If Robert Parry were still alive he wouldn’t be surprised. He was always perceptive to the neocon’s proclivity to double down when one of their plans went off the rails.

What’s clear is that the US does not pursue pragmatic goals with its foreign/military policy. It pursues ideological or dogmatic goals, such as US supremacy, anti-communism, anti-terrorism, etc. As history shows in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the US response to military failure is “The Surge”, which eventually becomes self-defeating. In line with this state of affairs, the US initiates ideological rather than pragmatic intelligence dissemination, as we witnessed in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and presently with the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

I’m sure that there are intelligence analysts somewhere at the CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency who know the real score, but those people are excluded from media and decision making circles. The real problem is not the lack of intelligence. Nope. It is the fear of telling the politicians and neocon functionaries hard truths they do not want to hear.

And, here we are. With the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine going south the neocons who call the shots in the Biden Administration have some choices to make. For make no mistake, the proxy conflict is the neocon’s baby. They planned it as a way in which to weaken and ultimately dismember Russia.

Within the first few months of the war President Biden publicly voiced a desire to avoid direct escalation with Russia by sending in larger, more advanced weapons systems that would be capable of striking Russia. The fears are that such weapons would lead to a rapid spiraling toward a direct NATO-Russia shooting war. But that apparently is becoming less of a concern as week by week there’s been escalation, in what’s increasingly openly acknowledged as a de facto proxy war. What’s more is that reports of Ukrainian forces being encircled in the Donbas, and perhaps increasingly in key places south, appears to have US defense planners scrambling to avoid defeat but without weighing consequences of escalation.

As for escalation, that’s going to be an “all or nothing” prospect. Anything short of a massive NATO intervention was going to be useless from the start and at this point the Russians are a fearsome adversary so it wouldn’t go well to say the least. That would leave nukes as the only option and then we’d have to depend on any senior officers in the Pentagon who haven’t gone completely batshit insane like the neocons.

As far as the vaunted economic “sanctions from hell”, they didn’t have the hoped for effect, to say the least. Even as the US, NATO and the EU continue to insist–against all observable reality–that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own. “Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote.

The tragedy is that this whole conflict was easily avoidable but for the incompetence and/or maliciousness of the US foreign policy establishment.

But that’s how the neocons roll. They are smarter than everyone else to the point where they believe they can shape reality. Remember what Karl Rove said about being an empire that makes its own reality? They really believe that shit. As for the the managerial class, they have no option but to embrace every lie. To reject one is to be a heretic. The more obvious the lie, the more it serves as a loyalty test.

Winston Smith would so get it.

So there is only one choice. The neocons have to Surge. It’s time for one more bet. Put it all on black and spin wheel. They cannot afford to lose. They have bet the house on winning. Their identities are at stake.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look good.

The blame game is already beginning and it’s becoming harder by the day to avoid the idea that this seems to be a theme in US foreign policy–who lost China,Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Ukraine?

What’s that adage about being in a hole again?