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conflict

Does Trump really know what’s going on in Ukraine? Former UK diplomat sounds alarm

Published

2 months ago

14 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Alastair Crooke says the situation in Ukraine is headed for an ‘inevitable escalation’ threatening a far bigger war with the West that Putin is trying to avoid.

What is the Trump administration doing about the Ukraine war? This week President Trump said the Russian leader Putin had “gone crazy” and issued what seemed to be a threat in response to Russian air strikes across Ukraine.

Reports in the Western media of a three-day Russian air assault on Ukraine – launched overnight on Sunday, May 25 – sparked outrage. The condemnation of the attacks was paired with renewed calls from the forever war faction to escalate U.S. involvement – leading to fears of a move towards World War III.

As usual, this media campaign for more war did not include the Russian perspective.

An unprecedented number of drones – over 1,000 – had been launched into Russia by Ukraine. It was reported May 25 that there was even a “large-scale” attempted assassination attack against Putin’s helicopter, involving dozens of Ukrainian drones, while the Russian president was on his way to visit the Kursk region. Putin survived thanks to the successful defensive actions of Russian military protecting the helicopter.

This was one reason for the Russian assault which seemed to have been news even to Donald Trump himself.

“I don’t like what Putin is doing … he’s killing people,” Trump said in a report of May 26. “Something happened to this guy.”

A reporter then tells Trump that a Russian military commander said Putin was targeted in a Ukrainian drone attack.

“I haven’t heard that,” said Trump, adding “maybe that would be a reason” for the Russian response.

Another reason was given by the Russian Foreign Ministry on May 23.

Two days after Trump’s remarks, Russian outlet TASS reported a “massive overnight attack by Ukrainian drones on Russian regions has been repelled,” claiming Russian defenses had downed almost 300 drones targeting 13 regions – including Moscow.

Trump added that Zelensky was not helping the cause of peace.

“He is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”

Does Trump know what is going on?

Speaking to Judge Napolitano, an unusually passionate and alarmed Alastair Crooke, a British former Middle East negotiator, noted how Trump “seemed not to know” that Ukraine had “launched over a thousand drones” and an attempted “assassination of President Putin.”

Crooke warns that Putin and the Russians understandably no longer trust anything that Trump and the Americans say. He tells Napolitano the situation is headed for an “inevitable escalation” threatening a far bigger war with the West, which Putin has been trying to avoid. See the exceptional interview below.

Trump is hypocritical in not telling the exact truth to reporters he openly denounces – as he did here – of being “fake news.”

What can the U.S. do?

Perhaps it is wise to ask what the Trump administration can do. With a new grand strategy of national security through the promotion of world peace, it would appear that all-out war with Russia is off the table.

The bipartisan push for escalation to war is ever-present, however. Whether it is war with Russia or war with Iran, the “neocon” faction constantly urges military action.

Why? The motives of people like Lindsey Graham – who once called for Putin’s assassination – are only partially explained by the capture of the U.S. House and Senate by the Israel lobby.

At base, this is about business. The economics of permanent war is the lifeline of the neocons, and of the European political establishment. If peace breaks out, they are all finished, as their business goes bankrupt as their promotion of war as the “defense of democracy.”

This is not only morally bankrupt, as JD Vance pointed out last May, but the forever wars pursued by Zionist neocons have driven America’s debt to a record $36 trillion high.

Trump’s goal is to change all of that. To do so, the business model of permanent war must go – in order to “make America great again.” Another reason was supplied by Vance last week: the “era of uncontested U.S. dominance” is now over.

It makes no sense to launch a great project to reverse the financially and diplomatically ruinous project of “liberal intervention” and then start a major war which many Western experts not on the military-industrial complex payroll are warning you will not win.

U.S. wars have cost ‘$21 trillion’

Speaking in Saudi Arabia on May 13, Trump derided the so-called “nation builders, neocons, liberal non-profits” who he said “spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities…”

As Newsweek reported, a 2021 study showed “[i]n the 20 years since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has spent more than $21 trillion” on funding the forever wars abroad – and on mass surveillance at home. The bottom line is that the business model of neocon wars has broken America, and Trump says he wants to fix that.

Given that the Russians have not lost in Ukraine, and have not collapsed as the Pentagon hoped they would in 2019, where does this leave the U.S.?

As Alastair Crooke and Col. Douglas Macgregor have pointed out, it leaves the U.S. with “no leverage.”

This means that after sanctions and after arming Ukraine and funding its regime have failed to stop Russia, the Russians will conclude the war on their own terms because they have won it.

So what can Trump do if the stick of further sanctions and arms is useless? Trump has offered the carrot of the inclusion of Russia in a new geopolitical dispensation which replaces conflict with strategic balance and stable trade deals.

Yet Russia has managed – and rather well – to realign the sale of its oil, gas, and other vast mineral resources. Its informal bloc sees it partnered with two other major producer nations – China and Iran. It is the consumer economic model of the West which needs these resources and cheap manufactured goods, which have the rest of the world for an alternative market should it sanction itself from access to them.

Will the U.S. walk away?

Along with the raw military power and industrial production capacity of the Russians, this is a compelling reason for the U.S. to just walk away from Ukraine. Both Trump and Vice President Vance have said the U.S. may do so.

That is the solution offered by Dr. S. Maitra, whose recommendation for a U.S. drawdown from NATO two years ago is now close to being realized. German outlet Handelsblatt warned on Monday that the EU and the UK must prepare for the imminent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe. The U.S. is already walking away from Europe on “defense” – and who pays for it.

Europe is preventing peace, says Lavrov

The search for reasons for the continuing war can be satisfied by noticing the lifeline of funding and arms provided to Ukraine.

The Russians have said that Trump, the “peace president,” promises peace but hypocritically continues to prolong the war with billions more U.S. money, weapons, intelligence, and U.S. special forces in Ukraine and Israel, without which both wars would quickly end. On Tuesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz responded by lifting range limits on weapons supplied to Ukraine – allowing U.S. and European supplied missiles to hit Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added this week that British and EU leaders were “sabotaging” the peace process. Why? He said in Istanbul on Friday: “President Trump has already said that this is not his war. He is interested in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine continuing.”

Lavrov explained, “European leaders are trying to prevent this, because if the war suddenly stops, they will end their political careers in disgrace.”

Lavrov added, “They’ve bet their reputation on dragging Europe into a war against Russia to facilitate the militarization of Europe,” saying “huge sums” of money were being allocated towards that end.

Lavrov’s remarks dispel any mystery over the reasons for prolonging and escalating the Ukraine war. The liberal-globalist leadership of Britain and Europe have invested their political futures in it. The vast economic might of the U.S. war faction relies on the production of wars for its existence.

With around three-fifths of the U.S. national debt of $36 trillion a direct result of its decades of wars it is clear whose money is talking up the need for more war. This is the “democracy” our tax money is defending in Ukraine.

It is the business of monetized death that has a low regard for the sacredness of human life. It is one of the largest and potentially most dangerous results of the modern culture of death that Pope John Paul II constantly warned the world to oppose.

Since NATO intelligence has been embedded in Ukraine it is inconceivable that Trump does not know how U.S. money is being spent – on launching attacks on Russia to provoke a major war.

Trump certainly knows that starting wars is the business of the neocon faction – the whole mission of his MAGA movement can be explained as an attempt to change the U.S. from a war economy with global ambitions. As Crooke points out, Europe knows this, too.

If Trump walks away, Crooke says, the Europeans don’t have the money or the troops to fight the war without him. The Europeans also fear Trump’s alternative “economic model” to the war economy will ruin them. Aside from the fact that they “hate him,” Crooke says, this is the reason they want to destroy him. How?

They want to “push Trump … into an escalation against Russia … to undermine Trump and his program…” he says.

This is an existential moment for the survival of an economic model – whose vast profits have captured the governance of the West. Behind the MAGA hats and talk of democracy’s defense, a battle for the life of the business of death is still being waged – with our taxes.

It would be crazy not to walk away from that and return to spreading a culture of life for the benefit of all mankind.

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conflict

US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Was it obliteration?

Published on July 5, 2025

By

A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear research center in Iran shows visible damage to structures and nearby tunnel entrances from recent US airstrikes. / Satellite image (c) 2025 Maxar Technologies.

Seymour Hersh Seymour Hersh

The US attack on Iran may not have wiped out its nuclear ambitions but it did set them back years

I started my career in journalism during the early 1960s as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now long-gone local news agency that was set up by the Chicago newspapers in the 1890s to cover the police and fire departments, City Hall, the courts, the morgue, and so on. It was a training ground, and the essential message for its aspiring reporters was: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

It was a message I wish our cable networks would take to heart. CNN and MSNBC, basing their reporting on an alleged Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, have consistently reported that the Air Force raids in Iran on June 22 did not accomplish their primary goal: total destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity. US newspapers also joined in, but it was the two nominally liberal cable channels, with their dislike—make that contempt—for President Donald Trump, that drove the early coverage.

There was no DIA analysis per se. All US units that engage in combat must file an “after-action report” to the DIA after a military engagement. In this case, the report would have come from the US Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM is responsible for all US military operations in the Middle East, Egypt, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One US official involved in the process told me that “the first thing out of the box is you have to tell your boss what happened.” It was that initial report of the bombing attack that was forwarded to DIA headquarters along the Potomac River in Washington and copied or summarized by someone not authorized to do so and sent to the various media outlets.

The view of many who were involved in the planning and execution of the mission is that the report was summarized and leaked “for political purposes”—to cast immediate doubt on the success of the mission. The early reports went so far as to suggest that Iran’s nuclear program has survived incapacitation by the attack. Seven US B-2 “Spirit” bombers, each carrying two deep-penetration “bunker-busters” weighing 30,000 pounds, had flown without challenge from their base in Missouri to the primary target: Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, concealed deep inside a mountain twenty miles north of the city of Qom.

The planning for the attack began with the knowledge that the main target—the working area of the nuclear program—was buried at least 260 feet below the rocky surface at Fordo. The gas centrifuges spinning there were repeatedly enriching uranium, in what is known as a cascade, not to weapons-grade level—uranium-235 isotopes enriched to 90 percent—but to 60 percent. Further processing to create weapons grade uranium, if Iran chose to do so, could be done in a matter of weeks, or less. The Air Force planning group had also been informed before the bombing raid, most likely by the Israelis, who have a vast spy network in Iran, that more than 450 pounds of the enriched gas stored at Fordo had been shipped to safety at another vital Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, 215 miles south of Tehran. Isfahan was the only known facility in Iran capable of converting the Fordo gas into a highly enriched metal—a critical early stage of building the bomb. Isfahan also was a separate target of the US attack on Fordo, and was pulverized by Tomahawk missiles fired by a U.S. submarine operating in the Gulf of Aden, off Yemen.

As a journalist who for decades has covered the nascent nuclear crisis in the Middle East, it seemed clear to me and to informed friends I have in Washington and Israel that if Fordo somehow survived its bunker-buster attack, as was initially suggested, and continued to enrich more uranium, Isfahan would not. No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.

I’ve been frustrated and angry at cable news coverage for years, and that includes Fox News, too, and decided to try and find the real story. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And I checked out enough of it to share.

I was told that “the first question for the American planners was how big was the actual workspace at Fordo? Was it a structure? We had to find that out before we got rid of it.” Some of the planners estimated that the working space “was the size of two hockey rinks: 200 feet long and 85 feet wide.” It came to 34,000 square feet. The height of the underground working space was assumed to be ten-and-a-half feet—I was not told the genesis of that assumption—and the size of the target was determined to be 357,000 cubic feet.

The next step was to measure the power of the dozen or more bunker-busters that were planned to be “carefully spaced and dropped” by the US B-2 bombers, using the most advanced guidance systems. (During one high-level session in Washington, one of the Air Force planners was asked what would happen if the B-2’s guidance systems were corrupted by an outside signal. “We’d miss the target” was the answer.)

I was assured that even if the rough estimate of the working space at Fordo was far off, the bombers targeting Fordo each carried a 30,000-pound bomb with an explosive payload of as much as five thousand pounds, which was more than enough to pulverize the mythical hockey rinks, or even a much larger working space.

Some of the bombs were also outfitted with what is known as a hard target void sensing fuze, which enabled the bombs to penetrate multiple layers of a site like Fordo before detonating. This would maximize the destructive effect. Each bomb, dropped in sequence, would create a force of rubble that would cause increasing havoc in the working areas deep inside the mountain.

“The bombs made their own hole. We built a 30,000-pound steel bullet,” the official told me, referring with pride to the bunker-busters.

Most important, he said, was that there were no post-strike hints detected of radioactivity—more evidence that the 450 pounds of enriched uranium had been moved from Fordo to the reprocessing site at Isfahan prior to the US attack there, which was code-named “Midnight Hammer.” That operation included a third US strike at yet another nuclear facility at Natanz.

“The Air Force got everything on the hit list,” the official told me. “Even if Iran rebuilds some centrifuges, it will still need Isfahan. There is no conversion capability without it.”

Why not, I asked, tell the public about the success of the raid and the fact that Iran no longer has a potential nuclear weapon?

The answer: “There will be a top-secret report about all of this, but we don’t tell people how hard we work. We tell the public what we think it wants to hear.”

The US official, asked about the future of the Iranian nuclear program, quickly acknowledged that “there is a communication problem” when it comes to the fate of the program.

The intent of the strike planners, he said, “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term—a year or so—with the hope they would not try again. The clear understanding was that there was no expectation to ‘obliterate’ every aspect of their nuclear program. We don’t even know what that is.

“Obliteration means the glass—[eliminating] Iran’s nuclear program—is full. The planning and the results are the glass is half-full. For Trump critics, the results are the glass is half-empty—the centrifuges may have survived and four hundred pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium are missing. The bombs could not be assured to penetrate the centrifuge chamber . . . too deep, but they could cover them up [with rocks and other bomb debris] and in the process cause unknown damage to them.

“Whether the 60 percent [enriched uranium] was there or not is irrelevant because without centrifuges they cannot refine it to weapons grade. Add to this the research and refinement and conversion from gas to metal—required for a bomb—at Isfahan are also gone.

“Results? Glass is half-full . . . a couple of years of respite and uncertain future. So now Trump’s defense is Full Glass. Critics? Half-empty. Reality? Half-full. There you are.”

The immediate beneficiary of the use of US force in Iran will not be a more placid Middle East, but Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Air Force and army are still killing massive numbers of Palestinians in Gaza.

There remains no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. But as the world has known for decades, Israel maintains a significant nuclear arsenal that it officially claims does not exist.

This is a story not about the bigger picture, which is muddled, but about a successful US mission that was the subject of a lot of sloppy reporting because of a reviled president. It would have been a breakthrough had anyone in the mainstream press spoken or written about the double standard that benefits Israel and its nuclear umbrella, but in America that remains a taboo.

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Obama Dropped Over 26K Bombs Without Congressional Approval

Published on June 27, 2025

By

Armstrong Economics

By Martin Armstrong

@miss_stacey_

Biden, Clinton, Obama & Harris on Iran #biden #clinton #obama #harris #trump #iran #nuclear

♬ original sound – Stacey

Iran has been the target for decades. Biden, Harris, and Clinton—all the Democrats have said that they would attack Iran if given the opportunity. It appears that Donald Trump is attempting to mitigate a potentially irresolvable situation. As he bluntly told reporters: We basically — we have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f‑‑‑ they’re doing.”

A portion of the nation believes Trump acted like a dictator by attacking Iran without Congressional approval. I explained how former President Barack Obama decimated the War Powers Resolution Act when he decided Libya was overdue for a regime change. The War Powers Act, or War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the POTUS the ability to send American troops into battle if Congress receives a 48-hour notice. The stipulation here is that troops cannot remain in battle for over 60 days unless Congress authorizes a declaration of war. Congress could also remove US forces at any time by passing a resolution.

Libya is one of seven nations that Obama bombed without Congressional approval, yet no one remembers him as a wartime president, as the United States was not technically at war. Over 26,000 bombs were deployed across 7 nations under his command in 2016 alone. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan were attacked without a single vote. Donald Trump’s recent orders saw 36 bombs deployed in Iran.

The majority of those bombings happened in Syria, Libya, and Iraq under the premise of targeting extremist groups like ISIS. Drone strikes were carried out across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan as the Obama Administration accused those nations of hosting al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Coincidentally, USAID was also providing funding to those groups.

Trump Obama Neocon War Bombs

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was initially implemented to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama broadened his interpretation of the AUMF and incorporated newly formed militant groups that were allegedly expanding across the entire Middle East. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism believes there were up to 1,100 civilian casualties in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Thousands of civilians died in Syria and Iraq but the death toll was never calculated. At least 100 innocent people died in the 2016 attacks in Afghanistan alone.

The government will always augment the law for their personal agenda. The War Powers Resolution was ignored and the AUMF was altered. Congress was, however, successful in preventing Obama from putting US troops on the ground and fighting a full-scale war. In 2013, Obama sought congressional approval for military action in Syria but was denied. Obama again attempted to deploy troops in 2015 but was denied. Congress has to redraft the AUMF to specifically prevent Obama from deploying troops in the Middle East. “The authorization… does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” Obama attempted to redraft the AUMF on his own by insisting he would prohibit  “enduring offensive ground combat operations” or long-term deployment of troops. He was met with bipartisan disapproval as both sides believed he was attempting to drag the United States into another unnecessary war.

The United States should not be involved in any of these battles, but here we are. Those living in fear that Donald Trump is a dictator fail to recognize that past leadership had every intention of sending American men and women into battle unilaterally without a single vote cast.

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