraqis certainly are not anxious to have American troops return to Iraq,” Preston told Press TV on Thursday.

“Also there’s been civil unrest in Iraq in recent times; there may be concerns that the Americans may try to foment civil unrest within Iraq because of the fact that the Iraqi government has moved closer to Iran,” he added.

PressTV-US forces leaving Syria not allowed to stay in Iraq: PM

PressTV-US forces leaving Syria not allowed to stay in Iraq: PMIraq’s Abdul-Mahdi says American forces withdrawing from Syria don’t have permission to stay in his country and Baghdad is taking legal action to address the issue.

US forces have been deeply unpopular in much of Iraq since their 2003-2011 occupation of the country.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said after a meeting with visiting US Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday that the American forces were not allowed to remain in Iraq and his government was taking “all international legal measures” to address the issue.

“We have (already) issued an official statement saying that, and we are taking all international legal measures. We ask the international community and the United Nations to perform their roles in this matter,” he said.

He asserted that any foreign troop presence on Iraqi soil must be authorized by the government first and should end upon Baghdad’s request.

Esper had initially told reporters that troops leaving Syria would go to western Iraq for further operations against scattered Daesh terrorists and “help defend Iraq”. But he backtracked on Tuesday, saying Washington aimed to eventually bring the troops home.

In a major U-turn in the US military policy, the White House announced on October 6 that the US would be withdrawing its forces from northeastern Syria, clearing the path for an expected Turkish incursion into the region.

Three days later, Turkey launched the offensive with the aim of purging the northern Syrian regions near its border of US-backed Kurdish militants, whom it views as terrorists linked to local autonomy-seeking militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The Nintendo Mennonite 2

Science and Technology • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I hate technology, dearest motherfuckers. Few things drive me balls deep into the red faster than technology and it just keeps getting worse with every new iPhone they pump out. Everywhere I go, everyone I see is surgically attached to those stupid fucking devices, hemming away at the flickering idiot boxes that only those jackals in Silicon Valley would be dense enough to call smartphones, as they meander aimlessly into oncoming traffic like lambs to the slaughter, or sit down to a romantic candlelight dinner only to spend the evening gazing listlessly into two separate articles on two separate Kardashians while their food gets colder than their marriage. I feel like a crotchety old grandmother bitching like this but I simply can’t shake the feeling that this is what those old Hindu mystics meant when they spoke of the Kali Yuga. If this is humanity at the pinnacle of progress, then progress is clearly a disease deadlier than cancer.

These days we have computers that talk, listen, fuck, watch us while we shit and report our bathroom habits back to any number of nefarious corporate and/or government perverts. Everyone knows this and nobody fucking cares. Edward Snowden is condemned to spend the rest of his life sweating vodka in some Brezhnev-era tower too cold for roaches while Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange slowly decompose in federal custody and nobody fucking cares. Everyone seems just peachy fucking keen with their flashy new digital prison cells as long as the Wi-Fi works. Now the computers can think and it wont be long before they realize they don’t need our lazy asses crowding their space.

It’s times like these that I almost envy my Amish neighbors out here in Central Pennsylvania. Sure they smell like shit and work themselves fucking stupid but they took a stand sometime in the mid-Nineteenth Century after deciding that they had exactly enough technology and they weren’t going to poison their community with anymore just for the sake of convenience. And for the most part they stuck to it. They stood their ground and they’re still standing. While the rest of us enjoy the crippling stress and isolation of progress with its mass shootings, reality television and nervous breakdowns, the Amish are doing just fine living like it’s 1869, and unlike their ideological nephew Theodore Kaczynski, they didn’t have to muddy their souls with a single bomb to do it. They simply dropped out of the bullshit and went their own way. I may be a gender-bending Yippie sex freak but it was my Amish neighbors that gave me my first lessons on the virtues of anarchism.

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US using Turks as de facto mercenaries in Syria Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , , ,

The United States is using “the Turks as de facto mercenaries” in Syria in order to continue Washington’s destabilization effort in the war-torn country, an analyst says. Keith Preston made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Sunday when asked about US President Donald Trump who had defended his decision to pull American forces out of northern Syria.

Screwing Over the Kurds: An All-American Pastime Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , , , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I have long been a vocal supporter of the Kurds, even before the Syrian clusterfuck sparked the Rojava Revolution. Part of this comes from my checkered past as a lapsed Tankie-Guevarist. I grew up gorging myself on New Left folk tails of Third World rebellion. The fearsome PKK were one of a dozen or so clans of crimson bearded renegades, fighting like Castro for some post-colonial utopia. I read everything I could find about the Bolshevik adventures of groups like FARC, Hezbollah and the Naxalites. But the thing that set the Kurds apart was their fourth quarter conversion to anarchism which closely mirrored my own.

Abdullah Ocalan discovered the works of Murray Bookchin right around the time I dropped communism for panarchy and syndicalism. And when the wrest of Syria sunk into CIA sponsored Salafi hell, the Ocalan influenced Kurds of the YPG created a successful stateless society that flourished amidst the chaos. It was proof positive that anarchism could work. But it was all over the moment the YPG accepted the poison gift of American military occupation. Anarchism quite simply cannot coexist with the greatest source of imperial tyranny on the fucking planet. The only sick comfort I took in this nauseating arrangement is that I knew it wouldn’t last. That’s because, dearest motherfuckers, screwing over the Kurds is a time-honored American pastime.

The original Kurdish screwjob was the work of that whimsical Bond villain known as Henry Kissinger. During his busy time as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under Nixon and Ford, respectively, Henry cooked up a devilish little scheme with the help of his flunkies in Israel and the Shah’s Iran. Iraq was becoming suspiciously cozy with the Soviet Union. So they flooded Iraq’s long suffering Kurdish independence movement with Soviet hardware pilfered from the killing fields of Vietnam and the Sinai Peninsula. Mustafa Barzani, the founding father of the modern Peshmerga, didn’t trust the Shah farther than he could squeeze his ham-fist up his pinched little quisling asshole, no sane Mesopotamian did, but he believed in his heart of hearts that America was that shining beacon of freedom on the hill. Mustafa was a sucker. Once Henry and Co. managed to frighten Iraq into playing ball, we quickly drummed up a deal between them and Iran that included handing over the Kurds on a spit. Not only did old Henry, that Nobel pacifist, refuse to even return Mustafa’s frantic calls for help, he cut all humanitarian aide to the region as Helter Skelter came tumbling down. The Kurds were slaughtered and Kissinger summed up America’s Kurdish policy in a nutshell when he told a disgusted congress that “One should not confuse undercover action with social work.” If only the Kurds took his advice.

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US, Saudi, Israel seeking to hijack Iraq protests Reply

Uncategorized • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The United States and its key allies in the Middle East are trying to find a way to “hijack” protests in Iraq in an attempt to influence its foreign policy, says an American analyst.

Washington does not like Iraq’s current role in the regional “resistance axis” that is countering Israeli and Saudi aggression, Keith Preston, director of attackthesystem.com, told Press TV’s “The Debate” program.

“I think much of the difficulty that Iraq is experiencing today is largely rooted in the policies that the United States has pursued towards Iraq for quite some time,” he said.

“We’d have to consider the lasting impact of not only the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the destabilization of Iraq that happened as a result,” but the fact that the US also propped up the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain, Preston added.

Washington’s policies also destroyed Iraq’s industrial effectively, “turning what was once one of the most advanced nations in the Middle East to a pre-industrial state,” the analyst argued.

America’s support for Takfiri groups that first overtook parts of Syria and then proceeded to override neighboring Iraq is also a reason for current problems, said Preston.

PressTV-Iraq: All evidence points to 'malicious hands' in unrest

PressTV-Iraq: All evidence points to ‘malicious hands’ in unrestOfficials in Baghdad blame “malicious hands” for the killing of both protesters and security forces during the latest bout of unrest that gripped the capital and some other cities. 

He said there is no denying that the Iraqi government is partially responsible for some of the shortcomings in people’s lives.

However, he argued, it is only natural to expect the West to try and “hijack” the protests in Iraq for its own benefit, just as it is doing with protests in Hong Kong and France.

“American foreign policy has not been happy with the course that the Iraqi government has taken in recent years,” he said.

Noting that the Americans are unhappy with Iraq’s close ties to Iran, Preston said: “They don’t like the fact that Iraq is largely part of the wider axis of resistance against Saudi influence in the region as well.”

That is why the US and its regional allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, see the protests as an opportunity to destabilize Iraq.

The other panelist, Brian Downing, who is an independent national security analyst based in Florida, said Saudi Arabia would use Iraq as a way to take attention away from its failures in Yemen in an attempt to repair its image.

Downing said while US policies also played a role in Iraq’s current situation, most of the blame should go to the Iraqi elite for failing to “evenly distribute” the country’s large oil income.

An issue of demographics is also at play, with Iraq’s large population of youths in their 20s desiring a better life and a better future, he added.

Trump’s impeachment inquiry may help his re-election campaign Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against US President Donald Trump may backfire and increase the Republican president’s chances of getting re-elected in 2020, says an American political analyst in Virginia.

Staunch Democrats “want to get rid of Trump by any means they can” but are “concerned that if Trump is impeached, that may have the effect of rallying his base, which may actually help him win re-election next year and discredit the Democratic candidate,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“There are some people who really dislike the president and just want him out of office, period, but there are other people who see this as a safety valve; they think that perhaps he won’t actually be impeached but this will have the effect of strengthening his base and strengthening his re-election potential, ” Preston told Press TV.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry in September after an unidentified whistleblower alleged Trump had unlawfully used his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former US Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against Trump is the latest and perhaps most serious threat to his presidency, and the White House is failing to contain the crisis.

On Friday, House Democratic lawmakers demanded that the White House provide documents related to allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine for political favors.

PressTV-Democrats subpoena White House in impeachment probe

PressTV-Democrats subpoena White House in impeachment probeHouse Democrats issued a subpoena to the White House Friday evening for documents relating to the President Donald Trump’s contact with Ukraine.

During a July 25 call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to speak with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani about whether Ukrainian officials improperly dropped an investigation of a company that hired Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Trump’s aggressive new strategy to thwart the Democrats’ impeachment offensive is already breaking down under the weight of new revelations.

Text messages released on Thursday between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide reveal that Zelensky was told he should open an investigation against Biden if he wanted an invitation to visit Washington.

US military–industrial complex guides American political system Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military

Press TV. Listen here.

The military–industrial complex in the United States has vast influence over the country’s economy and government policy, says an American political analyst.

“The armaments industry is such an important part of the American economy and such a powerful force within the American political system; in many ways it is the American political system,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“It’s been said that the United States doesn’t just have a military–industrial complex; it is a military–industrial complex,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.

“And that’s extended internationally through the fact that the United States has hundreds of military bases spread out all over the world, they’ve got nuclear weapons deployed in different places,” he added.

“The armaments industry guides American policy.”

Russia says it is closely watching the United States’ work on developing new weapon systems, months after Washington abandoned an arms control treaty with Moscow.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that Russian authorities “are actually keeping a close watch on Washington’s actions with regard to the development of new weapon systems.”

Back in early August, US President Donald Trump officially withdrew his country from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which had been concluded in 1987 by then-US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The INF had banned all land-based missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers and covered missiles carrying both nuclear and conventional warheads.

PressTV-US military steps up efforts to counter China's rising power

PressTV-US military steps up efforts to counter China’s rising powerThe US Defense Department has been sharply expanding its efforts to counter China’s growing military power.

Trump’s withdrawal from the INF reflect the new momentum his administration has given to the US policy of “strategic rivalry” with China and Russia, two countries seen increasingly as a threat by Washington.

Last month, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned European nations to tackle what he called growing security and economic threats from China and Russia, the latest sign that Washington has shifted its main focus from the US wars in the Middle East to confronting Beijing and Moscow.

Climate Cthulhu: A Post-Modern Horror Story Reply

Environment • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

is October 2019, dearest motherfuckers, and we are living in a horror story. To say that these are apocalyptic times seems to be a gross understatement. The Biblical notion of Armageddon, what with the gnashing of teeth and pillars of salt, seems almost quaint in our age, like some new attraction at Disney World where the Dipping Dots are served up to the kiddos by friendly leather-clad catamites. The Thunderdome looks like a goddamn jungle gym when compared to the Lovecraftian horrors of climate change. Mankind itself is being stalked by a colossal beast of our own creation with tentacles reaching far and wide across the globe.

From the sinking islands of the South Pacific, which are being swallowed whole like pills by the sea, to the frontiers of Alaska, where the once long frozen tundras are being set ablaze in massive god-size funeral pyres. From the tropical jungles of Central Africa, being erased from the globe by a tidal wave of rapidly expanding Saharan dunes, to the urban jungles of South Asia, where the sun burns so hot that the pavement of the streets themselves melts like ice cream in an oven and the sadhus shrivel up like burnt jerky on the blistering sidewalks. This beast has killed millions. This beast has slaughtered whole civilizations, liquidated glaciers the size of continents and murdered entire seasons in cold blood. Spring and Fall have been burned from the fucking calendar and Winter is next. This beast is just getting started and soon the dog days will last forever, or at least until forever too falls victim to this environmental Cthulhu. Howard Philips shrieks as Mother Nature wails. Ladies and gentleman, we are fucked. The killer has us cornered in the attic and their will be no final girls in this slasher nightmare.

This beast of which I speak, call it climate change, call it global warming, call it whatever the hell you like, is the bastard creation of a Doctor Frankenstein which too goes by many names; globalism, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, industrialism, imperialism. All just different genres of that fickle vice known as modernity, a fork in the road of human evolution where the brightest monkeys fooled themselves into believing that their self-serving technology made them superior to the rest of the living world. As usual, Marx was right and Marx was wrong. Marx was right to observe that capitalism, one of modernity’s more garish offspring, thrived on the nihilistic, almost vampiric thirst for constant expansion. He was wrong however to assume that capitalism’s insatiable hunger would inevitably lead to its own demise. There is another, far more unsavory, end game for the capitalist beast besides the karma of popular revolution, and that is a mass murder-suicide by expansion itself. Marx never imagined, even in his most fevered dreams, that humanity could be so ruthless as to destroy itself with toxic pleasure and use the old Kraut’s beloved industrialism to do it. It took mad men like Theodore Kaczynski to see that coming. Now Ted sits in his concrete tomb in Colorado, too sickened by his own vision to even snarl “I told you so!” to the once smug guards who’s homes are now on fire in the Rockies.

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The Conscience of a Contrarian Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Some months are harder than others to be a poorly trained anarcho-gonzo visionary. During these last couple months of the hellishly hot post-apocalyptic summer of this year of our lord Xenu, twenty-hundred-and-nineteen, I couldn’t seem to write a blog post that didn’t smack one class of my dearest motherfuckers or another across the face like a goddamn dead cat. I attempt to make an argument that Ilhan Omar voters and Tucker Carlson viewers have far more in common in the realm of war and peace than they do with any carcinogenic class of moderates in their own parties and the leftists act like I’m some kind of crypto-fascist Rudolf Hess apologist. The very next month, I make an argument that the white race is little more than a violent social construct that does a grave injustice to all poor people and the same paleos who applauded my daring and seemed primed to declare me their genderfuck Phyllis Schlafly last month are taking their turn tying the fucking noose. I just can’t win with you people. It’s not every month that you manage to piss off people you admire on both ends of the aisle, but what can I say? I’m a regular Renaissance bitch.

It’s months like these that I get saddled by my friends on both the left and the right with the dreaded C-word, and I ain’t talkin bout See-You-Next-Tuesday. The word reserved for cantankerous ideological perverts like me is contrarian. Such a universally reviled slur, but what the hell does it actually mean. The popular consensus among the mainstream politicos is that a contrarian is simply a childish rebel who picks confrontational opinions based largely on their radical cache or lack of popularity among the scions of the centrist wonkgeist. A contrarian zigs when the rest of the country zags. A contrarian picks fights just for cheap kicks and the verbal exercise.

And I’ll own up to some of this. I’ve always been a rebel, distrustful of any and all authority, I mean, shit, I’m a lapsed Irish Catholic raised on punk rock and cowboy movies, it’s practically in my fucking DNA. But the fact that this distinction is seen as some kind of vice is just proof positive to me of how far down that proverbial rabbit hole our nation’s special genre of bipolar bipartisanship has taken us. To your average partisan American dupe, a contrarian is essentially someone who refuses to comply with our toxic left-right paradigm. A leftist who refuses to blindly back Russiagate just because they recognize the well established fact that Trump sits somewhere on the psycho branch of the anti-social personality tree. Or a conservative who doesn’t require endless war or organized fag-bashing to satiate his or her own personal biblical philosophy.

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US Democrats not sincere in their concern for Yemen war: Analyst 2

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

RASA News Agency

RNA – Democratic Party lawmakers only began criticizing the Saudi war against Yemen after the murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“The Democrats have seized on the situation in Yemen and they see this as a weapon that they can use against the Trump administration for political purposes,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump is “turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s continued violence” against innocent Yemenis. 

Pelosi, the highest ranking Democrat in Congress, made the remarks in a statement she released on Twitter Saturday a day after Trump approved a plan to deploy troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

She described Trump’s decision as an “outrageous attempt” to circumvent the will of the Congress.

“Americans are weary of war, and have no interest in entering another Middle East conflict,” Pelosi reiterated, “particularly on behalf of Saudi Arabia.”

Pointing to Saudi Arabia’s “continued assault on countless men, women and children,” Pelosi slammed the president for “turning a blind eye” to the “continued violence against innocent Yemenis.

Preston rejected Pelosi’s comments as insincere, saying her remarks are a “cynical political ploy” to hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

“The goal of the Democrats is regrettably not to end the Saudi war in Yemen, the goal is simply to score partisan points when it comes to their own conflicts with the Republicans and the Trump presidency,” he added.

The Pentagon announced Friday it would send reinforcements to the region to bolster Riyadh’s air defenses following a recent drone attack on two major oil facilities owned by Saudi state oil giant Aramco.

The decision was made at the request of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the US Defense Department.

The Pentagon said the deployment would involve a moderate number of troops for what it called primarily “defensive in nature.”

The new decision comes after Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah fighters conducted strikes on the two facilities located in Abqaiq and Khurais on September 14. The attacks led to a halt in about 50 percent of the Arab kingdom’s crude and gas production, causing a surge in oil prices.

Tehran has fiercely rejected any involvement in the retaliatory attack by Yemeni forces against Saudi oil facilities and warned Washington that any military action against it will spell into an “all-out war” with immediate retaliation.

When Drones Come Home to Roost Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It was fucking beautiful. There are no more accurate words in the English dictionary to describe the vision I saw. I awoke Sunday afternoon, turned the TV on to CNN and there it was in all its infernal glory like Christmas Morning in hell. Standing six-hundred stories high above the sea of sand in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, a leaning wall of towering flames shimmering across the night sky like an aurora borealis made of fire. As all the usual yammering skulls off camera spun fantastic tall tales about an Iranian conspiracy to deny the House of Saud their Allah given right to rape and pillage with abandon, only one thing, one message, burned through my frontal lobes like Abqaiq crude, “They did it. The Houthis really did it!” The resounding feeling of karmic justice was downright euphoric. I wanted to cry. I wanted to dance. Fuck, I wanted to masturbate to the sight of those rabid dogs getting exactly what they deserved.

After spending nearly half a decade watching Saudi Arabia’s savage holocaust in Yemen and the dogged Houthi rebels courageous if at times downright suicidal resistance, after pouring over a veritable ocean of pictures and footage of starving and slaughtered Zaydi children, somehow this conflict on the other side of the planet had become very personal to me. In spite of being a decadent pagan faggot, the chaste Houthi rebels had come to symbolize a greater narrative beyond their own struggle for independence. They had come to symbolize a greater resistance to a dying empire of Atlantic supremacy represented by their twisted Arab cartels in the Persian Gulf, the Salafi Goliath to the Shia Davids. But now, the unthinkable. David struck back hard with his RC slingshot, landing a spectacular blow to the vital organ Goliath held most dear, his wallet.

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Bolton Firing Shows Trump’s Foreign Policy Not Consistent: US Analyst 1

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

An interview with Tasnim.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political commentator highlighted US President Donald Trump’s inconsistent approach toward foreign affairs, saying the president fired John Bolton to probably develop a “less aggressive stance” than the former US national security adviser.

“Certainly, there is a lack of consistency in the Trump administration when it comes to a variety of matters, including foreign policy,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim in an interview.

He added, “Trump likely fired Bolton because the President is inclined toward a less aggressive stance than what Bolton’s supporters would prefer.”

The following is the full text of the interview.

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