the empire sets off to conquer another recalcitrant;

I am getting that Iraq deja vu feeling again, only this time with respect to Iran.
You’ll recall the build-up to the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq: WMDs. Mushroom clouds. Charts and graphs. Preventive war.
The anti-Iraq propaganda from U.S. officials was overwhelming, so much so that by the time U.S. officials initiated their war of aggression against Iraq, many Americans had completely accepted the notion that the United States was an innocent victim about to come under nuclear attack from Saddam Hussein and that the U.S. government needed to initiate a massive military attack and invasion of Iraq in order to defend the United States.
Of course, as everyone learned afterward, the propaganda was entirely bogus. There were no WMDs and even if there were, the last thing that Iraq was doing to do with them was start a war against the most powerful military in history. The entire propaganda build-up was designed to get the American people on board with a war of aggression and not ask too many questions.


https://www.fff.org/2018/07/23/iran-another-u-s-war-of-aggression/

 even though kunstler buys the 'official' 911 story he seemingly gets the rest of the current situation spot on;


This idiotic fantasy congealed in the political matrix last week as everyone across the spectrum of parties and factions scrambled for patriotism brownie points in what is shaping up as an epic game of Capture-the-Flag for the mid-term elections. Listen to me for a moment, as our arch-nemesis Vlad the Putin said to Fox News knucklehead Chris Wallace in an interview aired Sunday Night — when Wallace interrupted Mr. Putin for perhaps the fourth time, saying, “I don’t want to interrupt you, sir, but….”
“Listen to me. Be patient,” Mr. Putin repeated dolefully, like a second-grade teacher struggling with an ADD kid.
The interview was trying my Christian patience, too. And my own personal fantasy was that Mr. Putin would whip out 30 inches of rebar and whap Chris Wallace upside the head with it. But he only repeated, “Be patient….”
So, listen to me: Russia did not “attack” us. Trolling on Facebook is not an attack on the nation. The allegation that Russia “hacked” Hillary’s email and the DNC server is so far without evidence, and computer forensics strongly suggests that the information was transferred onto a flash-drive on its journey to Wikileaks. And, of course, the information itself, concerning embarrassing unethical hijinks among Democratic Party officials, was genuine and truthful — they “meddled” in their own primary elections.


http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/russia-attacked-us/

 of course it is all a lie, and a series of large ones, and follow the link below for more;

What if everything we’ve been told about 9/11 is a lie? What if it wasn’t 19 Muslim terrorist hijackers that flew those planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon? What if the Muslims had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks on 9/11? What if everything we’ve been told about the reasons we invaded two sovereign nations (Afghanistan and Iraq) is a lie? What if the 17-year-old, never-ending “War on Terror” in the Middle East is a lie? What if our young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have given their lives in America’s “War on Terror” died for a lie? What if G.W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have been nothing but controlled toadies for an international global conspiracy that hatched the attacks of 9/11 as nothing more than a means to institute a perpetual “War on Terror” for purposes that have nothing to do with America’s national security? Would the American people want to know? Would the truth even matter to them?

The sad reality is that the vast majority of Americans who would read the above paragraph would totally dismiss every question I raised as being unrealistic and impossible—or even nutty. Why is that? Have they studied and researched the questions? No. Have they given any serious thought to the questions? No. They have simply swallowed the government/mainstream media version of these events hook, line and sinker.

It is totally amazing to me that the same people who say they don’t believe the mainstream media (MSM) and government (Deep State) versions of current events—which is why they voted for and love Donald Trump—have absolutely no reservations about accepting the official story that the 9/11 attacks were the work of jihadist Muslims and that America’s “War on Terror” is completely legitimate. These “always Trumpers” are dead set in their minds that America is at war with Islam; that Trump’s bombings of Syria were because President Assad is an evil, maniacal monster who gassed his own people; and that Trump’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan is totally in the interests of America’s national security.

BUT WHAT IF ALL OF IT IS A BIG, FAT LIE?

https://chuckbaldwinlive.com/Articles/tabid/109/ID/3766/What-If-Everything-Weve-Been-Told-Is-A-Lie.aspx

ain't this a curious thing;

 the empire never fails to entertain;

Comedy?  Disaster?  Mental disorder?  Hearing loss?
Even days after President Donald Trump’s bizarre appearance in Helsinki alongside a cool, composed President Vladimir Putin, it’s hard to tell what happened.  But it certainly was entertaining.
In case anyone in the universe missed this event, let me recap.  Trump met in private with Putin, which drove bureaucrats on both sides crazy.  So far, Trump won’t reveal most of what was said between the two leaders.
But after the presidential meeting, Trump replied to reporter’s questions by saying he believed Russia had no role in attempts to bug the Democratic Party during the election.  Outrage erupted across the US.  ‘Trump trusts the Russians more than his own intelligence agencies’ went up the howl.  Trump is a traitor, charged certain of the wilder Democrats and neocon Republicans.  Few Americans wanted to hear the truth.
In fact, so intense was the outrage at home that Trump had to backtrack and claim he had misspoken.  Yes, he admitted, the Russians had meddled in the US election.  But then he seemed to back away again from this claim.
The whole thing was black comedy.  Maybe it was due to Trump’s poor hearing or to jet lag and travel fatigue.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/madness-in-helsinki/5648296

 the link below leads to the rest of what you can start with pasted herein. it shows more fully how the empire works its nefarious ways;

On the world’s Grand Chessboard, the US is fighting for control and influence. And there are countries where its ambassadors are perceived more as imperial governors than simple channels of communication.

At the height of the Maidan protests in Kiev in early 2014, a conversation was leaked between the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the then-Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Victoria Nuland. The conversation gained notoriety because Nuland said to Pyatt, “F**k the EU” and the recording was almost instantly available on Youtube.
More shocking than Nuland’s bad language, however, was what the conversation was about. The US government officials were discussing how to put their men into power in Ukraine – which of the three then opposition factions would dominate, who would take the lead (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) and who would be excluded (Vladimir Klitschko).  At the time of this conversation, early February 2014, their enemy Viktor Yanukovych was still president. The leaked recording proved that the US and its Kiev embassy were actively involved in a regime change operation. The composition of the post-Maidan government corresponded exactly with US plans.
What few people knew at the time was that such levels of control over the composition of foreign governments had become standard practice for US embassies all over the world. As I could see on my very numerous travels around the Balkans in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the US ambassador was treated by the political class and the media in those countries not as the officially accredited representative of a foreign government but instead as an imperial governor whose pronunciamentos were more important than those of the national government.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-diplomats-act-like-imperial-governors-riding-roughshod-over-sovereignty-of-national-governments/5648227

engdahl is a very good writer with lots of things to present;

The Cold War between the countries of NATO and those allied to the Soviet Union lasted nearly a half century. Finally, exhausted and economically in dire straits, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, raised a white flag of surrender in November 1989, as Moscow let the Berlin Wall fall. The wall had become the symbol of what Winston Churchill, in his famous 1946 Fulton, Missouri–speech, called the Iron Curtain dividing the West–the “Free World” as Washington propaganda was fond of ever repeating–from the communist world dominated by Moscow.
Outside a small circle of US CIA, State Department, and Pentagon senior officials, together with their allies in select Washington think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute or the New York Council on Foreign Relations, what few realized was that Washington was about to unleash the most concerted effort at regime change across the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the newly formed Russian Federation itself. The rallying call was the “introduction of US-style democracy, freedom, human rights, a neo-liberal free market.” It was to become a tyranny and in some cases, such as Ukraine, it would be far worse than anything experienced under the Soviet regime.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/manifest-destiny-and-orwells-doublethink-democracy-as-cognitive-dissonance/5648111