US energy giant General Electric holds a vise grip over Iraqi energy matters. Since the US invasion, Iraq has spent $85 billion on its electricity sector but still faces 12-hour daily power outages. So why is GE still getting contacts it won’t fulfill?
US energy giant, General Electric’s (GE) website showcases a dazzling array of graphics, accompanied by statements from company officials, which paint a picture of a thriving partnership with Iraq.
“GE employees across our gas power, grid, and healthcare businesses are partnering with the people of Iraq to achieve continued progress in society and improve people’s lives every day. Since 2015 we have collaborated with private and public financial institutions to help secure over US $2.4 billion in financing for energy sector projects across the country.”
However, this glossy facade is a far cry from the reality of the multinational’s actions on the ground. In truth, GE’s energy policy in Iraq mirrors the broader approach that has been adopted by the White House towards Baghdad since the tumultuous illegal US-led invasion of 2003.
Origins of Iraq’s energy crisis
The energy conundrum has long been a source of concern for Iraqis. In the wake of the US occupation, corruption proliferated within state institutions, but it is the stranglehold exercised by GE – alongside Germany’s Siemens – over all matters pertaining to Iraqi energy that has exacerbated the situation.
This intricate web of control first emerged in 2003 when Washington assumed complete authority over Iraq. At that juncture, GE assumed responsibility for maintaining Iraq’s electricity infrastructure following the decision to privatize this once-government-subsidized sector.
An energy expert who represented the Iraqi government during those negotiations reveals to The Cradle that the initial maintenance contract inked between Baghdad and GE carried a staggering price tag of $5 billion.
More astonishing is that GE had no physical presence in Baghdad at the time: “The Americans were negotiating and signing contracts in Baghdad and then returning to Amman,” says the expert.
The genesis of Iraq’s electricity crisis can be traced back to the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The country’s strategic power plants were targeted for destruction by the US-led international coalition forces, and the US sanctions that followed thwarted any attempts at rehabilitation. This left Iraq’s infrastructure and industries in ruin and subjected its citizens to unbearable conditions during sweltering summers.
Between 2003 and 2021, Iraq poured a bewildering $85 billion into its struggling electricity sector. A former advisor to Iraq’s prime minister reveals to The Cradle that nearly half of this colossal sum was channeled into constructing gas-powered stations to generate electricity.
The remaining funds were allocated to purchasing gas, fuel, and electricity from neighboring countries, all while shouldering the financial burden of paying salaries to a workforce of 300,000 employees in the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity.
Prolonged power outages
A government advisor specializing in energy affairs estimates that some $35 billion has been squandered on futile investments within the country’s electricity sector.
That sum, he contends, could have significantly advanced Iraq’s electricity production to a formidable 40 gigawatts, which would sufficiently meet the entire nation’s surging energy demands. Instead, in stark contrast with that potential, Iraq’s current electricity production now languishes at a mere 23 gigawatts, barely satisfying half of the country’s needs.
This deficiency has led to agonizingly prolonged power outages, lasting up to a grueling 12 hours each day, especially during the scorching summer months.
Iran has alleviated a big part of that burden by exporting 7.3 gigawatts of electricity to Iraq monthly, while GE, Siemens, and their affiliated companies were contracted to provide an additional 27.7 gigawatts toward reaching the coveted 35-gigawatt goal.
That target has never been reached. Instead, Baghdad has had to continue relying on Iranian supply, and currently covers those costs through an account held with the Iraqi TBI Bank on behalf of the Iranian government. However, relentless US pressure on Iraq during sanction-exemption negotiations has placed Iraqi officials in a difficult position, forcing them to reduce payments to Tehran.
The GE vs. Siemens showdown
In the meantime, despite their non-performance in Iraq’s electricity sector, General Electric and Siemens continue to face off in fierce battles for yet more contracts. A high-ranking Iraqi official tells The Cradle that this fight goes right to the top:
“This issue was the first point raised by western officials in their meetings and communications with their Iraqi counterparts. All American presidents raise the issue of General Electric contracts. Siemens contracts were the focus of any contact that [former] German Chancellor Angela Merkel had with any Iraqi official. We were feeling tremendous pressure, and the prime Minister was confused about how to deal with this file.”
Back in 2008, Siemens had inked a substantial $1.9 billion contract with the Iraqi government to equip five new power stations with gas turbines capable of generating 3.19 gigawatts of electricity. This contract, alongside a $2.8 billion contract with GE the same year, was supposed to help solve the electricity crisis in Iraq.
But for well over a decade, neither conglomerate has delivered that full potential. Citing sanctions on Iran, Siemens delayed its supply of turbines to Iranian, Egyptian, and South Korean companies that Baghdad had commissioned to build power stations in Basra, Kirkuk, and eastern Baghdad.
For its part, GE simply ignored its contract specifications to provide heavy water and multi-fuel turbines, sending Iraq gas-only turbines instead, and then to add insult to injury, nabbed themselves extended maintenance contracts.
The American energy giant has also long-exploited Washington’s overwhelming political and military leverage over Iraq to stymie Siemens’ ambitions. In 2008, GE secured a $2.8 billion contract to supply Iraq with 56 gas turbines capable of generating 7 gigawatts, but it took four long years to deliver the goods to Iraq.
A $4.1 billion contract to install the turbines at various Iraqi stations had to be implemented by Turkish companies instead, adding to the litany of GE missteps.
The story doesn’t end there: Not only were GE’s turbines unable to operate on Iraqi gas, which then required chemical treatment to adapt to them, but it turns out the turbines were also incompatible with Iraq’s high temperatures, causing a spike in malfunctions. An example of the company’s shoddy performance can be seen at Al-Muthanna plant in southern Iraq, where six out of ten GE turbines are currently out of service.
Despite these avoidable failures, GE then obtained a $700 million contract to operate a power plant in the southern governorate of Dhi Qar. True to form, six years later, it still hadn’t done the required work.
The irrationality continues. Early this year, the Iraqi government signed yet another memorandum of understanding with Siemensto produce 6 gigawatts of electricity from associated petroleum gas (APG) in order to maintain turbines, establish transmission stations, and train Iraqi teams.
Foreign exploitation, domestic corruption
The situation is bleak: after two decades, numerous contracts, and tens of billions of dollars spent, Iraq still falls short of acquiring more than a third of its electric power requirements.
One of the primary reasons for this abject failure lies in the manipulation of contracts’ post-approval by Iraq’s Council of Ministers. This is when powerful corporations move in to rejig clauses and appendices that grant them additional extensions without having to face penalty clauses.
As one senior Iraqi official tells The Cradle, “the problem is political” and its solution is elusive. “More than $100 billion has been spent to solve Iraq’s electricity crisis, and the spending continues to no avail,” in part because of the lack of political resolve from politicians to tackle hard problems face on:
“The crisis will not be resolved if the tariff price is not adjusted. One kilowatt costs the state treasury 10 cents and is sold for 1 cent at best, while politicians promise their voters a further reduction in the price of electric energy without any scientific basis.”
Too many Iraqi politicians fear confrontation with an unforgiving Washington that knows Iraq’s most vulnerable pressure points.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Iraq’s energy crisis has been caused by domestic corruption and ineptitude – and western corporations who have exploited those weaknesses – the cognitive dissonance continues to snowball. Some politicians and commentators have even gone so far as to blame Iraq’s energy crisis on its reliance on imported Iranian gas, holding Tehran and its allies in Baghdad responsible for the sector’s collapse.
While western companies have undoubtedly and significantly played a role in Iraq’s energy crisis, Iraqis must absolutely assume the responsibility for not having negotiated contracts with companies like GE and Siemens to demand tangible, timely, and measurable results.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Throughout August and September, anti-government protests have rocked Syrian cities. While the crowds are typically small, numbering only a few hundred, they show little sign of abating. Demonstrators are motivated by increasingly unlivable economic conditions spurred by crippling U.S.-led international sanctions against Damascus. These have produced hyperinflation, mass food insecurity, and many daily hardships for the population. They also prevent vital humanitarian aid from entering the country.
The media has given the unrest blanket coverage. No reference to Washington’s central role in imposing the misery under which average Syrians suffer today, let alone that several key figures in the protests are former opposition fighters who laid down their arms under a government-approved reconciliation deal in 2018, can be found in the reporting.
By contrast, mainstream news outlets appear positively exuberant at the prospect of a new Syrian ‘revolution’ erupting, and many comparisons have been drawn to the protests in March 2011 that turned into an all-out war by the year’s end. In the process, the long-standing, indomitably established narrative that those demonstrations were initially peaceful and only turned violent after many months in response to brutal repression by authorities has been endlessly reiterated.
This is despite the reality of what happened during that fateful time being spelled out in the Syrian government’s own internal documents. Namely, records of the Central Crisis Management Cell, created in March 2011 by Damascus to manage responses to the rioting that began a few weeks earlier.
While mainstream outlets have previously reported on this trove, dubbing them “The Assad Files,” they have universally misrepresented, distorted or simply falsified the contents to wrongfully convict Syrian officials of horrific crimes. In some instances, quite literally. The documents show that Assad and his ministers struggled valiantly to prevent the upheaval from escalating into violence on either side, protect demonstrators, and keep the situation under control.
Meanwhile, sinister, unseen forces systematically murdered security service officials, pro-government figures, and protesters to foment catastrophe in a manner similar to many CIA regime change operations old and new. This shocking story has never before been told. Now, with dark insurrectionary clouds again pullulating over Damascus, it must be.
THIS OPPOSITION IS ARMED’
Over the first months of 2011, the Arab Spring spread revolutionary fervor rapidly throughout North Africa and West Asia. Mass protests dislodged long-reigning dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Libya was plunged into civil war, and even the hyper-repressive Gulf monarchies appeared threatened. There was one exception, however.
For the most part, the streets of Syria remained stubbornly calm.
This was despite relentless calls for upheaval by local opposition elements. Repeated demands for a “day of rage” against the government of Bashar al-Assad were widely publicized in the Western media but locally unheeded. As “Al Jazeera” explained in February of that year, Syrians had no appetite for regime change. For one, the country’s ethnically and religiously diverse population cherished their state’s secularism and feared unrest would create potentially violent tensions between them all.
Inconveniently, too, Assad was extremely popular, particularly with younger Syrians. He was widely perceived as a reformer who encouraged and protected diversity and inclusion and oversaw a system that, while far from perfect, delivered extremely high standards of education, healthcare, and much else. Unlike many other leaders in the region, his refusal to accommodate Israel was also greatly respected.
Peace in Damascus finally shattered in mid-March when massive demonstrations broke out in several major cities following weeks of sporadic, small-scale bursts of public disobedience across the country. Reports of thousands arrested and an uncertain number of protesters killed spread widely. This was the spark that ignited the West’s proxy war in Syria. Ominously, mere days earlier, a truck carrying vast quantities of grenades and guns was intercepted at Syria’s border with Iraq.
Anti-government protesters flash victory signs in the southern city of Daraa, Syria, March 23, 2011. Hussein Malla | AP
Pater Frans was a Jesuit priest from the Netherlands who, in 1980, established a community center and farm near Homs where he preached harmony between faiths and cared for people with disabilities. When the crisis erupted, he began publishing regular observations of events that were deeply critical of both the government and the opposition.
Along the way, Frans repeatedly noted that “from the start,” he witnessed armed demonstrators fire on police. “Very often,” he once recorded, “the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.” In September 2011, he wrote:
From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition…The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.”
It is unknown whether such problematic insights motivated Frans’ murder by armed militants in April 2014, not long after he refused an offer of UN evacuation.
‘NO DROP OF BLOOD’
If peaceful protesters were killed in the initial stages of the failed “revolution,” the question of who was responsible remains unanswered. The Central Crisis Management Cell records indicate that in the days leading up to the mid-March protests, government officials issued explicit instructions to security forces that citizens “should not be provoked”:
In order to avoid the consequences of continued incitement…and foil the attempts of inciters to exploit any pretext, civil police and security agents are requested not to provoke citizens.”
Similarly, on April 18, the Cell ordered the military to only “counter with weapons those who carry weapons against the state, while ensuring that civilians are not harmed.” Four days later, though, “at least” 72 protesters were allegedly shot dead by authorities in Daraa and Douma, the highest reported daily death toll since the demonstrations began. Condemnation from rights groups and Western leaders was fiery.
Three months later, a number of Syrian Arab Army officers defected and formed the Free Syrian Army. Claiming to have become disaffected, they threw their weight behind the opposition due to the April 18 slaughter and alleged the shooting was expressly ordered by their superiors, which they refused to fulfill. However, if orders to execute protesters were given, they evidently weren’t approved by Assad or his ministers.
Contemporary Cell records show that the highest echelons of the Syrian government were extremely unhappy about the killings in Daraa and Douma, with one official cautioning this “difficult day” had “created a new situation…pushing us into circumstances we are better off without.” They went on to lament, “If the directives previously issued had been adhered to, we would have prevented bloodshed, and matters would not have come to this culmination.”
An obvious suspicion is that the use of lethal force was directed by Army commanders planning to defect who wanted to concoct a valiant pretext while creating significant problems for the government. This interpretation is amply reinforced by the defectors who claimed that soldiers who refused the order to kill civilians were themselves executed.
An FSA fighter holds a bullet riddled poster of President Assad in Aleppo, Syria, March 30, 2013. Sebastiano Tomada | SIPA
That narrative was eagerly seized upon by Western media, rights groups, and the Syrian opposition as proof of Assad’s maniacal bloodlust. Yet, even the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory of Human Rights has dismissed it as entirely false “propaganda” intended to create divisions within government forces and encourage further defections. More sinisterly, it also provided a convenient explanation for why Syrian security operatives were dying in large numbers after the “peaceful” protests began.
From late March onwards, targeted killings of security operatives and soldiers by unknown assailants became routine before the military was formally deployed in Syria. By early May, the Cell requested daily updates on casualties among “our own forces.” Publicly, though, the government initially remained silent on the slaughter. The Cell records suggest officials were afraid of showing weakness, inflaming tensions, and encouraging further violence.
It was not until June, with the slaughter of at least 120 security forces by armed militants who’d taken over the town of Jisr al-Shughour, that Damascus – and the Western media – acknowledged the killing spree. Cell records show that by this time, government supporters were being abducted, tortured, and murdered by opposition actors. This led to the formal deployment of the military to handle the crisis, which subsequently became even more deadly. Despite the carnage, the Cell’s instructions remained unambiguous.
“Ensure that no drop of blood is shed when confronting and dispersing peaceful demonstrations,” an August memo states. The following month, an order to “prohibit harming any detainee” was issued. “If there is evidence” that any security official “fell short in carrying out any mission,” the Cell dictated, “any officer, head of branch or field commander” implicated would have to explain themselves to the government “to hold them accountable.”
‘TOPPLING DOWN THE REGIME’
Some of the most compelling passages in the Cell documents refer to unidentified snipers lurking on rooftops and buildings adjacent to protests from the upheaval’s beginning, firing on crowds below. One memo records that in late April 2011, a sniper near an Aleppo mosque “shot demonstrators, killing one and injuring 43,” and “the situation of some injured is still delicate.”
As such, “focusing on arresting inciters, especially those shooting at demonstrators,” was considered a core priority for the Assad government for much of that year. Around this time, the Cell also hit upon the idea of capturing “a sniper, inciter or infiltrator” and presenting them publicly in a “convincing” manner. One official suggested that “surrounding and catching a sniper alive or injured and exposing him in the media is not impossible” and would “restore public trust in security agencies and the police.”
But this never came to pass. Damascus also neglected to publicly present a bombshell document circulated among “the so-called Syrian opposition in Lebanon” that its intelligence services intercepted in May 2011. The remarkable file, reproduced in full in the Cell records, lays bare the opposition’s insurrectionary plans, providing a clear blueprint for precisely what had happened since March, and what was to come.
A Syrian anti-government fighter aims a sniper rifle inside a classroom at a school in Homs, Syria, Feb. 22, 2012. Photo | AP
The opposition proposed convening mass demonstrations so that security forces “will lose control of all regions,” be “taken unaware,” and become “exhausted and distracted.” This, along with “honest officers and soldiers” joining “the ranks of the revolution,” would make “toppling down the regime” all the more straightforward, particularly as any crackdown on these protests would encourage a Western “military strike,” ala Libya. They foresaw mainstream news outlets playing a significant role in making this happen:
Everyone should be confident that with the continuation of demonstrations today, media channels will have no choice but to cover the events…Al Jazeera will be late due to considerations of mutual interests. But we have Al Arabiya and Western media channels who will come forward, and we will all see the change of tone in covering the events and demonstrations will be aired on all channels and they will have wide coverage.”
The document is the most palpable evidence to date that the entire Syrian “revolution” unfolded according to a pre-prepared, well-honed script. Whether this was drawn up in direct collusion with Western powers remains to be proven. Still, the presence of snipers picking off protesters is a strong indication among many that this was the case.
Unidentified snipers are a frequent fixture of U.S.-orchestrated ‘color revolutions’ and CIA coups, such as the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2002 and the 2014 Ukrainian ‘revolution.’ In both cases, the shooting of unarmed protesters by snipers was pivotal in unseating the targeted government. In Kiev, demonstrations that began months earlier started running out of steam when 70 protesters were abruptly slain by sniper fire.
This turned the entire crowd violent while triggering an avalanche of international condemnation, which made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. In the years since, three Georgian mercenaries have claimed they were expressly ordered by nationalist opposition actors and a U.S. military veteran embedded with them to carry out a massacre “to sow some chaos.” Officially, the crime remains unsolved today.
‘BURN ENORMOUS SUMS’
The Central Crisis Management Cell documents would have forever remained a Syrian government secret were it not for the enterprising work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). This shadowy organization was founded in May 2011 by Western military and intelligence veterans to prosecute Syrian officials for war crimes. Its first act was to train Syrian investigators “in basic international criminal and humanitarian law” in service of a “domestic justice process in a future transitional Syria.”
For years, CIJA enjoyed glowing profiles in major news outlets and connected journalists and rights groups with material that formed the basis of several hard-hitting investigations exposing purported Syrian government atrocities. At no point was any concern raised about the Commission’s collaboration with dangerous armed groups to smuggle sensitive documentation out of abandoned government buildings in opposition-occupied areas of the country.
CIJA chief Bill Wiley claimed in 2014 that his organization worked with every Syrian opposition group “up to but excluding Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.” However, an investigation by “The Grayzone” indicates that the Commission’s staff in Syria were frequently in extremely close quarters with both groups and, in fact, paid them handsomely for their assistance in securing documentation. This included material seized in the city of Raqqa after its January 2014 capture by ISIS, when the terrorist group was massacring Alawites and Christians.
“We burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff,” Wiley told The “New Yorker” in 2016. Accordingly, CIJA received tens of millions of dollars for these efforts from a number of Western governments, including states at the forefront of the Syrian proxy war.
The Commission’s work produced no prosecutions for many years. This changed in late 2019 when Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib, two former Damacus’ General Intelligence Directorate members, were indicted in Germany for crimes against humanity.
The opposition proposed convening mass demonstrations so that security forces “will lose control of all regions,” be “taken unaware,” and become “exhausted and distracted.” This, along with “honest officers and soldiers” joining “the ranks of the revolution,” would make “toppling down the regime” all the more straightforward, particularly as any crackdown on these protests would encourage a Western “military strike,” ala Libya. They foresaw mainstream news outlets playing a significant role in making this happen:
Everyone should be confident that with the continuation of demonstrations today, media channels will have no choice but to cover the events…Al Jazeera will be late due to considerations of mutual interests. But we have Al Arabiya and Western media channels who will come forward, and we will all see the change of tone in covering the events and demonstrations will be aired on all channels and they will have wide coverage.”
The document is the most palpable evidence to date that the entire Syrian “revolution” unfolded according to a pre-prepared, well-honed script. Whether this was drawn up in direct collusion with Western powers remains to be proven. Still, the presence of snipers picking off protesters is a strong indication among many that this was the case.
Unidentified snipers are a frequent fixture of U.S.-orchestrated ‘color revolutions’ and CIA coups, such as the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in 2002 and the 2014 Ukrainian ‘revolution.’ In both cases, the shooting of unarmed protesters by snipers was pivotal in unseating the targeted government. In Kiev, demonstrations that began months earlier started running out of steam when 70 protesters were abruptly slain by sniper fire.
This turned the entire crowd violent while triggering an avalanche of international condemnation, which made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. In the years since, three Georgian mercenaries have claimed they were expressly ordered by nationalist opposition actors and a U.S. military veteran embedded with them to carry out a massacre “to sow some chaos.” Officially, the crime remains unsolved today.
‘BURN ENORMOUS SUMS’
The Central Crisis Management Cell documents would have forever remained a Syrian government secret were it not for the enterprising work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). This shadowy organization was founded in May 2011 by Western military and intelligence veterans to prosecute Syrian officials for war crimes. Its first act was to train Syrian investigators “in basic international criminal and humanitarian law” in service of a “domestic justice process in a future transitional Syria.”
For years, CIJA enjoyed glowing profiles in major news outlets and connected journalists and rights groups with material that formed the basis of several hard-hitting investigations exposing purported Syrian government atrocities. At no point was any concern raised about the Commission’s collaboration with dangerous armed groups to smuggle sensitive documentation out of abandoned government buildings in opposition-occupied areas of the country.
CIJA chief Bill Wiley claimed in 2014 that his organization worked with every Syrian opposition group “up to but excluding Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.” However, an investigation by “The Grayzone” indicates that the Commission’s staff in Syria were frequently in extremely close quarters with both groups and, in fact, paid them handsomely for their assistance in securing documentation. This included material seized in the city of Raqqa after its January 2014 capture by ISIS, when the terrorist group was massacring Alawites and Christians.
“We burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff,” Wiley told The “New Yorker” in 2016. Accordingly, CIJA received tens of millions of dollars for these efforts from a number of Western governments, including states at the forefront of the Syrian proxy war.
The Commission’s work produced no prosecutions for many years. This changed in late 2019 when Anwar Raslan and Eyad al-Gharib, two former Damacus’ General Intelligence Directorate members, were indicted in Germany for crimes against humanity.
Anwar Raslan, center, stands in the courtroom at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, Jan. 13, 2022. Thomas Frey | AP
Raslan headed the Directorate’s domestic security unit, while al-Gharib was one of his departmental lackeys. The pair defected in December 2012, with Raslan and his family fleeing to Jordan, where he would play “an active and visible role in the Syrian opposition.” He was part of the opposition delegation to the Geneva II conference on Syria in January 2014. In July of that year, he was granted asylum in Germany.
Following his escape, Raslan told numerous tales of abuse and atrocities perpetrated by his unit and the Syrian government during his 20 years of state service. He claimed his defection was spurred after learning of an apparent opposition attack in Damascus that he was investigating was, in fact, staged by security forces. Significant doubts about his accounts and whether his defection was principled or just cynical opportunism have been raised.
In a bitter irony, Raslan’s loudmouth tendencies were his undoing. His assorted claims provided grounds for his arrest by German authorities and were used against him in his prosecution, which heavily relied on documents seized by CIJA, including the Cell records. An expert statement submitted to the court by Commission operative Ewan Brown, a British Army veteran, falsely frames these as indicative that Assad’s government sanctioned and encouraged brutality and repression against peaceful protesters.
Al-Gharib was found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and received four-and-a-half years in prison in February 2021. A year later, Raslan was given life imprisonment for crimes including mass torture, rape, and murder. The pair were convicted not for personally perpetrating these horrors but for serving in the General Intelligence Directorate when they were allegedly committed. Details of these purported crimes were, in some cases, provided to the court by highly unreliable witnesses.
The conclusion that Al-Gharib and Raslan were prosecuted because they were within easy reach, and CIJA and its Western backers needed something to show for all their efforts, is ineluctable. The Commission had good reason to be nervous about failing to fulfill its founding objective. In March 2020, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) formally accused the organization of “submission of false documents, irregular invoicing, and profiteering” in connection with an EU “Rule of Law” project it ran in Syria.
CIJA’s crusade to punish Syrian officials could only succeed in the event of regime change. Its launch in May 2011 shows that foreign actors were laying the foundations for that eventuality from the earliest days of the ‘peaceful revolution.’ The recent protests may indicate that Western powers haven’t given up on the objective yet.
Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.
“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.
There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020, 6,027 of which were civilian casualties.
In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”
“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”
Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”
Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.
People search for flood victims in Derna, Libya, Sept. 15, 2023. Ricardo Garcia Vilanova | AP
Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists. This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights.
The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.
Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.
Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”
Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.
These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights.
The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.
The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.
Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.”
“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.” “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.”
The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.
In the first Republican candidate presidential debate last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis touted his time in Iraq. “I learned in the military, I was assigned with U.S. Navy SEALs in Iraq, that you focus on the mission above all else, you can’t get distracted,” he declared. Later in the debate he stated, “I’m somebody that volunteered to serve, inspired by Sept. 11 and I deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs in places like Fallujah, Ramadi…”
Some viewers had the impression that DeSantis was a Seal, but he was actually a Harvard Law School graduate who was a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) alongside the Seals. DeSantis was deployed in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, during President George W. Bush’s “surge” (intended to postpone the obvious failure of the war until after Bush’s second term ended). During DeSantis’ first campaign to become Florida’s governor in 2018, his first words in his first televised advertisement were, “Ron DeSantis, Iraq War veteran.”
The American troops that Bush sent to Iraq were injected into a conflict where it was often nearly impossible to distinguish friend from foe — what author Robert Jay Lifton labeled “atrocity-producing situations.” DeSantis is confident that few Americans recall the carnage that preceded his arrival in Iraq.
Fallujah was hammered by two brutal U.S. assaults in 2004. The first attack was launched in April 2004 in retaliation for the killings of four contractors for Blackwater, a company that became renowned for killing innocent Iraqis. After their corpses were dragged through the street, the Bush administration demanded vengeance.
President Bush reportedly gave the order: “I want heads to roll.” He raved at Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez during a video conference: “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!… Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!”
U.S. forces quickly placed the entire city under siege. The British Guardian reported: “The U.S. soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the U.S. military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.”
The city was blasted by artillery barrages, F–16 jets, and AC–130 Spectre planes, which pumped 4,000 rounds a minute into selected targets. Adam Kokesh, who fought in Fallujah as a Marine Corps sergeant, later commented: “During the siege of Fallujah, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.”
The Bush administration decided to crush the city — but not until after Bush was safely reelected. In the weeks after Election Day, U.S. Army soldiers and Marines pulverized Fallujah, Iraq, killing an unknown number of civilians, leaving the city a burnt-out ruin. Marine Col. Gary Brandl explained the U.S. holy mission: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.” Brandl sounded whacked but at least he wasn’t a Muslim fanatic.
Up to 50,000 civilians remained in Falluja at the time of the second U.S. assault. At a November 8, 2004, press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Myers said three days later that Fallujah “looks like a ghost town [because] the Iraqi government gave instructions to the citizens of Fallujah to stay indoors.”
Supposedly, Iraqi civilians would be safe even if when American troops went house to house “clearing” insurgents out. However, three years later, during the trials for the killings elsewhere in Iraq, Marines continually invoked the Fallujah Rules of Engagement to justify their actions. Marine Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was indicted for murdering three civilians in Haditha (the charges were later dropped), explained in a 2007 interview with PBS:
For the push of Fallujah, there [were no civilians]. We were told before we went in that if it moved, it dies…. About a month before we went into the city of Fallujah, we sent out flyers…. We let the population know that we were coming in on this date, and if you were left in the city, you were going to die.
The interviewer asked: “Was the procedure for clearing a house in Fallujah different from other house clearing in Iraq?”
Sharratt replied: “Yes. The difference between clearing houses in Fallujah was that the entire city was deemed hostile. So every house we went into, we prepped with frags and we went in shooting.” Thus, the Marines were preemptively justified in killing everyone inside — no questions asked. Former congressman Duncan Hunter admitted in 2019, “I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians … probably killed women and children.”
The U.S. attack left much of Fallujah looking like a lunar landscape, with near-total destruction as far as the eye could see. Yet, regardless of how many rows of houses the United States flattened in the city, accusations that the United States killed noncombatants were false by definition. Because the U.S. government refused to count civilian casualties, they did not exist. And anyone who claimed to count them was slandering the United States and aiding the terrorists.
The carnage the U.S. forces inflicting on Fallujah was a well-disguised triumph of hope and freedom. Bush announced on December 1: “In Fallujah and elsewhere, our coalition and Iraqi forces are on the offensive, and we are delivering a message: Freedom, not oppression, is the future of Iraq…. A long night of terror and tyranny in that region is ending, and a new day of freedom and hope and self-government is on the way.” But it is tricky for corpses to be hopeful.
During DeSantis’ first campaign to become Florida’s governor in 2018, his first words in his first televised advertisement were, “Ron DeSantis, Iraq War veteran.” The St. Augustine Record noted in 2018, “DeSantis was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets in that wide swath of the Western Euphrates River Valley were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated.”
Most of the details of DeSantis’ time in Iraq have not been disclosed. But he was deployed into an area where stunning detainee abuses by the U.S. Army had previously been reported. In September 2005, Americans learned that three 82nd Airborne Division soldiers complained about army cooks and other off-duty troops, for amusement and sport, routinely physically beating Iraqi detainees being held near Fallujah. One sergeant explained: “We would give [detainees] blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day.” The sergeant said that there were no problems as long as no detainees “came up dead…. We kept it to broken arms and legs.” Captain Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne repeatedly sought to get guidance from superiors on the standards for lawful and humane treatment of detainees. He, like other officers, never received clear guidelines. Fishback publicly complained: “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.”
Prior to his time in Iraq, DeSantis volunteered to be a legal advisor at Guantanamo. In a 2018 interview for CBS Miami, he stated that one of his tasks was to clarify “the rules for force feeding detainees.” He also stated, “What I learned from [Gitmo] and I took to Iraq — they are using things like [false charges of] detainee abuse offensively against us – it was a tactic, technique, and procedure.” A Vice documentary that covered DeSantis’ role at Gitmo was scheduled for broadcast on Showtime but the May 28 air date was canceled on the day after DeSantis announced his presidential campaign.
Did Harvard Law School have a class on legal workarounds for torture? Or were those lessons included in the classes on “Weaseling Under the Rule of Law”?
The Pentagon’s records on DeSantis’ years as a JAG could help voters judge his candidacy for the presidency. But Americans would be damn fools to expect transparency from the feds or from most political candidates.
When I was a young guy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I laughed when the Iranian revolutionaries condemned the United States as “The Great Satan.” America was the land of freedom, democracy, and Ronald Reagan, right? What the heck were those insane Islamists shouting about?
Well, hell, I’m not laughing anymore. Over the last few years, I’ve finally come to understand that those Iranians were right. I’ve never been religious, but I can see the clear evidence that Satan—that is, a very powerful force of evil—is ruling the United States of America at all levels today, including the federal and state governments, big corporations and all other large established institutions, and much of the American population itself. The United States has probably been in this crappy condition for many decades, but it didn’t sink in deep into my consciousness until the past few years.
Look around if you have eyes, and put two and two together if you can. America is in an obvious state of advanced social, cultural, moral, ethical, political, and economic decline and decay. Yet, Americans, as a whole, apparently are blind and incapable of doing the simple math. They continue to view themselves as vastly superior to the rest of the world, clinging to the delusion that they—sitting on their rickety rusty old perch that is about to fall out under their sick swollen asses— have the right to tell the entire world how to live.
The sophisticated, insidious, omnipresent propaganda of the giant elitist institutions of American government, corporations, and media have thoroughly brainwashed Americans, along with much of the rest of the world, into this delusional mindset. Most people do not realize that they have been transformed into the mindless zombie slaves of these institutions. And, in their zombified conditions, they don’t even notice the stinking cesspool of a culture with which they’ve allowed these institutions to surround themselves.
In other words, as my mom used to say about ignorant people, they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Excuse my limited biblical knowledge, but doesn’t the Bible or some other religious text say something about Satan deceiving a gullible world with a smiling face and charming demeanor? That is the United States these days—deceiving huge segments of the domestic and global population into believing that it is a force for good, while it is actually spreading its evil, chaos, corruption, and cultural decadence to everything that its influence touches. Hail Great Satan!
Government-corporate-media Conglomerate
Do not be deceived by the smiling, charming propagandist who just wants to enslave and control you. Detach yourself from the propaganda of the U.S.-based government-corporate-media globalist Conglomerate, which controls all aspects of American society and much of the rest of the Western world. Ignore the endless streams of lies, focus clearly on the truth, and be brave enough to speak the truth even as the Conglomerate seeks to silence you. I try to do that with my writings and music. I acknowledge that my writings are more professional, but my music, though amateurish, is more fun.
We who have open eyes can see how individual freedom is under constant assault by the Conglomerate. Since the fabulous phenomenal frauds of the COVID plandemic, the 2020 rigged election, the Ukraine warmongering, and the other bullshit of recent years, thousands of people who have had the guts to publicly disagree with the Conglomerate’s agendas and narratives have been silenced and persecuted. They have been blocked from social media platforms and other outlets of expression, they have been fired from their jobs and have had their incomes cut off, they have had their livelihoods and their lives destroyed, they have been arrested and incarcerated (such as the January 6 and vaccine-mandate protestors), and they have been killed (including from confrontations with police and adverse effects from forced vaccination).
The Conglomerate is determined to remain in control through any means necessary. So, it uses various strategies to deal with any prominent leaders of dissent who pose any danger to its control. It kicks Tucker Carlson off of his popular television platform. It relentlessly persecutes and prosecutes Donald Trump. It tries to silence Robert Kennedy Jr with a mainstream media blackout.
The tool of mass hysteria
One of the main tools that the Conglomerate uses to control the population is purposefully manufactured mass hysteria, such as the Trump Derangement Syndrome, COVID, and Ukraine hysterias. Most of the public mindlessly goes along with this—as if they are incapable of independent thought or free will while being held captive by Satan’s magnetic power. Those who do not go along with the hysteria are crushed.
Maintaining an endless series of mass hysterias is crucial for the U.S.-centered elitist globalist agenda of power accumulation and population control. I believe that it has previously been said that Satan seeks to conquer the world by controlling the population—by controlling the minds, hearts, and souls of the people. That is exactly what is happening. Mass hysteria, mass psychosis, moral panic, group think—whatever you call it, this is what is happening to us today, and it is a very effective form of control that is pure evil.
The hysteria is effective because it is designed to generate fear, which the Conglomerate then claims that only it can alleviate. All you have to do to feel better is trust the Conglomerate and faithfully obey its directives—regardless of how stupid and perverse those directives may be. Wear your masks, get your vaccines, take your pills, post your little Ukraine flags, call Trump a crook, call Kennedy a nut, and agree that men can be women, that two plus two equals five, and that shit tastes delicious especially when topped with puke. If you comply, you will be on the right side, the side of good, and you will be smart, and, best of all, you will always be safe. However, if you do not comply, you will be severely punished, and there is not a fucking thing that you can do about it. Comply, submit, and accept. Or the Conglomerate and its loyal followers will kill you in one way or another.
Needless to say, we are now unmistakably living in the twisted upside-down society described in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Conglomerate issues the command: “Be afraid of Russia. Russians are evil. We are good. We will protect you from them.” These are the lies that America uses as it provokes and prolongs a horrible war in Ukraine for the benefit of its military-industrial complex and its “woke” globalist agenda. American leaders even act as if they want to provoke a nuclear war with Russia, and, what the hell, China too. That is about as evil as a nation can get, is it not? But Satan loves and lusts for war—especially an elite globalist war that is waged against one nation (Russia) that is seeking to uphold its right to security as a nation-state and its values as an independent conservative culture. Satan hates nation-states. They get in the way of his unholy crusade for global governance—a one-world government aggressively pursuing an authoritarian decadent agenda. Satan—and America—will not tolerate the traditional, conservative culture of Russia blocking the progress of the great global crusade for gay and trans cultural domination!
Causing chaos and confusion
Post-World War II history shows that the United States loves creating war, chaos, confusion, destruction, and death around the world to advance its imperialist, globalist, corporatist, and now woke ambitions. Its military actions have killed millions of innocent people and destroyed countless lives in numerous war-waging adventures within the past several decades, including in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Africa, the Palestinian lands, Eastern and Central Europe, Central and South America, and elsewhere. Iran, of course, was subjected to the Western-imposed gross injustices of the Pahlavi dictatorship, which is what the Iranian revolutionaries were so pissed off about in 1979.
But, unlike Russia, the U.S. never gets punished with international sanctions or multinational business closings or preachy condemnations from airhead pop stars—because the U.S. is the key crusader for the globalist movement. Thus, all the other globalists (EU, UN, WHO, multinational corporations, Hollywood, etc) are on the U.S. establishment side.
Rising multipolar threat to Satan
Despite the scary doom-and-gloom reality of our current times, there are some encouraging signs that this U.S. dominance is finally coming to an end, especially with the planned expansion of the BRICS group and the group’s creation of a new currency to challenge the previously almighty U.S. dollar. Satan surely does not like the rising multipolar world that is going to relegate the U.S. to the sidelines. That new world should reduce his influence quite a bit, hopefully. We will see.
The developing multipolar world poses a serious threat to the perpetual American quest to spread international chaos for the benefit of its powerful elite classes, who have their sticky tentacles grabbing at stuff all around the globe. But there is little threat to the continued spread of Satanic chaos within America itself. We see how genuine democracy—like free speech and free, honest elections—is in an advanced rotting gangrenous condition in the United States—even as the American authoritarians claim to be defending nonexistent “democracy” in Ukraine.
Domestic decadence, twisted technology
The American people cannot escape from the social and cultural decadence that now permeates all aspects of our domestic society. Social divisions and individual hatreds are purposefully stoked and aggravated by obsessions with the most intimate personal matters—skin color, genes, and sexuality. The education system is primarily concerned with political indoctrination. Traditional organized religions (which I do not subscribe to, but which have in the past provided at least some common moral and ethical ground for people) have been corrupted and polluted to such a massive extent that most people have seemingly rejected not only those religions, but also all types of traditional morals, ethics, and sane concepts of right and wrong.
Traditional values that have been systematically extinguished as Satan has grown in power include the support and love of the traditional family (father, mother, children), real in-person social interaction, basic kindness and decency, and psychologically essential contact with the outside natural world. All these important facets of normal, healthy human life have become casualties of U.S.-created-and-promoted electronic technologies, which keep people addicted and enslaved to artificial “devices” and confine them like self-imprisoned convicts to artificial indoor environments. The results have been chronically pervasive neuroses and psychoses and the fundamental altering of human behavior and cognition. Electronic technology, in my opinion, has been the proudest achievement of Satan. (I’ve always thought that modern technology is basically evil, and I always agreed with Ted Kaczynski’s motives though not his methods.)
Satan is currently in a state of masturbatory ecstasy over all those ubiquitous, always-advancing, instant-gratification “pleasure” technologies—smartphones, computers, apps, Internet, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other things that I’m delighted to admit I don’t even know about. He also loves spreading the pleasures of US-promoted hedonistic pop culture and never-satisfied materialism. All you need to enjoy these pleasures is a credit card and an Amazon account. And you don’t ever need to pay off your credit card balance as you bury yourself under a mountain of endless debt. Who cares? It is the accepted American way, for both citizen and government.
As the Great American Satan keeps accumulating power, the millionaires and billionaires keep getting richer, and the majority of people keep getting intellectually dumber, emotionally more immature, and economically and spiritually poorer. But the people are so addicted to and hypnotized by their magic electronic devices that they will remain satiated with overwhelming pleasure even as their lives plummet deeper into Hell, their souls and minds become ever more vacuous, and their nature-derived freedoms are methodically stripped away by the Conglomerate’s authorities. Their drug addictions combine with their technology addictions to make them oblivious to any pain, guilt, or remorse. Satan smiles.
Reject the evil, speak the truth
Of course, the Iranian revolutionaries were not literally correct. The United States is not literally Satan. But the entrenched powers-that-be in the United States are the most prominent and influential forces of evil and destruction in the world today. And any American who supports or tolerates this situation is a dirty, guilty tool of Satan.
Therefore, any and all decent, moral people who are still around need to boldly reject this evil force—whether they are American dissidents living with the government-corporate bullshit at home or people in other countries struggling with the onslaught of American bullshit. Reject it, and reject it loudly for other people to hear and learn from.
After you open your eyes to reality, open your mouth and tell Satan to go back to Hell and stay there. We don’t want him anymore in our country or in our world.
A personal note
I originally wrote a version of this essay in early 2022 for Intellectual Conservative. The new essay here on The Unz Review is a revised and updated version. If you compare the old version with the new, you will see that my convictions have strengthened. Instead of thinking that Iran may have been correct in calling the U.S. Satan, I now am sure that Iran was correct.
Early this year, I basically renounced and rejected my own country in very strong language. Nevertheless, I am still finding tiny causes for American hope that are occasionally popping up, like the quixotic presidential campaign of RFK Jr. I fully expect to eventually be disappointed in those pitiful little hopes. But, despite my cognitive, rational conclusion that America is forever dead as a free country and firmly in the grasp of Satan, I guess there remains some emotional or spiritual element deep inside me that refuses to give up totally. Perhaps my eyes still require some additional opening.
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public, with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and writers and journalists were responsible for speaking out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power.’
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.”
DOG WHISTLES AND AMERICAN POWER
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.
‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts.’ What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’
“WHERE ON EARTH ARE THE VOICES SAYING NO?”
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, and George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity.’ American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian taxpayer for ‘advice.’ Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra-low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you prefer. Ukraine, as modern Europe’s fascist beehive, has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine, and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
Marth Gallhorn, center, talks to Native American soldiers on the 5th Army on the Cassino Front in Italy, March 1944 during World War II. British Official Photo | AP
In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American-bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow.’ The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel,’ was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist,’ regardless of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who traveled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job, and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.’ Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity, and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.’
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, and no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, and George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice,’ wrote Eagleton.
THE RE-GREENING OF AMERICA
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, and a civil resistance known as ‘the movement’ had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like the revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’
At the time, I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialized his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense, it was.
Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for ‘the movement,’ its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure said the report ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately ten times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’
‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five percent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al. — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality.’
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
Gen. Tommy Franks, head of US forces in Iraq, speaks with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during an interview at the Coalition Media Center in Doha, Qatar, April 13, 2003. Steven Senne | AP
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s ‘threat,’ and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’ spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women, and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies,’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
WAR BY MEDIA
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favorite presidential pastime, bombing and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016, Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of color: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan.
Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, and shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target.’
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people. ‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’
This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third was aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomized with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya, which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission,’ warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.’
In the year Nato invaded Libya, in 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia.’ Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China,’ in the words of his Defence Secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose.’
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the center of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons.’
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
“OUR” PROPAGANDA
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon, and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognize the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes.’
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilization blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.
Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.
In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.
Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.
If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.
But, after the claim made the rounds of front pages for a week or two, the story of Russia destroying its own pipelines was quietly shelved. That was partly because it seemed too difficult to maintain a narrative in which Moscow chose to destroy a critical part of its own energy infrastructure.
Not only did the explosions cause Russia great financial harm – the country’s gas and oil revenues regularly financed nearly half of its annual budget – but the blasts removed Moscow’s chief influence over Germany, which had been until then heavily dependent on Russian gas. The initial media story required the Western public to believe that President Vladimir Putin willingly shot himself in the foot, losing his only leverage over European resolve to impose economic sanctions on his country.
But even more than the complete lack of a Russian motive, Western states knew they would be unable to build a plausible forensic case against Moscow for the Nord Stream blasts.
Instead, with no chance to milk the explosions for propaganda value, official Western interest in explaining what had happened to the Nord Stream pipelines wilted, despite the enormity of the event. That was reflected for months in an almost complete absence of media coverage.
When the matter was raised, it was to argue that separate investigations by Sweden, Germany and Denmark were all drawing a blank. Sweden even refused to share any of its findings with Germany and Denmark, arguing that to do so would harm its “national security.”
No one, again including the Western media, raised an eyebrow or showed a flicker of interest in what might be really going on behind the scenes. Western states and their compliant corporate media seemed quite ready to settle for the conclusion that this was a mystery cocooned in an enigma.
ISOLATED AND FRIENDLESS
It might have stayed that way forever, except that in February, a journalist – one of the most acclaimed investigative reporters of the past half-century – produced an account that finally demystified the explosions. Drawing on at least one anonymous, highly placed informant, Seymour Hersh pointed the finger for the explosions directly at the US administration and President Joe Biden himself.
Hersh’s detailed retelling of the planning and execution of the Nord Stream blasts had the advantage – at least for those interested in getting to the truth of what took place – that his account fitted the known circumstantial evidence.
At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:
"Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165
Key Washington figures, from President Biden to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his senior neoconservative official Victoria Nuland – a stalwart of the murky U.S., anti-Russia meddling in Ukraine over the past decade – had either called for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines or celebrated the blasts shortly after they took place.
If anyone had a motive for blowing up the Russian pipelines – and a self-declared one at that – it was the Biden administration. They opposed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects from the outset – and for exactly the same reason that Moscow so richly prized them.
My latest: If, as seems likely, the US was behind the pipeline blasts, it shows it's ready to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield – and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has treated the Global South https://t.co/cIN1INfiOQ
In particular, the second pair of pipelines, Nord Stream 2, which was completed in September 2021, would double the amount of cheap Russian gas available to Germany and Western Europe. The only obstacle in its path was the hesitancy of German regulators. They delayed approval in November 2021.
Nord Stream meant major European countries, most especially Germany, would be completely dependent for the bulk of their energy supplies on Russia. That deeply conflicted with U.S. interests. For two decades, Washington had been expanding NATO as an anti-Moscow military alliance embracing ever more of Europe, to the point of butting up aggressively against Russia’s borders.
The Ukrainian government’s covert efforts to become a NATO member – thereby destroying a long-standing mutual and fragile nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow – were among the stated reasons why Russia invaded its neighbor in February last year.
Nearly a year into the Ukraine war, the western narrative of an 'unprovoked attack' by Moscow has become impossible to sustain https://t.co/xTaHEibKax
Washington wanted Moscow isolated and friendless in Europe. The goal was to turn Russia into Enemy No. 2 – after China – not leave Europeans looking to Moscow for energy salvation.
The Nord Stream explosions achieved precisely that outcome. They severed the main reason European states had for cozying up to Moscow. Instead, the U.S. started shipping its expensive liquified natural gas across the Atlantic to Europe, both forcing Europeans to become more energy dependent on Washington and, at the same time, fleecing them for the privilege.
But even if Hersh’s story fitted the circumstantial evidence, could his account stand up to further scrutiny?
PECULIARLY INCURIOUS
This is where the real story begins. Because one might have assumed that Western states would be queuing up to investigate the facts Hersh laid bare, if only to see if they stacked up or to find a more plausible alternative account of what happened.
Dennis Kucinich, a former chair of a U.S. Congressional investigative subcommittee on government oversight, has noted that it is simply astonishing no one in Congress has been pushing to use its powers to subpoena senior American officials, such as the secretary of the Navy, to test Hersh’s version of events. As Kucinich observes, such subpoenas could be issued under Congress’s Article One, Section 8, Clause 18, providing “constitutional powers to gather information, including to inquire on the administrative conduct of office.”
Similarly, and even more extraordinarily, when a vote was called by Russia at the United Nations Security Council late last month to set up an independent international commission to investigate the blasts, the proposal was roundly rejected.
If adopted, the UN Secretary-General himself would have appointed expert investigators and aided their work with a large secretariat.
Three Security Council members, Russia, China and Brazil, voted in favor of the commission. The other 12 – the U.S. and its allies or small states it could easily pressure – abstained, the safest way to quietly foil the creation of such an investigative commission.
Excuses for rejecting an independent commission failed to pass the sniff test. The claim was that it would interfere with the existing investigations of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. And yet all three have demonstrated that they are in no hurry to reach a conclusion, arguing that they may need years to carry out their work. As previously noted, they have indicated great reluctance to cooperate. And last week, Sweden once again stated that it may never get to the bottom of the events in the Baltic Sea.
As one European diplomat reportedly observed of meetings between NATO policymakers, the motto is: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” The diplomat added: “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering. It’s better not to know.”
It may not be so surprising that Western states are devoted to ignorance about who carried out a major act of international terrorism in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, considering that the most likely culprit is the world’s only superpower and the one state that can make their lives a misery.
But what should be more peculiar is that Western media have shown precisely no interest in getting to the truth of the matter either. They have remained completely incurious to an event of enormous international significance and consequence.
It is not only that Hersh’s account has been ignored by the Western press as if it did not even exist. It is that none of the media appear to have made any effort to follow up with their own investigations to test his account for plausibility.
“ACT OF WAR”
Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked – and verified or rebutted – if anyone wished to do so.
He set out a lengthy planning stage that began in the second half of 2021. He names the unit responsible for the attack on the pipeline: the U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, based in Panama City, Florida. And he explains why it was chosen for the task over the U.S. Special Operations Command: because any covert operation by the former would not need to be reported to Congress.
In December 2021, according to his highly placed informant, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan convened a task force of senior administration and Pentagon officials at the request of Biden himself. They agreed that the explosions must not be traceable back to Washington; otherwise, as the source noted: “It’s an act of war.”
The CIA brought in the Norwegians, stalwarts of NATO and strongly hostile to Russia, to carry out the logistics of where and how to attack the pipelines. Oslo had its own additional commercial interests in play, as the blasts would make Germany more dependent on Norwegian gas, as well as American supplies, to make up the shortfall from Nord Stream.
By March last year, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the precise site for the attack had been selected: in the Baltic’s shallow waters off Denmark’s Bornholm Island, where the sea floor was only 260ft below the surface, the four pipelines were close together and there were no strong tidal currents.
A small number of Swedish and Danish officials were given a general briefing about unusual diving activities to avoid the danger that their navies might raise the alarm.
The Norwegians also helped develop a way to disguise the U..S explosive charges so that, after they were laid, they would not be detected by Russian surveillance in the area.
The story no one wanted told. Seymour Hersh reveals how the US blew up the Nordstream gas pipelines, one of the great environmental disasters of our time. I'm guessing Hersh published on Substack because no establishment media outlet dared touch his expose https://t.co/B2IxQj5kuh
Next, the U.S. found the ideal cover. For more than two decades, Washington has sponsored an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic every June. The U.S. arranged that the 2022 event, Baltops 22, would take place close to Bornholm Island, allowing the divers to plant the charges unnoticed.
The explosives would be detonated through the use of a sonar buoy dropped by plane at the time of President Biden’s choosing. Complex arrangements had to be taken to make sure the explosives would not be accidentally triggered by passing ships, underwater drilling, seismic events or sea creatures.
Three months later, on September 26, the sonar buoy was dropped by a Norwegian plane, and a few hours later three of the four pipelines were put out of commission.
DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
The Western media’s response to Hersh’s account has perhaps been the most revealing aspect of the entire saga.
It is not just that the establishment media have been so uniformly and remarkably reticent to dig deeper into making sense of this momentous crime – beyond making predictable, unevidenced accusations against Russia. It is that they have so obviously sought to dismiss Hersh’s account before making even cursory efforts to confirm or deny its specifics.
The knee-jerk pretext has been that Hersh has only one anonymous source for his claims. Hersh himself has noted that, as with other of his famous investigations, he cannot always refer to additional sources he uses to confirm details because those sources impose a condition of invisibility for agreeing to speak to him.
That should hardly be surprising when informants are drawn from a small, select group of Washington insiders and are at great risk of being identified – at great personal cost to themselves, given the U.S. administration’s proven track record of persecuting whistleblowers.
But the fact that this was indeed just a pretext from the establishment media becomes much clearer when we consider that those same journalists dismissive of Hersh’s account happily gave prominence to an alternative, highly implausible, semi-official version of events.
In what looked suspiciously like a coordinated publication in early March, The New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeitnewspapers printed separate accounts promising to solve “one of the central mysteries of the war in Ukraine.” The Times headline asked a question it implied it was about to answer: “Who Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipelines?”
Instead, both papers offered an account of the Nord Stream attack that lacked detail, and any detail that was supplied was completely implausible. This new version of events was vaguely attributed to anonymous American and German intelligence sources – the very actors, in Hersh’s account, responsible both for carrying out and covering up the Nord Stream blasts.
In fact, the story had all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign to distract from Hersh’s investigation. It threw the establishment media a bone: the chief purpose was to lift any pressure from journalists to pursue Hersh’s leads. Now they could scurry around, looking like they were doing their job as a “free press” by chasing a complete red herring supplied by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Which is why the story was widely reported, notably far more widely than Hersh’s much more credible account.
So what did the New York Times’ account claim? That a mysterious group of six people had hired a 50ft yacht and sailed off to Bornholm Island, where they had carried out a James Bond-style mission to blow up the pipelines. Those involved, it was suggested, were a group of “pro-Ukrainian saboteurs”– with no apparent ties to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who were keen to seek revenge on Russia for its invasion. They had used fake passports.
The Times further muddied the waters, reporting sources that claimed some 45 “ghost ships” had passed close to the site of the explosion when their transponders were not working.
The crucial point was that the story shifted attention away from the sole plausible possibility, the one underscored by Hersh’s source: that only a state actor could have carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The highly sophisticated, extremely difficult operation needed to be concealed from other states, including Russia that were closely surveilling the area.
Now the establishment media was heading off on a completely different tangent. They were looking not at states – and most especially not the one with the biggest motive, the greatest capability and the proven opportunity.
Instead, they had an excuse to play at being reporters, visiting Danish yachting communities to ask if anyone remembered the implicated yacht, the Andromeda, or suspicious characters aboard it, and trying to track down the Polish company that hired the sailing boat. The media had the story they preferred: one that Hollywood would have created, of a crack team of Jason Bournes giving Moscow a good slapping and then disappearing into the night.
WELCOME MYSTERY
A month on, the media discussion is still exclusively about the mysterious yacht crew, though – after reaching a series of dead-ends in a story that was only ever meant to have dead-ends – establishment journalists are asking a few tentative questions. Though, let us note, most determinedly not questions about any possible U.S. involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper ran a story last week in which a German “security expert” wondered whether a group of six sailors was really capable of carrying out a highly complex operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines. That is something that might have occurred to a less credulous newspaper a month earlier when the Guardian simply regurgitated the Times’ disinformation story.
But despite the security expert’s skepticism, the Guardian is still not eager to get to the bottom of the story. It conveniently concludes that the “investigation” conducted by the Swedish public prosecutor, Mats Ljungqvist, will be unlikely ever to “yield a conclusive answer”.
Or as Ljungqvist observes: “Our hope is to be able to confirm who has committed this crime, but it should be noted that it likely will be difficult given the circumstances.”
Hersh’s account continues to be ignored by the Guardian – beyond a dismissive reference to several “theories” and “speculation” other than the laughable yacht story. The Guardian does not name Hersh in its report or the fact that his highly placed source fingered the U.S. for the Nord Stream sabotage. Instead, it notes simply that one theory – Hersh’s – has been “zeroing on a Nato Baltops 22 wargame two months before” the attack.
It’s all still a mystery for the Guardian – and a very welcome one by the tenor of its reports.
The Washington Post has been performing a similar service for the Biden administration on the other side of the Atlantic. A month on, it is using the yacht story simply to widen the enigma rather than narrow it down.
The paper reports that unnamed “law enforcement officials” now believe the Andromeda yacht was not the only vessel involved, adding: “The boat may have been a decoy, put to sea to distract from the true perpetrators, who remain at large, according to officials with knowledge of an investigation led by Germany’s attorney general.”
The Washington Post’s uncritical reporting surely proves a boon to Western “investigators”. It continues to build an ever more elaborate mystery, or “international whodunnit,” as the paper gleefully describes it. Its report argues that unnamed officials “wonder if the explosive traces – collected months after the rented boat was returned to its owners – were meant to falsely lead investigators to the Andromeda as the vessel used in the attack.”
The paper then quotes someone with “knowledge of the investigation”: “The question is whether the story with the sailboat is something to distract or only part of the picture.”
How does the paper respond? By ignoring that very warning and dutifully distracting itself across much of its own report by puzzling whether Poland might have been involved too in the blasts. Remember, a mysterious Polish company hired that red-herring yacht.
Poland, notes the paper, had a motive because it had long warned that the Nord Stream pipelines would make Europe more energy dependent on Russia. Exactly the same motive, we might note – though, of course, the Washington Post refuses to do so – that the Biden administration demonstrably had.
The paper does inadvertently offer one clue as to where the mystery yacht story most likely originated. The Washington Post quotes a German security official saying that Berlin “first became interested in the [Andromeda] vessel after the country’s domestic intelligence agency received a ‘very concrete tip’ from a Western intelligence service that the boat may have been involved in the sabotage”.
The German official “declined to name the country that shared the information” – information that helpfully draws attention away from any US involvement in the pipeline blasts and redirects it to a group of untraceable, rogue Ukraine sympathizers.
The Washington Post concludes that Western leaders “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved”. And, it seems the Western media – our supposed watchdogs on power – feel exactly the same way.
“PARODY” INTELLIGENCE
In a follow-up story last week, Hersh revealed that Holger Stark, the journalist behind Die Zeit’s piece on the mystery yacht and someone Hersh knew when they worked together in Washington, had imparted to him an interesting additional piece of information divulged by his country’s intelligence services.
Hersh reports: “Officials in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had decided shortly after the pipeline bombings to send teams to the site to recover the one mine that has not gone off. [Holger] said they were too late; an American ship had sped to the site within a day or two and recovered the mine and other materials.”
Holger, Hersh says, was entirely uninterested in Washington’s haste and determination to have exclusive access to this critical piece of evidence: “He answered, with a wave of his hand, ‘You know what Americans are like. Always wanting to be first.’” Hersh points out: “There was another very obvious explanation.”
Hersh also spoke with an intelligence expert about the plausibility of the mystery yacht story being advanced by the New York Times and Die Zeit. He described it as a “parody” of intelligence that only fooled the media because it was exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear. He noted some of the most glaring flaws in the account:
Any serious student of the event would know that you cannot anchor a sailboat in waters that are 260 feet deep’ – the depth at which the four pipelines were destroyed – ‘but the story was not aimed at him but at the press who would not know a parody when presented with one.’”
Further:
You cannot just walk off the street with a fake passport and lease a boat. You either need to accept a captain who was supplied by the leasing agent or owner of the yacht, or have a captain who comes with a certificate of competency as mandated by maritime law. Anyone who’s ever chartered a yacht would know that.’ Similar proof of expertise and competence for deep sea diving involving the use of a specialized mix of gases would be required by the divers and the doctor.”
And:
How does a 49-foot sailboat find the pipelines in the Baltic Sea? The pipelines are not that big and they are not on the charts that come with the lease. Maybe the thought was to put the two divers into the water’– not very easy to do so from a small yacht – ‘and let the divers look for it. How long can a diver stay down in their suits? Maybe fifteen minutes. Which means it would take the diver four years to search one square mile.’”
The truth is that the Western press has zero interest in determining who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines because, just like Western diplomats and politicians, media corporations don’t want to know the truth if it cannot be weaponized against an official enemy state.
The Western media are not there to help the public monitor the centers of power, keep our governments honest and transparent, or bring to book those who commit state crimes. They are there to keep us ignorant and willing accomplices when such crimes are seen as advancing on the global stage the interests of Western elites – including the very transnational corporations that run our media.
Which is precisely why the Nord Stream blasts took place. The Biden administration knew not only that its allies would be too fearful to expose its unprecedented act of industrial and environmental terrorism but that the media would dutifully line up behind their national governments in turning a blind eye.
The very ease with which Washington has been able to carry out an atrocity – one that has caused a surge in the cost of living for Europeans, leaving them cold and out of pocket during the winter, and added considerably to existing pressures that have been gradually deindustrializing Europe’s economies – will embolden the U.S. to act in equally rogue ways in the future.
In the context of a Ukraine war in which there is the constant threat of a resort to nuclear weapons, where that could ultimately lead should be only too obvious.
In February, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published an extensive investigation into the spectacular collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF), which the U.S. spent two decades and $90 billion building. In common with previous SIGAR reports, it offers a remarkably uncompromising, no-punches-pulled assessment, exposing corruption, incompetence, lies, and delusion every step of the way.
At the report’s core is a highly detailed timeline of the ANDSF’s – and, therefore, the Afghan government’s – disintegration. That SIGAR was able to construct such a painstaking obituary is nothing short of miraculous, for the Special Inspector General was stonewalled and obstructed at every turn by the agencies it is officially charged with scrutinizing.
The Pentagon and State Department rejected SIGAR’s jurisdiction over them, declined to review interim drafts of the report, denied access to their staff, and “mostly” refused to answer requests for information. “Very few” documents SIGAR asked for were turned over, and material disclosed “was often not materially relevant to our objectives.”
In lieu of cooperation from the guilty parties, SIGAR conducted a panoply of probing interviews with U.S. and Afghan officials. While often unnamed, their admissions and analysis provide stunning insight into conversations, deliberations, and machinations hidden from public view at the time. Together, these accounts help explain how the ANDSF, much-vaunted by the White House until its demise, failed so spectacularly.
It is a highly cinematic retelling that is part thriller, part farce. Take, for example, a former “senior Afghan national security official” recounting the morning of August 15, 2021, the day Kabul fell. As Americans rushed to depart the country, en route to a meeting with President Ashraf Ghani, he was told by the Presidential Protective Service chief that the Taliban, contrary to promises not to enter the city, had done so.
In the president’s office, the pair scrambled to draft an official statement to be transmitted domestically and internationally on the group’s unwelcome arrival. A secretary was asked to request some green tea from catering, as was customary in such meetings:
He went and brought the tray himself. Wait a minute, what happened to the server? He said, there’s no one left. People in our offices had abandoned and they had gone…[By around] 10 or 11, we no longer had a consolidated security force.”
This mass walkout was evident in every state apparatus. The president contacted the head of the National Security Directorate, the Afghan government’s primary intelligence service, which was created in the early 2000s by the CIA, requesting he rally operatives “to keep order in Kabul.” The Directorate chief regretfully informed him that the formerly 500-strong force tasked with managing the city’s defense now numbered less than 20 people.
Back at the President’s office, as word spread of police units all over the city summarily abandoning their posts en masse, the few in-house security officers who had come into work that day began shedding their official livery, which they’d pre-emptively donned over civilian clothes. By 11 am, all their uniforms were literally consigned to the garbage – and with that, the Afghan government ceased to exist.
“A CONSPIRACY THEORY”
This cataclysm came to pass first gradually, then rapidly.
Despite the vast financial, material and practical assistance Washington provided to the ANDSF over the years, the force was throughout its life completely dependent on the U.S., not only for anti-Taliban military operations but to make sure the Kabul paid soldiers’ salaries. Its undoing was ensured in February 2020, when the Doha Agreement was reached by the Taliban and Trump administration, which set a blueprint for eventual American withdrawal.
This concord immediately led to a drastic, total scaling back of Washington’s assistance, in particular airstrikes, which were fundamental to the ANDSF’s ability to stop the Taliban’s encroachment. The previous year, the U.S. had conducted 7,423 airstrikes on the force’s behalf, the most since 2009.
Overnight, though, this ceased outright, leaving air defense the exclusive responsibility of the Afghan Air Force, as per the agreement. In practice, Kabul’s fighter fleet consisted of just two A-29s, aging propeller-toting Brazilian-made light aircraft designed to operate in low-threat environments.
This also immediately crippled the ANDSF’s logistical capability. Weapons and supplies could not be ferried by ground quickly enough to meet operational demands, leading to the force lacking ammunition, food, water, and other vital resources necessary to sustain anti-Taliban military engagements.
Muddying matters even further, the full terms of the Doha Agreement were seemingly kept confidential from local police, security forces, and even the government. A former Afghan army general quoted by SIGAR suggests U.S. forces on the ground were likewise “confused about what to engage and what not to,” and thus forced to coordinate with the Pentagon and State Department “on an hourly basis…to get clarification on what they could do.”
A Taliban fighter holds an American-made M16 rifle in Kabul, December 12, 2021. Photo | Sipa via AP
“They would see the Taliban attacking our checkpoints. They would have videos of the Taliban doing it. But they would say we are not able to engage because we have limitations,” he records. “The Taliban started moving around connecting their small pockets of fighting groups across the country, uniting them and making the fighting units bigger and bigger. The U.S. would watch but do nothing because of the Agreement.”
Come May 2021, when the Taliban offensive began, demoralized, ill-equipped protective forces – who, in some cases, hadn’t seen their families or been paid for over six months – offered little resistance. Some of them joined the Taliban, and others were bribed to give up their positions. The ease with which the group breezed through fortified territory gave rise to a “conspiracy theory” circulating through state institutions that “the Americans wanted the Taliban to come back to power,” according to a former government minister.
The Taliban purportedly seized upon this development, publicizing they had “some kind of a secret deal with the Americans…under which certain districts or provinces would be surrendered to them” to facilitate ANDSF capitulations, according to an ex-Afghan national security official:
[Defeat] was going to happen anyway, so why would they want to die… they used that tactic very well throughout the country, they used it with local commanders, leaders in their areas, parliamentarians.”
SAME OLD STORY
It is tantalizing indeed to consider whether, far from “conspiracy theory,” the Doha Agreement did indeed amount to the Taliban being given free rein to take back control of Afghanistan and the apparent surprise of U.S. officials at the pace of the government’s collapse was just for show.
However, SIGAR outlines a total lack of professional oversight on the ANDSF’s development and capabilities, which “prevented a clear picture of reality on the ground” from emerging to any relevant party before it was too late. This was no accident, though; the Afghan government and military, their trainers and the Pentagon alike were all heavily incentivized to lie to one another, and political leaders in Washington, who were in turn motivated to mislead the public and justify the enormous investment.
This deceit also conveniently obscured industrial-scale corruption and embezzlement within the ANDSF. As prior SIGAR reports also found, so much money and equipment were flowing into Afghanistan without any supervision whatsoever, and weaponry and other aid were misused, stolen or illegally sold off with ease by Afghans, U.S. personnel and Pentagon contractors.
SIGAR ominously warns that a similar absence of accountability is evident in the “unprecedented” U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022.
“Diversion to illicit markets, misuse amongst groups fighting in Ukraine, or their acquisition by Russia or other non-state actors” are resultantly considered “likely unavoidable” consequences of this wellspring. Despite U.S. leaders promising a keen eye is being kept on the weapons shipments, SIGAR’s report makes clear these same officials did not even know what was being sent to Afghanistan. Is the same true for Kiev?
In a perverse irony, some of the American military equipment rescued from capture by the Taliban has been dispatched to Ukraine – specifically, fighter jets that could not be used by the Afghan Air Force. For the most part, though, what ended up in Kabul is now in the hands of a formerly sworn enemy, with armored vehicles and military aircraft featuring prominently in the group’s propaganda and training videos.
There are disturbing historical echoes in this. In the 1980s, the CIA and MI6 provided Afghanistan’s Mujahideen with 600 Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles to take down Red Army jets and helicopters. Following the 2001 NATO invasion, these weapons were routinely found in Taliban and Al-Qaeda arms caches across the country. As late as 2010, Western media was reporting the shoulder-fired Blowpipes were a major threat to American operations there.
In the present day, the U.S. has provided 1,400 MANPADS – another shoulder-fired missile – to Ukraine. The State Department believes these weapons “pose a serious threat to passenger air travel, the commercial aviation industry, and military aircraft around the world.” Since the 1970s, over 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by MANPADS.
“CLOSE FRIENDS WITH SENATORS”
One of the SIGAR report’s most striking sections documents the Afghan government’s failure to dedicate any time or resources at all to planning how the country’s assorted U.S.-created and sustained political, judicial, security and military institutions might operate post-withdrawal. Refusal might be more accurate – for as August 2021 approached, Ghani and his men remained implacably convinced the U.S. was not going anywhere and acted accordingly.
The reasons for this catastrophic oversight were manifold. First and foremost, neither President Ghani nor his administration at any point considered the prospect of total U.S. withdrawal to be remotely credible or even possible. They reasoned that Washington had expended so much blood and treasure over so many years, and the country was so strategically significant it would never be fully jilted by its generous benefactor.
In fact, they were certain the U.S. could not leave without the government’s express consent under the terms of the Bilateral Security Agreement inked in September 2014 by Kabul and Washington. It enshrined a permanent American troop presence in the country “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated by either side with two years’ notice.
Taliban fighters patrol in front of a torn photo of Ashraf Ghani on the wall of a city hall, Aug. 21, 2021. Photo | Kyodo via AP
As such, when U.S. officials began warning Afghan ministers the withdrawal would very much be total, they simply were not listened to. A State Department official despairingly recalls how Ghani interpreted his repeated cautions of what was to soon come as a mere diplomatic bluff intended to “shape his behavior.” Declaring Afghanistan to be “the most important piece of real estate in the world,” he asked the official airily, “how could you leave a territory as important geopolitically?”
“That [sic] was some of the toughest conversations I had with the President of Afghanistan,” the State Department official lamented. “I tried to plead with him, saying I know he’s very well-connected but, in our system, the President ultimately decides, and he should take this seriously not to miscalculate.”
A staggering blunder indeed, but in their defense, Ghani et al. were encouraged in their delusion by contradictory and conflicting messages, both private and public, from U.S. officials.
“They refuted profusely any argument their negotiations with the Taliban and their subsequent deal…was essentially a guise to withdraw all of their troops,” a former Afghan national security advisor alleges, adding:
We were constantly reassured the [U.S.] was committed to the partnership with the Afghan government. They insisted they wanted a peaceful Afghanistan in which the gains of the last 20 years would be preserved. They maintained this position until the very end.”
Ghani’s close personal connections to the U.S. power elite also helped foster the sense he was a “made man” and wouldn’t be discarded by his fellow gangsters. Hekmat Karzai, former Afghan deputy foreign minister, records how the president “thought he knew Washington, though many of these senators were his close friends…he was able to address both houses of Congress, and he thought he had lobbyists in Washington that were pulling for him.”
“SLOWLY CRACKING APART”
The SIGAR report offers no formal recommendations for the U.S. government. It is simply intended as a comprehensive postmortem to enhance public understanding of how unaccountably vast American taxpayer funds were spent on a nation-building project thousands of miles away from home, which ultimately failed miserably.
Yet, the lessons for all U.S. allies, particularly those heavily dependent on Washington’s diplomatic, financial and military backing, could not be starker. SIGAR’s findings are particularly relevant to consider in the context of the Ukraine conflict, given there are increasingly unambiguous indications the day Kiev is thrown under a bus by its Western sponsors rapidly approaches.
At the end of January, influential Pentagon-funded think tank RAND published a report, “Avoiding a Long War,” which concluded the risks and costs of keeping the conflict grinding on through endless weapons shipments and bottomless financial aid far outweighed any benefits to the U.S. It accordingly urged policymakers to immediately start laying foundations for a future “shift” in support for Ukraine, nudging Kiev to rein in its ambitions and rhetoric and initiate peace negotiations with Moscow.
It may be no coincidence that in the RAND report’s wake, public pronouncements by U.S. officials are no longer tubthumping and bullish, and there has been a marked shift in media reporting on the conflict. Stories of Ukrainian battlefield success and heroism and Russian incompetence and embarrassment, a daily staple for much of 2022, have suddenly become rather scarce.
In their place, numerous outlets have published detailed accounts of the bleak reality of the frontline, with poorly equipped, untrained Ukrainian conscripts forcibly marched into a relentless, highly lethal deluge of artillery fire while Russian forces steadily gain ground. Kiev’s personnel losses, a closely guarded state secret hitherto consistently downplayed by the media, are now widely acknowledged to be catastrophic and unsustainable.
On March 12, Politico reported Washington’s unity with Ukraine was “slowly cracking apart,” and administration officials privately worry so much manpower and ammunition is being expended that no counteroffensive can ever be mounted. It was also claimed – contrary to Biden’s explicit pledge to support the proxy war “as long as it takes” – Kiev had been plainly informed that U.S. support would not continue “indefinitely at this level.”
If true, there is no indication that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky received the memo. He recently hailed Kiev’s “invincibility” and dubbed 2023 “the year of victory.” His military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov has even suggested Ukrainians will be vacationing in Crimea this summer.
Maintaining the morale of one’s citizens, soldiers and foreign backers during wartime is absolutely essential, and the former comedian has proven himself highly adept in this regard. Yet, the same U.S. figures who not long ago readily echoed and legitimized this optimism are now actively repudiating Zelensky’s swagger. On February 15, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gravely warned Ukraine that its dream of retaking Crimea was not only fantastical but even trying would inevitably lead to a severe counter-response from Moscow.
This unprecedented intervention was in direct keeping with the RAND report’s contention that Kiev regaining territory from Russia was of “debatable” value to American interests, given “the risks of nuclear use or a Russia-NATO war would spike.” Ukrainian land being considered so expendable raises the obvious prospect Washington could compel Kiev to cede even more to Moscow in a peace deal.
One cannot help but wonder if, behind closed doors, Zelensky is in the manner of Ghani, being warned that Washington’s total withdrawal from the proxy war impends, but these entreaties are similarly falling on deaf ears.
If so, the Ukrainian president can be forgiven for similarly thinking the prospect to be inconceivable. Pan-Western public and political sympathy, fawning profiles in prominent newspapers and magazines, unrelenting positive media coverage, high-level visits to and from Washington, London and other centers of power, and ceaseless statements of solidarity from overseas would convince any leader they were eternally indispensable. But the U.S. abandoning Afghanistan entirely was likewise beyond belief to all concerned until it happened.
It is easily forgotten that in June 2021, Ghani flew to Washington for a well-publicized personal summit with Biden as the Taliban simultaneously surged across the country, inexorably seizing district after district. Widely reported as a strong signal that the White House still steadfastly supported Kabul, a government spokesperson said the visit would “highlight the enduring partnership between the U.S. and Afghanistan as the military drawdown continues.”
Less than three months later, Ghani would unceremoniously flee Kabul for the United Arab Emirates, where he has languished in almost total obscurity ever since, completely forgotten by the Western media and forsaken by his former “friends.” The “most important piece of real estate in the world” likewise almost instantly vanished from headlines and mainstream political discourse following the Taliban’s takeover, never to return.
This time round, U.S. investment is lower, the stakes far higher, and extrication considerably easier. And as the RAND report argued, the Ukraine conflict is taking up valuable time and energy of military chiefs, which could instead be more fruitfully devoted to planning a war with China, a horrific prospect now openly mooted in Washington. The only question is how many more Ukrainians will needlessly die before the forewarned “shift” in American policy comes to pass, and Beijing is in the firing line.
March 2003 and March 2011 have a great deal in common, but that is not where the story begins, Steven Sahiounie writes.
The 20th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq for regime change coincides with the 12th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Syria for regime change. March 2003 and March 2011 have a great deal in common, but that is not where the story begins.
The destruction of two nations, sitting side by side in the Middle East, began in 1996 with the strategy paper called “A Clean Break”, written by the man known as “The Architect of the Iraq War”.
“A Clean Break” was authored in part by Richard T. Perle, an American Jew from New York. Being born a Jew is not paramount to this story, but being an Israeli agent is. There should be a test when working on sensitive and top-secret plans for the U.S., that your allegiance is sworn to the U.S. and no other country on earth. Perle was an American, but his allegiance lay elsewhere.
Perle delivered the paper to Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just been elected as Prime Minister of Israel. The paper presents the reasons for the U.S. to attack and destroy Iraq and Syria. After President Bill Clinton took office, the paper was presented to him for action, but he declined. But, by the time of the 9/11 bombing of the WTC in NYC in 2001, the time was ripe to dust off the paper and Perle and his associates found President George W. Bush a willing partner.
Perle was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which was responsible for developing reasons for the U.S. to attack other countries. The Pentagon does not develop policy, they simply are asked to report if a planned attack can be carried out successfully, or not. There is an old saying, “A soldier’s job is not to question why, a soldier’s job is to do or die”. Wars and attacks by the U.S. cannot be blamed on the Pentagon, that blame must rest on the Oval Office, the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Policy Board.
The 9/11 attack was carried out on the orders of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national living in Afghanistan, and a leader of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group following the political ideology of Radical Islam, which is the same ideology as the Muslim Brotherhood, with hundreds of followers in the U.S.
The trick was how could the Bush administration connect Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq? The director of the CIA, George Tenet, repeatedly told Bush that there was no connection.
The second strategy of the Bush administration, was to build the case for invading Iraq based on Saddam Hussein having “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD). The CIA was able to support that premise, not based on any facts, but based on the idea that Hussein might have WMD. When Tenet was asked about the WMD, he replied “We will find it when we get there.” That proved to be wishful thinking, as no WMDs were ever found by thousands of armed and highly skilled U.S. soldiers who combed every nook and cranny in Iraq, for years.
So how did the U.S. public and Congress come to believe the Bush administration’s lies? That was accomplished by the U.S. mainstream media. The Bush administration spoon-fed false information to key journalists in the most reputable media outlets. The journalists were unable to personally verify the information on WMD, and they refused to reveal their sources who were the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. government. Without the complicity of the media, the case for going to war in Iraq could never have been believed.
The events leading up to the first day of the bombing in Baghdad were unfolding so rapidly, that the ‘red flags’ of doubt were overlooked. Hans Blix was returning to his hotel in Baghdad when Bush announced to the world on TV that he would order the beginning of the bombing in 24 hours. Blix was blindsided when confronted by a microphone thrust in his face at the entrance of the hotel. At first, he didn’t believe the Bush order, and reiterated the results of his visits to numerous sites in Iraq, that Hussein had no WMD, they had been destroyed previously.
But, that never stopped the bombing from commencing on time. While the bombs were falling across Baghdad, Blix was back in NYC delivering his detailed report to Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General, which made the case that the Bush attack was based on a lie. All of this was covered in the media, but it was too late to stop the war machine.
The U.S. was not alone. The UK and many of the NATO allies signed up for the Bush war on Iraq. All of them bear responsibility for their participation in an unjustified war that cost millions of lives. The U.S. coalition partners blame their decision to participate on the fact they believed in U.S. intelligence, and they believed in the lies. Another factor in their decision to follow the U.S. lead was the fact that the U.S. had been the sole ‘Super Power’. Those days are over, as the international community recognizes the new multi-polar world.
When Perle penned “A Clean Break” in 1996 for the leader of Israel, the attack on Syria was included, sort of a ‘2 for 1’ idea. Take out both Iraq and Syria at the same time, and Israel will be a safer place. Once Donald Rumsfeld became involved in planning the 2003 attack on Iraq, he counseled against including Syria. His decision was based on knowing two countries’ destruction is too big of a goal to be accomplished. He decided to focus on destroying Iraq only.
Syria was not attacked, and the war next door did not spill over the border. Syria accepted 2 million Iraqi refugees, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt came to Damascus in 2009 and met President Assad because of his open-door Iraqi refugee policy.
The plans to destroy Syria began in the 1996 paper by Perle, and by March 2011 the President Obama administration had already started on their plans to create a ‘new Middle East’ and Obama utilized NATO to assist in the attack, invasion, and occupation of Libya. The U.S.-NATO attack on Libya was the precursor to the attack on Syria which used Syrian followers of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and later were replaced by international terrorists following Radical Islam, such as Al Qaeda and finally ISIS.
Today, Iraq lies destroyed. It has never been reconstructed. Large areas still have no water, electricity, or medical care. The infrastructure of Iraq is broken. The Iraqi constitution was drafted by the invaders and has set the parliament up as a sectarian and ethnic quota system. In the U.S., it would be unthinkable to base elected offices on religion or ethnicity, but it was the U.S. invaders who developed the Iraqi constitution which has locked the country into an unworkable system of corruption based on who your parents were, and where did they live. The U.S. also insisted the Iraqi form of government be a Parliamentary system, which has kept the country locked into chaos as there is no central leader who can get things done, unlike the U.S. Presidential system.
Syria resisted the U.S.-NATO attack and the people fought back. Now, after 12 years there exists a possibility that brighter days are ahead for the Syrian people and the hope of reconstruction. In Iraq, there is also hope that the suffering they endured at the hands of brutal invaders, who committed atrocities against civilians, can be relegated to the pages of history, and a new chapter in security and prosperity can begin.
The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after, the Western media are at it again.
This week, March 20, saw the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war launched on Iraq. The war resulted in over one million deaths and a decade of brutal military occupation. It spawned sectarian civil war, millions of displaced and destitute, and terrorism that engulfed the entire Middle East, as well as large swathes of Africa and Asia. Iraq and several other ancient nations have been destroyed because of the Anglo-American war. And it was a war based on flagrant American and British lies over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was also supported by NATO partners, should be an occasion for proper accounting with Nuremberg-standard war crimes prosecutions of American and British political and military figures. Persons such as George W Bush, the former U.S. President, and Tony Blair, the ex-British premier, should be facing jail time for capital crimes. The current U.S. President Joe Biden should also be in the dock since his role as a senior Senator at the time was crucial in enabling the war. Also up for indictment are several Western media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post which promulgated the lies that made the case for war.
Despicably, the man who shed so much light on the crimes, publisher Julian Assange, is the one who languishes in a prison torture dungeon.
Twenty years on, there is an eerie sense of collective amnesia among Western politicians and media over the colossal war crimes associated with Iraq. It’s almost as if it did not happen. The Western protagonists and their propaganda outlets have gotten away with mass murder.
This week marked another odious anniversary, which shamefully, was met with the same Western silence and indifference. On March 24, 1999, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance unilaterally began bombing former Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days. Thousands of civilians were killed in a military assault on that country – under the cynical pretext of “humanitarian protection” – which was not approved at the time by the United Nations. The bombing campaign was conducted, like the Iraq War only four years later, on the basis of unilateral action by Washington and its Western allies.
Lamentably, a glance at the calendar would throw up countless such vile anniversaries of unlawful American and Western military aggression. March 19, for example, marked the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011.
In a powerful essay by Ron Ridenour for Strategic Culture Foundation we are reminded of the extraordinary warmongering record of the United States and its imperialist partners. In terms of the number of countries invaded and the consequent death toll, including from the first use of atomic bombs, the U.S. is certainly “exceptional” for all the wrong reasons.
Yet what makes the record all the more horrendous is the impunity. The collective amnesia towards the Iraq War is perhaps the most damnable symptom of impunity in recent decades. It also exposes the rank hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the so-called “rules-based global order” that Washington and its Western minions continually spout about. The “rules-based global order” is an Orwellian blandishment for lawlessness and predation by rogue regimes that trample all over the United Nations Charter and international law.
The chronic impunity that the United States has come accustomed to in the murderous pursuit of its imperialist objectives means that it never stops its rogue state rapacity. It’s a repeat offender because it never has been held to account. There is an analogy here with the way Washington relentlessly abuses the privileges bestowed on the dollar as a global reserve currency. Washington parasites off the globe by printing dollars and levying undue rights for unearned services and goods. The racket never seems to stop because there is no accountability.
Likewise, the warmongering of the United States never ceases. The blood lust of its capitalist power and imperialist needs never ceases. The criminality is permitted because in large part the Western media serve to cover up the crimes with fabricated excuses and lies. The wars in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s were whitewashed as “crusades against communism” instead of being reported as the genocidal imperialist rampages that they were. The impunity from those enormous crimes then led to more wars and crimes. The Iraq War fits into this rolling context.
But there is also the historical factor of the Soviet Union and the supposed victory of the Cold War by the United States. Without a checking counterforce, the U.S. rulers became consumed with the arrogance of presumed “unipolar” dominance. It is no coincidence that after 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States embarked on an even more licentious pursuit of imperialist wars and the tyrannical notion of “rules-based global order”. There came in short order a state of permanent war on the planet by the U.S. and its Western allies. The wars and covert interventions led by the United States in Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, among other places, were all commensurate with the self-ordained right of expansion by the NATO alliance toward Russia. The same U.S.-led military expansionism is underway toward China.
This is the proper context by which the current war in Ukraine should be understood and assessed. As well as the relentless militarist build-up against China in the Asia-Pacific.
The United States and its NATO allies are fueling a conflict in Ukraine by pouring endless amounts of weapons into that country. The latest step to further escalation is Britain announcing it is supplying depleted uranium artillery shells to Ukraine. These toxic weapons were used by the U.S., Britain and NATO forces in former Yugoslavia and Iraq which have resulted in unprecedented cancer deaths and birth defects among civilian populations. Again, the crime of impunity is followed by more crime.
The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after aiding and abetting the crime of the 21st century, the Western media are at it again. These organs and their grinders are trying to tell the world that Russia is an aggressor in Ukraine and that Russia and China are posing “a threat to Western democracy”.
In a state visit to Moscow this week, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin declared the need for earnest diplomacy to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. The Western powers and their media lackeys reacted by disparaging any such diplomacy and instead sought to vilify Russia and China as being somehow villains against global security.
It’s quite easy to tell who the real villains and liars are. The Iraq War is one of many such touchstones.
Most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.
The war in Ukraine is now entering its second year, having reached its first anniversary this week. On February 24 last year, Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory. The conflict has taken many twists and turns over the past 12 months. But there seems to be one inescapable, paramount development. The contours of hostility have emerged to identify the primary global threat – the United States and its zero-sum obsession with imperialist hegemony.
Strictly speaking, the war in Ukraine is entering its tenth year because the origins of the conflict are traced to the coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 sponsored by the American CIA and other NATO agents. The NeoNazi regime that was installed then and which continues in power (headed up by a Jewish president nonetheless) was weaponized and covertly supported by the United States and its NATO partners to aggress the Russian-speaking people of formerly southeastern Ukraine. The bigger objective for the regime was to draw the Russian Federation into an existential confrontation that is now underway.
The Western governments and their media propaganda outlets assert the nonsense narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. The Western propaganda system – whose names include household brands like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, CNN, DW, and France 24, and so on – completely whitewashes the preceding eight years to the war erupting.
Putin reiterated the claim this week in an annual state-of-the-union type speech when he said “the West started the war”. The Russian leader was predictably vilified in the West for saying such. But the facts of history are on Putin’s side.
American scholar Professor John Mearsheimer is one of several eminent voices who confirm that the war in Ukraine was presaged by NATO and NATO’s relentless expansion toward Russia over many years. Ukraine was but the tip of the spear pointed at Russia.
Other sources on the ground in the Donbass region – formerly of Ukraine – also confirm that the NATO-backed Kiev regime was escalating its aggression during February last year before Russia’s military intervention. This would account for why American President Joe Biden was confidently predicting at the beginning of last year that Russian forces would “invade” Ukraine. The American paymasters of the Kiev regime knew that Russia would be compelled to intervene in order to forestall an incipient deadly assault on the Russian-speaking population inside the then-Ukrainian border.
The Donbass region has since seceded from Ukraine in referenda held last year and joined the Russian Federation following the footsteps of the Crimean Peninsula. Western media/propaganda outlets talk about Russia “annexing” the Donbass and Crimea, ignoring the referenda verified by international observers. But then the same Western media refuse to report on how the U.S. in an act of international terrorism blew up the Nord Stream pipelines five months ago. Thus, say no more about their craven credulity.
Lamentably, the hostilities in Ukraine have been exacerbated and unnecessarily prolonged because of the massive flow of American and NATO weapons into that country. At least $100 billion of armaments has been pumped into the regime whose foot soldiers model themselves on Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazi Third Reich in World War II. This is while Western populations suffer record levels of poverty and austerity imposed by callous elitist rulers.
Just this week, the Biden administration pledged another $2 billion in military aid to the Kiev regime, including the resupply of HIMARS long-range rockets. The sophisticated U.S.-supplied artillery is being used to target and kill civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions which are now part of the Russian Federation. Reliable information shows that the HIMARS artillery units are being operated by NATO mercenaries, not Ukrainian troops.
The grave implication is that the United States and NATO are at war against Russia. This is no longer a proxy war of indirect support. The visit to Kiev this week by President Biden and the ludicrous talk about “defending world democracy” against “Russian aggression” clearly demonstrates that Washington is commanding the conflict and its dangerous charade of hoodwinking the world.
Russia’s stated aims of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” the Kiev regime are far from met – yet. The aforementioned would-be offensive by the NATO-backed regime against the Donbass region in February last year was thwarted by Russia’s intervention and countless lives were no doubt spared. Nevertheless, the truth is that the people in the newly constituted parts of Russia are continuing to live under deadly conditions imposed by the NATO axis. Just this week, several civilians in Petrovsky near Donetsk City, including ambulance workers, were killed by NATO-backed shelling.
The war in Ukraine has escalated into an existential one that Russia cannot afford to lose. Likewise, the investment of political and financial capital by Washington and its imperialist allies is such that they also face an existential challenge whereby they cannot back down without losing fatal prestige.
There is barely any diplomatic or political effort to find a peaceful solution. China this week unveiled a 12-point peace plan to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, but the plan was quickly dismissed or undermined by the U.S. and European leaders. The ultimate problem is Washington and its imperialist minions are seeking a zero-sum hegemonic result, one where Russia is defeated, which will, in turn, pave the way for bigger ambitions of confronting China. Already, the American imperialists are well on their way to reinforcing the military encirclement of China.
The war in Ukraine is really a manifestation of underlying historical forces. The supposed end of the Cold War in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to subsequent decades of unbridled American military lawlessness and wars of impunity. Arguably, one can go further back and contend that the United States and its imperialist gang of powers are the inheritors of the Third Reich’s task to conquer Russia’s vast landmass. Western capitalist powers backed the rise of the Third Reich, and only for a brief period expediently switched sides to defeat Nazi Germany in 1945 because Hitler had gone rogue, only for the Western powers to quickly resume the historic objective of vanquishing Russia under the guise of the Cold War. The truth is the Cold War never ended. Because the American-led capitalist warmongering order never ended. (And there will never be peace under this order.)
Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, in an address to the Security Council this week cited figures that showed that the U.S. engaged in illegal foreign military interventions on over 250 occasions since the ostensible end of the Cold War some three decades ago.
For its part, China this week denounced the United States as the major instigator of world conflicts, claiming that 80 percent of foreign wars and hostilities were attributable to covert and overt American actions.
No nation has overseen the number of coups, regime-change operations, mass killings, and assassinations compared with the United States. Its ruling regime even assassinated one of its own presidents – John F Kennedy in 1963 – because he stood in the way of imperialist objectives.
In the make-believe fairytale world of Western governments and media (a deluded global minority, it must be noted), the war in Ukraine is laughably portrayed as being about “defending democracy and freedom”. The reality is Ukraine has become a money-splurging war racket in which Western war and banking industries are drooling at the profits facilitated by a corrupt cabal in Kiev propped up by NeoNazi paramilitaries and NATO mercenaries who are killing Russian civilians. A gruesome video emerged this week showing NATO-backed murderers in uniforms hanging a man and his pregnant wife in the Lugansk region, an atrocity confirmed by the state prosecutor for the region.
It is estimated that up to 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed over the past year, while the United Nations estimates that about 7,200 civilians have died. Russia claims to be trying to minimize civilian casualties.
The United States and its NATO accomplices are fighting an imperialist war “to the last Ukrainian” and bequeathing another failed state as they have done elsewhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen among others. This time, however, the American Empire is pushing a war against nuclear power, Russia, which is not going to back down. Two existential forces are incrementally going head-to-head. And most people realize that the United States and its capitalist impoverishing-war-system must be defeated if the world is to ever live in peace.
IV. Technological Hegemony—Monopoly and Suppression
V. Cultural Hegemony—Spreading False Narratives
Conclusion
Introduction
Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.
The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage “color revolutions,” instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order.”
This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples.
I. Political Hegemony — Throwing Its Weight Around
The United States has long been attempting to mold other countries and the world order with its own values and political system in the name of promoting democracy and human rights.
◆ Instances of U.S. interference in other countries’ internal affairs abound. In the name of “promoting democracy,” the United States practiced a “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America, instigated “color revolutions” in Eurasia, and orchestrated the “Arab Spring” in West Asia and North Africa, bringing chaos and disaster to many countries.
In 1823, the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine. While touting an “America for the Americans,” what it truly wanted was an “America for the United States.”
Since then, the policies of successive U.S. governments toward Latin America and the Caribbean Region have been riddled with political interference, military intervention and regime subversion. From its 61-year hostility toward and blockade of Cuba to its overthrow of the Allende government of Chile, U.S. policy on this region has been built on one maxim-those who submit will prosper; those who resist shall perish.
The year 2003 marked the beginning of a succession of “color revolutions” — the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. Department of State openly admitted playing a “central role” in these “regime changes.” The United States also interfered in the internal affairs of the Philippines, ousting President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 and President Joseph Estrada in 2001 through the so-called “People Power Revolutions.”
In January 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released his new book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love. He revealed in it that the United States had plotted to intervene in Venezuela. The plan was to force the Maduro government to reach an agreement with the opposition, deprive Venezuela of its ability to sell oil and gold for foreign exchange, exert high pressure on its economy, and influence the 2018 presidential election.
◆ The U.S. exercises double standards on international rules. Placing its self-interest first, the United States has walked away from international treaties and organizations, and put its domestic law above international law. In April 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would cut off all U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with the excuse that the organization “supports, or participates in the management of a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” The United States quit UNESCO twice in 1984 and 2017. In 2017, it announced leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2018, it announced its exit from the UN Human Rights Council, citing the organization’s “bias” against Israel and failure to protect human rights effectively. In 2019, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to seek unfettered development of advanced weapons. In 2020, it announced pulling out of the Treaty on Open Skies.
The United States has also been a stumbling block to biological arms control by opposing negotiations on a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and impeding international verification of countries’ activities relating to biological weapons. As the only country in possession of a chemical weapons stockpile, the United States has repeatedly delayed the destruction of chemical weapons and remained reluctant in fulfilling its obligations. It has become the biggest obstacle to realizing “a world free of chemical weapons.”
◆ The United States is piecing together small blocs through its alliance system. It has been forcing an “Indo-Pacific Strategy” onto the Asia-Pacific region, assembling exclusive clubs like the Five Eyes, the Quad and AUKUS, and forcing regional countries to take sides. Such practices are essentially meant to create division in the region, stoke confrontation and undermine peace.
◆ The U.S. arbitrarily passes judgment on democracy in other countries, and fabricates a false narrative of “democracy versus authoritarianism” to incite estrangement, division, rivalry and confrontation. In December 2021, the United States hosted the first “Summit for Democracy,” which drew criticism and opposition from many countries for making a mockery of the spirit of democracy and dividing the world. In March 2023, the United States will host another “Summit for Democracy,” which remains unwelcome and will again find no support.
II. Military Hegemony — Wanton Use of Force
The history of the United States is characterized by violence and expansion. Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii. After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives. In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined. The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.
According to the book America Invades: How We’ve Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth, the United States has fought or been militarily involved with almost all the 190-odd countries recognized by the United Nations with only three exceptions. The three countries were “spared” because the United States did not find them on the map.
◆ As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world. According to a Tufts University report, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A new Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776-2019,” the United States undertook nearly 400 military interventions globally between those years, 34 percent of which were in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific, 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13 percent in Europe. Currently, its military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise.
Alex Lo, a South China Morning Post columnist, pointed out that the United States has rarely distinguished between diplomacy and war since its founding. It overthrew democratically elected governments in many developing countries in the 20th century and immediately replaced them with pro-American puppet regimes. Today, in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, the United States is repeating its old tactics of waging proxy, low-intensity, and drone wars.
◆ U.S. military hegemony has caused humanitarian tragedies. Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions. The 2003 Iraq War resulted in some 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, including over 16,000 directly killed by the U.S. military, and left more than a million homeless.
The United States has created 37 million refugees around the world. Since 2012, the number of Syrian refugees alone has increased tenfold. Between 2016 and 2019, 33,584 civilian deaths were documented in the Syrian fightings, including 3,833 killed by U.S.-led coalition bombings, half of them women and children. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reported on 9 November 2018 that the air strikes launched by U.S. forces on Raqqa alone killed 1,600 Syrian civilians.
The two-decades-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country. A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to the September 11 attacks were killed in U.S. military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced. The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution. After the “Kabul debacle” in 2021, the United States announced that it would freeze some 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank, a move considered as “pure looting.”
In September 2022, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu commented at a rally that the United States has waged a proxy war in Syria, turned Afghanistan into an opium field and heroin factory, thrown Pakistan into turmoil, and left Libya in incessant civil unrest. The United States does whatever it takes to rob and enslave the people of any country with underground resources.
The United States has also adopted appalling methods in war. During the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, the United States used massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons as well as cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium bombs, causing enormous damage on civilian facilities, countless civilian casualties and lasting environmental pollution.
III. Economic Hegemony — Looting and Exploitation
After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centered around the U.S. dollar. In addition, the United States has also established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules and arrangements of international organizations including “approval by 85 percent majority,” and its domestic trade laws and regulations. By taking advantage of the dollar’s status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting “seigniorage” from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America’s political and economic strategy.
◆ The United States exploits the world’s wealth with the help of “seigniorage.” It costs only about 17 cents to produce a 100 dollar bill, but other countries had to pony up 100 dollar of actual goods in order to obtain one. It was pointed out more than half a century ago, that the United States enjoyed exorbitant privilege and deficit without tears created by its dollar, and used the worthless paper note to plunder the resources and factories of other nations.
◆ The hegemony of U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hike, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies such as the Euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon’s secretary of the treasury John Connally once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, that “the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem.”
◆ With its control over international economic and financial organizations, the United States imposes additional conditions to their assistance to other countries. In order to reduce obstacles to U.S. capital inflow and speculation, the recipient countries are required to advance financial liberalization and open up financial markets so that their economic policies would fall in line with America’s strategy. According to the Review of International Political Economy, along with the 1,550 debt relief programs extended by the IMF to its 131 member countries from 1985 to 2014, as many as 55,465 additional political conditions had been attached.
◆ The United States willfully suppresses its opponents with economic coercion. In the 1980s, to eliminate the economic threat posed by Japan, and to control and use the latter in service of America’s strategic goal of confronting the Soviet Union and dominating the world, the United States leveraged its hegemonic financial power against Japan, and concluded the Plaza Accord. As a result, Yen was pushed up, and Japan was pressed to open up its financial market and reform its financial system. The Plaza Accord dealt a heavy blow to the growth momentum of the Japanese economy, leaving Japan to what was later called “three lost decades.”
◆ America’s economic and financial hegemony has become a geopolitical weapon. Doubling down on unilateral sanctions and “long-arm jurisdiction,” the United States has enacted such domestic laws as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and introduced a series of executive orders to sanction specific countries, organizations or individuals. Statistics show that U.S. sanctions against foreign entities increased by 933 percent from 2000 to 2021. The Trump administration alone has imposed more than 3,900 sanctions, which means three sanctions per day. So far, the United States had or has imposed economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries across the world, including Cuba, China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela, affecting nearly half of the world’s population. “The United States of America” has turned itself into “the United States of Sanctions.” And “long-arm jurisdiction” has been reduced to nothing but a tool for the United States to use its means of state power to suppress economic competitors and interfere in normal international business. This is a serious departure from the principles of liberal market economy that the United States has long boasted.
IV. Technological Hegemony — Monopoly and Suppression
The United States seeks to deter other countries’ scientific, technological and economic development by wielding monopoly power, suppression measures and technology restrictions in high-tech fields.
◆ The United States monopolizes intellectual property in the name of protection. Taking advantage of the weak position of other countries, especially developing ones, on intellectual property rights and the institutional vacancy in relevant fields, the United States reaps excessive profits through monopoly. In 1994, the United States pushed forward the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), forcing the Americanized process and standards in intellectual property protection in an attempt to solidify its monopoly on technology.
In the 1980s, to contain the development of Japan’s semiconductor industry, the United States launched the “301” investigation, built bargaining power in bilateral negotiations through multilateral agreements, threatened to label Japan as conducting unfair trade, and imposed retaliatory tariffs, forcing Japan to sign the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement. As a result, Japanese semiconductor enterprises were almost completely driven out of global competition, and their market share dropped from 50 percent to 10 percent. Meanwhile, with the support of the U.S. government, a large number of U.S. semiconductor enterprises took the opportunity and grabbed larger market share.
◆ The United States politicizes, weaponizes technological issues and uses them as ideological tools. Overstretching the concept of national security, the United States mobilized state power to suppress and sanction Chinese company Huawei, restricted the entry of Huawei products into the U.S. market, cut off its supply of chips and operating systems, and coerced other countries to ban Huawei from undertaking local 5G network construction. It even talked Canada into unwarrantedly detaining Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou for nearly three years.
The United States has fabricated a slew of excuses to clamp down on China’s high-tech enterprises with global competitiveness, and has put more than 1,000 Chinese enterprises on sanction lists. In addition, the United States has also imposed controls on biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other high-end technologies, reinforced export restrictions, tightened investment screening, suppressed Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, and lobbied the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of chips and related equipment or technology to China.
The United States has also practiced double standards in its policy on China-related technological professionals. To sideline and suppress Chinese researchers, since June 2018, visa validity has been shortened for Chinese students majoring in certain high-tech-related disciplines, repeated cases have occurred where Chinese scholars and students going to the United States for exchange programs and study were unjustifiably denied and harassed, and large-scale investigation on Chinese scholars working in the United States was carried out.
◆ The United States solidifies its technological monopoly in the name of protecting democracy. By building small blocs on technology such as the “chips alliance” and “clean network,” the United States has put “democracy” and “human rights” labels on high-technology, and turned technological issues into political and ideological issues, so as to fabricate excuses for its technological blockade against other countries. In May 2019, the United States enlisted 32 countries to the Prague 5G Security Conference in the Czech Republic and issued the Prague Proposal in an attempt to exclude China’s 5G products. In April 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the “5G clean path,” a plan designed to build technological alliance in the 5G field with partners bonded by their shared ideology on democracy and the need to protect “cyber security.” The measures, in essence, are the U.S. attempts to maintain its technological hegemony through technological alliances.
◆ The United States abuses its technological hegemony by carrying out cyber attacks and eavesdropping. The United States has long been notorious as an “empire of hackers,” blamed for its rampant acts of cyber theft around the world. It has all kinds of means to enforce pervasive cyber attacks and surveillance, including using analog base station signals to access mobile phones for data theft, manipulating mobile apps, infiltrating cloud servers, and stealing through undersea cables. The list goes on.
U.S. surveillance is indiscriminate. All can be targets of its surveillance, be they rivals or allies, even leaders of allied countries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several French Presidents. Cyber surveillance and attacks launched by the United States such as “Prism,” “Dirtbox,” “Irritant Horn” and “Telescreen Operation” are all proof that the United States is closely monitoring its allies and partners. Such eavesdropping on allies and partners has already caused worldwide outrage. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a website that has exposed U.S. surveillance programs, said that “do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honor or respect. There is only one rule: there are no rules.”
V. Cultural Hegemony — Spreading False Narratives
The global expansion of American culture is an important part of its external strategy. The United States has often used cultural tools to strengthen and maintain its hegemony in the world.
◆ The United States embeds American values in its products such as movies. American values and lifestyle are a tied product to its movies and TV shows, publications, media content, and programs by the government-funded non-profit cultural institutions. It thus shapes a cultural and public opinion space in which American culture reigns and maintains cultural hegemony. In his article The Americanization of the World, John Yemma, an American scholar, exposed the real weapons in U.S. cultural expansion: the Hollywood, the image design factories on Madison Avenue and the production lines of Mattel Company and Coca-Cola.
There are various vehicles the United States uses to keep its cultural hegemony. American movies are the most used; they now occupy more than 70 percent of the world’s market share. The United States skilfully exploits its cultural diversity to appeal to various ethnicities. When Hollywood movies descend on the world, they scream the American values tied to them.
◆ American cultural hegemony not only shows itself in “direct intervention,” but also in “media infiltration” and as “a trumpet for the world.” U.S.-dominated Western media has a particularly important role in shaping global public opinion in favor of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.
The U.S. government strictly censors all social media companies and demands their obedience. Twitter CEO Elon Musk admitted on 27 December 2022 that all social media platforms work with the U.S. government to censor content, reported Fox Business Network. Public opinion in the United States is subject to government intervention to restrict all unfavorable remarks. Google often makes pages disappear.
U.S. Department of Defense manipulates social media. In December 2022, The Intercept, an independent U.S. investigative website, revealed that in July 2017, U.S. Central Command official Nathaniel Kahler instructed Twitter’s public policy team to augment the presence of 52 Arabic-language accounts on a list he sent, six of which were to be given priority. One of the six was dedicated to justifying U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, such as by claiming that the attacks were precise and killed only terrorists, not civilians. Following Kahler’s directive, Twitter put those Arabic-language accounts on a “white list” to amplify certain messages.
◆The United States practices double standards on the freedom of the press. It brutally suppresses and silences media of other countries by various means. The United States and Europe bar mainstream Russian media such as Russia Today and the Sputnik from their countries. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube openly restrict official accounts of Russia. Netflix, Apple and Google have removed Russian channels and applications from their services and app stores. Unprecedented draconian censorship is imposed on Russia-related contents.
◆The United States abuses its cultural hegemony to instigate “peaceful evolution” in socialist countries. It sets up news media and cultural outfits targeting socialist countries. It pours staggering amounts of public funds into radio and TV networks to support their ideological infiltration, and these mouthpieces bombard socialist countries in dozens of languages with inflammatory propaganda day and night.
The United States uses misinformation as a spear to attack other countries, and has built an industrial chain around it: there are groups and individuals making up stories, and peddling them worldwide to mislead public opinion with the support of nearly limitless financial resources.
Conclusion
While a just cause wins its champion wide support, an unjust one condemns its pursuer to be an outcast. The hegemonic, domineering, and bullying practices of using strength to intimidate the weak, taking from others by force and subterfuge, and playing zero-sum games are exerting grave harm. The historical trends of peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit are unstoppable. The United States has been overriding truth with its power and trampling justice to serve self-interest. These unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn growing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.
Countries need to respect each other and treat each other as equals. Big countries should behave in a manner befitting their status and take the lead in pursuing a new model of state-to-state relations featuring dialogue and partnership, not confrontation or alliance. China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The United States must conduct serious soul-searching. It must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.
The reckless warmongering ambitions of the Western powers know no bounds. Just as Washington and its imperial minions in the NATO axis are escalating the war in Ukraine against Russia with the utmost deranged folly, the Western rulers are also pushing ahead to bait China with provocations and threats. The psychopathic behavior of the collective Western so-called leaders shows beyond doubt that the Ukraine conflict is but one battlefield in a bigger global confrontation.
This week saw the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on a tour of East Asia where he boasted about coordinating nuclear forces with South Korea and Japan in a provocative and wanton show of strength towards China (under the guise of standing up to North Korea). Austin repeated baseless propaganda claims accusing China of threatening security in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. The audacious inversion of reality distorts the fact that it is the United States and its allies who are militarizing the region with warships and missiles. Just this week, the U.S. announced the opening of four new military bases in the Philippines for the explicit purpose of launching a future war on China.
In tandem with the Pentagon chief, the NATO alliance’s civilian head Jens Stoltenberg was also touring East Asia where he warned that Russia and China posed a threat to international peace and security. Stoltenberg claimed that if Russia was not defeated in Ukraine then China would be the next problem. He urged South Korea and Japan to work with NATO to confront Russia and China.
In an address in Tokyo, Stoltenberg held forth: “What is happening in Europe today could happen in East Asia tomorrow. China is not NATO’s adversary [sic]. But its growing assertiveness and its coercive policies have consequences. For your security in the Indo-Pacific and ours in the Euro-Atlantic. We must work together to address them. Beijing is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, without any transparency. It is attempting to assert control over the South China Sea, and threatening Taiwan.”
The same message was delivered this week to the Atlantic Council in Washington by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson who is a notorious liar and waffler who claimed preposterously in a BBC documentary aired this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intimidated him with assassination, called for more weapons supply to Ukraine in order to decisively defeat Russia because otherwise, China will be an additional threat. According to Johnson, who was forced to step down last summer as prime minister owing to his incorrigible lying and intrigues in Downing Street, Chinese President Xi Jinping is watching Ukraine closely with a view to invading Taiwan.
This week thus saw an extraordinary public bracketing of Russia and China as a common enemy that, Western powers assert, needs to be confronted militarily by the United States and its NATO minions. Defeating Russia is a prelude to defeating China, according to the Western powers.
The madcap drive for war among Western imperialists has taken on a global dimension. U.S. military commanders are publicly warning that a war with China may be only two years away, and this is while the NATO powers are currently waging a dangerously explosive war against Russia in Ukraine.
This incredible outbreak of psychopathy among American and European elites is directly related to at least two historic developments. Firstly, there is a systemic collapse in the Western capitalist economies. Widespread endemic poverty and mounting public unrest are severely challenging the conventional authority of Western governments which are locked in failed dead-end policies. This empirical desperation for the ruling elite to avoid social meltdown and revolution – “peering down the abyss” as our columnist Alistair Crooke elaborates this week – is manifesting in the age-old recourse to militarism and war as a way to resolve deep-seated and insoluble contradictions in the capitalist system.
Secondly, the Western powers are hellbent on preventing the emergence of a multipolar international order that supplants their erstwhile global dominance. In an interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week Pepe Escobar presented a big-picture analysis of why the U.S. and its associated cabal of Western rulers are pushing the war in Ukraine against Russia. It is all about trying to shore up a failing U.S.-led unipolar world order, one that is bankrupt and corrupted from decades of criminal imperialist warmongering. Russia, China and other nations of the Global South subscribing to an emerging multipolar order based on international law, equality, cooperation and common security is anathema to the U.S. supremacist view of the world.
This is what’s really at stake in the year-old military conflict in Ukraine. This is not merely an isolated war to do with “defending democracy and freedom” of Ukraine, as the Western media absurdly confabulate. The Nazi regime in Kiev was built up deliberately since the CIA-backed coup in 2014 with the strategic objective of eventually confronting Russia after eight years of low-intensity aggression against the Donbass and Crimea.
However, after Russia, if it were to be defeated, China is the next target in a geo-strategic move by the Western powers to gain hegemonic control over the Eurasian hemisphere. The U.S. imperial and NATO mouthpieces are making the stakes clearer than ever with their own self-indicting arrogant words.
The bankrupt capitalist West can only but drool at the prospects of conquering Russia’s vast natural wealth and gaining neocolonial control of China in another would-be century of shame. Eurasia is the key to global dominance, as Western imperial planners have long noted.
It seems appropriate too that this week saw the 80th anniversary of the historic Soviet victory at Stalingrad over the Nazi Third Reich. That turning-point victory in February 1943 led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and its criminal imperialist ambitions. If that heroic battle had not been won, the history of the world would have followed a very different path.
Likewise today in Ukraine there is another historic battle going on, one whose outcome threatens the world with expanded global war and perhaps even nuclear catastrophe if the warmongering NATO imperialist machine is not defeated. Washington’s Reich Syndrome (also known as “exceptional narcissism”) which has reigned since the end of World War II and which has subjected the world to endless wars and relentless financial looting must be finally extirpated.
This year is promising to be a most consequential watershed in world history.
KIEV, UKRAINE (THE GRAYZONE) — The demise of FTX, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume in 2022, and the second-largest by holdings, has sent a wave of chaos through global financial markets.
As the turbulence grows, the government of Ukraine is conducting an ongoing cleanup and whitewashing operation to rid any and all references to a high-level cryptocurrency fundraising arrangement it struck with FTX from the web. Eerily, it seems to have commenced just days before the scandal erupted.
Online records unearthed by The Grayzone claim tens of millions were raised by FTX for the Ukrainian government, and put to a variety of belligerent uses. But with the company now exposed as a Potemkin village lacking underlying assets, and major question marks hanging over whether its operations were from day one fraudulent top to bottom, where does that leave the supposedly successful donation scheme? Were those sums truly raised, and if so, to what purposes were they actually put?
FTX’s destruction resulted from a mass sell-off of the company’s native bitcoin token, FTT, by the rival exchange, Binance. Its value plummeted, prompting a three-day “run” on billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency, which in turn created – or exposed – a “liquidity crisis” within FTX, as it did not have the available assets required to redeem client withdrawals. FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11th.
FTX founder and top Democrat Party donor Sam Bankman-Fried now faces criminal investigations in the Bahamas, where the exchange was headquartered, and calls for official investigations into the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry are reverberating across the globe.
The sudden death of FTX has been compared to the 2008 disintegration of Lehman Brothers that precipitated the financial crisis.
Massive customer holdings have apparently gone missing thanks to a secret “back door” in the FTX bookkeeping system that allowed Bankman-Fried to make changes to the company’s financial records without any accountability. This connivance may have been used to hide at least $10 billion in client funds Bankman-Fried transferred from exchange to another company he founded, digital asset trader Alameda Research.
While mainstream media pores over the details of Bankman-Fried’s gargantuan crypto scam, not one single major outlet has investigated or even acknowledged FTX’s relationship with the government of Ukraine.
Were client holdings unaccountably and illegally funneled into the West’s proxy war? Or did the supposed aid FTX sent to Kiev find its way into the hands of Ukrainian scammers, corrupt warlords and illicit actors?
The corporate media’s failure to explore these questions appears all the more perverse given Bankman-Fried’s flamboyant promotion of his intimate financial relationship with the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
FTX PLEDGES TO “TURN BITCOIN INTO BULLETS, BANDAGES AND OTHER WAR MATERIEL” FOR UKRAINE
The partnership between FTX and the Ukrainian government was first publicized on March 14th when the leading cryptocurrency website CoinDesk announced Kiev had launched a dedicated webpage for cryptocurrency donations dubbed Aid for Ukraine.
Under its auspices, FTX pledged to “convert crypto contributions to Ukraine’s war effort into fiat for deposit” at the National Bank of Kiev, allowing the embattled government to “turn bitcoin into bullets, bandages and other war materiel.” CoinDesk stated the initiative “deepens an unprecedented tie-up between public and private sector forces in crypto.”
Oleksandr Bornyakov, an official at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, hinted to CoinDesk about an “upcoming NFT collection” auction to “give the next boost to the crypto fundraising process.”
(Bornyakov’s Ministry of Digital Transformation played a key role in the successful, Zelensky-led campaign to cancel The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate’s appearance at Web Summit, a major international gathering of the tech industry in Lisbon, Portugal).
In a press release accompanying the announcement of the FTX partnership with Ukraine, Bankman-Fried explained that, “at the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could.” He promised that the arrangement provided “the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most.”
KIEV DISAPPEARS AID FOR UKRAINE SITE DAYS BEFORE FTX SCANDAL GOES PUBLIC
The Aid for Ukraine webpage has now been deleted, but can still be accessed via the Internet Archive. Until very recently, it encouraged visitors to “help Ukraine with crypto” and pleaded, “don’t leave us alone with the enemy.”
The site featured promotional quotes from an assortment of Ukrainian government officials and bitcoin bros – among them, FTX’s founder.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, thanked “the crypto community” for funding the purchase of helmets, bulletproof vests, and night vision devices. For his part, Bankman-Fried declared himself “incredibly excited and humbled” to “support crypto donations to Ukraine.”
The last available Internet Archive capture of Aid for Ukraine” took place on the afternoon of October 26th. Throughout the webpage’s existence, the Internet Archive captured multiple snapshots of it weekly. This clearly indicates the page was purged by Kiev in late October, several days before the FTX crisis initially broke out.
Once it was deleted, the Ukrainian government created a standalone websiteon November 1st to promote the endeavor. The page was identical, and quotes from Bankman-Fried, and references to FTX’s involvement and its logo, remained in place until the morning of November 15th.
Was the original webpage’s dumping and erasure, and the shift to a totally new interface, at that time merely a spooky coincidence, or were the Ukrainians warned of what was coming? What did Kiev know, and when did it know it?
BANKMAN-FRIED CHANNELED MILLIONS TO BIDEN THROUGH “STEALTH” PAC
Though FTX has been accused of serving as a money laundering vehicle for the US Democratic Party, concrete evidence supporting this claim has yet to materialize. But given Bankman-Fried’s background as one of the most prolific donors to the Democrats, and the role he played as a nexus between party power-brokers and the cryptocurrency sphere, the allegations are understandable.
Bankman-Fried is the son of Stanford law professor Barbara Friedman, founder of a shadowy Super PAC called Mind the Gap which quietly channeled millions to Democratic party candidates, primarily from nameless Silicon Valley investors.
The organization has no website or social media footprint, and its founders do not advertise their involvement publicly. Chosen through complex data analysis, beneficiaries of the Super PAC often have no idea themselves who or what has donated to their campaigns.
“The raison d’être is stealth,” an individual “with ties to the organization” told Vox back in 2020.
Bankman-Fried establishment of FTX in April 2019 – the same month Joe Biden announced his 2020 Presidential run – has added to the intrigue surrounding the scandal. Once vast sums started flowing into and through the FTX exchange, its founder channeled profits into Biden’s campaign coffers. Oddly, Bankman-Fried had no prior history of political giving.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Bankman-Fried gifted over $5 million to Biden and groups supporting him. This reportedly helped fuel a potentially decisive “nine-figure, eleventh-hour blitz of TV advertising” targeting swing states, and made the crypto bro the second-largest donor to the president, right behind Michael Bloomberg.
Bankman-Fried claimed this wellspring of generosity was “motivated less by specific issues than by the Biden team’s ‘generic stability and decision-making process.’” Such an apparent lack of enthusiasm for the President stands at odds with the staggering sums he has pumped into Democratic party coffers ever since.
In 2022 alone, Bankman-Fried lavished almost $40 million on Democratic candidates, campaigns, and PACs. The giving spree made him the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes, behind liberal venture capitalist George Soros.
More recently, Bankman-Fried pledged to donate a staggering $1 billion between this year and 2024 to ensure a Democratic victory in the next presidential vote. On October 14th, however, he completely backtracked, branding the investment a “dumb” move. Something scandalous was brewing behind the scenes.
One week later, the Texas State Securities Board announced it was investigating FTX on suspicion of selling unregistered securities. The development went largely unnoticed by the media. To the extent it generated any interest at all, it was framed as just one of several examples of financial authorities scrutinizing crypto players.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE $60 MILLION RAISED BY AID FOR UKRAINE?
If FTX was indeed laundering funds for the proxy war in Ukraine, the slightest indication that regulators were investigating its operations would have triggered alarm bells throughout Washington – and by extension, Kiev. This may be why the Ukrainian government switched the Aid for Ukraine webpage with a dedicated website, and scrubbed the original entirely from the internet just days after the announcement.
Also curious are the Internet Archive captures of the Aid for Ukraine website that show records of funds purportedly flowing to Kiev via Bitcoin had not been updated since July. At the time, the webpage reported that over $60 million had been raised by the “community.” This figure is reflected on the updated standalone Aid for Ukraine fundraising site.
A breakdown of spending on the new Aid for Ukraine website states Kiev had spent a total of $54,573,622 in cryptocurrency donations by July 7th on a wide variety of equipment, vehicles, drones, “lethal equipment” and other resources. One of the biggest single expenditures was $5,250,519 on a “worldwide anti-war media campaign,” the details of which would only “be published after our victory” due to “security reasons.”
Ukrainian government officials and private sector actors involved in the operation of Aid for Ukraine have scoffed at suggestions of impropriety regarding its use, but have only raised further questions with their denials.
Oleksandr Bornyakov of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation declared that Aid for Ukraine simply used FTX to “convert donations into fiat in March.” The CEO of Everstake, the “validator” company that in theory guaranteed crypto funds donated via Aid for Ukraine reached Kiev’s Ministry of Defense, also thanked “every crypto holder for donating…in those early day [sic], when every cent and every minute was crucial.”
Taken in tandem, these comments suggest Aid for Ukraine was set up purely to receive donations in the initial stages of the war, and the $60 million figure represents sums received and converted in the weeks immediately following the launch of the initiative. This interpretation is reinforced by an Everstake staffer’s presentation at a cryptocurrency conference at Web Summit on November 1st, on the subject of “raising [over] $60m in crypto for Ukraine.”
Our Segment Lead @jane_everstake is getting ready to speak at a #FILLisbon panel about @_AidForUkraine and raising >$60m in crypto for Ukraine. The panel kicks off in just 15 min, at 11.30 Lisbon time. Don’t miss it if you’re there! pic.twitter.com/wTnC9Qfqvx
But an Internet Archive capture of Aid for Ukraine on April 1st adds to the confusion, showing that two-and-a-half-weeks after the initiative launched, the webpage was updated to claim “over $70 million” had been raised from crypto donors. This was revised down to “over $60 million” five days later.
More strangely, Aid for Ukraine records show that from the time of the initiative’s launch to April 14th, a total of $45,103,538 was spent. This means just $9,470,084 was spent between April 14 and July 7th, a period in which the war developed into a “bloody war of attrition” according to The Guardian.
This leaves a gap of at least $5.5 million in the money Aid for Ukraine claimed to have raised in its initial weeks, and the funds it says it distributed in Ukraine.
The disparity was confirmed in a tweet by the official Aid for Ukraine Twitter account, posted on the evening of November 15th, which stated that “out of $60 million received, $54 million have already been spent on Ukraine’s humanitarian and military needs.”
8/11 The ongoing FTX crisis does not affect the operation of Aid For Ukraine. Out of $60 million received, $54 million have already been spent on Ukraine’s humanitarian and military needs. The report’s available on Aid For Ukraine’s official website.https://t.co/tCTmJ3Xwsb
This implies that no further funds of any size were received after early April, and the total has remained static ever since, despite the resource being open for donations. Which would be highly unusual.
The government of Ukraine, FTX, and Everstake all now have serious questions to answer. Namely, why the funds purportedly raised appear to have decreased in a span of a few days, why no donations have been received since then on the Aid for Ukraine webpage or its new website, how much has been donated since the alleged initial influx, and where did the rest of the money go?
UKRAINE: A BLACK HOLE FOR WESTERN AID
Stories of potential financial impropriety by Ukrainian officials and the country’s military are invariably ignored or outright buried by the Western media. An August exposé by the Kyiv Independent documented wide-ranging abuses by the leadership of a wing of the International Legion, including sexual harassment, looting, threatening soldiers at gunpoint and sending them unprepared on reckless missions. Though the Kyiv Independent often influences Western media’s coverage of the Ukraine conflict, this story was completely ignored in mainstream quarters.
That same month, CBS broadcast an investigative feature revealing that only 30 percent of Western arm shipments to Ukraine ever reach the frontline. Due to intense backlash from the Pentagon and other powerful sources, CBS temporarily pulled its own documentary and an accompanying promotional trailer and article from the web. The feature has since been “updated” to claim that “the situation has significantly improved” since filming, and “a much larger quantity now gets where it’s supposed to go.”
When it comes to Ukraine, Democrats at the highest levels are also immensely skilled at burying embarrassing stories. In December 2015, Joe Biden coerced Kiev’s then-leader Petro Poroshenko into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin as a condition for the US underwriting a $1 billion IMF loan to Ukraine.
“I’m going to be leaving here in six hours. If [Shokin] is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden threatened.
With Shokin’s firing, the experienced lawyer’s ongoing probe into the energy giant Burisma ended as well. Which meant that Burisma’s most famous board member, Hunter Biden, the son of then-US Vice President’s son, eluded official scrutiny.
Now, a politically connected crypto-billionaire who used a secret financial “back door” to fleece customers of ungodly sums of money has become the latest character in the saga of shady US aid to Ukraine. And though the collapse of his FTX firm is front page news, mainstream outlets are studiously avoiding the Ukraine angle.
US President Donald Trump’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ was meant to represent a finality of sorts, an event reminiscent of Francis Fukuyama’s premature declaration of the ‘End of History’ and the uncontested supremacy of western capitalism. In effect, it was a declaration that ‘we’ – the US, Israel and a few allies – have won, and ‘you’, isolated and marginalized Palestinians, lost.
The same way Fukuyama failed to consider the unceasing evolution of history, the US and Israeli governments also failed to understand that the Middle East, in fact, the world, is not governed by Israeli expectations and American diktats.
The above is a verifiable assertion. On October 17, the Australian government announced that it is revoking its 2018 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Expectedly, the new decision, officially made by Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was strongly criticized by Israel, celebrated by Palestinians and welcomed by Arab countries who praised the responsible diplomacy of Canberra.
Any serious analysis of the Australian move, however, must not be confined to Australia’s own political shifts but must be extended to include the dramatic changes underway in Palestine, the Middle East and, indeed, the world.
For many years, but especially since the US invasion of Iraq as part of the politically-motivated ‘war on terror’, Washington perceived itself as the main, if not the only, power that is able to shape political outcomes in the Middle East. Yet, as its Iraq quagmire began destabilizing the entire region, with revolts, social upheavals and wars breaking out, Washington began losing its grip.
It was then rightly understood that, while the US may succeed in waging wars, as it did in Iraq and Libya, it is unable to restore even a small degree of peace and stability. Though Trump seemed disinterested in engaging in major military conflicts, he converted that energy to facilitate the rise of Israel as a regional power, which is incorporated into the Middle East’s political and economic grids through a process of political ‘normalization’, which is wholly delinked from the struggle in Palestine or the freedom of the Palestinians.
The Americans were so confident in their power to orchestrate such a major political transformation to the extent that Jared Kushner – Trump’s Middle East advisor and son-in-law – was revealed to have attempted to cancel the very status of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, an attempt that was met with a decisive Jordanian rejection.
Kushner’s arrogance reached the point that, in January 2020, he declared that his father-in-law’s plan was such a “great deal” which, if rejected by Palestinians, “they’re going to screw up another opportunity, like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.”
All of this hubris was joined with many American concessions to Israel, whereby Washington virtually fulfilled all Israeli wishes. The relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem was merely the icing on the cake of a much larger political scheme that included the financial boycott of Palestinians, the cancellation of funds that benefited Palestinian refugees, the recognition of the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel and the support of Tel Aviv’s decision to annex much of the occupied West Bank.
The then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies had hoped that, as soon as Washington carried out such moves, many other countries would follow, and that, in no time, Palestinians would find themselves friendless, broke and irrelevant.
This was hardly the case, and what started with a bang ended with a whimper. Though the Biden Administration still refuses to commit to any new ‘peace process’, it has largely avoided engaging in Trump’s provocative politics. Not just that, the Palestinians are anything but isolated, and Arab countries remain united, at least officially, in the centrality of Palestine to their collective political priorities.
In April 2021, Washington restored funding to the Palestinians, including money allocated to the UN refugees’ agency, UNRWA. It did not do so for charitable reasons, of course, but because it wanted to ensure the allegiance of the Palestinian Authority, and to remain a relevant political party in the region. Even then, the PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, still declared, during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan on October 12, that “we (Palestinians) don’t trust America”.
Moreover, the annexation scheme, at least officially, did not go through. The rejection of any Israeli steps that could change the legal status of the occupied Palestinian territories proved unpopular with most UN members, including most of Israel’s western allies.
Australia remained the exception, but not for long. Unsurprisingly, Canberra’s reversal of its earlier decision regarding the status of Jerusalem earned it much criticism in Tel Aviv. Four years following its initial policy shift, Australia shifted yet once more, as it found it more beneficial to realign itself with the position of most world capitals than to that of Washington and Tel Aviv.
Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ has failed simply because neither Washington nor Tel Aviv had enough political cards to shape a whole new reality in the Middle East. Most parties involved – Trump, Netanyahu, Scott Morrison in Australia, and a few others – were simply playing a political game linked to their own interests at home. Similarly, the currently embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss is now jumping on the bandwagon of relocating the British embassy to Jerusalem so that she may win the approval of pro-Israel politicians. The move further demonstrates her lack of political experience and, regardless of what Westminster decides to do next, it will unlikely greatly affect the political reality in Palestine and the Middle East.
In the final analysis, it has become clear that the ‘Deal of the Century’ was not an irreversible historical event, but an opportunistic and thoughtless political process that lacked a deep understanding of history and the political balances that continue to control the Middle East.
Another important lesson to be gleaned from all of this is that, as long as the Palestinian people continue to resist and fight for their freedom and as long as international solidarity continues to grow around them, the Palestinian cause will remain central to all Arabs and to all conscientious people around the world.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website iswww.ramzybaroud.net
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare
– Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’
Putin’s West is Satanic Speech
During the signing ceremony on the accession to the Russian Federation of the four new regions on September 30th president Vladimir Putin declared that a ‘revolutionary transformation of the world’ is underway and stated that there will be ‘no return to the old order’. As expected, his oration was largely ignored or distored by Western mainstream media:
“Our compatriots, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine who are part of our united people have seen with their own eyes what the ruling class of the so-called West have prepared for humanity as a whole. They have dropped their masks and shown what they are really made of.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West decided that the world and all of us would permanently accede to its dictates. In 1991, the West thought that Russia would never rise after such shocks and would fall to pieces on its own. This had almost happened. We remember the horrible 1990s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia remained standing, revived, grew stronger and occupied its rightful place in the world.”
Signing ceremony for the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions at the Grand Kremlin Palace’s St George Hall
“Meanwhile, the West continued to look for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia… to set our peoples against each other and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory and its natural wealth, resources and people who cannot and will not do someone else’s bidding.
Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through.
Do we want to have in Russia, ‘Parent number one, parent number two and Parent number three’ instead of Mother and Father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the idea that other genders exist besides Female and Male, and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.
Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge for us all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble the reverse of religion – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ preached in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruit ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation. New centers of power are emerging. They represent the majority of the international community. They are ready not only to declare their interests but also to protect them. They see in multipolarity an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means gaining genuine freedom, historical prospects, and the right to their own independent, creative and distinctive forms of development, to a harmonious process.
There are many like-minded people in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. An essentially emancipatory, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies. Its power will only grow with time. It is this force that will determine our future geopolitical reality.“
“The destruction of the Western hegemony is irreversible,“ Putin concluded.
JFK’s Forgotten ‘Peace For All Time Speech’
President John F. Kennedy, under the influence of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world was brought to the brink of annihilation, made an equally momentous speech at the American University on June 10, 1963:
“I have chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles – which can only destroy and never create – is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
…wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete. It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government – local, State, and National – to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within their authority…
All this is not unrelated to world peace. ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,’ the Scriptures tell us, ‘he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’ And is not peace… basically a matter of human rights – the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation…?
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough – more than enough – of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on – not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
“Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” – JFK in his 1961 Inaugural Address
Rise and Fall of a Hegemon
Kennedy’s speech was quickly relegated to the memory hole after his assassination only five months later with his successor Lyndon B. Johnson quickly ramping up the war in Vietnam, chosing to ignore painful French colonial lessons there a decade earlier as well as president Charles de Gaulle’s warning that “…you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire”. LBJ forged full steam ahead, using a false flag attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to commit a half a million U.S. troops to the jungles of Indochina.
An alleged North Vietnamese attack on the USS Madoxx was used as an excuse to ramp up the Vietnam war which ended up costing 58,220 American and over two million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian lives
Even though it was done under the banner of ‘defending democracy and freedom’, it nevertheless gave the lie to JFK’s assertion that the United States would never start a war.
Shock and Awe on full display in Baghdad, March 2003 at the start of the war to rid the world of Saddam’s non-existent WMD’s; when the kinetic phase of a war is completed it is replaced by an economic shock and awe, when the target country’s economy is plundered
Former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl concurs with Putin’s portrayal of the West’s exploitative colonial mindset:
“The era of the ‘Seven Sisters,’ a cartel of oil companies that divided up the oil market, came to an end (in the 1970’s). However, for US policymakers – at least, psychologically – this era still persists. ‘It’s our oil,’ is an expression I often hear uttered in Washington. Those voices were particularly loud during the illegal US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. To really understand the core of the conflict in Ukraine – where a proxy war rages – one must break down the confrontation thus: The US and its European allies, who represent and back the global financial sector, are essentially engaged in a battle against the world’s energy sector. “ Kneissl wrote for the The Cradle on October 13th.
“The conflict that the West calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… is not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia; it is a phase in the hybrid war that the West has been waging for decades against any country that chooses an economic path other than subordination to the United States. In its current phase, this war takes the form of a US-led NATO war over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn – one that can be sacrificed. This fact is hidden by wall-to-wall Western propaganda portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as either mad or a devil hell-bent on recreating the Soviet Union. This pre-empts any questions about why Putin might be doing this, about the rationale for Russian actions.
The United States, having sought without success to dominate the world, wages this war to stall its historic decline, the loss of what remains of its power. This decline has accelerated in recent decades as neoliberalism turned its capitalist economic system unproductive, financialised, predatory, speculative, and ecologically destructive, massively diminishing Washington’s already dubious attractions to its allies around the world.“
With an annual budget approaching a trillion dollars, the U.S. military is far removed from its Hollywood image of a ‘mean, lean fighting machine‘, and has turned into a bloated dinosaur mired in monumental corruption. This was confirmed by no less an auhority than the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, on September 10, 2001, revealed that Pentagon auditors found that 25% of the military budget could not be accounted for, and that $2.3 trillion were missing.
The very next day, however, the war on waste was overtaken by the ‘war on terror’ and everything was forgiven and forgotten. Business continued as usual.
The current decrepit state of the U.S. military is aply reflected in its dismal recruitment figures, with the army announcing on October 1st that – despite offering sign-up bonuses of up to $50,000 – it had still managed to miss its enlistment target by 25%.
The most likely causes: one in three Americans are overweight or otherwise unfit, the Covid ‘vaccine’ mandates, and lastly, Pentagon’s advocacy of LGBTQ/transgender ideology which has become the centerpiece of Biden regime’s ‘numerous accomplishments’ but which a priori eliminates potential conservative and religious-minded candidates who usually form the backbone of the military.
After obligatory inoculations recruits must undergo doctrinal inculcation emphasizing ‘equity and minority rights’ prior to being unleashed to sow death and destruction in defense of human rights around the globe
The New Normal: ‘Drag Queens’ are now in charge of teaching biology to kids, including that72 genders exist – according to polls, a third of Generation Z consider themselves ‘gender fluid’ – which is what Putin was referring to in his speech
Winner Takes All
“Ukraine’s Blitzkrieg Means That Russia Cannot Win The War,” runs a typical headline used by the mainstream media as it downplays Russia’s strategic success and amplifies the tactical setbacks in order to make it look like the war is turning into a quagmire for Putin.
This is something which geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar takes issue with: “ … in only 7 months, Russia annexed 120,000 km2 – or 22% of Ukrainian territory – that produces nearly 90% of GDP and has over 5 million citizens. Along the way, the allied forces basically destroyed the Ukrainian army, which they continue to do 24/7; billions of dollars of NATO equipment; accelerated the demise of most Western economies; and evaporated the notion of American hegemony…”
The U.S. military has shown itself incapable of beating a ragtag Taliban force in Afghanistan and does not stand a chance against Russia, as the military expert Scott Ritter confirmed in 2017:
“NATO would be totally outmatched in a conventional war with Russia… Today, NATO and American anti-armor weapons continue to play catch up to new innovations being fielded by the Russians. The Americans like to quantify the Russian Army as being ‘near peer’ in terms of its capabilities; the fact of the matter is that it is the U.S. and NATO armored forces that are ‘near peer’ to their Russian counterparts, and there are many more Russian tanks in Europe today than there are NATO and American.”
Instead of Russia running out of missiles and ammunition as is often claimed, it is the U.S. and NATO which have emptied out their warehouses and run out of weapons, as reported by CNBC: “In the U.S. weapons industry, the normal production level for artillery rounds for the 155mm howitzer – a long-range heavy artillery weapon currently used on the battlefields of Ukraine – is about 30,000 rounds per year in peacetime. The Ukrainian soldiers… go through that amount in roughly two weeks.” Pentagon is now looking for U.S. companies to build more shells, while new HIMARS systems promised to Ukraine won’t arrive for years.
The painful truth for NATO is that the decades-long offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage countries has left it with insufficient industrial capacity required to wage a protracted war against a ‘near-peer’ adversary.
All this is ignored by the Western media which, through sensationalistic headlines like “In Washington, Putin’s Nuclear Threats Stir Growing Alarm” and “Putin Prepared to Use Nuclear Weapons”, is creating the illusion that Russia is losing badly and will resort to anything to turn things around.
Former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus was thus interviewed by ABC News on October 2nd and stated how Russia is “desperate after a string of setbacks” and then promised that if it used nuclear weapons, the US would destroy the Russian military in Ukraine and sink its naval fleet.
What Petraeus – better known for having lost both ‘surges’ in Iraq and Afghanistan – fails to mention is that the U.S. is the one nuclear superpower with a first strike policy which is defined as an “…attack on an enemy’s nuclear arsenal that effectively prevents retaliation against the attacker. A successful first strike would cripple enemy missiles that are ready to launch and prevent the opponent from readying others for a counterstrike by targeting the enemy’s nuclear stockpiles and launch facilities.”
Under this policy, “The U.S. president has the auhority, without consulting anyone, to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike – not merely in retaliation… Our warheads could be launched in defense of allies, after the onset of a conventional war involving our troops… or in response to a bellicose threat posed by a nuclear state.”
On the other hand, Russia’s Basic Principles doctrine does not allow for unprovoked use of nuclear weapons – tactical or strategic. In any case, Russia has absolutely no need to resort to tactical nukes as it possesses the most powerful conventional weapon in existence, nicknamed FOAB – Father of All Bombs – a thermobaric bomb with a blast yield of 44 tons TNT; more importantly, these weapons do not emit any radiation, as nuclear fallout would pose both an immediate and lingering threat to their troops as well as to local civilians – most of whom are expected to one day become loyal Russian citizens.
FOAB dropped from a Tu-160 bomber at the Opuk training range, Black Sea in 2016; this ordnance is designed to vaporize targets and collapse structures by igniting a fuel-air mixture in midair
Artist Marina Abramovich and Jacob Rotschild posing in front of a painting titled‘Satan Summoning His Legions’ by Thomas Lawrence at the Royal Academy of Arts;Lord Rotschild & Co. control most of the planet’s assets
High Noon for NATO, Midnight for Humanity?
100 Seconds to Midnight according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who now warn that we have never been closer to a nuclear holocaust and find ourseleves at doom’s doorstep
As luck would have it, ‘Steadfast Noon’ will likely coincide with Moscow’s own annual nuclear drills dubbed ‘Grom’, when Russia tests its nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles.
This is a Do-or-Die moment for the western hegemon which is not willing – or rather, cannot – back down under any circumstances. Conscious of its inability to win a conventional war against Russia, it will resort to any measure in order to win, even if it means setting the world ablaze.
The U.S. has managed to convince itself that it can emerge victorious from a pre-emptive nuclear war, but cannot afford be seen as the aggressor in the eyes of the global community; a ‘False Flag’ event is therefore set to be staged in Ukraine using a low-yield device for which Russia would quickly be blamed, triggering an immediate NATO response. As inadvertently confirmed by Ukrainian president Zelensky while addressing the Australian Lowy Institute on October 6th, the scheme involves a ‘decapitation strike’ on Moscow against Putin and his Cabinet, after which the rest of the regime would collapse like a house of cards.
Assuredly, if this suicidal policy is ever applied outside a computer simulation, the world would have to concur with Mr. Putin’s assertion that the collective west is being run by satanists.
Sadly, that realization will have come too late to save humanity.
2017 Deagel.com forecast in which the U.S. is projected to lose two-thirds of its population by 2025; Deagel is a branch of the US military intelligence, preparing briefs for agencies such as the NSA, NATO, UN, and the World Bank. This forecast has been purged after the founder Edwin Deagel passed away in 2021
“There are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks where decades happen.”
“Hitting, succeeding, and capturing, all these things, if they are not with a spiritually sacred dimension, they are nothing but defeat.”[1]
– Imam Khomeini
Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, a response to a larger compound war that had percolated for several years, has been the subject of much quasi analyses. A vast majority of the compositions involves ad hoc cursory descriptions that concentrate on the “mechanics” of sub-operations within the operation, laical aims beneath the goal, secularly-defined methods & means, and varied temporal aftereffects discharged into a future material outcome that is concealed for now. In all these though, the critical “quintessence” has gone AWOL.
By critical “quintessence”, I mean careful and calculated use of a different kind of compass to navigate and approach the analyses and evaluation of methods, means, and outcomes. The sort of compass that actively and willfully transforms the nature of an exploration into relevant questions. Questions like: How do you measure “success” in a war, or in a battle, or in a military operation? What are the indicators by which you measure that success? Is success defined by the tangible and measureable superiority in domains of land, sea, air, inner space, outer space, and cyberspace? Is it measured by the square kilometers of land that is acquired and brought under control? Or, is it calculated by the number of hearts and minds captured, the number of injured produced, or the number of dead bodies accumulated? Is it in the number prisoners you take? Or, is it, perhaps, measured in Euro, Pound, Dollar, Rial, Yuan, Ruble, gold, silver, bitcoin, cubic feet of oil and gas, fluctuations in stock prices, and the like? Or, is it defined by how fast you announce “Mission Accomplished” while attired in a body gear that has been engineered to cause artificial ‘inflation’ in order to deflect attention from severe defects and shortcomings?
Source: Stephen Jaffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. The guy in the middle is George W. Bush Jr. on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where he delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech regarding the illegal war of aggression against Iraq on May 1, 2003.
“It was doomed from the beginning by the Kremlin’s ridiculous assumption that Washington would permit the operation to be limited. The widening of the war was guaranteed. The fact that the war has widened is now understood by Russian TV hosts who say the proxy war in Ukraine between the US and Russia is over and Russia now faces a real direct war with the US and its NATO puppets. For Russia to continue in Ukraine, the Kremlin must fight a real war and knock out the government in Kiev and the governmental and civilian infrastructure that permits Ukraine to conduct war without Russian interference and which permits supply avenues for ever more dangerous Western weapons to be acquired by Ukraine. It is stunning that Putin thought he could drive Ukrainian troops out of Donbas and then sign an agreement ending the conflict.”
It appears what the author is essentially suggesting that Russia should have invoked a Russian version of ‘shock and awe’ operation, perhaps similar to what the US executed in Iraq three weeks after which it announced its mission as ‘accomplished’. How did that sort of “real war”, the sort that “knocked out the government and destroyed the governmental and civilian infrastructure” in Iraq worked out for you? How did it work for you in Afghanistan? How has it worked out for your parasitic Zionist regime in West Asia?
At any rate, I am referring to type of exploration that questions the questions and detonates their underlying usual and customary assumptions. To put all that into cognitively more accessible terms to fit my purpose, I may say, anybody can wage a war – that is easy. But to wage a war with the right adversary and to the right proportion and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy (adapting a rhetorical prose attributed to Aristotle).
But who is the right adversary? What is the right proportion? When is the right time? What is the right purpose? And most important of all, how is the right way determined?
The short answer is it depends. A bit longer answer is that it depends on your worldview, belief system, and ethical and moral framework based on which you are engaged in a war and the criteria according to which those belief systems and worldviews define success, and measure and evaluate its key indicators.
Here, I would like to focus on two major competing worldviews (from among several) that define and determine what that “right” is. One of the two worldviews belongs to Estekbar Jahani, or Global Arrogance, represented by US-Anglo-Zionist-West. The other worldview is that of Moghavemat, or the Resistance, represented by the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the nations and groups that are in this camp.
The rationale for examining the first worldview, belonging to the Global Arrogance, is quite obvious. For the most part, this worldview has wreaked havoc on our entire plant and has championed indiscriminate death and destruction anywhere it had been allowed to penetrate. We examine the second worldview, that of the Resistance, for two specific reasons. Firstly, it is the worldview that has been solidly standing up to the first worldview and limiting its spread for some time now. Secondly, it is the worldview that has currently formed a strategic partnership with Russia in her war against US-NATO (which is a segment of US-Anglo-Zionist-West).
I would also like to limit the focus of the essay regarding the indicators of ‘success’ in a war or military operations, on three specific indicators: the right purpose, the right method & tools, and the right proportion.
On with it. We have ample evidence that the first group, the Global Arrogance, believes itself to be the owner of the entire planet and everyone and everything in it. Thus, it arrogates to itself the right to consider anyone, anytime, and anywhere to be the right person, the right time, and right place to attack to get anything it wants if it can do so by getting away at minimum socio-political and economic cost to its clique. They prefer a hit and run sort of approach and pave their paths with blood and tears.
The report card, for the past few decades, of the representatives of the Global Arrogant worldview (US-Anglo-Zionist-West) is colorfully marked by illegal and aggressive wars and military operations against Lebanon (1982-1984), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Islamic Republic of Iran, Persian Gulf (1987-1988), Panama (1989-1990), Iraq Persian Gulf (1990-1991), Iraq (1991-2003), Somali (1992-1995), Serbia (1992-1995), Haiti (1994-1995), Yugoslavia (1992-1995), Afghanistan (2001-Present), Yemen (2002-Present), Iraq (2003-Present), Pakistan (2004-Present), Somalia (2007-Present), Libya (2011-Present), Uganda (2011-Present), Sudan (2011-Present), and Syria (2014-Present), just to be brief.
For this camp, the right purpose has been $, Power, Oil; the right Methods & Means has been wholesale killing, stealing, lying, cheating, sanctions, torture –pardon me, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’—of prisoners, terror, chemical, biological, nuclear, and you name it; any means and methods, in short. The most savage, the better. As far as the right proportion is concerned, the limits appear quite limitless:
Leslie Stahl: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
So, this is another definition of “success” for the Global Arrogance:
Source: Images are a selection from a study titled “Living near an active U.S. military base in Iraq is associated with significantly higher hair thorium and increased likelihood of congenital anomalies in infants and children,” (2019). The study was conducted by a team of independent medical researchers. This photo was extracted from the Intercept, available online at: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/25/iraq-children-birth-defects-military/
The more one stirs up the US wars and operations, the worse it stinks. So, let’s move on.
I have better access to evidence regarding the indicators I mentioned with respect to the worldview of the Moghavemat, the Resistance, which is, as stated, represented by the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the nations and groups that are aligned in it. I will therefore draw on field evidence and demonstrate how we might determine the right purpose, the right method & tools, and the right proportion as well as how we evaluate and measure success in various operational domains, within the specific framework rooted in our belief system.
The Sacred Defense (Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988). Saddam of then Iraq, encouraged, fully supported, equipped to his teeth, and financed to no end by the West, the East, and the Middle, attacked the newly constituted Islamic Republic of Iran on Shahrivar 31, 1359 [September 22, 1980]. The attack was illegal, unjustified, and unprovoked. It was a coordinated attack along a 1,280 Kilometer Iran-Iraq border from the north most borderline to the south most shorelines plus the Persian Gulf and several major inner cities’ important infrastructures. The West provided him with the chemical and biological weapons for use and he did not say no.
Naturally, Iran had to defend itself. Let me add here that any religion, school of thought, charter, moral and ethical framework that does not recognize self-defense as an obligation (and not merely as a legitimate right) is not worth the paper on which it is written. Why? Because, people, when they view something as a right, they have this propensity to give up their legitimate and God-given rights easily, willingly, and rather foolishly. However, if they are taught to think of something as a duty and obligation, then they cannot easily let go of their obligation without expecting severe consequences. That expectation of severe consequence has great deterrent value—so we are taught by the Quran:
“Would you not fight a people who broke their oaths and intended to expel the Messenger, and they were the first to begin their attack on you? Do you fear them? But Allah has more right that you should fear Him, if you are true believers.” [Tawbah (Chapter 9, Verse 13]
From this verse, we understand that there are at least three types of people with whom we must fight: 1) People who willfully break their oaths, contracts, and any agreement they have made with us. 2) People who attempt to expel us from our land and dislocate us. 3) People who initiate an attack and aggress against us.
In our Sacred Defense against Saddam of Iraq, not just one but all three conditions were met. He tore up the 1975 Algiers agreement; he attacked our land and killed and displaced millions of our people; and he began to actually occupy segments of our land. In response, we had the duty to: 1) Fight him and his army and his allies. 2) Don’t fear any them. 3) Fear only God. So, the motivation, or the purpose for this war, on this end, for the people of Iran was, first and foremost, to fulfill their duties and defend their nation against the aggressors.
With respect to defense, Ayatullah Khamenei has a very interesting elucidation that I’d like to quote here. He says:
“Defense is a part of the identity of a nation that is alive. Any nation that cannot defend itself is not alive. Any nation that does not recognize the importance of defense is not alive, in a manner of speaking, it is not alive. We cannot have eyes and power of analysis to see deep and hostile plot of the Arrogance against Islam, the Revolution, and the Islamic System, yet not think about defending ourselves. God forbid the day this nation and its elected officials to neglect wretched and hostile aggression of Global Arrogance headed by the United States of America.”[2]
As far as material “how,” or material methods & means were concerned, in the Sacred Defense, we did not have the luxury of choosing from among many ways and means. We had inherited a nation that had been entirely dependent on the Global Arrogance headed by the US-West, LLC for its military equipment and training. Billions of dollars sent by Shah to purchase military crafts and the like were blocked by the same entity. After the Revolution, even nails and barbed wires had been put on the list of sanctions. Quite amusingly, it was the only war over which the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist US-West had come together and had formed a perfect and united alliance against Iran. So, the Iranians did the best they could with what they had. And they succeeded. Iran’s territorial integrity remained intact.
What stands out the most for us, what is most valuable for us, however, is that the Islamic Republic of Iran did not use just any means. Weapons of mass destruction were out of question. Chemical and biological weapons were out of question. Hitting cities, towns, and people was out of question. When the Iranian cities and towns were being bombarded and innocent civilians were being killed, some voices from within Iran were asking for exact retaliation. Top officials went to visit Imam Khomeini to ask permission to respond in kind. Imam Khomeini, however, outright refused and said,
“You must take great care not to ever get angry and, due to the fact that they are bombing your cities and killing your loved ones, become inclined to respond in kind. But this way, you are not taking revenge from him [Saddam]. You must take your revenge from Saddam and the Baath regime, and you are doing that. Be careful though that not even a bullet is shot toward their cities. These are cities that are oppressed just like our Behbahan [a city in Iran] is oppressed. Basra, too, is oppressed. So is Mandali. All of them are under oppression. We must protect the human aspect of this to the end. We must protect the human aspects until our martyrdom or death and don’t submit to this anger that since he is doing this, we, too, must hit one of their cities. No, it’s not like this. The principles are Islam’s principles. This is Islamic Republic. Here, Islam rules. So, be mindful of yourself, of those who have power, of the government that has power, of the Guard that has power, of the military that has power, of Basij that has power, those who have power must, more than others, protect the human aspects, the Islamic aspects. They must spend this power in the right place and never violate its boundaries.”[3]
We prostrate before God and thank Him for Imam Khomeini who helped protect and keep the soul of our nation unblemished. When he is talking about spending the power in the right place, he is in fact talking about the quintessential right method & means and the right proportion based on our beliefs. Thank God that this spirit manifested itself in the battlefields during the Sacred Defense.
Eight year of Iraq-Iran war also taught the Iranians to be self-sufficient in everything and taught the US-West, LLC a valuable lesson. It taught them that a war with Iran would not be a walk in the park. And the Iranians learned to become quite self-sufficient in bi**h-slapping the United States of America when the opportunities have presented themselves.
Source: Khabar Online News Agency. The arrest of US navy personnel near Farsi Island in Persian Gulf within the Iranian territorial water by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on January 12, 2016. Photo was accessed online at: khabaronline.ir/x6fSc
Source: IRNA. Remains of the United States RQ-4A Global Hawk BAMS-D surveillance drone that had violated the Iranian air space over the Strait of Hormuz by IRGC on June 20, 2019.
Source: Image from Ayn al-Asad US airbase in Iraq after Operation Martyr Soleimani on Jan. 8, 2020 @ 1:20 am. Transcript and translation of a CBS interview by Bashgah Khabarnegaran Javan News Agency. Accessed online at: https://www.yjc.news/00WwDI
These are noteworthy events if we also note that in 2020, the military expenditure for the United States was 801 billion dollars (38% of the world total on military expenditure) and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s was 24.6 billion dollars (1.2% of World’s total)[4]. That is, the US spent 33 times more on all things military than Iran, yet, when slapped by Iran in Ayn al-Asad while the whole world was watching, the Commander in Chief of the United States of America’s most significant response was: “it didn’t hurt.” Well, that’s not exactly what we heard.
It perhaps is an opportune moment here to hear directly from Sardar Hajizadeh, the IRGC Commander who gave the order for Ayn al-Asad’s strike, about exactly how that event on January 8, 2020 proceeded. I have translated for you segments of an interview he gave on this topic last year. The full video in Persian could be accessed here.
Interviewer: We would like to re-visit that day when you heard he [Martyr Soleimani] had been martyred. What happened? Did you form a meeting? If you could, please talk about any of them that is not classified or is not a security issue.
Sardar Hajizadeh: There were discussions. At that point, we gave the highest probability for a direct fire exchange with [the United States of] America, hit some of their bases and they in turn to react to it. That high probability was expected among all groups, the political figures and the military figures. We considered all aspects. But it was impossible for us not to give a direct respond. Also, the honorable people of Iran must pay attention to this matter that [the US] America, after the World War II, after 75 years, during all these times, no nation had ever had any direct battle with them, or hit them. No one had done that. That is, no one had dared to do that.
After that operation, too, when I would meet with top military commanders from many countries, all of them would ask at the very beginning of the meeting, their first question of me would be this, ‘how did you possibly made this decision?!’
Sardar Hajizadeh: So, [US] Americans realized that Iran intends to do something and they began to issue threats.
Interviewer: The Americans?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Yes. It was the second day, the day after their terror act, Trump came and issued a direct threat. He said, ‘If Iran responds, we will hit 52 locations in Iran. So, it is under these circumstances that you are deciding to hit [US] America. And many people from many places [foreign officials & international organizations] were sending messages to us not to escalate, to cool down, or to do something later, and so on and so forth…
Interviewer: So, what happened next? They said they’ll hit 52 locations but the decision here did not change?
Sardar Hajizadeh: No, it did not. They would say quite solidly that they would absolutely hit 52 locations and we, too, made the solid decision to absolutely hit. Until the night before the operation, our decision was to hit Taji Camp. It is near Baghdad, near Kazmain. But the night before we changed our decision and decided to hit Ayn al-Asad.
Interviewer: Who had information that you were going to target Ayn al-Asad?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Very limited number of people had it. Just a few commanders of the Revolutionary Guard, for example, and the head of the Command Center, Major General Bagheri. Very limited number of people knew, we and only seven or eight other high commanders.
Interviewer: Did you inform Iraq? How long before the operation did you notify them?
Sardar Hajizadeh: See, there has been this ambiguity about this and they said something like…
Interviewer: …people say they [the US Americans] knew, they evacuated the location, they left….
Sardar Hajizadeh: Well, we will show you photographs and you will broadcast them. Almost in all US bases, they were on high alert and they did not know where exactly we were going to hit. But they were anxious. From Persian Gulf to Strait of Hormuz to Kuwait, from there to Iraq and to Jordan…everywhere they were giving high probability that we would respond. That day, after Hajj Qasem’s martyrdom, they distanced themselves about 500 kilometers from Makron shores. That is, they went outside of Hormuz Strait.
Interviewer: They were giving a high probability you hit, and they left.
Sardar Hajizadeh: Yes. So, all these talks that the Americans knew and all that, no, [the US] America did not know where we were going to hit. Decidedly they did not know.
[Videos and films were shown by Sardar Hajizadeh in the program that clearly showed the US forces had evacuated the Persian Gulf and had dispersed their planes to different locations in their various bases.]
Sardar Hajizadeh: Now you see the photographs of Al-Hodaid and A-Zahrra, when you look, before they martyred him [Martyr Soleimani], these fighter jets [pointing to photos] have their regular arrangements. The fighters are all lined up together. But after they martyred him [pointing to other photos], as they were worried about attacks from Iran, they spread them all over the taxiway, in different disparate locations. They spread it around. That means they adopted a full defensive posture. You see these navy ships here [pointing to Persian Gulf], these are from before their terror act. Now you see after the martyrdom, all of them are gathered up here. You see here is fully evacuated. This shows that they are worried they might be attacked. The same situation applies to their air bases.
Interviewer: When did we let the Iraqi’s know?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Half an hour before firing the missiles. Either through Quds Force or the Foreign Ministry, they informed the Iraqi Prime Minister that we intend to hit an airbase in Iraq.
Interviewer: Half an hour?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Half an hour. However, they did not know which base.
Interviewer: They did not even know which base?
Sardar Hajizadeh: No they didn’t. This half-an-hour notice, too, was only out of respect for the Iraqis since it was their land, they had decided to let them know half an hour before the strikes.
Interviewer: Had the number of missiles been determined, too?
Sardar Hajizadeh: We fired and hit them with 13 missiles.
[A video of the exact moment Sardar Hajizadeh is giving the go ahead for the strikes by phone is shown. I took a screenshot of the video [images below] at two separate moments. The first image is the moment Sardar Hajizadeh is giving the go ahead for the strike by phone and the second image is moments after that.]
The moment Sardear Hajizadeh is giving the order for the strikes on Ayn al-Asad: “Hit. Hit baba, Bismillah.”
Sardar Hajizadeh, having just ordered them by phone to fire the missiles, is explaining to those present in the command room: “You see we are firing one at a time [with pause] so that their people would have time to escape because we are not after mass killing. But that evil Trump committed such crime. Even at the time they were striking Haji’s vehicle with their missiles, the strikes on the two cars were done within a second from one another. He had not given them any opportunity [to get away].”
The fine point Sardar Hajizadeh is raising here is noteworthy because he is referring to a code in the rules of combat among the Iranian fighters and commanders. When striking a place where there are a lot of low-ranking soldiers, you fire in a way they would have an opportunity to run if you are able to provide them that opportunity, like Ayn al-Asad strikes. However, Trump had ordered striking Sardar Soleimani and Abu Mohandis Al-Mahdi and their companions while they were not even in a battlefield, or in a military base, or on high alert.
The interview continues…
Interviewer: Was Ayn al-Asad Operation complete success?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Yes. All missiles hit precisely where they were directed to hit. Precisely where they were meant to hit.
[Here, the interview has incorporated videos reports from Persian-language stations like BBC and the like about the strikes.]
Interviewer: One thing they say is this, ‘there was nothing at Ayn al-Asad when we hit it. What was the use of hitting Ayn al-Asad? The damage to [the US] Americans was not that significant.’ Could you expand on this a bit more?
Sardar Hajizadeh: You see, they could have killed Sardar Soleimani without admitting they did this. Why did they claim responsibility? Why? Because they wanted to say, ‘We have power. We hit and you cannot do anything.’ That was the whole story. And we RESPONDED, we HIT to say, ‘It is not like you can hit and run. If you hit, you will definitely be hit.’
[The interview is moved to a different location.]
Sardar Hajizadeh: You see, all of these have been destroyed. Here is the control center for UAVs. It’s destroyed.
Interviewer: Did they have any people who were killed?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Yes, they had people who were killed. The Iraqi people who were there they reported to us about the dead bodies they [the US Americans] were putting into bags. And they managed to kick out all of them [the Iraqis] within the first hours. Even when they were pulling out the dead bodies from underneath the rubbles. First they kicked out the Iraqis, then, they pulled the dead bodies out.
Interviewer: Themselves?
Sardar Hajizadeh: Yes, themselves.
[Toward the end of the interview, the interviewer asks, “Was this the retaliation/revenge?”]
Sardar Hajizadeh: This was the beginning of the revenge. I believe it was an important beginning and it demolished [the US] American’s grandiosity. But it is not yet finished.
Interviewer: Once we hit them, what happened next? What else were we ready for?
Sardar Hajizadeh: We were ready, in the event they responded, to start hitting the US bases. The beginning was Ayn al-Asad but the continuation was to be all bases in the region. That is, we had to hit all of them. We had prepared 400 missiles for the initial moments. We had prepared ourselves to escalate and continue the fight. But, well, the [US] Americans did not decide on continuing.
Interviewer: Did they even try to destroy any of our incoming missiles?
Sardar Hajizadeh: No. You see, these people have some capabilities. But we, too, know how to fight. We have learned a thing or two in these few years. We hit both their shield and themselves. All the bases they have in the region, you can do simultaneous strikes with 500 missiles, you can completely decommission them and hit them rather hard in a manner that would be hard for them to rehabilitate.
Sardar Hajizadeh: One day, I had a meeting with high commander of the Russian aerospace division, who had come to Iran. I showed him the videos of the Persian Gulf and was explaining to him how with drones we fly right overhead the US navy ships. He asked, “Don’t they hit? Don’t they see you? Aren’t you afraid?” I said [smiling], “General, test them!” He flew [the drone] over the US navy ship. I told him not to worry. You see, others are learning these moves. The head of Russian aerospace asked, “how come they don’t hit you?” I answered, “if they hit, we’ll hit back.”
Sardar Hajizadeh: At any rate, hitting Ayn al-Asad was not some small task. Some claim we coordinated things with them. If we were the sort to coordinate [chuckle] things with them, then, we wouldn’t have been having all these battles!
(The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. Walter Russell Mead. Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2022.)
In today’s world, a clear understanding of the relationship between the US and Israel is important – this is not the work to clear it up. Walter Mead’s hypothesis is that Israel does not control US governance, but that many other forces have shaped the relationship. With that, he is correct and in an overly long convoluted manner he is able to make that sort of clear. “The Arc of the Covenant,” for the arguments presented could have been well worked in half of its almost six hundred pages.
Instead, the book is a mix of theology, sociology, geopolitics, domestic politics, history, and biographical analysis of – mostly – various presidents of the US It really succeeds with none of them. It contains far too much theorizing and conjecture, discusses at length beliefs and morals, and has far too many unanswered rhetorical questions (okay, rhetorical questions really seek no answer, but there are far too many of them). The reader will not come away with a good understanding of Israel as the vast majority of the discussion is centered on US political maneuvering.
To his credit Mead is quite critical of many US failures around the world but mostly in the Middle East. Unfortunately that comes from a perspective, unstated but implied, that the US is the indispensable nation and acts with good intentions because of its moral strength and liberal beliefs. He does use “exceptionalism” frequently, implied or directly, giving support to the thought that Mead, without stating it directly, is a firm believer in the US being the world’s global policeman, “by the courageous use of necessary force.”
Omissions
There are far too many problems with the arguments presented in this work to counter them here, but it is what is missing that makes the arguments so weak.
While he discusses “national interests” and the ability of the US to use force to maintain peace (a lot of an oxymoron) he never discusses the US as an empire. Certainly the evil Russians and Chinese, and before World War I the Germans, Russian, and Ottomans were all the cause of that war as contending empires. British, French, Dutch, and other European empires are mentioned in passing, but he does not accept, or will not articulate, that the US is the largest empire the world has seen – militarily and economically, the two going hand in glove.
The massive 750 military bases around the world, mostly surrounding Russia and China, and that ability to use the global reserve currency, the petro-dollar (never mentioned in the book although oil is continually mentioned as a strategic value) and its associated institutions (WTO, BIS, World Bank, SWIFT et al) to impose destructive sanctions on countries that do not abide by its wishes is the modern form of imperialism.
He reiterates several times the US role in decolonization without recognition that it was the US that denied Vietnam its fair and democratic elections, denied Korea the right to vote for its post war government, created the CIA with its initial successes overthrowing governments in Iran and Guatemala in 1953. He admits US errors in Iraq, Libya, and – well not quite Syria, it was the “brutal” Russians that destroyed Syria, even while US forces remain in large parts of the country to this day. There is no mention of Operation Gladio, the occupation of Japan and Germany that continues today, nor the seemingly endless list of interventions to overthrow unfriendly regimes either through economic or military power.
Israel
When it comes to discussing Israel there are equally large omissions. A reasonable essay on Herzl’s machinations is given, but after that, he generally uses only passing mention of Israel’s settlements and the wall as the main components of Palestinian strife. He accepts that some people think of Israel as a “colonial-settler” enterprise but dismisses that thought as being on the radical left and of little importance.
He dismisses the idea that Israel is a racist (actually he never mentions that with Israel) and an apartheid state. The book is recent enough that the author is surely aware of the major institutional labels of Israel as apartheid, including Israel’s own B’etselem.
Nor does he get into the details of the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people as an ongoing process. The many discriminatory laws and policies, house destructions, the imprisonment, and the torture as an everyday occurrence of Palestinian life are never considered.
At the same time, Mead does not create a coherent history of Israel. In his concluding remarks Mead states, “….for both Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples whose fates have become intertwined in ways that neither side wanted or foresaw.” This is absolutely not true, as Jabotinsky, Herzl, Weismann, Ben Gurion and others – including most of the British political establishment – knew that depositing Jewish immigrants on land owned by Palestinians was a source of major problems as obviously the Palestinians recognized it as well.
He continues with “their private quarrel must be fought out in the glare of global publicity.” That at least is good news, as the balance of power, out of sight of global publicity, hugely puts Israel in a dominating position.
Finally he concludes “I have tried to shine a useful light on the relationship between the ways Americans think about the world and the approaches they develop to act in it.” Mission not accomplished as per the errors and omissions mentioned above among many others.
Current Events
“The Arc of a Covenant” was published shortly before the Russian invasion in Ukraine to prevent the ongoing shelling of the Donbas people by Ukrainian forces. Since then, it is clearly demonstrated that the “prime directive” (p. 13) of the US empire is the destruction of the Russian state and the containment of the power of China.
We are entering a new era where “the ways American think about the world and the approaches they develop to act in it” are clearly global dominance through financial and military means. All the purported values and morals are worthless when the true history of US imperial adventures are understood.
– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.
Amidst serious tremors in the world of geopolitics, it is so fitting that this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) heads of state summit should have taken place in Samarkand – the ultimate Silk Road crossroads for 2,500 years.
When in 329 BC Alexander the Great reached the then Sogdian city of Marakanda, part of the Achaemenid empire, he was stunned: “Everything I have heard about Samarkand it’s true, except it is even more beautiful than I had imagined.”
Fast forward to an Op-Ed by Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev published ahead of the SCO summit, where he stresses how Samarkand now “can become a platform that is able to unite and reconcile states with various foreign policy priorities.”
After all, historically, the world from the point of view of the Silk Road landmark has always been “perceived as one and indivisible, not divided. This is the essence of a unique phenomenon – the ‘Samarkand spirit’.”
And here Mirziyoyev ties the “Samarkand Spirit” to the original SCO “Shanghai Spirit” established in early 2001, a few months before the events of September 11, when the world was forced into strife and endless war, almost overnight.
All these years, the culture of the SCO has been evolving in a distinctive Chinese way. Initially, the Shanghai Five were focused on fighting terrorism – months before the US war of terror (italics mine) metastasized from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond.
Over the years, the initial “three no’s” – no alliance, no confrontation, no targeting any third party – ended up equipping a fast, hybrid vehicle whose ‘four wheels’ are ‘politics, security, economy, and humanities,’ complete with a Global Development Initiative, all of which contrast sharply with the priorities of a hegemonic, confrontational west.
Arguably the biggest takeaway of this week’s Samarkand summit is that Chinese President Xi Jinping presented China and Russia, together, as “responsible global powers” bent on securing the emergence of multipolarity, and refusing the arbitrary “order” imposed by the United States and its unipolar worldview.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pronounced Xi’s bilateral conversation with President Vladimir Putin as “excellent.” Xi Jinping, previous to their meeting, and addressing Putin directly, had already stressed the common Russia-China objectives:
“In the face of the colossal changes of our time on a global scale, unprecedented in history, we are ready with our Russian colleagues to set an example of a responsible world power and play a leading role in order to put such a rapidly changing world on the trajectory of sustainable and positive development.”
Later, in the preamble to the heads of state meeting, Xi went straight to the point: it is important to “prevent attempts by external forces to organize ‘color revolutions’ in the SCO countries.” Well, Europe wouldn’t be able to tell, because it has been color-revolutionized non-stop since 1945.
Putin, for his part, sent a message that will be ringing all across the Global South: “Fundamental transformations have been outlined in world politics and economics, and they are irreversible.” (italics mine)
Iran: it’s showtime
Iran was the guest star of the Samarkand show, officially embraced as the 9th member of the SCO. President Ebrahim Raisi, significantly, stressed before meeting Putin that “Iran does not recognize sanctions against Russia.” Their strategic partnership will be enhanced. On the business front, a hefty delegation comprising leaders of 80 large Russian companies will be visiting Tehran next week.
The increasing Russia-China-Iran interpolation – the three top drivers of Eurasia integration – scares the hell out of the usual suspects, who may be starting to grasp how the SCO represents, in the long run, a serious challenge to their geoeconomic game. So, as every grain of sand in every Heartland desert is already aware, the geopolitical pressure against the trio will increase exponentially.
And then there was the mega-crucial Samarkand trilateral: Russia-China-Mongolia. There were no official leaks, but this trio arguably discussed the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline – the interconnector to be built across Mongolia; and Mongolia’s enhanced role in a crucial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connectivity corridor, now that China is not using the Trans-Siberian route for exports to Europe because of sanctions.
Putin briefed Xi on all aspects of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, and arguably answered some really tough questions, many of them circulating wildly on the Chinese web for months now.
Which brings us to Putin’s presser at the end of the summit – with virtually all questions predictably revolving around the military theater in Ukraine.
The key takeaway from the Russian president: “There are no changes on the SMO plan. The main tasks are being implemented.” On peace prospects, it is Ukraine that “is not ready to talk to Russia.” And overall, “it is regrettable that the west had the idea to use Ukraine to try to collapse Russia.”
On the fertilizer soap opera, Putin remarked, “food supply, energy supply, they (the west) created these problems, and now are trying to resolve them at the expense of someone else” – meaning the poorest nations. “European countries are former colonial powers and they still have this paradigm of colonial philosophy. The time has come to change their behavior, to become more civilized.”
On his meeting with Xi Jinping: “It was just a regular meeting, it’s been quite some time we haven’t had a meeting face to face.” They talked about how to “expand trade turnover” and circumvent the “trade wars caused by our so-called partners,” with “expansion of settlements in national currencies not progressing as fast as we want.”
Strenghtening multipolarity
Putin’s bilateral with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not have been more cordial – on a “very special friendship” register – with Modi calling for serious solutions to the food and fuel crises, actually addressing the west. Meanwhile, the State Bank of India will be opening special rupee accounts to handle Russia-related trade.
This is Xi’s first foreign trip since the Covid pandemic. He could do it because he’s totally confident of being awarded a third term during the Communist Party Congress next month in Beijing. Xi now controls and/or has allies placed in at least 90 percent of the Politburo.
The other serious reason was to recharge the appeal of BRI in close connection to the SCO. China’s ambitious BRI project was officially launched by Xi in Astana (now Nur-Sultan) nine years ago. It will remain the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for decades ahead.
BRI’s emphasis on trade and connectivity ties in with the SCO’s evolving multilateral cooperation mechanisms, congregating nations focusing on economic development independent from the hazy, hegemonic “rules-based order.” Even India under Modi is having second thoughts about relying on western blocs, where New Delhi is at best a neo-colonized “partner.”
So Xi and Putin, in Samarkand, for all practical purposes delineated a road map for strengthening multipolarity – as stressed by the final Samarkand declaration signed by all SCO members.
The Kazakh puzzle
There will be bumps on the road aplenty. It’s no accident that Xi started his trip in Kazakhstan – China’s mega-strategic western rear, sharing a very long border with Xinjiang. The tri-border at the dry port of Khorgos – for lorries, buses and trains, separately – is quite something, an absolutely key BRI node.
The administration of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Nur-Sultan (soon to be re-named Astana again) is quite tricky, swinging between eastern and western political orientations, and infiltrated by Americans as much as during the era of predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s first post-USSR president.
Earlier this month, for instance, Nur-Sultan, in partnership with Ankara and British Petroleum (BP) – which virtually rules Azerbaijan – agreed to increase the volume of oil on the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to up to 4 million tons a month by the end of this year. Chevron and ExxonMobil, very active in Kazakhstan, are part of the deal.
The avowed agenda of the usual suspects is to “ultimately disconnect the economies of Central Asian countries from the Russian economy.” As Kazakhstan is a member not only of the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), but also the BRI, it is fair to assume that Xi – as well as Putin – discussed some pretty serious issues with Tokayev, told him to grasp which way the wind is blowing, and advised him to keep the internal political situation under control (see the aborted coup in January, when Tokayev was de facto saved by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO]).
There’s no question Central Asia, historically known as a “box of gems” at the center of the Heartland, striding the Ancient Silk Roads and blessed with immense natural wealth – fossil fuels, rare earth metals, fertile agrarian lands – will be used by the usual suspects as a Pandora’s box, releasing all manner of toxic tricks against legitimate Eurasian integration.
That’s in sharp contrast with West Asia, where Iran in the SCO will turbo-charge its key role of crossroads connectivity between Eurasia and Africa, in connection with the BRI and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
So it’s no wonder that the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, all in West Asia, do recognize which way the wind is blowing. The three Persian Gulf states received official SCO ‘partner status’ in Samarkand, alongside the Maldives and Myanmar.
A cohesion of goals
Samarkand also gave an extra impulse to integration along the Russian-conceptualized Greater Eurasia Partnership – which includes the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – and that, just two weeks after the game-changing Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) held in Vladivostok, on Russia’s strategic Pacific coast.
Moscow’s priority at the EAEU is to implement a union-state with Belarus (which looks bound to become a new SCO member before 2024), side-by-side with closer integration with the BRI. Serbia, Singapore and Iran have trade agreements with the EAEU too.
The Greater Eurasian Partnership was proposed by Putin in 2015 – and it’s getting sharper as the EAEU commission, led by Sergey Glazyev, actively designs a new financial system, based on gold and natural resources and counter-acting the Bretton Woods system. Once the new framework is ready to be tested, the key disseminator is likely to be the SCO.
So here we see in play the full cohesion of goals – and the interaction mechanisms – deployed by the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, EAEU, SCO, BRICS+ and the INSTC. It’s a titanic struggle to unite all these organizations and take into account the geoeconomic priorities of each member and associate partner, but that’s exactly what’s happening, at breakneck speed.
In this connectivity feast, practical imperatives range from fighting local bottlenecks to setting up complex multi-party corridors – from the Caucasus to Central Asia, from Iran to India, everything discussed in multiple roundtables.
Successes are already notable: from Russia and Iran introducing direct settlements in rubles and rials, to Russia and China increasing their trade in rubles and yuan to 20 percent – and counting. An Eastern Commodity Exchange may be soon established in Vladivostok to facilitate trade in futures and derivatives with the Asia-Pacific.
China is the undisputed primary creditor/investor in infrastructure across Central Asia. Beijing’s priorities may be importing gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and oil from Kazakhstan, but connectivity is not far behind.
The $5 billion construction of the 600 km-long Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan (Pakafuz) railway will deliver cargo from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean in only three days instead of 30. And that railway will be linked to Kazakhstan and the already in progress 4,380 km-long Chinese-built railway from Lanzhou to Tashkent, a BRI project.
Nur-Sultan is also interested in a Turkmenistan-Iran-Türkiye railway, which would connect its port of Aktau on the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea.
Türkiye, meanwhile, still a SCO observer and constantly hedging its bets, slowly but surely is trying to strategically advance its own Pax Turcica, from technological development to defense cooperation, all that under a sort of politico-economic-security package. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did discuss it in Samarkand with Putin, as the latter later announced that 25 percent of Russian gas bought by Ankara will be paid in rubles.
Welcome to Great Game 2.0
Russia, even more than China, knows that the usual suspects are going for broke. In 2022 alone, there was a failed coup in Kazakhstan in January; troubles in Badakhshan, in Tajikistan, in May; troubles in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan in June; the non-stop border clashes between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (both presidents, in Samarkand, at least agreed on a ceasefire and to remove troops from their borders).
And then there is recently-liberated Afghanistan – with no less than 11 provinces crisscrossed by ISIS-Khorasan and its Tajik and Uzbek associates. Thousands of would-be Heartland jihadis have made the trip to Idlib in Syria and then back to Afghanistan – ‘encouraged’ by the usual suspects, who will use every trick under the sun to harass and ‘isolate’ Russia from Central Asia.
So Russia and China should be ready to be involved in a sort of immensely complex, rolling Great Game 2.0 on steroids, with the US/NATO fighting united Eurasia and Turkiye in the middle.
On a brighter note, Samarkand proved that at least consensus exists among all the players at different institutional organizations that: technological sovereignty will determine sovereignty; and that regionalization – in this case Eurasian – is bound to replace US-ruled globalization.
These players also understand that the Mackinder and Spykman era is coming to a close – when Eurasia was ‘contained’ in a semi-disassembled shape so western maritime powers could exercise total domination, contrary to the national interests of Global South actors.
It’s now a completely different ball game. As much as the Greater Eurasia Partnership is fully supported by China, both favor the interconnection of BRI and EAEU projects, while the SCO shapes a common environment.
Yes, this is an Eurasian civilizational project for the 21st century and beyond. Under the aegis of the ‘Spirit of Samarkand.’
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, renowned Australian investigative journalist John Pilger has warned that the “US is close to getting its hands on” the courageous WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Last month, British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the US, where he faces 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act for publishing true information exposing American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Pilger explains, Patel’s order will be the subject of a further appeal, but the British judiciary that will adjudicate has facilitated Assange’s persecution every step of the way. This underscores the urgency of a political fight to free Assange, based on the powerful struggles of the working class that are emerging all around the world.
Pilger began his media career in the late 1950s. His first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny, exposed aspects of the US war in Vietnam in 1970. Since then, Pilger has produced more than 50 documentaries, many of them feature-length and centering on revealing the crimes of the major imperialist powers.
In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Assange was asked: “Who has been your most critical public supporter?” He replied: “John Pilger, the Australian journalist, has been the most impressive.”
Pilger has been unwavering in his defence of the WikiLeaks publisher. In 2018 and 2019, he addressed Socialist Equality Party rallies, demanding that the Australian government use its diplomatic and legal powers to free Assange.
Because of his principled defence of Assange and opposition to war, Pilger is hardly ever referenced in Australia’s official media, despite being one of the country’s most well-known and respected journalists.
WSWS: After Patel’s announcement allowing extradition, where is the Assange case up to? Are the dangers he confronts of a greater urgency than previously?
John Pilger: It is a dangerous, unpredictable time. Since the Home Secretary signed the extradition order, a provisional appeal has been filed by Julian’s lawyers. ‘Provisional’ is part of the tortuous process of appeal. The lawyers must submit what are known as ‘perfected grounds of appeal’ in the next few weeks, then the US and the Home Secretary file their responses. Only after that does it go to a judge (not sitting in a court) to decide whether or not he will accept it. It may sound meticulous but, having observed it, it looks to me like a finely spun blanket of obfuscation over a profoundly biased system.
Until the High Court hearing last year, I believed the country’s senior judges would reject the US appeal and reclaim something of the mythologised notion of British justice if only for the system’s survival, which partly depends on “face” within the arcane reaches of the British establishment. This show of “independence” in support of justice has happened in the past. In Julian’s case, the facts are surely too outrageous—no properly constituted court would even consider it—yet I was wrong. The decision by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales last October that the US in effect had the right to fabricate and belatedly introduce “assurances” that had not even been part of previous due process was quite shocking. There was no justice, no process; the guile and ruthlessness of US power was on show. Might is right.
Today, the US knows it is close to getting its hands on Julian. Unlike previous parliaments at Westminster, there is not a single voice speaking up for him. In spite of a tenacious campaign emphasising the threat Julian’s extradition poses to a “free press,” he is barely acknowledged in the media, which remains intensely hostile to him. Journalists have never been as compliant as they are today, and Julian’s case is a reminder—to some—of what they ought to be. He shames them.
WSWS: You have consistently defended Julian for more than ten years. Over that period have you been shocked by the intensity with which he has been pursued?
JP: Perhaps not shocked; as a journalist, I have had my own taste of state ruthlessness. Remember the pursuit of Julian is a measure of his achievements. He informed millions about the deceptions of governments too many trusted; he respected their right to know. It was a remarkable public service.
WSWS: Do you think this is bound up with a broader assault on democratic rights?
JP: Yes, it’s the latest stage of the abandonment of what used to be called “social democracy.” The “rollback” of rights in the US and UK is in reaction to the uprising, in the 1960s an 1970s, of people and their conscientiousness and of ideas of equity. This was an historical “moment” when society was becoming more enlightened; minority and gender rights were gaining acceptance; workers were fighting back. At the same time, the so-called “information age” was launched. It was only partly about information; it was a media age, with the media establishing a ubiquitous, controlling place in people’s lives. One of the most influential books of the time was The Greening of America. On the cover were the words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.” The message of its author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich, was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.
Within a few years, driven by new opportunities of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had subverted people’s sense of acting together, their sense and language of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated; class as a way of explaining society became heresy. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. The propaganda was that something called globalism was good for you. Corporatism, its specious language and its authoritarianism, appropriated much about the way we lived, ensuring what the economist Ted Wheelwright called a “Two Thirds Society”—with the bottom third beholden to debt and poverty while an unrecognised class war uprooted and destroyed the power of labour. In 2008, the election of the first black president in the land of slavery and the fabrication of a new cold war completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a critical opposition and an anti-war movement.
WSWS: Is there a relationship with the escalation of war, including the US-led confrontations with China and Russia?
JP: Events today are the direct result of plans laid in the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance, a document that laid out how the US would maintain its empire and see off any challenges, real and imagined. The aim was US dominance at any cost, literally. Written by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who would play key roles in the administration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, it might have been written by Lord Curzon in the 19th century. They formed “The Project for a New American Century.” America, it boasted, “would oversee a new frontier.” The role of other states would be as vassals or supplicants, or they would be crushed. It planned the conquest of Europe, and Russia, with all the zeal and thoroughness of Hitler’s imperialists. The roots of NATO’s current war on Russia and provocations of China are here.
WSWS: What do you think of the role being played by the Albanese Labor government? Can you comment on the Declassified Australia report, with internal briefings for Attorney-General Dreyfus, which indicated that the only focus of the Labor government is a hypothetical prison transfer, after Assange has been extradited to the US and convicted of Espionage Act charges there?
JP: The Albanese Labor government is as right-wing and compliant as any Australian Labor government—only the Whitlam government in 1972–75 broke the mould, and it was got rid of. It was the Labor government of Julia Gillard that initiated Australia’s collusion with the US to silence Assange. The “prison transfer” idea may be seen as a weasel way of satisfying support for Julian in his homeland. Whatever happens, the US will decide and the Albanese government will do as it’s told.
WSWS: We are raising the need for workers and young people to come to Assange’s defence, as the spearhead of the fight against war and authoritarianism. Why do you think ordinary people should take up the struggle to free Assange?
JP: Julian Assange is the courageous embodiment of a struggle against the darkest, most oppressive forces in our world; and people of principle, young and old, should oppose it as best they can; or one day it may touch their lives, and worse.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 