War Planning

by Mark Davis

Exclusive to STR

“Warfare is the art of deceit. Therefore, when able, seem to be unable; when ready, seem unready; when near-by, seem far away; and when far-away, seem near. If the enemy seeks some advantage, entice him with it . . . Attack where he is not prepared: go by way of places where it would never occur to him you would go.” (Sun Tzu – The Art of War - Chapter 1)

“In joining battle, seek the quick victory . . . in war, I have heard of foolish haste, but I have yet to see a case of cleverly dragging on the hostilities. There has never been a state that has benefited from an extended war.” (Sun Tzu – The Art of War - Chapter 2)

"A government should not mobilize its army out of anger . . . Act when it is beneficial; desist when it is not. Anger can revert to joy, wrath can revert to delight, but a nation destroyed cannot be restored to its existence, and the dead cannot be brought back to life." (Sun Tzu – The Art of War - Chapter Twelve)  

The American Elite, who plan the wars that we the people are forever being asked to support, appear to have only read up to Chapter One in the famous little book written over 2,300 years ago by the Chinese Master.  The power of public opinion which is needed to entice us to supply our labor and provide the lives of our children voluntarily is very fickle.  Therefore, influencing public opinion must be the first order of business when planning for war.  And make no mistake: war is a business.  So when no enemy ships are offshore, no enemy planes are flying overhead and no enemy troops are massing on the border, it is difficult to spread war fever.  Therefore, deceit must be used to start offensive wars.  

War planners must first deceive their own people into believing that they must be defended by establishing a pretext for the war they plan to wage.  There is always a base constituency of knee-jerk nationalists whose world view involves simply good guys (us) vs. bad guys (them).  The self-glorification used by state indoctrination centers (popularly referred to as history classes at the public schools) and the state-controlled media (a.k.a. free press) reinforce this worldview on a daily basis.  Facts, logic and reasoning exposing the lies of the state have no effect on those who blindly follow the state religion.  Fortunately, this vocal minority is not sufficient in number to carry out the elite war plans, and thus deceit is required to “persuade” greater numbers of people to “get in line.”  

To this day, there are many who believe that if only the American people had the “resolve” to continue killing Vietnamese, napalming villages and spreading Agent Orange in their fields for just a few more years, then “we” could have “prevailed.”  Therefore, war planners must control the media and “manage information” first and foremost if the United State is going to be able to “win” future wars.  The recent acceptance by many of domestic spying, domestic psyops and torturing foreigners because it is “needed” in the War on Terror displays a most disturbing trend in public opinion.  

War is serious business.  The business of war is very profitable for those who manufacture the weapons and wares of war-making.  We are currently being led down the path of Perpetual War based on stratagems masquerading as strategies.   This path leads to war, famine, pestilence and death for states and peoples including our own.  Deluding ourselves that we are singularly “special” in the history of men and states is part of the ruse.  Alas, if we continue down this path then we will surely come upon the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Perhaps that is the plan.  

The economic and geopolitical struggles fostered by the few who profit on the sorrows of the many were founded so long ago that they are accepted as a fact of life by a majority of people today.  Many who are not rabid nationalists also accept the validity of a state monopoly on the use of force.  The argument goes that the state exists to protect us from evil and therefore the state is determined to be de facto good itself.  Of course, once this rationale is generally accepted as truth, it doesn’t take long before statists begin to argue that in order to fight evil, the state must then use evil means to battle with evil.  Therefore a key stratagem is to establish the state as good-natured, but necessarily evil.   

The only way that I know of to battle evil is with good.  First, it is important to establish the mutual exclusivity of good and evil.  Evil does no good and good does no evil.  To voluntarily become evil in order to defeat evil is obviously self-defeating.  This is true whether using good means to accomplish evil ends or using evil means to attain good ends.  Second, use historical facts to expose the long train of abuses and lies used by the state to deceive our ancestors into supporting their schemes utilizing mass murder and the destruction of homes and cities.  The wisdoms that “War is the health of the state” and “The first casualty of war is the truth” go hand in hand.  

Reconciling natural survival instincts (fear) with a personal commitment to peaceful action is not always easy.  The Non-Aggression Principle requires a clear and present danger of a threat of force before responding with force.  Initiating force on the premise of paranoid fear is the ultimate cowardly act.  It takes real courage to stand your ground when given no other peaceful option, but even greater courage to sacrifice your own property and life for peaceful reconciliation.   

Even if you cannot love your enemy, you should be able to not hate him.  This requires a deep personal understanding of the benefits of peaceful cooperation.  That is, peace leads to liberty which then leads to prosperity.  As Yoda once said, “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.”  

Exposing the lies of the state throughout history takes little effort when addressing people who have read historical perspectives not from official sources and television propaganda films.  However, since a majority of the population uses the childish standard of “everybody knows that” as “common knowledge,” this task can be prudential in scope.  However, it is possible to give a brief rundown of why a country that hasn’t been invaded since the early 1800s can find so many reasons to invade so many places.  

President Polk sent General Zachary Taylor with a fairly small contingent (about 3,500 troops) to parade up, down and over a disputed border until the Mexicans took the bait and “fired the first shot.”  The press rallied the population with “Remember the Alamo .”  President Lincoln sought to reinforce the tax collection office at Fort Sumter with a slow boat while constantly pledging to forcefully collect tariffs from all ships using the Charleston Harbor for trade.  Although blockading a port is considered an act of war, guess who is remembered as having “fired the first shot”?  

The Cuban and Pilipino peoples had been fighting for independence from Spain off and on for 40 years, and when the Spanish were about defeated, the U.S. sent the battleship Maine into Havana Harbor .  This ship sank when a coal boiler located next to explosives blew up.  When William Randolph Hearst and other newspapers sent reporters to Havana to cover the Spanish attacks, they discovered that there was no action.  Frederick Remington wrote to Hearst that “There is no war . . . Request to be recalled.”  Hearst famously replied that: “Please remain.  You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”  It’s a good thing that we have always had a “free press” to look out for the interests of the common man so he could “Remember the Maine !”  

In The Great War (to End All Wars) Americans were vehemently against joining in the European fratricide, but the American Elite knew better.  Winston Churchill as the leader of the British Admiralty purposely sacrificed a British passenger ship with 1,198 passengers including 128 Americans and six million rounds of U.S. manufactured ammunition to fuel public opinion against Germany .  The Lusitania ’s escort was withdrawn and a course charted through a known U-boat zone a week after Churchill wrote a letter saying it is “most important to attract neutral ships to our shores, in hopes especially of embroiling the U.S. with Germany .”  The free press trumpeted “Remember the Lusitania !”  

Churchill then helped teach FDR how to start a war and get the other guy to appear to shoot first by taking a page out of Lincoln ’s blockade playbook.  Lt. Arthur McCollum, head of the Far East desk for U.S. Navy Intelligence, wrote a detailed eight-step plan a year before Pearl Harbor designed to provoke an attack.  This plan included an oil blockade and purposely unacceptable demands proposed to remove the blockade.  Secretary of War Stimson wrote notes in October and November 1941 saying how important it was to use diplomacy to maneuver Japan into “firing the first shot.”  The famous “Day of Infamy” speech was written the day before Pearl Harbor , according to FDR’s speechwriter’s diary.  Thus FDR not only knew when Pearl Harbor was coming, but he made sure it was coming.  The free-press trumpeted “Remember Pearl Harbor!”  The war planners successfully got their war fever stoked overnight among a formerly reluctant populace.  

When WW II was effectively over and we were getting ready to switch enemies from the ranks of our Allies ala Orwell, the decision was made to nuke the Japanese in order to send a message to the Russians.  The official lie here was it “saved lives” with the number originally estimated at about 46,000 which has now grown to mythical proportions at “millions”!  Murdering defenseless women and children, especially if they look a little different, has never been a problem for professional war planners before, during or after wars.  Of course, to war planners, “we” are always at war.   

The Korean War pulled a page out of Polk’s Mexican War playbook and John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson and other American Elite maneuvered the North Koreans into “firing the first shot.”  In planning for the Vietnam War, President Johnson knew that the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” was a staged event that petered out but couldn’t wait to go on national television to “inform the people” of the grave threat.  The free press of course got a spike in their ratings and newspaper sales.   

The U.S. Imperial Government supposedly had to rescue some medical students in Grenada and instigate the now popular “regime change” policy.  The U.S. invaded Panama for the tenth time in a hundred years to pull off another regime change, removing a former CIA asset set up in power by the CIA .  Another former CIA asset, Saddam Hussein, invaded a country with what he thought was tacit approval from his handlers in Washington , D.C. before they turned on him in the Gulf War I.

Finally we come to the mother of all pretexts: September 11.  Under President Reagan, there was a significant increase in defense spending until the Evil Empire somehow turned out to be a paper tiger and the Great American War Machine was left standing alone in the ring searching desperately for a foe to justify its continued existence.  The American Elite front group at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) then flat out called for significant increases in “defense” spending to basically dominate the world forever.  According to the PNAC plan, “The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor .”  Could it be that the “catastrophic and catalyzing event” of September 11 was known about, or dare say even planned, by those who would most benefit from it?  By those who publicly stated that it was what we “needed”?  Based on historical trends, it would be truly extraordinary if it wasn’t.

In case you think the above assertion is off base, you should not only research the obvious discrepancies in the official lies about 9-11, but consider Operation Northwood from 1962.  This proposed alternative plan to the Bay of Pigs fiasco had the written approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was nixed by McNamara, if not President Kennedy.  The plan would have had innocent people shot down on American streets, hijacked airplanes, and engineered a wave of violent terrorism including bombings in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere.  The plan proposed to sink (actual or staged) boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba on the high seas with official press releases blaming Castro for all of it.  This plan is evidence of the type of war planning that is ongoing.  If anything, these plans have become more sophisticated and bold.

The American people have mostly believed their elected government officials and the media who duped them into supporting nearly every war that the United State government has ever fought.  Once the nationalist knuckle-draggers get their emotional war slogan, like say “Remember 9-11,” the band wagon picks up steam and away we go.  It usually takes several generations before it is even considered rational to question official lies because of the emotional attachment people have to these lies that justify their backing a program of mass murder.  Even after people accept the facts exposing the lies, the wars of the past are somehow remembered as “good” simply because that is how we define the actions of “leaders” elected by “the people.”

The lies that initiated the swell of popular support for the invasion of Iraq are well documented, yet the war planning for the next battle in the Perpetual War upcoming in Iran is following the exact same path.  Hey, it worked, didn’t it?  My greatest fear is “another catalyzing event like Pearl Harbor ” or 9-11 being planned by our brilliant war planners who thought that Iraq would be a cakewalk.  People are starting to turn against occupying the Middle East into perpetuity so they need to be whipped up into another war fever before we invade Iran and perhaps even back the use of nuclear weapons in the process.

If we sit idly by as the war planners “manage information” with the goal of influencing a docile population to forego more treasure and sacrifice more children to their schemes of world domination then we will soon meet our fate.  Speak the truth, for it is the only thing that will set us free from the war planners.