Pretexts for War

There are some who will argue that the Japanese took the bait and attacked Pearl Harbor to drag the USA into the war with the Nazis (and save the British). Let’s go down the rabbit hole.

The USA effectively shut off the Japanese oil supply by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26, 1941. Because Japan relied on the U.S. for roughly 80% of its petroleum, this economic maneuver completely paralyzed its ability to purchase American oil. The escalation occurred in a series of steps driven by Japan’s aggressive military expansion in Asia. Let’s talk about that.

1. The Export Control Act (July 1940) – As Japan extended its war into China, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the newly passed Export Control Act to restrict the flow of military supplies. In July 1940, the U.S. cut off shipments of scrap iron, steel, and high-grade aviation fuel, but purposely allowed regular crude oil to keep flowing to avoid provoking an immediate war.

2. The Occupation of Indochina – Instead of backing down, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and invaded northern French Indochina to block supply routes into China. When Japanese troops moved into southern Indochina in July 1941—positioning themselves to strike British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies—the Roosevelt administration decided to take decisive action.

3. The Asset Freeze (July 26, 1941) – Rather than passing an explicit, legally complicated oil embargo, Roosevelt signed an executive order freezing all Japanese financial assets in the United States. This meant Japan no longer had access to the dollars required to buy American oil. Shortly after, the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) followed suit with their own financial restrictions. Within days, Japan lost 94% of its total oil imports. The Imperial Japanese Navy estimated it had only 18 to 24 months of fuel reserves remaining. Faced with the choice of either fully withdrawing from China to get the sanctions lifted or seizing the oil-rich regions of Southeast Asia by force, Japanese leadership chose war. To protect their flank while invading the Dutch East Indies, they launched the preemptive strike on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was a backwater at the time, but six Movietone camera crews were sent to Oahu weeks before the attack, during the upcoming holidays, with nothing to film until that Sunday. Coincidence? You be the judge.

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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that dragged the US into the Vietnam War in full force was based on a lie. That band-aid was ripped off some time ago. I have no love for the Communists (then or now), but the larger war was based on a deliberate fabrication. Declassified National Security Agency documents released in 2005 confirmed that the August 4 attack never actually happened and was a product of miscommunication rather than a staged conspiracy. While it wasn’t a fabricated false flag, the administration knowingly weaponized bad intelligence to justify a pre-desired military escalation.

See The Pentagon Papers. After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, President Richard Nixon’s administration created a secret White House Special Investigations Unit known as the “Plumbers” to plug security leaks. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were hired as the unit’s lead operatives. They later organized the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Before the Watergate burglary, Liddy, Hunt, and other Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, trying to find files to discredit Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

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The First Iraq War – Invasion of Kuwait – Ambassador April Glaspie (right) tacitly green-lighted Saddam Hussein’s invasion by assuring him that the US would not respond. On July 25, 1990, just eight days before Iraq’s invasion, Ambassador Glaspie was suddenly summoned to meet with Saddam Hussein. At the time, Iraqi troops were massing on the Kuwaiti border. T

The Iraqi Transcript: Following the invasion, Iraq released a transcript of the meeting. In it, Glaspie is quoted as telling Saddam, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” and noting that Secretary of State James Baker had emphasized that Kuwait was not directly associated with America. Critics argue this statement assured Saddam that the United States would not intervene militarily. 

The U.S. State Department Cables: Declassified U.S. diplomatic cables and WikiLeaks releases largely confirmed that Glaspie used this standard diplomatic phrasing, reflecting official State Department instructions that the U.S. did not take a legal stance on specific inter-Arab border demarcations. 

Glaspie (who had no business being in that position at that time and place) may have only been a weak DEI tool. Halliburton made a lot of money. We killed a lot of people.

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The War in Afghanistan occurred because we had to attack ‘somebody’ after the 911 attacks, perpetrated by Saudi nationals and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani militant. Was it a genuine war on terror, or did it begin small and morph into a massive grift against the American taxpayer wherein contractors and NGOs gorged themselves on the “Full Faith and Credit of the United States”? The U.S. government justified the extended, 20-year war in Afghanistan by continuously shifting and expanding its strategic objectives from immediate counter-terrorism self-defense to nation-building, regional stability, and human rights.

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The Second Iraq War – Weapons of Mass Destruction – was likewise based on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I was in a position to ‘know’ that they were only ‘hoping’ we would find the weapons to justify the war. We killed a lot of people. Bipartisan investigations and post-war reports (such as the Iraq Survey Group report) concluded that senior officials selectively used raw, unverified intelligence and relied heavily on unreliable informants and Iraqi exiles. President Bush later acknowledged that the pre-war intelligence turned out to be false and stated he was disappointed and responsible for the flawed outcome, though he maintained that removing Saddam Hussein was still the correct security decision.

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Iran War – Regarding ongoing military actions involving the U.S. and Israel against Iran, the jury is out. There is no question that Iran was developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems, which it openly vowed to use against Israel and US interests (in the Middle East and to directly attack the USA. Critics argue that Netanyahu’s long-standing push for confrontation with Tehran successfully nudged Washington into a wider war. Proponents and administration officials maintain that military action is driven by core American interests—such as protecting U.S. forces, regional allies, and addressing threats from Iranian ballistic missiles and nuclear infrastructure—rather than external pressure.

The Ayatollah is dead. Ayatollah Jr. is said to exist, but nobody has seen evidence of that. He is said to have lost a leg as a result of bombing and to have been injured. No matter what, the credibility of the “new king” is in doubt. The top 1000 people in Iran, including their nuclear scientists, are dead. Their clients in Gaza are dead. Hezbollah in Lebanon is seriously degraded.

I believe that the US needs to destroy much of what is modern Iran and encourage the Persians to remove the IRGC and establish a popular government that can be a good neighbor and can represent the welfare of the Persian people. I don’t think we’re finished with them – and we need to finish what we started.

Let’s devote a paragraph to the Houthis before we move on, though much can be written about Yemen.

The Houthis have an axe to grind with the Saudis, who are US allies of convenience. The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah or Ansarullah, are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Yemen in the 1990s. It is made up mostly of Zaydis, whose leadership is drawn largely from the al-Houthi family. Where the Iranian Shia are “Twelvers,” the Houthis are “Fivers.” Unlike Twelver Shiites—who believe in twelve specific, divinely appointed Imams with the twelfth in occultation—Zaydis parted ways over the identity of the Fifth Imam and do not share the doctrine of the Twelve Imams. Zaydism is doctrinally closer to Sunni Islam in certain ritual and legal aspects than Twelver Shiism is, though it maintains core Shia principles regarding the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants. While the Houthis receive military and political backing from Iran (predominantly Twelver), their alliance is primarily a geopolitical partnership within the Axis of Resistance rather than a shared theological identity. The conflict between the Saudis and the Houthis is complicated – as is everything in the Middle East.

Bullet Points:

** Cause of death.

** Ryan on the toxicity of SpecWar.

** How long have you been married?

In the Russian Arctic (and Ukraine)

A good piece on the Russian Arctic Initiative. Worth the view. Well produced and researched.

Russia’s specialized Arctic ground forces have been functionally decimated and hollowed out after being redeployed from their bases on the Kola Peninsula to fight in Ukraine. Two primary Arctic warfare units have borne the brunt of these catastrophic losses:

1. 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade (Arctic)

Background & Deployment: Stationed in Pechenga near the border with Norway and Finland, the 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade was considered one of Russia’s most elite, technologically advanced, and feared Arctic forces. It was among the first units deployed to Ukraine during the initial invasion, where it carried out a failed assault on Kharkiv.

Destruction: According to Western intelligence and internal documents reviewed by journalists, the unit was effectively wiped out during the first few months of combat. By late May 2022, fewer than 900 soldiers remained of its initial 1,400 to 1,600-man Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs). The brigade lost dozens of its sophisticated, Arctic-optimized T-80BVM tanks and specialized mobile rocket launchers. Military analysts noted that rebuilding this specialized unit to its former strength will take years, and it was later reorganized into a broader motor rifle division to compensate for its structural hollowing.

2. 80th Arctic Motor Rifle Brigade

Background & Deployment: Stationed in Alakurtti, Murmansk Oblast, the 80th Arctic Motor Rifle Brigade was custom-built in 2014 under the Northern Fleet Strategic Command to wage specialized warfare in extreme sub-zero conditions. Because of massive manpower shortages, they were misallocated to Ukraine and deployed far outside their element to the sweltering, wet marshes of the Dnieper-Bug estuary and islands in the Kherson region.

Destruction: The brigade was functionally destroyed by Ukrainian precision strikes and counter-operations. Independent military reports and analysts confirmed the brigade suffered up to 80% casualties. Along with severe personnel losses, the unit lost rare, highly advanced Arctic military hardware designed strictly for polar operations, including: Tor-M2DT surface-to-air missile defense systems, DT-30 Vityaz heavy tracked Arctic transport vehicles, and GAZ-3344-20 ‘Aleut’ Arctic all-terrain vehicles.

Strategic Impact

The destruction of these specialized troops has fundamentally altered the security landscape of the High North. Regional intelligence groups report that Russia’s Arctic ground posture has been reduced to a fifth of its pre-war size, shifting the operational advantage in the Arctic Circle entirely toward NATO and its northern allies.

Parting Shot

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