Genocide in occupied Palestine isn’t a mere mistake to correct; it’s an enduring Israeli policy, bolstered by its allies. The time has come to stand for justice.
The Palestinian Resistance emerged in response to the occupation of Palestine making its existence inherently righteous and its endeavor to liberation ever so relevant. (Illustrated by Hady Dbouq)
We have all heard the question “What do you think would be a proportionate response to what happened on October 7?” But let us step away from the reductive perspective where every event is dealt with as an isolated incident disconnected from the root cause from which it was birthed.
The real question, in the face of occupation, is: “What is a proportionate response to the colonization of the Middle East and the occupation of Palestine?” To be able to have that conversation, we must first bring forth the numbers of what truly happened in 1948 when Palestine was occupied. The occupation of Palestine is also often referred to as the great catastrophe known in its Arabic translation only: The Nakba.
The Nakba resulted in the displacement of 957,000 Palestinians out of 1.4 million in 1,300 villages and towns. The majority ended up in neighboring Arab countries, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and other nations. Thousands who stayed in Israeli-occupied areas were driven from their homes and lands. This period also witnessed over 51 massacres, with more than 15,000 Palestinians martyred.
Moreover, since 1967, there have been over 1 million detention cases (Palestinians detained by “Israel”), as well as over 1,000 reported attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. This is only part of the injustice and oppression suffered by the people of Palestine on their own land. More could be said regarding stolen properties, land grabs, demolitions, cultural genocide and systematic killings through medical negligence, raids, and collective punishment to name only a few.
Let’s revisit the question once more:
Is the Palestinian and Arab response proportionate to the actions taken by the Zionist lobby that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948? What about the crimes it has committed since?
For most, at least those who possess the capacity to make a sober assessment, and with kind hearts who were genuinely fooled by false rhetoric and narrative that have been propagated for decades, neutrality fails after this simple and brief historical presentation. But now what? Let’s delve deeper into the concept of neutrality and how it speaks nothing but the colonizer’s tongue amid a case of severe occupation-turned-genocide. This explanation can only be brought forward in contrast with Resistance aimed at liberation.
Murderers in fancy suits and shiny dresses
“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses.” –Thomas Sankara
Using eloquent words and dressed up nicely in suits and dresses, the colonizer has often set itself at a higher standard and is responsible for upholding ‘equality’ through imposing a value scope of idealism and neutrality upon the ‘other’ [those that do not look like the colonizer or speak their tongue].
An idealism that held the “other”, from now on referenced as the oppressed, to the highest standard all the while they use eloquent speech to veil their double standards. While any deviation from the colonized gets marketed, through multi-billion dollar media empires, as ‘radicalism’, their impunity and murderous policies have often weighed on a very different scale.
Their actions, including massacres, systematic cultural genocide, wars, and unholy interventions, have followed one of three patterns:
In some cases, these actions were only acknowledged decades later, with a grim cinematic apology designating the atrocities as ‘a mistake’ and a dark stain on their history. This was notably seen in the case of France in Algeria and Rwanda.
Alternatively, they have been veiled with eloquent words that charm the listener but lack meaningful substance, all the while serving imperial interests. An example of this can be observed when the collective West claimed ‘neutrality’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, brought ‘democracy’ to Libya, and funded terrorist groups in Syria to bring forth ‘freedom’.
Lastly, there are instances where they openly admit to the killing of hundreds of thousands but claim “the price was worth it,” as former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously did in a 1997 interview when speaking of the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children to preserve Western interests.
That being laid out, alongside the brief history of the Nakba massacres, the final straw I to show that “Israel” is in fact a necessity for the collective West and a very important asset without which American influence, and consequently European influence, recedes greatly allowing for the rise of a reformed Arab world. Such a rise threatens major economic and geopolitical interests for the West that has for so long survived, in its luxurious form, on the plunder of the Global South.
The collective West today, led by NATO, and including “Israel”, have sought after their own interests at the cost of human life forgetting that in the same way that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” genocide, ethnic cleansing, subjugation, and plunder were colonial and occupation practices, no matter how often they are called “peace”.
In this post-World War II era, although genocide has occurred before, the October 7 operation launched by the Palestinian Resistance represents a significant turning point, coinciding with the decline of Western influence.
It has reaffirmed what has always been, though most recently veiled in clauses of human rights, development, and cooperation: the US, which drives both NATO and Israeli decision-making and policy, continues to impose its influence by force of economic means, but when it fails, it returns to its old-school habits and brings back its policy of genocide, plunder, mass destruction, and subjugation.
When we speak of such policies, we do not only speak of the doers but also those suffering on the other end of these policies. The people suffering the price of genocide and plunder are without doubt those paying an incredibly higher price. A price that has been inked in blood, trans-generational trauma, and identity crisis.
When weighing financial losses against the human cost, it becomes indisputable that anyone with even a modest amount of compassion and common sense would unequivocally stand in solidarity with the oppressed.
In the tragic case of occupied Palestine, the people of Palestine (and an argument can be made for the entire Arab world) have endured the heartbreaking loss of their ancestral lands and the relentless, systematic ethnic cleansing that has unfolded over decades. Their lives have been marred by the profound sorrow of witnessing generations of ancestors, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren suffer unfathomable pain.
Neutrality sidelines justice, reaps only an equation of ‘either subjugation or violence’
“The colonial regime is a regime established by violence. It is always by force that the colonial regime was established. It is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have imposed themselves. Violence in daily behavior, violence towards the past which is emptied of all substance, violence towards the future.” – Frantz Fanon
The latest atrocity, the Gaza genocide, stands as a harrowing testament to the depths of suffering endured. This genocide, characterized by deliberate and calculated brutality, has left an indelible mark on the Palestinian people. It is within this context that the Israeli occupation President, Isaac Herzog, shockingly confessed: “This war is not only a war between Israel and Hamas [falsely isolated from Palestine’s popular choice of Resistance], it’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization. To save the values of Western civilization.”
President of the occupation state Isaac Herzog on MSNBC: "This war is not only a war between Israel and Hamas, it's a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization. To save the values of Western civilization." pic.twitter.com/qRiAA1Rhn1
Prior to that, US President Joe Biden decades ago, in 1986, announced that if there were “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
Also, significantly, back in 1999, Samuel Berger, who then served as the US assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, stressed, in an address titled The Middle East On The Eve Of The Millennium: Building Peace, Strengthening America’s Security, that “How the Middle East evolves matters,” adding that “it matters, of course, most directly, to the people of the Arab world.”
However, Berger, in what could have possibly been one of the most straightforward speeches in the history of the US, further explained that the “Middle East” matters not only to the Arab people who live there but also “matters to the American people as well, because of the strategic, political and economic interests that are at stake.”
After the US interests in the Arab world, Berger emphasized that the region “also matters – profoundly — to the people of Israel,” justifying that argument by saying, “For them, the difference between a Middle East focused on economic development and looking to the future and a region mired in poverty and in hatreds inherited from the past is the difference between peace and conflict…lasting security and…perpetual threat…a normal life and the lives they have been forced to live.”
That being said, it’s important to note that any claim of neutrality falls short of ‘impartiality’ when considering the evident Western interests. In brief, ‘Israel’ is viewed as a vital geopolitical entity (better described as a ‘barrier state’) and plays a crucial role in preserving the nation-states established as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This historic agreement divided the Arab world into spheres of influence and established countries in service of Western interests. Consequently, the potential loss of “Israel”, yes I do mean the complete liberation of occupied Palestine, is perceived as a significant challenge for the West. It could threaten the emergence of a prosperous Arab world, regardless of its specific shape or form. Moreover, the rise of a highly effective Resistance movement that has excelled on various fronts could lead to a reduction in Western influence in the Middle East. This, in turn, may open the door for liberation movements across the Global South to gain momentum.
These potential developments have far-reaching consequences for the global influence of the West, potentially marking the end of its era of hegemony. Additionally, they could pose obstacles and disruptions to multi-billion dollar interests both within the region and worldwide. Beyond neutrality is justice and vengeance
Do you condemn the Resistance and stand with occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide?
In the face of occupation, ethnic cleansing, gentrification, forced displacement, dehumanization, illegal detentions, torture, and genocide, in the face of such immense suffering and ongoing atrocities, the pursuit of justice becomes an urgent moral imperative, starkly contrasting with the notion of neutrality. Confronted with the stark reality of oppression, neutrality is not a virtue, rather it is merely a colonial narrative; it is a passive stance that inadvertently perpetuates injustice.
To truly stand for justice is to actively advocate for the rights, dignity, and freedom of the oppressed, in this case, the Palestinian people. It is to recognize that silence in the face of oppression is a tacit endorsement of the oppressor’s actions. Justice demands that we confront and challenge the systems and forces that perpetuate suffering, and it calls for solidarity with those who seek liberation and a brighter future.
Justice demands us to stand with the Resistance. The Resistance was born of the people and remains a popular choice among all the oppressed peoples of this region. Our moral duty is to engage the enemy by all means available to us, not just in words and chants. Real support seeks to advance the liberation movements on the ground and hinder or obstruct the capabilities of the enemy and all those who seek to support them.
The blood of over 100,000 people has already been spilled in occupied Palestine alone. These martyrs’ blood must not go in vain and that is our duty, those who remain steadfast in this land and on this path. Retribution is an unavoidable outcome, as the adversary, having resorted to shedding the blood of the innocent, has sown the seeds of inevitable retaliation. Despite exhausting all peaceful avenues, and with the occupation, along with its supporters, persisting in promoting violence and denying the oppressed their rightful claims, the concept of vengeance, which in Arabic carries profound significance in seeking retribution or repayment, has been declared. In recent years, it has been presented by the Resistance, as a path to full liberation.
In light of the end of President Michel Aoun’s term, a considerable period of presidential vacuum is expected to follow due to the political disputes among the various parties.
The presidential vacuum synchronizes with a constitutional conflict between the Free Patriotic Movement and the caretaker premier Najib Mikati about the powers of the caretaker government.
Mikati insists that the caretaker government can resume its activities and assume the powers of the presidency amid the rejection of the other party. However, Aoun signed the degree accepting the resignation of Mikati’s government, which may escalate the ongoing dispute.
The political rift among the various parties in Lebanon has so far prevented the parliamentary blocs from securing a majority for any presidential candidate.
House Speaker Nabih Berri decided to stop holding sessions to elect a new president till a certain consensus is reached, noting that he would call for a national dialogue session for this sake.
Hezbollah officials have always called for preventing the foreign interventions from affecting the presidential election process, warning that the US administration has plotted to impose a candidate that opposes the Resistance.
Head of Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc, Hajj Mohammad Raad, said that the US administration is an arrogant tyrant that spreads woes everywhere, adding that it has decided to impose a new Lebanese president that opposes the Resistance.
MP Raad added that the US administration is provoking the foreign ambassadors to Lebanon in order to promote prevention of electing a president that acknowledges the right of the Resistance.
During the first four sessions, the Lebanese Forces and Progressive Socialist Party voted for Michel Moawwad who obtained an average of only 40 votes. However, the pro-Resistance alliance cast blank ballots, securing an average of 55 votes.
According to the Lebanese Constitution, in all the sessions that follow the first one, the minimum number of deputies who must attend the session is 86 and the winner candidate must obtain 65 votes.
Thus, the pro-Resistance alliance is closer to achieving the presidential election win which would be in need of sustaining and maintaining the political contacts in this regard.
Lebanese Parliament
Regarding the names of the candidates, the pro-Resistance alliance has not disclosed its choices; however, sustaining the political coverage for the Resistance requires electing a candidate who voices a clear support to the Resistance.
Candidates who exist in the grey area can never carry out the mission of protecting the Resistance that is protecting the entire nation from the Israeli enemy.
The US administration exerts heavy pressures on the Lebanese presidency whoever the president is. In 2000, US Secretary of State Madlin Albright tried to force Lebanon acknowledge the Blue Line as an international border in a phone call with the President Emile Lahoud whose patriotic affiliation and personal power made him switch off the telephone.
Thus, the political disputes and narrow interests in Lebanon can never be the criteria according to which the presidential elections will be held.
The strategic policy of preserving the Army-People-Resistance golden formula, which has protected the nation and its resources from all the enemies, must be the path of all the Lebanese officials, including the president of the republic.
“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!
Because they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere.
Professor John Mearsheimer said the war in Ukraine will be a footnote in the history books written about the world changes this war has triggered. This remark may provide the best explanation of the huge noise the NATO countries have made about providing Ukraine with more sophisticated armaments and with billions of dollars in order to prevent a Russian victory. It also explains the big media campaign led by the West about the so-called advance made by the Ukrainian army against the Russians in Kharkov area. The press conference by NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, and the US Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, has to be seen and understood in light of the dire economic crisis which is biting into Europe.
Despite the iron fist laid on Western media, it is an open secret today that the sanctions imposed by the West against Russia have backfired on the West itself, and it has become clear that Western people are the ones suffering because of these sanctions, and not the Russian people as the western governments planned. In addition, the Eastern rapprochement between China and Russia is treading fast steps toward an alliance, and the Shanghai organization is attracting more member states, which in a short while, will become one of the most important world alliances that NATO countries do not want to see at all. Both China and Russia have announced that their future dealings and trade are going to be in Yuans and Rubles, which will start to weaken the dollar and shake its world status.
During the week and contrary to the expectations of Western media, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that he is going to Kazakhstan for a Shanghai meeting with the aim of meeting with President Putin. Every time these two leaders meet, they add another brick to the fortified base of their alliance whose grand announced aim is to change the world system into a multipolar system after getting rid of Western hegemony once and for all.
Of course, western experts and planners know all this and dread it, but instead of mentioning it or trying to address it in the real world, these jumped to the domain that they know best; i.e. the military claiming to their audiences that “Ukrainian forces have been able to stall Moscow offensive in the Donbass strike back behind Russian lines and retake territory.” On this narrative, they built the argument that NATO countries should send more support to Ukraine, with more billions of dollars and with the most sophisticated arms. Their imagination was set free to imagine that this is a very important moment for the Ukrainian people and army, and we should support them in order to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine, as per their illusions.
First, there is no doubt that the press conference and all the media fever that came in its aftermath hailing progress made by Ukrainian forces against Russian forces was meant to change the focus of the Western people’s attention from the horrible consequences of the war on Ukraine on their daily lives and to stop the masses from taking to the streets to forcefully object to these policies, which proved to be disastrous to most of them.
Second, NATO countries have a history of supporting wars that have nothing to do with their geography or history. They now claim that they have to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to protect the Eastern borders of NATO. What about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; are those also bordering NATO, or threatening its power? And what about Taiwan now; is it on the borders of NATO too?
The history of these countries proves without a shadow of a doubt that the military industry is at the core of its survival and continuity, and that is why they cannot survive and keep their hegemony over the world without this industry being well and prosperous, knowing that for this industry to be well and prosperous, it can only feed on wars. That is why they cannot stop igniting wars in one part of the globe or another, and that is the most pending danger NATO countries constitute to the welfare of human beings everywhere.
What we have to remember is that we are dealing with two different worlds, two different systems of thinking, two different histories, and two very different objectives. The West, which has subjugated and colonized many countries across the world over centuries, has perfected the usage of media and psychological wars to keep people as its subject. Throughout history, Western colonial powers gave no thought to civilian casualties. A reminder of the answer of Madeleine Albright about millions of Iraqi children being killed; she said, “But it was worth it,” whereas Eastern powers represented by Russia in this war pay so much attention to avoiding unnecessary loss of civilian lives. They change their plans and their tactics if they can save lives in their military or on the adversary’s civilian lives. In fact, the Eastern attitude always believes in taking time. They are not in a hurry, and they do not rush to launch a media or psychological campaign because their objectives are far-reaching and by far nobler than those of the party whose main concern is to sell arms and accumulate more capital.
For those reasons and many others unlisted here, we have to take the Hollywood postures made by the NATO Secretary-General and the US Secretary of State with a huge pinch of salt. Their major aim was to divert attention from the huge disaster they have created to their people through this uncalculated and misconceived adventure. It would have been much wiser and historically correct to review their decisions and decide whether they should continue in this futile endeavor or acknowledge the new realities on the ground born from the rise of the East and its determination, supported by the majority of people on Earth, to put an end to Western hegemony and remap the world on the basis of equal integrity and mutual respect. This may take a bit more time than what most people desire, but the train has left the station and it will undoubtedly reach its abode. The rest are insignificant details that no one will mention in the future.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
President Joe Biden’s foreign policy advisors are applauding themselves for devising a “sensitive” itinerary as he plans to embark on a trip to the Middle East on July 13.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Biden defended his controversial planned meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (known as MBS), saying it is meant not only to bolster US interests but also to bring peace to the region.
It seems that his trip will not include Yemen, though if this were truly a “sensitive” visit, he would be stopping at one of Yemen’s many beleaguered refugee camps. There he could listen to people displaced by war, some of whom are shell-shocked from years of bombardment. He could hear the stories of bereaved parents and orphaned children and then express true remorse for the complicity of the United States in the brutal aerial attacks and starvation blockade imposed on Yemen for the past eight years.
From the vantage point of a Yemeni refugee camp, Biden could insist that no country, including his own, has a right to invade another land and attempt to bomb its people into submission. He could uphold the value of the newly extended truce between the region’s warring parties, allowing Yemenis a breather from the tortuous years of war, and then urge ceasefires and settlements to resolve all militarized disputes, including Russia’s war in Ukraine. He could beg for a new way forward, seeking political will, universally, for disarmament and a peaceful, multipolar world.
More than 150,000 people have been killed in the war in Yemen, 14,500 of whom were civilians. But the death toll from militarily imposed poverty has been immeasurably higher. The war has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, creating an unprecedented level of hunger in Yemen, where millions of people face severe hardship.
Some 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure; by December 2022, the projected number of hungry people will likely rise to nineteen million. The rate of child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world, and nutrition continues to deteriorate.
I grew to understand the slogan “No Blood for Oil” while living in Iraq during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm war, the 1998 Desert Fox war, and the 2003 Shock and Awe war. To control the pricing and the flow of oil, the United States and its allies slaughtered and maimed thousands of Iraqi people. Visits to Iraqi pediatric wards from 1996 to 2003 taught me a tragic expansion of that slogan. We must certainly insist: “No Starvation for Oil.”
During twenty-seven trips to Iraq, all in defiance of the US economic sanctions against Iraq, I was part of delegations delivering medicines directly to Iraqi hospitals in cities throughout the country. We witnessed the ghastly crime of punishing children to death for the sake of an utterly misguided U.S. foreign policy. The agony endured by Iraqi families who watched their children starve has now become the nightmare experience of Yemeni families.
It’s unlikely that a US President or any leader of a US-allied country will ever visit a Yemeni refugee camp, but we who live in these countries can take refuge in the hard work of becoming independent of fossil fuels, shedding the pretenses that we have a right to consume other people’s precious and irreplaceable resources at cut-rate prices and that war against children is an acceptable price to pay so that we can maintain this right.
We must urgently simplify our over-consumptive lifestyles, share resources radically, prefer service to dominance, and insist on zero tolerance for starvation.
Okay, I am going to ask you to make a real effort and, for a while at least, drop your certitudes and what you believe is a good or a bad way to prosecute a war. Instead, I am going to appeal to your common sense.
Long before the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine started, but following the Russian ultimatum, I indicated many times that what Russia would be doing is the following: ask for negotiations and if the other side rejects them, Russia would turn up the “pain dial”, slowly, step by step. If the other side agreed to negotiations, but then used them to stall and negotiate in bad faith, same response: Russia would turn up the pain dial. A little. Step by step.
And do WHAT exactly next???
What is the point of turning on the pain dial and remaining silent?
The purpose of the pain dial is to convince your enemy to agree to substantive talks. Conversely, that means that turning the pain dial WITHOUT offering talks simply makes no sense.
Yeah, yeah, I know, in Zone A NOT to negotiate with the enemy is a sign of manhood, virility, courage, prowess and being “Presidential”. Which did not stop the Ubermacho Trump from… … negotiating with “Rocket Man” and then end up being totally screwed over by him. So, I get it, when you are used to stupid politicians, you do not want negotiations, or you end up with SNAFUs like Biden telling the 82nd in Poland about “we you will be there” (that is in the Ukraine!).
But please understand that Russian politicians are not as stupid as yours.
And a country with smart and well-educated diplomats does not need to fear talks, quite the contrary.
Lavrov vs Bliken – you get what I mean?
Next, another Zone A hangup: the goal of a war.
In Zone A, wars are to be fought towards maximal destruction of lives and infrastructure. That is what the US promises its enemies “we will bomb you to the stone age” and that is what Uncle Shmuel did to Iraq. Only to eventually lose that war too (ditto for all the other wars the US has ever fought since WWII).
In Zone B people understand that the goal of a war is to achieve a political outcome.
As Ho Chi Minh tried to explain to his ignorant counterparts “you can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win“.
“Just” mass murder achieves very little and the little it does achieve is never long lasting. And nobody looks very “Presidential” after getting his ass handed to him!
For the Kremlin, this is a no brainer: you always talk to anybody worth talking two, especially if these talks increases your chances to:
Lose less soldiers
Lose less equipment
Kill less people (on both sides)
Preserve the civilian infrastructure
Get a sense of how your enemy is doing and feeling
Prove to your own and foreign public opinion that you are using violence only as a last resort
Only slowly increasing the pain on your pain dial, thereby making each increase more sensitive
Save immense sums of money
Have somebody on the other side to sign a declaration of surrender
Allow the country which you defeated to recover faster and better
What did the US ignoramuses do in Iraq?
First they did bomb it viciously and genocidally (Madeleine Aldumb admitted that openly!)
Then they invaded with the “kill! kill! kill!” mindset.
Then they declared victory.
Then they got stuck and defeated.
Then they shamefully had to run with their tails tucked.
General Shamanov vs General Petraeus – you get what I mean?
Now I do NOT want Russia to follow this no doubt “brilliant” US plan.
Turning the Ukraine into Iraq is NOT what Russia wants or needs.
So, and especially for those alternatively gifted or really mentally stuck in Zone A:
Russia is doing the absolutely correct thing by negotiating and talking with pretty much everybody and anybody. The problem is not the fact of talks, it is the dismal way the Russians (superb negotiators but sub-pathetic PR people) presented the information, which they did only partially, rather ambiguously and with all the wrong faces doing the talking.
The benefit of this PR disaster was a wave of rage and patriotism which is now even way higher than it was at the initiation of combat operations. There is a kind of an informal referendum going on in Russia where people vote with their feet to go to the local recruitment center and volunteer for combat in the Ukraine!
Now the center of gravity of this operation is clearly going to go to the big cauldron containing two more cauldrons in the Donbass.
Nobody really knows how many Ukrainian soldiers are left alive there, what their condition and morale are, and how much of their deep defenses still stand. But here is what we do know:
This is the biggest Ukrainian force in the entire theater of operations
There are AT LEAST several TENS OF THOUSAND soldiers still left
These were the best trained and equipped forces of the Ukrainian military
The way the Nazis organized them is, roughly, that in each Ukrainian “brigade” there is at least one bona fide Nazi “battalion” tasked with making darn sure that nobody negotiates with the Russians or, if they do, that those who do quickly get dispatched.
In these conditions a direct assault by Russian forces is always an option, they have proven in Mariupol and Avdeevka that they can do that when needed. I remind you that during WWII the Soviet Union liberated 1’200 (one thousand two hundred!) towns and cities from Nazi occupiers. The Russian military knows more about urban warfare than any other army on the planet, especially modern urban warfare.
But it would be INFINITELY better to convince these Ukrainian forces (which are doomed, and they understand that!) to surrender and, for that goal, offer them some kind of “out” which would include some tangible concessions/rewards for those units who will accept the inevitable and surrender.
The same goes for the “big” top level negotiations in Belarus or Turkey. Here is what Lavrov declared today about these talks. The Ukrainian side agreed to:
No nukes for the Ukraine
No NATO for the Ukraine
No alliances of any kind and a neutral Ukraine
Give up any claims on Crimea and the Donbass
Now if you do not see these as major concessions, you have issues I cannot help you with.
I will just say that many Ukie propagandists instantly dismissed it all as “false” just as they have, apparently, “resurrected/transported” the two Ukrainian soldiers who tortured Russian POWs to a location in Kiev. The truth is that these are painful and major concessions. Hence the desperate Ukie (and, really, US!) needs to present ANY negotiations as “5min to total surrender” by the Russians – the reality is too awful for the leaders of the Empire of Lies to even contemplate, let alone admit.
Add to this the “disarmament” of the Ukraine by the Russian armed forces and you will see that things are going pretty fantastically well, especially for such a short and RELATIVELY small and limited operation. At least that is true for the military aspect. Info operations, alas, not so much 😦
Finally, and as always, I remind you that this is not, repeat, NOT, about the Ukraine.
Disarming and denazifying the Ukraine is only a means towards a much more important goal: the future collective security architecture of a post-NATO Europe which, in turn, is just the cornerstone of all of international security.
So, the goal is NOT to denazify the Ukraine, that is a means towards the goal, the real goal is to denazify the planet.
Oh I know, very few, if any, in Zone A will see that as anything but totally over the top hyperbole. Why?
It’s a mental block: most folks in Zone A think of themselves and their country as somehow “indispensable”, but they are wrong. Far from being indispensable, they need to be permanently re-educated (over several generations!) and eventually integrated into Zone B as a “normal”, morally and mentally sane, country.
This, by the way, also implies NEGOTIATIONS with the US, NATO and all of Zone A!
And if Zone A does not want to negotiate anything? Correctomundo! You turn up the pain dial, and ask again. Then repeat until Zone A accepts talks.
It’s that simple, really.
My very last comment will be this: right now, the purely military aspects of the SMO are taking second place to the economic cataclysm which Zone A brought upon itself (and much of the world). The Eurolemmings especially are only slowly beginning to discover the immene joy and privilege of being a member of the European Reichsgau of Empire of Lies truly is!
What can I say? They SO richly deserve this….
And if all of the above is just Putinist propaganda, by all means, send a letter to the Russian General Staff, ask for a meeting, and explain to all these boneheads how warfare “your way” is so much superior to warfare “their way”. Begin by listening all the heroic victories which your country has ever won.
Or apply to the CIA. They actually might hire you! 😆
Foreword, Prologue, Introduction: This is Part 1 of 6 and will form a complete ebook that will be available for download with part six.
Foreword
From: James Bacque
Date: Saturday, Jan 5, 2019 9:13 PM
Dear Larry
Thanks for the information–as you guessed I have encountered much of it myself already. I wish you good luck . . . Be as moderate as you can in expressing your very important findings. Remember that hardly anyone knows as much as you do and some of your findings are very upsetting.
All the best
Jim
Prologue To Volume One
A Brief History of America That You Won’t Learn in a University
One of the more popular historical myths embedded in the American consciousness by the propaganda machine relates to the migration of settlers to the New World, the narrative detailing how hundreds of thousands of the virtuous oppressed flocked to the dockyards in a headlong rush for freedom and opportunity. There may indeed have been five or six such persons, but a much larger group was there to escape the hangman and jailer and an even larger selection were slave traders, hookers, and budding capitalist scam artists looking for greener pastures. When we add in the vast numbers hoping to escape justified persecution for their perverted witches-brew versions of Christianity, the first Americans were hardly role models for a new nation. The evidence is more clearly on the side of criminals, losers and misfits, religious whackos and opportunists than on the mythical oppressed. And, for the record, there is no evidence whatever of settlers emigrating to America in search of either “freedom” or “opportunity”, at least not within the current meaning of these words.
Good mental health was not a prerequisite for European settlers emigrating to the New World. We are fond of reminding ourselves that Australia was (and mostly still is) populated primarily with murderers, thieves and sexual perverts, but the immigrants to America were not noticeably better. Indeed, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty got the words more or less correct in referring to “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. While the Australians had their serial killers and muggers, the Europeans went one better with their Christian extremists who spent their weekdays burning witches and killing Indians, and their Sundays in church thanking God for the opportunity. The Australians have marginally improved their habits over the centuries while the Americans have not.
America is widely accepted, and indeed even prides itself, on being a deeply Christian country, with 65% or more of the population declaring religion important in their lives. This would be supported by history, since the major migrations to the New World consisted of a long list of flaky religious sects whose primary goal in emigration was the opportunity to build a society entirely based on those isolationist and extremist heresies. It is probably safe to say that Salem witchcraft was the seedbed in which the peculiarly American version of Christian theology sprouted and flourished, and which also served as a practical introduction to mass hysteria which would later be so usefully applied to the concepts of patriotism and democracy. The enduring echoes of this religious ancestry have been highly influential in all of subsequent American history.
The Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (“The most famous words in the English language”, if you’re American; just another Hello Kitty greeting card, if you’re not), states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all White Men were created superior and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, the most important of which is slavery”. In the recent history of the modern world, only two nations of people have so thoroughly embraced slavery as to have practiced it on an immense scale for hundreds of years: the Christians in America and the Dalai Lamas in Tibet. And only these two groups so cherished slavery in their hearts they fought a civil war over the right to maintain it. It is hardly a moral selling point that both sets of racist bigots lost the war and, while Mao cleaned up Tibet, the racism and bigotry persisted in America, often violently, for another 200 years and is still widely in evidence today. Christian virtue does not die easily.
Internationally, the American government and its leaders function with an absolute amorality, driven primarily by their commercial Darwinism, their law-of-the-jungle, might-makes-right philosophy. Yet individually most Americans accept all this as somehow being righteous and pleasing in the eyes of their god. The vast network of torture prisons, the numerous governments overthrown, the countless brutal dictatorships installed and supported, the commercial and military enslavement of so many populations, the 10 to 20 million civilians massacred, the constant meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the so-frequent destabilisation of governments, the plundering of the resources of so many nations. All of these are excused, justified, forgiven, often praised, then quickly forgotten by these moral Christians. Americans may be comfortable with all this cognitive dissonance, but as Jiddu Krishnamurti aptly wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.
Hypocrisy has always been a prominent, if not quite endearing, feature of Americans, and especially of their government. It is Americans who preach democracy and freedom at home while installing brutal puppet dictators all over the world, who preach free trade at home while practicing savage mercantilistic protectionism abroad. It is Americans who espouse human rights at home while building the largest network of torture prisons in the history of the world. And of course, preaching that human life is precious at home while murdering millions in other nations in trumped-up wars of liberation. It is only Americans who moan about “the appalling loss of 5,000 American lives” in Iraq while killing one million Iraqis, half of whom were children. It is only the Americans who use the CIA, NED, USAID and the VOA to pay and prod individuals in other countries to create internal political dissent, then condemn a government for cracking down on “innocent dissidents”. Maybe one day Americans will lose their stomach for all this creation of worldwide instability and have another American revolution. And not before time.
Most Americans are only dimly aware of their own sordid past, a situation abetted by all the blank pages in the history books. The portions of US history contained in these pages have mostly been excised from the historical memory of Americans because they don’t fit the mythical narrative. Most Americans fervently believe their country was founded on God and Christian virtue, liberty, democracy, human rights and free trade, but when we dig beneath the propaganda and jingoism we discover the United States of America was founded on religious extremism, racism, slavery, genocide, a brutal imperialism and a virulently predatory strain of capitalism.
These volumes contain a capsule history of the United States of America with selections that will not be found in any history book, but that nevertheless consists of facts which are not in dispute. From here, we will look at some specifics, beginning with how America became rich. From this point forward, ideology and reality will be in constant conflict, presenting stark challenges to our uninformed beliefs.
Quiz on American History
a. Which US Secretary of State holds the World Record for being the most prolific baby-killer in recorded history?
b. Which US General holds the World Record as the greatest pathological mass killer in modern history?
c. Fidel Castro listed in the Guinness Book of Records as surviving 638 murder attempts by the US government. For what was he being punished?
d. The father of which recent US President conspired with a group of Jewish bankers and industrialists in 1933, engaging a famous General to amass an army of 500,000 troops to overthrow the US government and install a fascist dictatorship in America?
e. How many times has the US invaded Canada?
f. The US has been a nation for about 245 years. For how many of those years has the US been at war?
g. How many democracies has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime? How many brutal dictatorships has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime?
h. Japan conducted abominable human experimentation in China during WWII – Shiro Ishii’s infamous Unit 731. Why was Japan spared war crimes trials?
i. How many Presidents, Prime Ministers and senior government officials of other countries has the US assassinated for disobedience or obstruction to hegemony?
j. Which country operates the only Torture University in the world?
k. For several hundred years, slave-trading was the highest-paying job in America. What was the second-highest-paying?
l. Which government for about 100 years paid a lifetime salary to any citizen who could steal patents and processes from other countries?
m. Which revered US Supreme Court justice recommended killing off all Americans of low IQ?
n. The government of which country for decades silenced political dissidents by performing frontal lobotomies and turning them into vegetables?
o. Which famous American institution recommended “mercy killings” of the economically unfit, these to be performed in local gas chambers?
p. Which American Defense Secretary gathered 500,000 young men with an average IQ of about 65 and sent them to Vietnam? How many returned? What was his punishment?
q. Which American Military physician appeared before Congress in what year, asking for $10 million to fund the creation of the HIV virus? Did he receive the money?
r. When and where was Coca-Cola was invented?
s. Which famous person invented the incandescent light bulb? Which the telephone? The most famous American inventor was Thomas Edison. How many things did Edison invent?
t. We are told Germany killed some 6,000,000 Jews during WWII. How many Germans were killed in Germany AFTER the end of WWII?
u. Which famous physicist wrote to Roosevelt, offering to fund the entire unknown cost of creating the atomic bomb, stating the funds were already confirmed available?
v. Which famous US President was the illegitimate son of a Jewish slave trader?
w. Abraham Lincoln’s wife was an inveterate opium addict. Who was her opium supplier?
x. In what year was slavery abolished in the US?
y. Which US President exposed tens of millions of US citizens to radiation from open-air atomic tests, then instructed medics to inform women experiencing leukemia, hair loss, miscarriages, that they were suffering from “housewife syndrome”?
z. Which famous shoe did Nike design that set Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman on the road to fame and glory?
Answers
a. Madeleine Albright; Iraq, 500,000
b. Cutis LeMay; about 20 million, give or take
c. Expelling the Jews from Cuba
d. George Bush
e. Five so far
f. 235
g. Zero. More than 50, and counting
h. Ishii and his entire unit were transported to the US to teach Americans the pleasures of live vivisections and other atrocities. Ishii was a Professor at the University of Maryland until his death decades later.
i. More than 150, and counting (including Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN)
j. The US of A; the “University of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia
k. Killing Indians
l. The US of A. Amounts of $20,000 to $50,000, in the 1800s
m. Oliver Wendell Holmes
n. The US of A. (FBI)
o. Carnegie
p. Robert McNamara. Not many, but the Defense Dept. refuses to release statistics. Made President of the World Bank.
q. Dr. Donald MacArthur, Deputy Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense. 1969. Yes.
r. The Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit, 40 years before Coke stole the patent.
s. Joseph Swan, USA, five years before Edison stole the patent. Antonio Meucci, Italy, five years before Bell stole the patent. None. All Edison’s patents were either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased.
t. Between 12 million and 14 million; some by execution, the bulk by starvation.
u. Albert Einstein, funds offered by Rothschild and other European Jewish bankers.
v. Abraham Lincoln; the son of A. A. Springs(tein) and Nancy Hanks. Adopted by the Lincoln family.
w. A Jewish drug dealer named John Wilkes Booth.
x. Slavery was never abolished in the US. It just changed form.
y. Eisenhower
z. The Japanese Onitsuka Tiger. Nike stole the design and began manufacturing in the US. American courts ruled Onitsuka and Nike could “share” the patent.
Introduction to the Series
David Edwards was quoted in the Third World Traveler as having written:
“Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”
This is the condition we face in dealing with America and Americans today: a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever marketing and nationalistic propaganda that is almost inevitably contradicted by the facts. In truth, there is little about the US today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what Americans ‘know’ about their nation, its history and its conduct in international affairs, is wrong, and often violently wrong. I am not so much concerned with what Americans believe about their own country, but it is a concern that this enormous compendium of historical fiction has been marketed to the rest of the world as truth, with peoples in many other nations believing the same fairytales as do the Americans and holding that nation in a level of regard that is to say the least undeserved, and often dangerous for the absence of truths.
These truths are the content of these books, the history of the US as it really was then and still is today, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast comforter of propaganda, jingoism, patriotism and misinformation that blankets the nation we know as the United States of America. Coincident with what is truly an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the US is an equal volume of black-tinted information about the world outside the US. To the same extent that Americans have been subjected to a century or more of positive and unforgivably false propaganda about their own nation, they have also been subjected to enormously false negative propaganda and misinformation about the world outside their borders.
This series of books was to a large extent an accident of circumstance which began with my extended stay in China and the almost immediate realisation that the voluminous negative flood about China persistently emanating from the Western Zionist media was entirely false; demonisation and propaganda at their worst, giving Americans wholly unrealistic and often vicious misinterpretations and misunderstandings about the realities of China. After viewing a decade or more of this onslaught, and after writing many series of articles in attempts to correct some of the more egregious falsehoods, it seemed a book might be a more appropriate format. But then during ten years or more of historical research, it became apparent that Americans had been subjected to an even greater campaign of misinformation about their own nation than about China and other foreign countries.
I then seemed faced with a two-fold task: to correct – in the eyes of Americans, and perhaps Westerners generally – some of the more glaring misinformation about China, but then to correct – in the eyes of Americans – the even more glaring misinformation about their own country. To further complicate the issues, it gradually became clear that the world outside the US had been so contaminated by American historical mythology, jingoism and propaganda that foreigners were largely living in the same fairyland, insofar as the realities of America were concerned, as were the Americans themselves. To add to the confusion, it eventually emerged that the US-based power of the media, of advertising, of propaganda and misinformation, had contaminated not only the American view of other nations but the views of the peoples within those nations – to the point where Russians or Chinese or Vietnamese had been excessively exposed (thanks in no small part to malignancies like the VOA and Radio Free Europe) to both the glorified but false images of the US and the comparatively derogatory but false images of their own nations that had been so heavily propagated by the American government and the Zionist media to their own people. One book thus became five.
These books are intended to provide only a summary of the related topics. Full volumes can, and have been, written on many of the topics in these chapters. We have seen many books on the CIA involvement in narcotics or in Tibet, volumes on the discrepancies in the official 9-11 narrative or the Bush regime torture prisons, others on the various failings of US democracy or the American educational system. But these individual offerings, useful as they are, treat the segments as essentially disparate and unrelated issues where in reality most of them are integral parts of a deeply-connected whole. My purpose in these volumes is to present a unified picture to enable readers to see the entire landscape as a single canvas and appreciate the inter-relationships of the parts. It is this unified image that will provide a comprehensive understanding of world events and the forces driving them.
Preface To Volume One
Almost every individual or family has what we call ‘skeletons in the closet’, a collection of perhaps embarrassing or even shameful events, regrettable actions, unsavory family members, sins we committed that we would rather not confess in public, things we do not dwell on and would prefer to forget, recognition not only of our imperfections but reflecting the reality that we not so much make mistakes as sometimes act with less than honorable motives.
Included in this category are lies that we tell. Many of these are what we call ‘white lies’, usually small avoidances of truth often done for convenience or even a good cause. No doubt all of us lie on occasion, but there are precious few of us for whom lies constitute the foundation of our lives, where we are in a real sense “living a lie”. We occasionally encounter people who lie about their educational credentials or work history, sometimes greatly exaggerating their accomplishments, and in these instances the lies may serve as an important part of the foundation of a person’s life, perhaps obtaining a highly-paid position based on entirely false credentials, a life that would in part disintegrate if all the truths were known. We find this sometimes with con artists, whose very existence seems built on a vast and intricate weaving of lies, with lives that would indeed disintegrate if the truths were made public. These latter people are, in some real sense, “living a lie”.
Moving from individuals to nations, there are a few countries in the world that fit this latter category, one being the United States of America – a nation and a people that are in every sense living a lie, with virtually the entire foundation of beliefs, of actions, of history, of national pride, of citizenship, based on things that are not only not true but constitute an all-encompassing network of fabricated historical myths. This is not an idle claim, and is not an accusation that can be made against many other countries. I know of no place regarding the US where we can look and not find the landscape littered with falsehoods and supported by an enormous scaffolding of myths, half-truths, buried facts, boldly revised history, nationalistic propaganda and magnificent outright lies. It is true that most nations sugar-coat some parts of their history, but the US is almost unique in the world in being a nation that is genuinely built – and almost entirely built – on a foundation of lies.
With most other nations, if all their historical and political lies were fully exposed with all truths openly documented, they would still survive. But for Americans, the existential threat would be unbearable and I do not believe the US could survive as a nation if all its historical truths were unveiled and confirmed, in a manner by which Americans were compelled to confront them as fact, where denial was not an option.
As two minor examples, we have the now well-documented fact that the US government abandoned several thousand prisoners of war in Vietnam, men held back by the Vietnamese pending the American payment of the agreed war reparations of several billions of dollars. The US government had no intention of paying the money and so walked away from the table, leaving the men behind. Many veterans attempted to bring this to public attention, even testifying before Congress; many had unshakable proof of their claims, but the government – and the media – ignored them until recently when all the factual details emerged in second-tier internet news sites and could no longer be avoided. A much greater existential threat lies in the truth of Pearl Harbor, where it is no longer a secret, except to Americans, that Roosevelt knew not only of the impending Japanese attack (which he had carefully and deliberately provoked), but that he knew precisely the location and course of the Japanese fleet and the date and time of the attack. Roosevelt and his aides held back this information from their own high-level military at Pearl Harbor, sacrificing those lives for the greater objective of a “justified” entry into both theaters of the Second World War.
I believe there are almost no Americans with the emotional capacity to face this brutal truth, either philosophically or emotionally, and yet similar evidence virtually floods the available information sources. I would repeat here David Edwards’ words that “we will become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’.” Yet these things have always been true about the American government. It wasn’t so long ago that declassified documents revealed Operation Northwoods, where the CIA proposed to shoot down a planeload of American college students and a US space shuttle launch, using those as justification to invade Cuba and remove Castro. The US government has both proposed and executed dozens of these atrocities over the years, all hidden from the American mind and heart with the compliance of the media. Pearl Harbor was by no means the worst of these, but few Americans will be able to deal with these truths of their nation.
Many other events are perhaps less brutal but no less breathtaking in their dishonesty. All the tales of how the US became rich, the jingoistic mantras of ingenuity and innovation, of wealth resulting from freedom and democracy, hard work and fair play, are entirely false, and repugnantly so. America became rich through a program of organised violence encompassing hundreds of years, through centuries of unpaid slave labor, military invasions, and the bullying and plundering of weaker nations. The propaganda of the benefits of American-style capitalism follows this same pattern, but Americans are fed this pulp from birth and no longer have the intelligence to see the truth. The US government statistics on items like inflation, unemployment, GDP and more, are the most misleading and dishonest of all nations today. The propaganda machine tells us otherwise, but one need only look at the facts. The US has for the last century been the largest perpetrator of espionage in the world, this activity provably including commercial espionage on a grand scale for more than a century, but the propaganda machine lays this accusation on other nations while claiming a desire to collect only information on terrorists. An enormous lie of a magnitude almost too large to comprehend or refute.
Thomas Edison, revered in American history books as one of the most prolific inventors of all time, never invented anything. The stories about him are fabricated historical myths, as are the cherished legends of the Wright Brothers making the first powered flight or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. Coca-Cola was a world-famous Spanish product stolen and patented by US pharmacist John Pemberton, with the US government refusing to recognise the prior patents. Tales of American inventiveness and IP are almost 180 degrees from the truth, with solidly documented proof that the US stole more IP from more countries than did any other nation, by orders of magnitude, paying $20,000 to $50,000 to anyone who could accomplish such a theft, at a time when even $20,000 was a lifetime salary for an average person. This pattern is consistent in every area and every field of endeavor in American society. The entire history of the US, as described in the history books and repeated incessantly by everyone from Hollywood to various Presidents, is almost all false, and the parts not false are almost always misrepresented. The nation of America and all of its people, are truly living a lie.
The entire thread of “Democracy” and “democratic values” is one of the greatest serial lies ever told. American history books, and American minds, are filled with tales of the US “making the world safe for democracy” by battling tyranny everywhere and installing democratic governments, but this has never happened even one time. While the propaganda machine was flooding the imaginary world with tales of democracies, the US was flooding the real world with brutal military dictators that would permit US multinationals and banks to pillage their countries. All the theory of the US’ fabled democracy, the government by the people, the checks and balances, is false, with the truth in the open but Americans so indoctrinated nobody seems able to see. Furthermore, the US government has made it illegal to teach many of these truths in America’s public schools.
All the propaganda of moral superiority, of concern for human rights, are, as we will see, lies in their entirety. The US is not only not morally superior, but has the worst human rights record of all nations excepting one, in recent centuries. Americans have many tales – almost all false – of other nations committing wartime atrocities while their own government and military were committing far worse and heavily censoring the media to prevent that knowledge from escaping custody. Almost no Americans know of the vast massacres committed by their military in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Iraq. Human rights atrocities began from the first days of the white settlers landing in North America, and have never ceased. Ever since the US outsourced to other countries its human rights atrocities, it has boasted to the world of its moral righteousness in human rights leadership, but all was based on lies, deception and marketing. The world’s only “torture university” – the infamous School of the Americas, the decades of cruel and even savage atrocities inflicted on so many of the world’s nations, have been lost in the American propaganda of goodness.
The US heavily promotes its fictitious position as the world’s policeman, but it has never once acted in such a capacity. No nation has ever been protected or defended from anything by the US, but many dozens have instead been ravaged and destroyed by this same imaginary angel of mercy. Everything about the US protecting any part of the world, is an outright lie. American heads are filled with tales of American goodness rescuing these populations from tyranny, but the hundreds of US military interventions have been undertaken to beat down indigenous populations who were rebelling against American imperialism, poverty and death. The US Congressional Record lists these interventions as “protecting American interests” without providing details on precisely what interests were being protected, by what means this “protection” was being inflicted and, most importantly, why America had any “interests” in those nations in the first place.
The US government has not only lied about every war and foreign military intervention, but has most often created false-flag events to accompany the lies and create fictitious justifications for belligerent action. The American entry to World War One was promoted by perhaps the greatest woven tapestry of lies ever created, thanks to Lippman and Bernays, a project that involved literally millions of lies told over a period of years, sufficient to brainwash an entire population into hating an innocent country. The promotion of World War Two was not better in any respect. The Americans have done this since the destruction of the warship Maine in Cuba’s harbor more than a century ago, and have never ceased these enormous self-inflicted injuries. Lies used to justify more lies.
It is now well-known and not in dispute that US officials told more than 900 separate lies to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq. The same is true with Libya, and with Syria today. The same is true of the destruction of Yugoslavia, another devastating military adventure based 100% on lies. All of the so-called “color revolutions” and other similar were not initiated to protect local populations from dictators but to punish unwilling nations for resisting the brutal American-style capitalism that was ravaging their shores. Ukraine, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and so many more nations have been under attack by the US government simply for resisting colonisation, but stillborn American minds believe they are God’s representatives pressuring “the bad guys”. Every part of American foreign policy and foreign involvement is covered with a carpet of lies, the media assisting in subversion and burying of the truths.
It would be useful to collect a catalogue of lies told by American presidents, Secretaries of State and other high officials, and publish these alongside the true facts. Consider this statement by George Bush made in 2003, just as his vast international kidnapping and torture regime was running at top speed: “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.” Name one president of any country that has told a greater lie than this one by George Bush.
The US government and its agencies boast to the world about their freedom of speech while condemning censorship in other nations, yet the US is probably the most heavily censored of all countries. The fact that the media are willing conspirators does not change the fact that all news and public content is heavily controlled and that 95% of what Americans “know” about their own nation and the world, is false. The US news media invariably present only one side of events that proselytise the current political agenda, leaving the American people hopelessly in the dark about the true facts. This is so true that one US columnist noted that only 4% of Americans have any awareness of the immense brutality perpetrated on the people of Palestine by the state of Israel for the past 70 years. American history books and other educational materials consist largely of historical myths, propaganda about the goodness of America, about the badness of other nations, lies about the foundation and entire history of America itself. Hollywood is one of the worst criminals in this regard, with virtually every movie containing historical content being little more than a twisted propaganda film, satisfying one ideology or another while totally misleading Americans on the truths of their own nation. Stephen Spielberg’s recent ‘Lincoln’ movie is one such example, but there are hundreds of others.
The US, the one nation in the world stridently claiming an absolute freedom from propaganda, brainwashing and censorship, is in fact and reality the nation most overwhelmed with precisely these attributes. We will see irrefutable evidence that American schoolchildren are exposed to extensive indoctrination virtually from birth in terms of politics, capitalism, consumerism, patriotism, moral superiority, American exceptionalism and so much more. We will see that this indoctrination and brainwashing are so extensive that the American view of itself and its place in the world bear almost no comparison to reality, to the extent that this vast gulf between beliefs and reality constitutes a national mental illness. Given the enormous cognitive dissonance in America today, one can conclude only that Americans are the most deluded people on earth.
And in the end, this is the reason the US Department of Homeland Security has built its 800 detention centers and purchased its three billion bullets, the same reason that many (Western) columnists are openly suggesting that the rampant abuse of power, the entrenched corruption and feeding from the public trough, the persistent plundering and terrorising of nations with civilian casualties in the millions, “has become so widespread, so deeply entrenched and so increasingly bold, that the only possible remedy is a revolution”. American and European columnists are becoming increasingly vocal in actually recommending another American revolution, convinced that only a popular uprising of the population acting in concert would have the power to reverse this tide. Until then, America, unlike almost every other nation in the world, will continue to be a nation built on lies.
Part Two of Six will contain: Colonisation, Labor and Slavery
All indications are that the Pentagon will be able to maneuver more effectively in Washington than on the battlefield.
Given the present atmosphere in Washington in which there is no lie so outrageous as to keep it out of the mainstream media, a great deal of policy making takes place without even key players in the government knowing what is going on behind their backs. Of course, there is a long tradition of government lying in general but most politicians and officials have probably convinced themselves that they are avoiding the truth because complicating issues might lead to endless debate where nothing ever gets done. There may be some truth to that, but it is a self-serving notion at best.
The real damage comes when governments lie in order to start or continue a war. The Administration of George W. Bush did just that when it lied about Iraq’s secular leader Saddam Hussein seeking nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists and developing delivery systems that would enable Iraq to attack the U.S. with the nukes. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice knew she was not telling the truth when she warned that “the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” She also was a key player in the Bush team approval of the CIA’s use of torture on captured al-Qaeda.
Rice is, by the way, not in jail and is currently a highly esteemed elder statesman serving as Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Likewise for her friend and patron Madeleine Albright who famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. imposed sanctions were worth it. In the United States the only ones who are ever punished are those who expose the crimes being committed by the government, to include a number of whistleblowers and journalists like Julian Assange.
The active American military role in lying probably started at Valley Forge but it came into prominence with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was an alleged attack by the North Vietnamese on U.S. Navy ships that led to an escalation in Washington’s direct role in what was to become the Vietnam War, which produced 58,000 American dead as well as an estimated three million Vietnamese. No one was punished for faking the casus belli and today Vietnam is a communist state in spite of the martial valor of the U.S. Army. Overall commander of US forces in Vietnam General William Westmoreland, who died in 2005, repeatedly advised the media and the White House that the American military was “winning” and there would be victory in six more months. General Westmoreland knew he was lying, as the Pentagon Papers subsequently revealed, and he also proved reluctant to share his plans with the White House. He even developed a contingency plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam without informing the president and Secretary of Defense.
Prize winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter has written an article “Trump Administration Insider Reveals How US Military Sabotaged Peace Agreement to Prolong Afghan War” that describes how the brass in the Pentagon currently are able to manipulate the bureaucracy in such a way as to circumvent policy coming out of the country’s civilian leadership. The article is based in part on an interview with retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat arms officer who served as an acting senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense during the last months of Donald Trump’s time in office. He would have likely been confirmed in his position if Trump had won reelection.
Porter describes the negotiations between the Taliban and Trump’s Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, which began in late 2018 and culminated in a peace agreement that was more-or-less agreed to by both sides in February 2019. The Pentagon, fearing that the war would be ending, quickly moved to sabotage a series of confidence building measures that included disengagement and cease fires. In short, US commanders supported by the Pentagon leadership under Secretary of Defense Mike Esper as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued to attack Taliban positions in spite of the agreements worked out by the diplomats, blaming all incidents on the Taliban. They also used their “perception management” media contacts to float fabricated stories about Taliban activity, which included the false account of Russians paying Taliban fighters bounties for every American they could kill.
After the 2020 election, which Donald Trump appeared to have lost, Esper, Central Command chief General Kenneth McKenzie and the senior field commander General Scott Miller took the offensive against any withdrawal by sending a memo to the president warning that no troops should be removed from the country until “certain conditions” had been met. An enraged Trump, who believed that the disengagement from Afghanistan was the right thing to do, then used his authority to order a withdrawal of all US troops by the end of the year. He also fired Esper, replacing him with Christopher Miller as SecDef and brought in Macgregor, who had openly expressed his belief that the war in Afghanistan should be ended immediately as well as the wars in the Middle East.
Macgregor and Miller reasoned that the only way to remove the remaining troops from Afghanistan by year’s end would be to do so by presidential order. Macgregor prepared the document and President Trump signed it immediately. On the next day November 12th, however, Colonel Macgregor learned that Trump had subsequently met with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Acting Secretary Miller. Trump and Miller were told by Milley and O’Brien that the orders he placed in the memorandum could not be executed because a withdrawal would lead to a surge in violence and would damage chances for an eventual peace settlement. Trump was also told that an ongoing US presence in Afghanistan had “bipartisan support,” possibly a warning that he might be overruled by Congress if he sought to proceed. Trump later agreed to withdraw only half of the total, 2,500 troops, a number that has continued to remain in place under President Joe Biden. A current agreement has the US withdrawing those last soldiers, together with allied NATO troops, by May 1st but it is under attack from Congress, think tanks, the mainstream media and the military leadership for the same reasons that have been cited for staying in Afghanistan over the past twenty years and predictably Biden has folded. Last week he announced that some American soldiers will remain in country to maintain stability after the deadline.
The story of Trump and Afghanistan is similar to what took place with Syria, where plans to withdraw were regularly reversed due to adroit maneuvering by the Pentagon and its allies. It remains to be seen what Joe Biden will do ultimately as he is being confronted by the same forces that compelled Trump to beat a retreat. The more serious issue is, of course, that the United States of America portrays itself as a nation that engages only in “just wars” and which has a military that is under control and responsive to an elected and accountable civilian government. As Afghanistan and Syria demonstrate, those conceits have been unsustainable since the US went on a global dominance spree when it launched its War on Terror in 2001. All indications are that the Pentagon will be able to maneuver more effectively in Washington than on the battlefield. It will continue to have its pointless wars, and its bloated “defense” budgets.
This article by renowned author Nobojsa Malic was first published on March 26, 2005
In the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For some reason, many in the targeted nation thought the name of the operation was “Merciful Angel .” In fact, the attack was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker. For, however much NATO spokesmen and the cheerleading press spun, lied, and fabricated to show otherwise (unfortunately, with altogether too much success), there was nothing noble in NATO’s aims. It attacked Yugoslavia for the same reason then-Emperor Bill Clinton enjoyed a quickie in the Oval Office: because it could.
Most of the criticism of the 1999 war has focused on its conduct (targeting practices, effects, “collateral damage”) and consequences. But though the conduct of the war by NATO was atrocious and the consequences have been dire and criminal , none of that changes the fact that by its very nature and from the very beginning, NATO’s attack was a war of aggression: illegal, immoral, and unjust; not “unsuccessful” or “mishandled,” but just plain wrong.
Illegal
There is absolutely no question that the NATO attack in March 1999 was illegal . Article 2, section 4 of the UN Charter clearly says:
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
Some NATO members tried to offer justification. London claimed the war was “justified” as a means of preventing a “humanitarian catastrophe,” but offered no legal grounds for such a claim. Paris tried to create a tenuous link with UNSC resolutions 1199 and 1203 , which Belgrade was supposedly violating. However, NATO had deliberately bypassed the UN, rendering this argument moot.
Article 53 (Chapter VIII ) of the UN Charter clearly says that:
“The Security Council shall, where appropriate, utilize such regional arrangements or agencies for enforcement action under its authority. But no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council.” (emphasis added)
Furthermore, Article 103 (Chapter XVI ) asserts its primacy over any other regional agreement, so NATO’s actions would have been illegal under the UN Charter even if the Alliance had an obligation to act in Kosovo. Even NATO’s own charter – the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 – was violated by the act of war in March 1999:
“Article 1
“The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. […]
“Article 7
“This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” (emphasis added)
Yugoslavia had not attacked any NATO members, nor indeed threatened the security of any other country in the region; it was itself under an attack by a terrorist , irredentist organization. What NATO did on March 24, 1999 was an act of aggression, a crime against peace .
Illegitimate
Perfectly aware that the bombing was illegal, NATO leaders tried to create justifications for it after the fact. They quickly seized upon a mass exodus of Albanians from Kosovo, describing it as “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide .” But as recent testimonies of Macedonian medical workers who took care of Albanian refugees suggest, the Western press was engaging in crude deceit , staging images of suffering refugees and peddling the most outrageous tall tales as unvarnished truth.
Stories abounded of mass murder, orchestrated expulsions, mass rapes, seizure of identity papers, even crematoria and mine shafts filled with dead bodies. Little or no evidence was offered – and not surprisingly, none found afterwards. The stories were part of a Big Lie , aimed to justify the intervention, concocted by professional propagandists, and delivered by the KLA-coached refugees. The KLA ran every camp in Macedonia and Albania, and there are credible allegations they organized the exodus in many instances. Albanians who did not play along were killed.
Eventually, the “genocide” and other atrocity stories were debunked as propaganda. But they had served their purpose, conjuring a justification for the war at the time. They had allowed NATO and its apologists to claim the war – though “perhaps” illegal – was a moral and legitimate affair. But there should be no doubt, it was neither .
Unjust
Even if one can somehow gloss over the illegal, illegitimate nature of the war and the lies it was based on, would the war still not be justified, if only because it led to the return of refugees? Well, which refugees? Certainly, many Kosovo Albanians – and quite a few from Albania, it appears – came back, only to proceed to cleanse it systematically of everyone else. Jews, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Ashkali, Gorani, no community was safe from KLA terror , not even the Albanians themselves. Those suspected of “collaborating” were brutally murdered, often with entire families.
According to the Catholic doctrine of “just war ,” a war of aggression cannot be just. Even if one somehow fudges the issue, “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”
The evil conjured by NATO’s and KLA’s propaganda machine was indeed grave. But it was not real. In contrast, what took place after the war – i.e., under the NATO/KLA occupation – is amply documented. At the beginning of NATO’s aggression, there were fewer dead, fewer refugees, less destruction, and more order than at any time since the beginning of the occupation. NATO has replaced a fabricated evil with a very real evil of its own.
Monument to Evil
What began six years ago may have been Albright’s War on Clinton’s watch, but both Albright and Clinton have been gone from office for what amounts to a political eternity.
For four years now, the occupation of Kosovo has continued with the blessing – implicit or otherwise – of Emperor Bush II, who launched his own illegal war in Iraq . Kosovo is not a partisan, but an imperial issue; that is why there has been virtually no debate on it since the first missiles were fired.
Albright and KLA leader Hashim Thaci, Rambouillet, 1998
Six years to the day since NATO aircraft began their onslaught, Kosovo is a chauvinistic, desolate hellhole.
Serbian lives, property, culture, and heritage been systematically destroyed , often right before the eyes of NATO “peacekeepers.” Through it all, Imperial officials, Albanian lobbyists, and various presstitutes have been working overtime to paint a canvas that would somehow cover up the true horror of occupation.
Their “liberated” Kosovo represents everything that is wrong about the world we live in.
It stands as a monument to the power of lies, the successful murder of law, and the triumph of might over justice. Such a monument must be torn down, or else the entire world may end up looking like Kosovo sometime down the line. If that’s what the people in “liberal Western democracies” are willing to see happen, then their civilization is well and truly gone
[Note by the Saker: as most of you know, I don’t do reposts (see here why). This time, however, I decided to make a small exception to this rule and I emailed William and asked him for the permission to repost his excellent article on the hardcore russophobic elements inside Biden’s team. William has very kindly allowed me to do so, so here it is below]
The new Biden Administration has from day one made it clear it will adopt a hostile and aggressive policy against the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin. The policy behind this stance has nothing to do with any foul deeds Putin’s Russia may or may not have committed against the West. It has nothing to do with absurd allegations that Putin had pro-US dissident Alexei Navalny poisoned with the ultra-deadly Novichok nerve agent. In has to do with a far deeper agenda of the globalist Powers That Be. That agenda is what is being advanced now.
The Cabinet choices of Joe Biden reveal much. His key foreign policy picks–Tony Blinken as Secretary of State and Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; Bill Burns as CIA head; Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor ; Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence—all are from the Obama-Biden Administration and all have worked closely together. As well, all see Russia, not China, as the prime security threat to the United States’ global hegemony.
As candidate, Joe Biden stated this often. His key foreign policy choices underscore that the focus with the Biden Administration, regardless how fit Biden himself is, will shift from the China threats to that of Putin’s Russia. Biden’s CIA head, Bill Burns, is a former Ambassador to Moscow and was Deputy Secretary of State during the Obama CIA coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. Notably, when Burns left State in November 2014 he was succeeded by Tony Blinken, now Secretary of State. Blinken reportedly formulated the US State Department response to Russia’s Crimea annexation.
Nuland is key
All Biden choices are uniformly clear in blaming Putin’s Russia for everything from US election interference in 2016 to the recent SolarWinds US government computer hack, to every other claim aired against Russia in recent years, whether proven or not.
In trying to determine what the new Biden Administration and the US intelligence agencies have in store towards Putin and Russia, however, the best indication is the prominent role being given to Victoria Nuland, the person, together with then-Vice President Joe Biden, who ran the political side of the US coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2013-14. She infamously was wire-tapped in a phone call to the US Ambassador in Kiev during the Maidan Square 2013-14 protests, telling the Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, regarding EU choices for a new Ukraine regime, “F**k the EU.” Her husband, Robert Kagan is a notorious Washington neocon.
On leaving government on Trump’s election in 2016, Nuland became a Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, headed by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright who is also chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) affiliate, National Democratic Institute. Nuland also joined the Board of the NED, after 2016, keeping in close contact with NED regime change operations. She is a Russia expert, fluent in Russian and a specialist in toppling regimes.
As Obama Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian and European Affairs in 2013, Nuland worked closely with Vice President Joe Biden to put into power Arseniy Yatsenyuk in a US-friendly and Russia-hostile Ukraine coup. She fostered months of protest against the regime of the elected President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, to force his ouster after his decision to join the Russian Eurasian Economic Union. Founder of the private intelligence group Stratfor, George Friedman, in an interview just after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, called it “the most blatant coup in (US) history.”
New Initiatives
In a major article in the August, 2020 Foreign Affairs, journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Nuland outlines what most likely will be US strategy for undermining Russia in the coming months. She complains that, “resignation has set in about the state of US-Russian relations, and Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to change the game.” In other words, she is about “changing the game” with Putin. She charges that in the past 12 years, “Russia has violated arms control treaties; fielded new, destabilizing weapons; threatened Georgia’s sovereignty; seized Crimea and much of the Donbass; and propped up despots in Libya, Syria, and Venezuela. It has used cyber-weapons against foreign banks, electrical grids, and government systems; interfered in foreign democratic elections; and assassinated its enemies on European soil.”
She goes on to say the repeated US economic sanctions on select Russian banks and companies as well as Putin backers have done little to change Russian policy, claiming that, ”US and allied sanctions, although initially painful, have grown leaky or impotent with overuse and no longer impress the Kremlin.”
But Nuland suggests that Putin’s Russia today is vulnerable as never in the past 20 years: “the one thing that should worry the Russian president: the mood inside Russia. Despite Putin’s power moves abroad, 20 years of failing to invest in Russia’s modernization may be catching up with him. In 2019, Russia’s GDP growth was an anemic 1.3 percent. This year, the coronavirus pandemic and the free fall in oil prices could result in a significant economic contraction…Russia’s roads, rails, schools, and hospitals are crumbling. Its citizens have grown restive as promised infrastructure spending never appears, and their taxes and the retirement age are going up. Corruption remains rampant, and Russians’ purchasing power continues to shrink.”
In her CFR article Nuland advocates using, “Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms… there is no reason why Washington and its allies shouldn’t be more willing to give Putin a dose of his own medicine inside Russia, while maintaining the same deniability.” She adds that because Russians widely use the Internet and it is largely open, “Despite Putin’s best efforts, today’s Russia is more permeable. Young Russians are far more likely to consume information and news via the Internet than through state-sponsored TV or print media. Washington should try to reach more of them where they are: on the social networks Odnoklassniki and VKontakte; on Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube; and on the many new Russian-language digital platforms springing up.”
Navalny
Around the time Nuland submitted her July-August Foreign Affairs article, perennial Putin opponent, Alexey Navalny was in Berlin, ostensibly recovering from what he claims was an attempt by Putin’s intelligence to kill him with highly toxic nerve agent, Novichok. Navalny, a US-educated opposition figure who was a Yale University Fellow in 2010 has been trying to gain a strong following for well over a decade, has been documented receiving money from Nuland’s National Endowment for Democracy, whose founder in the 1990s described it as doing, “what the CIA used to do, but privately.” In 2018 according to NPR in the US, Navalny had more than six million YouTube subscribers and more than two million Twitter followers. How many are bots paid by US intelligence is not known. Now, five months after exile in Berlin, Navalny makes a bold return where he knew he faced likely jail for past charges. It was obviously a clear calculation by his Western sponsors.
The US government’s NGO for Color Revolution regime change, the NED, in a piece published on January 25 echoes Nuland’s call for a social media-led destabilization of Putin. Writing about the Moscow arrest of Navalny just three days before the Biden inauguration, the NED states that, “By creating a model of guerrilla political warfare for the digital age, Navalny has exposed the regime’s utter lack of imagination and inability….” They add, “Putin is in a Catch-22: If Putin kills Navalny, it could draw more attention to the problem and exacerbate unrest. If Putin lets Navalny live, then Navalny remains a focus for resistance, whether he is in prison or not… Navalny has very much outmaneuvered Putin at each turn since the poisoning. It’s becoming a bit humiliating for him.”
Since his alleged botched poisoning in August in Russian Far East, Navalny was allowed by the Russian government to fly to Berlin for treatment, a strange act if indeed Putin and Russian intelligence had really wanted him dead. What clearly took place in the intervening five months in exile suggests that Navalny’s return was professionally prepared by unnamed Western intelligence regime change specialists. The Kremlin has claimed intelligence that shows Navalny was directly being tutored while in exile by CIA specialists.
On Navalny’s Moscow arrest January 17, his anti-corruption NGO released a sophisticated YouTube documentary on Navalny’s channel, purporting to show a vast palace alleged to belong to Putin on the Black Sea, filmed with use of a drone, no small feat. In the video Navalny calls on Russians to march against the alleged billion dollar “Putin Palace” to protest corruption.
Navalny, who clearly is being backed by sophisticated US information warfare specialists and groups such as the NED, is likely being told to build a movement to challenge United Russia party candidates in the September Duma elections where Putin isn’t a candidate. He has even been given a new tactic, which he calls a “smart voting” strategy, a hallmark NED tactic.
Stephen Sestanovich, New York Council on Foreign Relations Russia expert and former board member of the NED, suggested the likely game plan of the new Biden team. On January 25 Sestanovich wrote in the CFR blog, “The Putin regime remains strong, but nationwide protests in support of Alexei Navalny are the most serious challenge to it in years. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is showing a political creativity and tactical skill that Putin has not previously faced. If the protests continue, they could reveal vulnerabilities in his decades-long hold on power.” This was two days after Russia-wide protests demanding Navalny’s release from jail. “With his bold decision to return to Moscow and the release of a widely viewed video purporting to expose regime corruption, Navalny has shown himself to be a capable and imaginative political figure—even from jail, perhaps the most formidable adversary Putin has faced,” he wrote. “The strategic sophistication of Navalny’s team is underscored both by its video release and, before that, by its exposé of the Federal Security Services (FSB) personnel who poisoned him last summer.”
The clear decision of the Biden team to name a former Moscow ambassador to head the CIA and Victoria Nuland to No. 3 position at the State Department, along with his other intelligence choices indicate that destabilizing Russia will be a prime focus of Washington going forward. As the NED gleefully put it, “Navalny’s arrest, three days before Biden’s inauguration former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul says, has all the makings of “Biden’s first foreign policy crisis. Whatever was in their transition documents, this is now front and center for them.”
The reason however is not because of domestic corruption by Putin’s inner circle, true or not. Biden could care less. Rather it is the very existence of Russia under Putin as an independent sovereign nation that tries to defend that national identity, whether in military defense or in defense of a traditionally conservative Russian culture. Ever since the US-backed NED destabilization of the Soviet Union in 1990 during the Bush Administration, it has been NATO policy and that of the influential financial interests behind NATO to break Russia into many parts, dismantle the state and loot what is left of its huge raw materials resources. The globalist Great Reset has no room for independent nation states like Russia is the message that the new Biden team will clearly convey now. ——- F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
In an article in the NYT on America’s “Racial Democracy” (or racist democracy), (1) Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver noted “The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued that when political ideals diverge very widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. When the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it.”
This means that if propaganda is not only incessant and pervasive but if its tenets are too far removed from factual truth, the victims of this propaganda lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their beliefs and their actions, believing their actions correspond with the religiously-inspired tenets of their propaganda even when they patently and most obviously do not correspond. The theory is not intuitively obvious, but it is heavily supported by facts. Perhaps it is for this reason that Americans are guilty of what I call “the Utopia Syndrome”, comparing themselves not with the real world of their actions but with some utopian standard that exists only in their own imaginations, a world of fancy and illusion where they meet the standards but all others do not. In this light, it may be that much of what we attribute to American hypocrisy may in reality be due to a peculiarly American kind of mass insanity.
Dictionaries generally define ‘aberration’ as a deviation from the normal or typical, an event or characteristic that may be unpleasant or even criminal but that is seldom encountered. In 1975, a US Senate Committee was investigating the documented tales of the CIA engaging in widespread killings of world leaders obstructive to US hegemony. (2) (3) Their conclusion?
“The committee does not believe that the acts of assassination which it has examined represent the real American character. They do not reflect the ideals which have given the people of this country and the world hope for a better, fuller, fairer life. We regard the assassination plots as aberrations.”
So, as William Blum noted, (4) the assassinations by the CIA of more than 50 national leaders and 100 lesser targets spanning at least 50 years and continuing in uninterrupted form through twelve US Presidents, are mere “aberrations” that don’t reflect “the real American character”. Reading from the same script, the US military casually described all the circumstances and events at its worldwide network of US torture prisons over twelve decades as “aberrations”.
It is worth re-reading the above quote telling us the 150 or more murders “do not represent the real American character”, the quote forming a perfect introduction to the Propaganda Mask and the Utopia Syndrome. The assassinations of all these foreign leaders are not denied; instead they are described as inconsistent with the American utopian ideal, and it is the ideal rather than the act against which America judges itself, the fictitious utopian ideal providing the real measure of American moral supremacy. This pathological reasoning is a stunning tribute to the efficacy of the propaganda methods of Lippman and Bernays, who almost single-handedly turned Americans into raving lunatic war-mongers during both World Wars. (5) It is from precisely this propaganda that Americans today can commit multiple horrendous atrocities, violate every measure of human rights, yet claim the high moral ground and see no inconsistency or conflict. The propagandised utopian ideal of creating peace and stability in the world will supersede America’s actions of creating only war and instability. The propagandised ideal of fostering and protecting democracy will overwhelm and mask the reality that the US has never anywhere installed a democracy, has never supported democracy, and has instead almost exclusively installed and supported brutal Right-Wing dictatorships. This patently illogical logic applies across the entire spectrum of US behavior.
Following the same line of reasoning, an American writer named Dana Williams wrote a reasonably good article detailing that America’s military interventions have always been waged only on behalf of big business and the elites, but then added: “America’s most priceless treasure is its democratic values and its growing sense of human rights”. What? A growing sense of human rights? Evidenced by what? This woman had just written of the increasingly devastating litany of American atrocities and destruction of so many governments and nations and in the next breath tells us of this same country’s priceless and growing treasure of democracy and human rights, apparently unaware of any conflict. Such is the power of propaganda and the ability of myths to insinuate themselves into the human heart and mind.
Michael Parenti, for whom I have considerable admiration, did essentially the same thing, writing, “… the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.” (7) But where were all these openly-debating Americans when their government was progressively destroying Iraq for more than ten years? Where were they when Madeline Albright was killing 500,000 Iraqi infants? Where was the open public debate about the destruction of Jugoslavia or Libya? Where are they today when the US is destroying Venezuela? Due to the intensive propaganda and ideological programming, Americans are taught to venerate the process, but ignore the result. This is truly a kind of mass insanity, with all the credit due to Bernays, “the father of Public Relations in America”.
Further examples of this mass delusion are not difficult to find. US President Obama was asked why the US managed to rise for more than 200 years without apparent failure. His response was to say, “The true strength of our nation comes not from power of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the staying power of our ideals of democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.” (8) We can be forgiven for questioning the man’s sanity, that he could make such a blatantly nonsense statement. Even worse, how ignorant and gullible can Americans be, that they will cheer and wave their flags on hearing such rubbish? We have already examined the sources of wealth of this nation, and they most emphatically have never been related, not even in imagination, to ideals of democracy or liberty.
In another case illustrative of the pervasive nature of this illness, in 2014 an American football team cancelled the employment contract of one of their star players for having made a vicious assault on his wife. In a casino hotel, the elevator camera recorded the man punching his wife in the head so hard that he drove her head-first into the steel wall, rendering her unconscious on the floor. (9) (10) A moment later, the CCTV camera in the hallway recorded him dragging her unconscious body out of the elevator and dumping her on the floor like a rag doll. When the videos were released and went viral, the man made a statement to the media in which he said, “That is not the kind of person I am.” But of course it is the kind of person he is; this was the third time the police had to intervene when he had done something similar. But, as with most Americans and with the nation itself, he doesn’t compare himself to the reality of his actions but rather to the utopian ideals he pretends to hold in his mind. So even though he repeatedly punches his wife unconscious, that’s not the kind of person he is. This story is a perfect illustration of America today.
On another occasion, James Fallows, an American author and correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, wrote in one of his diatribes comparing China with the US: “… though we fall short of the ideal, we strive for a reliable rule of law.” (11) I have no particular wish to throw stones at Fallows, but this man is painting targets on his forehead with such a clearly ridiculous statement. All of the current domestic and international evidence – all of it – supports an unqualified assertion that the US freely ignores and violates every manner of law, both its own and those of other nations, whenever they become inconvenient or hinder unilateral action, yet we have Fallows with his delightfully patronising arrogance pontificating about America striving for perfection in following the rule of law, while suggesting that China does not do so. His claim is not different in quality than Bush and Obama flatly stating “we do not torture” after we have seen all the evidence and the torture prisons are all still open. Black is white. Nothing else to see here. Let’s move on. And move on Fallows does, secure in his fairyland mythology of American moral superiority, oblivious to the enormous contradictions snapping at his heels.
Fallows, in his suspended consciousness, conforms perfectly to this utopian syndrome, comparing the actions of his country to a high standard which exists only in his imagination and to which the US has never adhered. He does the same with his foolish criticisms of China, imagining the existence of some idolised standard which he then claims China fails to meet.
It is of extreme importance for readers to realise and fully understand that expressions like ‘rule of law’, ‘freedom’, and ‘democratic values’ are merely hypothetical idealistic constructs. They are myths and, like all myths, they are “designed to serve an emotive rather than cognitive function, not to provide fact based on reason but as propaganda to arouse emotions in support of an idea”. (12) Their purpose, and their clever effect, is not to provide information but to make one’s heart swell with pride at one’s own moral superiority. Think again of Fallows’ “though we fall short of the ideal, we strive for a reliable rule of law.” As Americans, we instantly feel that surge of pride in our breasts that we are so law-abiding while others by insinuation are not. Even further, we feel yet more pride that we so openly admit our (occasional and trivial) failures but, being good incarnate, we face and overcome these failings and continue striving in the best Olympic spirit. How can our god not love us?
The US government does precisely the same with its annual reports on human rights, which not only meet the definition of the utopian fallacy but contain the added merit of being mostly grand lies about countries that happen to be out of favor, and equally grand omissions about current politically-useful allies.
In this mental condition, Americans consider themselves superior to all others and believe they are advancing some greater good when all they are doing is forcibly imposing their warped anti-social values and political hegemony onto unwilling nations and peoples. Through their generations of propaganda, programming and brainwashing, most Americans live in an indispersible fog of mass delusion and self-deception in which black is white but which they inexplicably fail to fathom. From their ignorance and simple-mindedness created by their excessive utopian programming, Americans see their country’s prosecution of wars, the cannibalisation of nations and the single-minded devotion to the profit of a few elites, as the promotion of democracy and freedom, and are apparently incapable of the minor clarity of thought necessary to see that their murderous and greedy actions have absolutely nothing to do with either freedom or democracy.
When challenged, they usually offer a logic so groundless and illogical as to almost defy challenge. In their minds, all the nations their government has attacked are by utopian definition “evil regimes”. From the invasion of Mexico onward, in all the nations in South and Central America, in Africa and the Middle East, in Asia and Africa, the US was selflessly battling despotic tyranny. Of course, these nations were innocent, but to produce a list of all the countries the US has invaded and colonised with a military dictatorship, will almost inevitably evoke this response: “You make a list of all the evil regimes that “free America” has fought against, and use that list as evidence of how evil free America is.” If only that were true.
The combined political, religious and capitalistic propaganda tenets have resolved into what John Galbraith in The Affluent Society termed “conventional wisdom” (13) (14) which, through generations of that same propaganda, made these tenets “more or less identical with sound scholarship”, and their status being “virtually impregnable”, as he put it. The tenets of course have not actually been adhered to by any US government or indeed by the elites and their corporations, which means in Galbraith’s terms that the tenets are “highly acceptable in the abstract” rather than in reality. And this is the source of our dystopia of utopia in America today. We have the bizarre situation where this conventional wisdom – propaganda, in fact – makes a vigorous advocacy of these beliefs a substitute for behavior according to these beliefs.
So we have Americans preaching democracy while their government installs brutal dictatorships everywhere, and they see no disconnect. We have Americans preaching human rights while kidnapping people in other countries and “rendering” them to be mostly tortured to death, and see no disconnect. We have Americans fervently preaching and defending free-market capitalism while that same animal relieved about 30% of them of their homes and jobs, yet they see no disconnect.
This massive delusion is constantly reinforced by public repetition where each knows that many others share these beliefs. It all functions as a kind of religious morality play, the repetitive propaganda not only providing reassurance but serving as additional and pervasive evangelising of these foolish beliefs. Galbraith stated that “In some measure, the articulation of the conventional wisdom is a religious rite. It is an act of affirmation like reading aloud from the Scriptures or going to church.” He went on to say that this evangelising as a religious rite is not negligible because “its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned”. In other words, statements like “we strive for a rule of law” are empty and nonsense pronouncements providing religious reinforcement of the mythical utopian tenets of American propaganda, then used as evidence of a superior morality tantamount to God’s will. Only in America do we find rampant self-adoration for preaching a gospel that we totally ignore in our real lives, in fact a monstrous hypocrisy re-branded as religion.
This is precisely what John Kozy was telling us (15) when he wrote that subjects in American schools were taught as if they were comprised of revealed religious truths, and in which the fundamentals of American patriotism, religious and political ideology, consumerism and free market capitalism were not different than studying the Bible in that they could not be questioned because they were by nature unquestionable, and therefore critical evaluation was proscribed. And again, “those who ask inconvenient questions are silenced in shame; books that present inconvenient truths are removed from libraries”. In the US as in no other country in the world, is it so necessary to adhere to the accepted narrative, nor so likely to provide acceptance and even applause for regurgitating that same narrative. And in no other nation does there exist the vast discrepancy between beliefs and actions or between theory and practice. The American political gospel tells us that we protect and install democracies everywhere. In real life this has never occurred even one time, but that doesn’t alter our faith in our political religion and nobody excommunicates us for our sins.
According to Galbraith again, “conventional wisdom accommodates itself not to the world that it is meant to interpret but to the audience’s view of the world”, the same view that has been artificially created by the professional propagandists. As much as Americans may criticise other nations for disapproval of deviations in behavior, especially political behavior, the same disapproval mechanism operates much more forcefully in American society. Only in America can we fully experience the awesome power of the ability of propaganda to make 300 million people so deaf, dumb and blind that they will fervently and solemnly declare that black is white. This process is so effective that not long after the flood of revelations of the extensive US network of torture prisons, including witness reports, photos and video of the pathologically depraved treatment of the prisoners, President Bush could go on national TV and tell America, “We do not torture” – and have most Americans believe him. Likewise with Obama with his torture prisons still in full operation, who told the nation, “I can stand here before you tonight and assure you that we do not torture”, leaving 300 million pathetically-brainwashed Americans firmly grounded in the moral superiority of a nation that does no wrong.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel, commenting on American deaths in Iraq, said President Bush “believes in the value and dignity of every human life, that every life is precious and he grieves for each one that is lost”. (16) (17) As proof, one day President Bush was speaking to a meeting of the terrorist organisation known as Freedom House, and told the members, “We’re a country of deep compassion. We care. One of the great things about America, one of the beauties of our country, is that when we see a young, innocent child blown up, we cry. We don’t care what the child’s religion may be, or where that child may live, we cry. It upsets us. The enemy knows that, and they’re willing to kill to shake our confidence. That’s what they’re trying to do”. (18) But then there is a White House videotape of a conversation between former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then President George Bush, discussing their Christian obligation to spread democracy everywhere, at least in part for the purpose of protecting the lives of these innocent children. (19) (20) Powell opened the conversation with, “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” To which Bush responded, “Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! Stay strong! Kill them! We are going to wipe them out!”
After overthrowing about 50 national governments and installing brutal military remote-control dictatorships in each of them, and trying to do the same in another 20 countries while grossly interfering in their media, elections and internal affairs, Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul, told the world, “America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people”. (21) (22)
After interfering in about 100 countries, inflicting immense bloodshed and misery on countless millions of innocent civilians, US President Ronald Reagan boasted, “We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, never had any thought of that kind.” (23) And it was the great John F. Kennedy himself who told us, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war”. (24) As William Blum pointed out, this must mean that in America’s hundreds of wars with more than 70 nations spanning more than 200 years, all those countries invaded the US first, and America was just defending itself.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in an interview probably conducted in the office of his psychiatrist, claimed “the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps were the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century”. (25) This was the same interview in which he encouraged all NYT readers to “give war a chance”.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, needing a way to punish Saddam Hussein for not wanting to become a US colony, personally arranged the targeted destruction of Iraq’s drinking water purification facilities and enacted worldwide sanctions to prevent Iraq from obtaining replacement supplies or repairs. According to the United Nations, Albright’s actions directly resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi infants from contaminated drinking water, with the full knowledge of the US government. Then in a TV interview on the program 60 Minutes where she was confronted with evidence of these acts by Leslie Stahl, Albright famously proclaimed, “Yes, it was worth it.” (26) (27) And after personally arranging the 80-day non-stop bombing of Yugoslavia, the greatest continuous bombing campaign ever instituted by anybody anywhere, she said, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere”. (28)
A US government official stated that “The American Empire is probably the most beneficial and moral the world has ever seen; not only in terms of technological development, but also through nurturing democracy and prosperity in the world. No other global empire has ever taken actions so massively against its interests solely for moral purposes.” Yet examination will uncover no example where the US has ever nurtured democracy, nor prosperity either, and I challenge anyone to detail even a single incident in the history of the world where the US has ever acted, massively or otherwise, against its interests solely for moral purposes. Various US military officials have claimed that “Our country is a force for good without precedent”, and that “The US military is a force for global good that … has no equal”. US President Woodrow Wilson boasted a century ago, that “America is the savior of the world”, while destroying and colonising that same world. Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for War and Misery, wrote, “And the truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the US is good for a vast portion of the world’s population”. (29) Evidenced by what? By the Propaganda Mask and the Utopia syndrome. Nothing else.
American Christianity is a major part of this national insanity. George Bush informed the world that God told him to invade Iraq and, during the invasion, said “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job”. And when the war was over, after having killed a million or more innocent Iraqi civilians, Bush said, “When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious. … In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion. … When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man”. We are apparently to conclude that no one has had greater love for his fellow man than George Bush had for the million civilians he killed in Iraq and that Madeleine Albright was just exhibiting her great love for mankind by killing half a million infants. And of course, Obama can’t be left out of this parade. After countless thousands of deaths in the illegal destruction of Libya and the countless civilian deaths incurred by his drones in Pakistan, he fulfilled his propaganda obligation by telling us, “I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis”. (30) The people in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Pakistan might have a different interpretation of Obama’s relationship with his god.
Another result of this utopian syndrome is what we term “the pot calling the kettle black”, in other words, attributing to others the sins that “our side” commits and being apparently oblivious to the gross illogic and falsehoods in our position. The only reason the US accuses Huawei of being a potential spy is because Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, Xerox, and so many other American IT firms have been spying for the CIA and NSA for decades. The US media accuse anyone writing articles sympathetic to China, Russia or Iran of being paid shills, only because American correspondents have been paid CIA shills since the 1950s.
Another example that recently crossed my path was an article in the Financial Times by Jamil Anderlini who was at the time the FT’s station chief in Beijing. In an article titled ‘Patriotic education distorts China world view’, (31) Anderlini claimed that China’s “selective teaching of history influences its self-image”, imagining a great “disconnection between how the world views China and how China – from ordinary citizens to top leaders – sees itself.” He stated the world sees China as a frightening monster that bullies all other nations, his ignorance rendering him blissfully unaware that this sentiment is not true for China but for the US that he defends.
He wrote that China’s “selective teaching” of history and emphasis on “patriotic education” cultivates a “nationalistic, anti-western victim mentality among young Chinese”, again apparently ignorant of the typical Western (US) patriotic education cultivating US patriotism. This mentality is typical for all Western media correspondents who are selected primarily for the extent of their conversion by US propaganda. This is perhaps a good place to note that prior to joining the Financial Times, Anderlini was employed as a male underwear model which employment no doubt contributed to his deep understanding of Chinese culture while solidifying his credentials as the FT’s Beijing station chief.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes‘. His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ + http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
The billowing wheat fields of Syria once were a staple that kept the people sated through times of struggle. Until the beginning of the war, Syria was a net food exporter, providing grain to neighboring countries and enjoying a healthy supply more than sufficient to feed its population. When the attempted overthrow of Bashar al-Assad began in 2011, the nation collapsed into chaos and food production plummeted. Syria’s borders shrank to a third of their pre-war size as ISIS took over huge swathes of desert, and US-backed Kurdish forces invaded the country’s northeast under the cover of fighting terrorism.
Russia’s intervention in 2015 secured the highly populated coastal regions, finally bringing an end to the jihadist occupation of Aleppo and removing ISIS from the country’s center. The coastal cities were hardened with the creation of permanent Russian bases in Khmeimim and Tartus, and Bashar al-Assad’s secular government was kept in power. The strategically significant northeast however, was lost.
The governorate of Deir Ezzor in northeastern Syria splits evenly across the Euphrates River, and is the site of an emerging fault line between the Empire and Resistance Axis. On the West bank of the Euphrates, Bashar al-Assad’s government rules, while the East is occupied by Kurdish and American forces. Unable to achieve complete regime change, the Empire has shifted gears and now is waging a war primarily based on starvation. Limiting the flow of food and energy in the country may not even succeed in directly impeding military operations, but it can effectively turn Syria into a third world country by grinding civilian life to a halt and starving the population.
Syria’s occupied northeast produces 60% of the country’s wheat and 95% of the country’s oil: 400,000 barrels per day of oil production has been lost due to the Kurdish invasion. The formerly oil-rich nation now pumps a mere 20,000 bpd and relies on Iranian tankers to import energy. These tankers are increasingly intercepted by Western powers as part of this war of starvation. Additionally, in the last two years five separate sanctions bills have been passed in Washington, targeting the country’s oil and grain trade.
Energy is not just needed for the tanks and planes of Assad’s military, it is required to power the factories, agricultural operations, businesses, and homes of the Syrian people. Strangling the flow of energy and food into Syria has created spillover effects that have crippled the nation’s economy. With no power for tractors to cultivate wheat or trucks to ship food, the remaining agricultural resources have become severely underutilized and the nation is at risk of famine.
This is nothing new. Just recall what US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said when confronted with the fact that over half a million Iraqi children had died of starvation due to sanctions:
We think the price is worth it
Any price is “worth it” because Iraq, Syria, and Iran have been targeted for destruction for decades, part of the Empire’s longstanding plan to conquer all of Central Asia. We see the antecedents of such a foreign policy in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the “Clean Break” white paper, and General Wesley Clark’s confession that these nations were slated for regime change well before whichever casus belli that prompted American intervention was manufactured. In addition to the territorial agenda, control of the planet’s oil resources upholds the phenomenon of petrodollar recycling, defending the dollar’s status as world reserve currency.
Accordingly, the Empire has no plans to leave northeast Syria. While the media spun up a narrative about Trump “abandoning the Kurds,” nothing could be further from the truth. The Trump administration gave drilling approval in the region to a little known oil company called Delta Crescent Energy LLC. One of the partners at this firm named James Reese is an ex Delta Force agent who served as a commander and operations officer in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Other partners include international oil executives and diplomats. These players will collaborate with the Kurds to pump oil through Syria and Iraq while fulfilling Washington’s agenda of denying the Syrian civilization the resources needed for survival.
So while imperial and resistance forces patrol either side of the Euphrates, we can see the new front in the northeast as a microcosm of what will come as a hawkish administration takes the helm in Washington.
On Aug 23 2020, Russian major general Vyacheslav Gladkikh was assassinated by IED while in Deir Ezzor governorate, the highest ranking soldier to be killed in the war. Immediately prior to his death, the general was coordinating with local Arab militiamen, giving us a window into the strategy of the Resistance Axis in the region. It has been the goal of Assad and the Russians to reintegrate this crucial territory by allying with the Arab majority in the governorate, who are being oppressed by the ruling Kurdish minority. Arab protests and discontent with the corrupt SDF leadership have accelerated, so while Western media blames General Gladkikh’s assassination on ISIS we can see other clear beneficiaries.
Speaking of ISIS, the way northeast Syria has evolved begs the question: what was the purpose of ISIS? Let us first review the multiple channels of American support:
1. Manpower: Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, America unilaterally disbanded the Iraqi army without pay, despite warnings that this would create a pool of manpower for terrorism. Many of these soldiers later filled the ranks of ISIS
2. Supply abandonment: M1A1 Abrams tanks, LAVs, and 2,300 Hummers were left conveniently unguarded in lots for ISIS to acquire during its rise
3. Direct airdrop: In Oct 2014, the US was caught airdropping weapons and ammunition directly to ISIS fighters and passed it off as an accident
4. Osmosis: Cash, supplies, and weaponry delivered to “vetted” rebel groups through the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program often ended up directly in ISIS hands. In one case a UN audit determined that TOW missiles were controlled by ISIS less than two months after leaving an American production line
5. Side switching: When ISIS began to fall many of its fighters simply left and joined other US-aligned groups such as the FSA and SDF
6. US ally funding: Leaked Clinton emails explicitly stated that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were providing direct financing
What of the strategic importance of ISIS? At its territorial height, the Islamic State was essentially a band down the center of Syria that separated Assad’s coastal strongholds from the oil and farmland necessary to the nation’s functioning. It also fulfilled the important role of impeding Iranian access to the region, one of the reasons for which Qasem Soleimani led Shi’ite brigades against ISIS to open up corridors of support for Syria and Lebanon.
And of course we cannot forget that the US had pockets of soldiers in ISIS territory throughout the entire conflict, monitoring the situation. The outcome in the Syrian war was rigged from the beginning, as even in the event that Assad managed to defeat ISIS and avoid regime change, the Empire would never allow him to achieve full territorial reintegration.
As soon as Russia began to reverse the tide in the conflict, the US swooped in to “liberate” the oil fields. American anti-ISIS bombings were greatly exagerrated (at one point PBS even took Russian bombing footage and labeled it as American). Furthermore these operations were concentrated in the northeast, while Syrians, Iraqis, Russians, and Iranians were allowed to do the leg work on the ground against ISIS. Essentially, Assad reclaimed infertile desert terrain at an enormous human cost and just as his forces reached Deir Ezzor the Empire took the resource-rich northeast and bombed any Syrian crossing of the Euphrates.
Merely one day after the inauguration of the Biden administration in Washington, the US began transferring hundreds of soldiers from Iraq to northeastern Syria in order to harden the imperial presence. Even under the Trump administration a ninth US army base in Deir Ezzor was commissioned in October, directly facing Syrian military positions west of the Euphrates. The new cabinet is stacked with career advocates of regime change, so we can foresee that the border in northeast Syria will be a debut at which the forces of imperialism seek to demonstrate their fanatical commitment to “involvement in the region.”
While unheard of by most Americans, this northern governorate is a litmus test for what is to come in the next four years of foreign policy. Whether it transforms into a frozen conflict zone like Donbass or the site of disastrous great power confrontation, it is a clear sign of the Empire’s unwillingness to “go gentle into that good night.” Though the lines in Deir Ezzor may already be drawn, it appears that a clash in the Idlib region is on the horizon as Turkish forward observation posts are abandoned and rumors circulate of heavy artillery moving to the border.
All eyes remain on Syria as the people bear the cost of a war of starvation and the Empire seeks to avenge its greatest humiliation at the hands of Russia.
The Ister is a researcher of financial markets and geopolitics. Author of The Ister: Escape America
The media being focused on an upcoming election, coronavirus, fires on the West Coast and burgeoning BLM and Antifa unrest, it is perhaps no surprise that some stories are not exactly making it through to the evening news. Last week an important vote in the United Nations General Assembly went heavily against the United States. It was regarding a non-binding resolution that sought to suspend all economic sanctions worldwide while the coronavirus cases continue to increase. It called for “intensified international cooperation and solidarity to contain, mitigate and overcome the pandemic and its consequences.” It was a humanitarian gesture to help overwhelmed governments and health care systems cope with the pandemic by having a free hand to import food and medicines.
The final tally was 169 to 2, with only Israel and the United States voting against. Both governments apparently viewed the U.N. resolution as problematical because they fully support the unilateral economic warfare that they have been waging to bring about regime change in countries like Iran, Syria and Venezuela. Sanctions imposed on those countries are designed to punish the people more than the governments in the expectation that there will be an uprising to bring about regime change. This, of course, has never actually happened as a consequence of sanctions and all that is really delivered is suffering. When they cast their ballots, some delegates at the U.N. might even have been recalling former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s claim that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. imposed sanctions had been “worth it.”
Clearly, a huge majority of the world’s governments, to include the closest U.S. allies, no longer buy the American big lie when it claims to be the leader of the free world, a promoter of liberal democracy and a force for good. The vote prompted one observer, John Whitbeck, a former international lawyer based in Paris, to comment how “On almost every significant issue facing mankind and the planet, it is Israel and the United States against mankind and the planet.”
The United Nations was not the only venue where the U.S. was able to demonstrate what kind of nation it has become. Estimates of how many civilians have been killed directly or indirectly as a consequence of the so-called Global War on Terror initiated by George W. Bush are in the millions, with roughly 4 million being frequently cited. Nearly all of the dead have been Muslims. Now there is a new estimate of the number of civilians that have fled their homes as a result of the worldwide conflict initiated by Washington and its dwindling number of allies since 2001. The estimate comes from Brown University’s “Costs of War Project,” which has issued a report Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States Post-9/11 Wars that seeks to quantify those who have “fled their homes in the eight most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001.”
The project tracks the number of refugees, asylum seekers applying for refugee status, and internally displaced people or persons (IDPs) in the countries that America and its allies have most targeted since 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria. All are predominantly Muslim countries with the sole exception of the Philippines, which has a large Muslim minority.
The estimate suggests that between 37 and 59 million civilians have become displaced, with an extremely sharp increase occurring in the past year when the total was calculated to be 21 million. The largest number of those displaced were from Iraq, where fighting against Islamic State has been intermittent, estimated at 9.2 million. Syria, which has seen fighting between the government and various foreign supported insurgencies, had the second-highest number of displacements at 7.1 million. Afghanistan, which has seen a resurgent Taliban, was third having an estimated 5.3 million people displaced.
The authors of the report observe that even the lower figure of 37 million is “almost as large as the population of Canada” and “more than those displaced by any other war or disaster since at least the start of the 20th century with the sole exception of World War II.” And it is also important to note what is not included in the study. The report has excluded sub-Saharan Africa as well as several Arab nations generally considered to be U.S. allies. These constitute “the millions more who have been displaced by other post-9/11 conflicts where U.S. forces have been involved in ‘counterterror’ activities in more limited yet significant ways, including in: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.”
Yemen should be added to that list given U.S. military materiel assistance that has enabled the Saudi Arabian bombing attacks on that country, also producing a wave of refugees. There are also reports that the White House is becoming concerned over the situation in Yemen as pressure is growing to initiate an international investigation of the Saudi war crimes in that civilian infrastructure targets to include hospitals and schools are being deliberately targeted.
And even the United States Congress has begun to notice that something bad is taking place as there is growing concern that both the Saudi and U.S. governments might be charged with war crimes over the civilian deaths. Reports are now suggesting that as early as 2016, when Barack Obama was still president, the State Department’s legal office concluded that “top American officials could be charged with war crimes for approving bomb sales to the Saudis and their partners” that have killed more than 125,000 including at least 13,400 targeted civilians.
That conclusion preceded the steps undertaken by the Donald Trump White House to make arms sales to the Saudis and their allies in the United Arab Emirates central to his foreign policy, a program that has become an integral part of the promotion of the “Deal of the Century” Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Given that, current senior State Department officials have repressed the assessment made in 2016 and have also “gone to great lengths” to conceal the legal office finding. A State Department inspector general investigation earlier this year considered the Department’s failure to address the legal risks of selling offensive weapons to the Saudis, but the details were hidden by placing them in a classified part of the public report released in August, heavily redacted so that even Congressmen with high level access could not see them.
Democrats in Congress, which had previously blocked some arms sales in the conflict, are looking into the Saudi connection because it can do damage to Trump, but it would be far better if they were to look at what the United States and Israel have been up to more generally speaking. The U.S. benefits from the fact that even though international judges and tribunals are increasingly embracing the concept of holding Americans accountable for war crimes since the start of the GWOT, U.S. refusal to cooperate has been daunting. Last March, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague authorized its chief prosecutor to open an investigation into U.S. crimes in Afghanistan the White House reacted by imposing sanctions on the chief prosecutor and his staff lawyer. And Washington has also warned that any tribunal going after Israel will face the wrath of the United States.
Nevertheless, when you are on the losing side on a vote in a respected international body by 169 to 2 someone in Washington should at least be smart enough to discern that something is very, very wrong. But I wouldn’t count on anyone named Trump or Biden to work that out.
Hollywood actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson was once asked why he likes having Brits as the villains in his movies. He replied: “I wanted to give the Germans a break.”
Although amusing, that sort of sentiment is unlikely to translate into policy when it comes to Washington’s modern-day foes. The Americans don’t give breaks to nations they haven’t conquered.
The onslaught of the coronavirus offered a unique opportunity for the US to test out new approaches towards countries that have been treated as enemies for generations. But Washington chose to double down on cruel and self-defeating strategies.
Unable to stave off mass suffering at home, the dysfunctional American government went to great lengths to weaponize the virus, fueling the incendiary spread of the disease in ‘rogue states’.
And while the mainstream media is eager to magnify Donald Trump’s profoundly stupid comments about injecting disinfectants, they haven’t covered the consequences of his foreign policy decisions with nearly as much fervor.
Blocking recourses needed to combat the pandemic
At the height of the pandemic in late March, the White House quietly cut tens of millions in dollars in funding for health care programs in Yemen.
The move left considerable funding gaps for dozens of UN programs in the war-torn country that were focused on supplying Yemenis with hand soap, medication and staffing clinics.
American officials justified the move by obliterating logic and claiming that it was a response to ‘interference’ from Yemen’s Ansarullah movement.
Already characterized as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen has killed tens of thousands since 2015. Many of those that perished have succumbed to curable diseases.
That’s because the US-backed Saudi war effort in Yemen consists of a blockade, sanctions, and the frequent bombing of health facilities. These punishing tactics also spawned the deadliest cholera epidemic in modern history, serving as a tragic precursor to the potential impact of the coronavirus.
Washington’s ambition to use the coronavirus in order to cripple defiant nations is equally evident when it comes to Iran.
Even before the start of the pandemic, the Islamic Republic was already the most heavily sanctioned country in history. Several weeks into the coronavirus crisis, Iran was recording one death from COVID-19 every ten minutes.
The Trump administration responded to the suffering of the Iranian people by imposing a new set of sanctions, which targeted companies that build and maintain Shia holy sites. In the days that followed, Washington blocked an Iranian request for a USD 5 billion emergency loan from the IMF, which was earmarked for combating the pandemic.
Similarly, in Venezuela, where years of American sanctions have crippled the public health care system, the White House offered to ease the embargo if President Nicolas Maduro steps down.
Washington also felt that a raging pandemic was the right time to indict Maduro on a bizarre set of drug trafficking charges and offer USD 15 million to anyone who delivers him to the US.
The Americans dished out another million dollars to pay for surgical masks for “Israeli” troops patrolling occupied Palestinian territories.
In this corner of the Middle East, another US-backed campaign to blockade the Gaza Strip left Palestinian health officials pleading for more ventilators and beds for intensive care units.
The “Israeli”-enforced blockade on the Palestinian enclave, which dates back to 2007, continues to severely limit the entry of medical supplies, food, and even drinking water.
Although the coronavirus pandemic brought these unconscionably dangerous and cruel practices to the forefront, the devastating impact of American sanctions and economic blockades unfolds largely out of sight. Ignored by the mainstream media, these measures go both unnoticed and unchallenged.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, only a small percentage of the public actually realizes that the sanctions regimes are Washington’s most pervasive and brutal form of modern warfare. The effects are far more deadly than bombs.
Destroying nations
By cutting off the possibility of a productive life and stunting the growth of millions of young people, sanctions wreck societies one household at a time.
There is never any real expiry date, and the gradual torment that slowly destroys entire generations doesn’t cost nearly as much as an actual military campaign.
Meanwhile, it rolls back decades of progress in industrial development, essential infrastructure, and, of course, healthcare services.
The coronavirus pandemic is only the latest reminder that American sanctions are effectively designed to target the elderly, the sick, and the most vulnerable segments of society.
These are not peaceful instruments that act as a substitute for diplomacy. They are tools of war used to punish all nations that refuse to submit to America’s will.
In 2000, the then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions was a price worth paying. Albright replied: “We think the price is worth it.”
Between the coronavirus pandemic and one-liners from ghoulish creatures like Albright, you may be forgiven for thinking that you are living in a Hollywood blockbuster. But if you were hoping to catch a break like the Germans in Mel Gibson’s movies, your rosy optimism will inevitably collide with a reality stage-managed by the US government that is a lot less compassionate.
May 11, 2019 “Information Clearing House” –Assalamu’alaikum. Dr. Mahathir, Mrs. Mahathir, distinguished Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies of American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of America in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the nineteenth century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians, while in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (à la Bataan) to Bantustans, which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world.
Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain — in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against the Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal conditions from which they still suffer today. All in the name of securing America’s so-called place in the sun.
And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses the effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding central Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or promoting democracy, which is total nonsense.
For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign policy of the United States of America since its foundation, has been predicated upon racism, aggression, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third millennium of humankind’s parlous existence, nothing has changed about the operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack upon Iran.
Now the assigned topic today is The Middle East Agenda : Oil, Dollar Hegemony and Islam. So, I’m only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have to begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in 1973. As you know in 1967, Israel launched an illegal war of aggression against the surrounding Arab states, stole their land and ethnically cleansed their people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel, which Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to use force to recover their lands.
Israel almost collapsed, the United States and Europe came to their support by providing weapons and in reaction the Arab states imposed an oil embargo on the United States and Europe, and brought their economies to their knees. Whereupon, the then U.S Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger threatened them and said: This will never happen again, and if you do, we will prevent it. And it was not just a threat. The United States government then at that time, planned, prepared and conspired, to steal the oil of the Persian Gulf. They did not have the military capability to do this at that time, to carry out the Kissinger threat, which was also then repeated by the Ford administration, and the Carter administration under Harold Brown and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
So they put into planning an interventionary force, designed expressly for the purpose of stealing Arab oil fields, and that was called the Rapid Deployment Force. And it took ten years of training, planning, positioning, and supply to build that interventionary force of that capability and eventually it was called the U.S. Central Command. The purpose of the U.S. Central Command is to steal and control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. And that’s exactly what the U.S. Central Command proceeded to do in the Bush Sr. war against Iraq, their first military expedition.
And as we know, that war exterminated probably two hundred thousand Iraqis. Half of them innocent civilians. Simply wiped out in a bombing campaign and a military expedition of unprecedented dimensions. But remember, it took fifteen years for the Pentagon and three different administrations both Republicans and Democrats to get the capability to do this. And then, when that genocide or conflict was over, what happened? The United States carved Iraq up into three pieces with their air force, the so-called no-fly zones, a zone for the Kurds in the North, a zone for the Shi’ah in the South, and the Sunni in the middle. Why? To destroy Iraq as an effectively viable state.
In his book, Clash of Civilizations, Huntington from Harvard who advised the Pentagon and advised the State Department pointed out that the only Arab state with the capability to lead the Arab world and challenge the United States and Israel was Iraq. And so Iraq had to be destroyed, to maintain the domination of the United States and its proxy, Israel. And remember after 1973, whatever it was before then, Israel is nothing more than a catspaw of the United States. They do what America tells them to do! Otherwise Israel is nothing more than a failed state.
In addition then, to destroying Iraq as a state, carving it up into three pieces, was the decision to debilitate and destroy the Iraqi people. And so they continued the genocidal economic sanctions on the people of Iraq, that my colleagues, Denis Halliday, Hans Von Sponeck, so courageously resisted and finally resigned from the United Nations as a matter of principle, calling them by what they really were: genocide. The United States and Britain maliciously and criminally imposed genocidal sanctions on the people of Iraq, that killed approximately 1.5 million Iraqis, all of whom were innocent civilians.
And when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the five hundred thousand dead children, she said that she thought the price was worth it. Now, I could have taken that statement to the International Court of Justice, and filed it against the United States as evidence of genocidal intent against the people of Iraq in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. And indeed I offered to do so to the then President of Iraq, but for whatever reasons he decided not to take these claims to the International Court of Justice.
And now, as you see, he is on trial in a total kangaroo court proceeding in Baghdad that is completely controlled and dominated by the United States government. So, 1.5 million Iraqis died as the result of these genocidal sanctions. And then came September 11. And we know for a fact that the Bush Jr. administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going to be launched on the United States. And they let it happen anyway deliberately and on purpose. Why? They wanted a pretext for war. And not just one war but for a long war which they are talking about today.
Indeed, from my research the war plans drawn up by the Pentagon for the war against Afghanistan were formulated as early as 1997.Enormous military forces fielded by that same U.S. Central Command, were already in and around and surrounding the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean before September 11. This war had been long-planned against Afghanistan. And armed, equipped, supplied, trained and war-gamed and ready to go. They just needed the pretext and that was September 11. Why? The United States wanted access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia.
That had been a Pentagon objective since at least before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And the 9/11 attack gave them the pretext to make this major grab for the oil and gas of Central Asia. And they are there today with their bases, with their troops, in the surrounding countries in Central Asia. And of course in the process, obliterated, we don’t even have an estimate of the Muslims in Afghanistan who were killed in the air bombardment, twenty, twenty five thousand, maybe more, and tens of thousands of others starved to death and still suffering today.
But that, as we know from all the records was only the first step in the process. They wanted to finish the job in Iraq. And so immediately after September 11, Bush ordered Rumsfeld to update and operationalize the plans for attacking and invading Iraq. It had nothing at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. We in the peace movement in America had been saying that all along. The United Nations had determined there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These were lies designed to scaremonger the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal war of aggression, a Nuremberg crime against peace, against Iraq. And they told whatever lies and broke what international laws they had to break in order to attack Iraq.
And today the estimate, again we don’t know. Perhaps two hundred thousand people in Iraq had been killed outright by the United States, Britain, their allies, in Iraq. And again, most of them civilians. Clearly if you add up what United States government has done to Iraq from August of 1990, when it imposed the genocidal economic embargo until today. The United States and Britain have inflicted outright genocide on the Muslim and Christian people of Iraq and they are predominately Muslim as we know.
Now comes the third step in the Pentagon’s pre-existing plan, to control and dominate the oil and gas resources of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It sounds a bit like the plan that Hitler and the Nazis had in the 1930s. Does it not? First go into Austria, then go into Czechoslovakia, then go into Poland. So first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Iran. Iran is going to be the next victim of these outright criminals unless you and I can stop them.
Right now there are three aircraft carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf. And whenever they had put three aircraft carrier task forces over there, it’s always to prepare for an attack. And according to Seymour Hersch, the award winning journalist, it will probably be an aerial bombardment, along the lines of what they did to Yugoslavia in 1999. As you remember there, seventy eight days of aerial bombardment by the United States and NATO with no authorization from the Security Council. Clearly illegal. Killing again, we don’t know the exact number outright, four to five thousand innocent civilians. And targeting civilian infrastructure, all up and down, from which the people still suffer today. The use of depleted uranium ammunitions, with consequent outbreaks of cancer are documented today.
So this is what, is being planned right now as we speak; an attack upon Iran. Using jet fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, on these three aircraft carrier task forces, using cruise missiles on submarines. Of course Israel will be involved and have a role to play, doing exactly what the Americans tell them to do. In addition, it appears that if they attack Iran, they will also attack Syria. Yesterday, if you heard President Bush’s press conference in Vienna, he threatened Syria, right? There’s no other word for it. He threatened Syria.
These Neo-Conservatives want to take out Syria as a favour to Israel. Remember, many of these Neo-Conservatives are affiliated personally and professionally with the Likhud Party in Israel and Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, the man who exterminated twenty thousand Arabs in Lebanon, most of them, not all of them were Muslims. And in addition, slaughtered two thousand completely innocent Palestinian women, children and old men at Sabra and Shatila. Ariel Sharon, the man who went to Haram Al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, where Muhammad, (Peace Be Upon Him) ascended into heaven, and desecrated the Haram on September 28th, 2000, and deliberately provoked the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and has inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinian people since then. Close to thirty seven hundred Palestinians since then alone have been killed….most of them shot down like dogs in the street, and what has the Muslim world done about this?
My Palestinian friends tell me that they are worried that the government of Malaysia might recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with Israel. I certainly hope this is not true. We must treat the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, the same way the world treated the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa.
If the United States attacks Iran, they will probably attack Syria with the Israeli air force and they will attack Lebanon to take out the Islamic resistance movement in southern Lebanon – Hezbollah that defended the legitimate rights of Lebanon and the Lebanese people and expelled the invading longstanding occupying Israeli army that had the full support of the United States government for over twenty years.
So they could attack Iran, Syria, Southern Lebanon and inflict yet another round of ethnic cleansing on the suffering Palestinian people. Remember Sharon and Likhud believe that Jordan is Palestine. And they want to drive as many Palestinians as possible out of their homes and into Jordan.
So if the United States as reported by Hersh and other reliable sources, goes ahead and attacks Iran, we could see warfare erupt all the way from Egypt to the border with India. This whole area convulsed in warfare. And who will be the primary victims of this war? Muslims. The United States could not care less about Muslim life. Look at the demonisation and victimisation of Muslims that we have seen inflicted by the United States and its surrogate, Israel. Look at Guantanamo, where six hundred Muslim men have been treated like dogs in a kennel. Pretty much the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Look at Abu Ghraib and the sadism and sexual exploitation and perversion of Muslims by their American captors. And the same thing has been done in Baghram in Afghanistan. And when Professor Sharif Bassiouni, the U.N. special rapporteur filed the Report with the Security Council against U.S. practices in Afghanistan, the Americans had Kofi Annan fire him. Just as they had Kofi Annan fire Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, when she protested what was going on down in Guantanamo.
The United States could not care less about Muslim life. And the same is true for the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. They would be happy to use nuclear weapons against Iran. They would be happy to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Muslims in Iran. It would create no problem at all for them. Indeed, I went to school with these Neo-Conservatives at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz was there, Chalabi, Khalilzad, Shulsky, all the rest of them. I went through the exact same programme. Their mentor, Professor Leo Strauss. And who was his teacher in Germany and his sponsor? Professor Carl Schmitt who went on to become the most notorious Nazi law Professor of his day, justifying every atrocity that the Nazis inflicted on everyone. We must understand that these Neo-Conservatives are in fact Neo-Nazis. They have espoused the Nazi doctrine of Schmitt and Strauss and Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the “superman.” They are the supermen, and the Muslims are the scum of the earth.
Now, I do not believe the United States will initially start bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. But if things get out of control they are fully prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons. And here in our materials, you have the Pentagon’s Joint Publication 3-12, which you can get on the internet…. just do a Google search and read it. And you will see there dated March 15, 2005; nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into United States conventional forces.
So if Iran were to defend itself, human wave attacks, whatever, they will be happy to use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Remember, these Neo-Nazis, Neo-Cons want to break the taboo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They want to use tactical nuclear weapons, to be able to say to the rest of the world, you do what we tell you to do or else look what we did to the Iranians!
It’s a very serious situation. And this could even get further out of control. Remember that before Bush invaded Iraq, President Putin of Russia said that if he invades Iraq he could set off World War Three. Well, I interpreted that as an implicit threat. Even the famous American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite said that if Bush invaded Iraq he could set off World War Three. Two weeks ago we had the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; China, Russia and Iran. So again, if Bush were to attack Iran, he very well could set off a Third World War, a nuclear war. And that is where you come in:
“This is what I can do. These are my talents. These are my professional qualifications. These are my skills. This is my cheque book. Let me help. Let me prevent, let me help prevent a nuclear war, a possible final, cataclysmic Third World War.”
Thank you, shukran.
ARAB STRATEGY FORUM: Political Systems in the Arab World in 2020:
Moving Towards Reform and Development
by Professor Francis A. Boyle
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL
Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.
The demand by the Bush Jr. administration and its Zionist neo-conservative operatives for democratization in the Arab world is a joke and a fraud that is designed to pressure, undermine, and destabilize Arab governments and states at the behest of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, and to pursue America’s continuing campaign for outright military control and domination of the Gulf oil and gas resources that the United States government launched in direct reaction to the Arab oil embargo of the West in 1973. For over the past three decades American foreign policy toward the entire Middle East has been determined by oil and Israel, in that order.
The United States government will seek direct military control and domination of the hydrocarbon resources of the Arab and Muslim world until there is no oil and gas left for them to steal, using Israel as its regional “policeman” towards that end. Oil and Israel were behind both the Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. wars against Iraq. And now Bush Jr. is threatening to attack Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in conjunction with the genocidal apartheid regime in Israel. As the oil and gas in the Arab and Muslim world proceed to run out, the United States and Israel will become even more predatory, aggressive, destructive, and genocidal toward Arab and Muslim states and peoples.
The Bush Jr. administration and its Zionist neo-conservative operatives could not care less about democracy in the Arab world. In fact, Bush Jr. and his Neo-Cons are all trying very hard to build a Police State in the United States of America that we lawyers are vigorously opposing. What the Bush Jr. administration and its Zionist neo-conservative operatives really want in the Arab world are quisling dictators who will do their dirty work for them and the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime against the wishes and prayers of the Arab people for democracy, human rights, the rule of law, constitutionalism, as well as for the liberation of Palestine and Al Quds.
Those will be the predominant facts and trends that the Arab world will have to confront between now and 2020. It was not my assignment here today to advise Arab states and the Arab people how to counteract this anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda by the United States and Israel. But certainly the sacred Koran and the divinely inspired teachings of the Prophet Mohammed – May Peace and Blessings Be Upon Him! – shall guide you and protect you during this most difficult period in the history of the Arab Nation, the Arab People, Arab States, and Islam.
Shukhran.
Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010).
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
– بفارق سبع سنوات حمل كل من محمد جواد ظريف وغونداليسا رايس شهادة الدكتوراه في العلاقات الدولية من جامعة واحدة في أميركا هي جامعة دنفر، التي نالت رايس الدكتوراه فيها عام 1981 ونالها ظريف في عام 1988. والسنوات السبع هي فارق العمر تقريباً بينهما، وبتسلسل مشابه صعد كل منهما في سلم السياسة الدولية لدولتين، تتوزّعان طرفي التصادم على مساحة المنطقة الأهم في العالم، منذ سقوط جدار برلين وانهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي على الأقل. وهو الحدث الذي رفع مقام رايس من العلم إلى السياسة، حيث تركزت عليه كنموذج أطروحة الدكتوراه التي جعلتها مستشارة في البيت الأبيض لشؤون الاتحاد السوفياتي عام 1989، في عهد الرئيس جورج بوش الأب، لتصل إلى منصب مستشارة الأمن القومي ولاحقاً وزيرة الخارجية في عهد رئاسة إبنه جورج بوش وتخرج معه مهزومة بنظرياتها التي شكلت أساس السياسات الأميركية الفاشلة في المنطقة الأشدّ خطورة وحساسية في العالم، قبل أن تعود سياسات رايس للظهور على يدي من خلفوها في عهدي الرئيسين باراك اوباما ودونالد ترامب، بسبب الفراغ الفكري والأيديولوجي وفقدان وجود مفكر جديد مبهر يوازيها في صناعة النظريات القابلة للتحول إلى سياسات من موقع مصالح الدولة ونخبها الحاكمة.
– بدأ ظريف صعوده في الدبلوماسية الإيرانية معاوناً في سفارة بلاده في واشنطن، ليصير السفير لاحقاً ويتقدم وصولاً لتبوء منصب وزير الخارجية، ويثبت فيه، مقدماً مثالاً للسياسات المستوحاة من أطروحته التي نال عليها الدكتوراه، حتى يمكن القول إن الصراع الأميركي الإيراني هو بطريقة ما امتداد للصراع العلمي بين النظريتين اللتين تختصران أطروحتي الدكتوراه لكل من رايس وظريف، بعدما كانت مرحلة مادلين أولبرايت في عهد بيل كلينتون مرحلة كمون لنظريات رايس واختبار لنظريات أولبرايت، التي تنتمي لجيل المفكرين الاستراتيجيين النادر في حال السياسة الأميركية اليوم مع صعود رجال الأعمال المفتقرين للثقافة في عهد الرئيس ترامب، وأولبرايت هي إبنة جورج كوريل الذي كان عراب رايس العلمي ومرشدها، وقد حملت جامعة دنفر للعلاقات الدولية التي تخرجت منها رايس وتخرج منها ظريف مؤخراً اسم جورج كوريل تيمناً بدوره الكبير في الصعود العلمي للجامعة.
– تمحورت نظريات أولبرايت على الاحتواء الإيجابي في السياسة الدولية، فهي صاحبة نظرية احتواء طالبان في أفغانستان، ونظرية احتواء سورية في مفاوضات الشرق الأوسط لتحقيق السلام، وصاحبة نظريات تشكل منها عملياً ما عُرف باسم تقرير بايكر هاملتون الذي وثق فشل حربي العراق وأفغانستان، ودعا إلى الواقعية في فهم التوازنات الجديدة في السياسات الدولية ناصحاً بالتخلي عن الدعم المطلق لـ»إسرائيل» والانفتاح على صعود روسيا وإيران، وهي التي حذرت عام 2010 في تقريرها لحلف الأطلسي من نظريات التلاعب بالنسيج الاجتماعي لدول الشرق الأوسط التي تبناها المفكر برنارد لويس الذي كان شريكاً في لجنة الحكماء التي ترأستها أولبرايت بقرار من مؤتمر قمة حلف الأطلسي لرسم السياسة. ونظرية برنارد لويس المؤسسة على فهمه للتاريخ القائم برأيه على الديمغرافيا السكانية وهجراتها وليس على الجغرافيا، وهذا منطلق تبريره التاريخي لقيام كيان استيطاني على حساب السكان الأصليين وتصويره عملاً تاريخياً في كل من أميركا وفلسطين، ونظريات برنارد لويس تتلاقي في عمقها مع نظريات رايس التي توجتها بنظرية الفوضى الخلاقة.
– قامت نظرية رايس الدراسية في أطروحة الدكتوراه على بناء العلاقات الدولية وفقاً لمعادلتي التصادم القيمي، وميزان القوى المالي، وراهنت على تفكيك الاتحاد السوفياتي بقوة الثبات على التسابق على الإنفاق العسكري، والإخلاص بالتبشير بنظام ديمقراطي يحترم الحريات والحقوق الأساسية للتعبير، والانتصار المبهر الذي رفعها إلى مراتب عليا في السياسة، قابلته هزيمة مدوية عندما جرى اختباره في المنطقة الأخطر في العالم بوجه إيران، وكانت حرب العراق وبعدها حرب تموز 2006 على لبنان، ومحاولة إخضاع سورية فيهما، عنوان خطة رايس كمستشارة للأمن القومي ووزيرة للخارجية بعدها، ويُعتبر فوز حركة حماس بالانتخابات الفلسطينية في كانون الثاني 2006 الذي لم تستطع رايس تحمّل تبعاته وتقبل التعامل معه وفقاً لنظريتها، الفشل الأكبر قيمياً لما بشرت به من إخلاص لقيمتي الحرية والديمقراطية، بينما تعتبر العقوبات على إيران وفشلها في وقف تقدم البرنامج النووي الإيراني التعبير عن الفشل الآخر للجناح الموازي لنظريتها القائمة على القوة المالية الأميركية، خصوصاً عامي 2007 و2008 رغم بلوغ إيران أدنى مراتب إنتاجها من النفط الذي وصل إلى 700 ألف برميل يومياً بدلاً من مليونين ونصف مليون برميل.
– ما تفعله إدارة ترامب اليوم ليس إلا اجترار هزلي لنظريات رايس التي تعامل معها ظريف من قبل، وقد كان يشغل منصب سفير بلاده في الأمم المتحدة، حتى عام 2007، وشغل منصب مستشار في مجموعة التفاوض على الملف النووي التي كانت برئاسة رئيس مجلس الأمن القومي آنذاك، الرئيس حسن روحاني بين عامي 2003 و2007، قبل أن يعود وزيراً للخارجية عام 2013. وأطروحة ظريف التي نال الدكتوراة على أساسها وتشكل مصدر أفكاره وإدارته للدبلوماسية الإيرانية، تقوم على إمكانية إنتاج سياسة دولية لقوة ثورية من ضمن القانون الدولي، وفي ظل موازين القوى الطاغية لصالح مشروع الهيمنة الذي تمثله السياسات الأميركية.
– يعرف المتابعون للسياسات الإيرانية أن نظرية الدفاع الذاتي في القانون الدولي والسياسة، التي تمثل عنوان مشروع ظريف، تتسع للفصل بين الموقف العقائدي للدولة وبين سياساتها الخارجية، فلا مانع من الانفتاح على ترك واشنطن تغزو أفغانستان والعراق، رغم عدم الموافقة على هذا الغزو، لأن الدفاع الذاتي للدولة يجب أن يشتغل بطريقتين مختلفتين، عندما تصبح مصالحها العليا في دائرة الخطر، وعندما يتم التعارض مع مبادئها، رغم أنه في الحالتين يمكن للدفاع الذاتي أن لا يبدو خيار مواجهة في الظاهر، عندما يكون الاستدراج إلى ملعب مناسب للمواجهة، أو لتعظيم المخاطر، أو للاحتواء، وهذا ما حصل في حربي العراق وأفغانستان، لكنه ما يحصل مع الاتفاق النووي الذي ظن كثيرون أنه ترجمة لسياسة اعتدال إيرانية تريد مسايرة الأميركيين والغرب، وصنفوا ظريف معتدلاً على هذا الأساس، بينما يظهر اليوم أنه منصة استدراج لمواجهة من داخل القانون الدولي، ربحت إيران جولته الأولى ببقاء أوروبا تحت مظلته وخروج أميركا وحيدة من أحكامه واستحالة العودة لمعاقبة إيران على برنامجها النووي بقرارات أممية، وتتجه إيران الآن لربح جولته الثانية على أوروبا. وهذه نظرية الدفاع الذاتي في القانون الدولي التي يبدو أن إدارة ترامب تفتقر لمن يقرأ ليفهم حركتها، ويدرك الفشل الكبير الذي ينتظره في المواجهة معها، كما كان فشل الفوضى البناءة بالاعتماد على الدفاع الذاتي الذي قادت عبره سورية بالتعاون مع إيران وقوى المقاومة الحرب التي شنتها واشنطن بدعم دولي وإقليمي استثنائيين، لتسقط فيها قيمياً وعملياً بفعالية الدفاع الذاتي في القانون الدولي.
– الإجراءات الإيرانية الأخيرة وما سيليها فصول جديدة في علوم السياسة الدولية، بمقدار ما هي خطوات سياسيّة مثيرة.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently recounted to an audience at Texas A&M University that when he was head of the Central Intelligence Agency he was responsible for “lying, cheating and stealing” to benefit the United States. “Like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
The Secretary made the comment with a grin, noting that when he was a cadet at West Point he subscribed to the Academy honor code, which stated that “You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.” The largely student audience clearly appreciated and irony and laughed and applauded, though it is not clear what they made of the “glory of the American experiment.” The normally humorless Pompeo was suggesting ironically that yesterday’s Pompeo would be required to turn today’s Pompeo into the appropriate authorities for lying and also conniving at high crimes and misdemeanors while at the Agency.
Certainly, some might find Pompeo’s admission a bit lame though perhaps understandable as he arrived at CIA without any experience in intelligence. Someone should have whispered in his ear, “That is what spy agencies do Mike.” And if he found the moral ambiguities vexing, he should have turned down the job. Equally lame has been the international media coverage of the comments (it was not reported in any major national news outlet in the US) which reflected both shock and vindication at finding a top-level official who would admit that Washington does all that sort of nasty stuff.
And Pompeo is not alone in his doing what would have hitherto been unthinkable as many senior figures in the Trump Administration who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution now find themselves conniving at starting various wars without the constitutionally required declaration of war from Congress. Pompeo has personally assured both the Venezuelans and Iranians that “all options are on the table,” while also arming the Ukrainians and warning the Russians to get out of Caracas or else face the consequences. And it is a good thing that he has now learned how to lie as he does so when he keeps insisting that the Iranians are the leading state sponsors of terrorism or that the Saudis are fighting a just war in Yemen.
And then there is the ethical dimension. The United States government is already involved in economic acts of war through use of its sanctions worldwide. It is currently dedicated to starving the Iranian and Venezuelan people to force them to change their governments. This week, a global boycott of Iranian oil sales to be enforced unilaterally by Washington kicks in with the objective, per Pompeo, of reducing “Iran’s oil exports to zero” to deny its government its “principal source of revenue.” The problem with the Pompeo objective is that attacking a foreign government normally rallies the people around their leadership. Also, denying a country income ultimately hurts ordinary people much more than it does those who make the decisions. One recalls the famous Madeleine Albright line about killing 500,000 Iraqi children through malnutrition and disease brought about by sanctions as “being worth it.”
Pompeo believes himself to be a good Christian. Indeed, a very good Christian in that he believes that the second coming of Jesus Christ is imminent and by virtue of his good deeds he will be saved and “raptured” directly to heaven. He, like Vice President Mike Pence, is referred to as a Dispensationalist, and he also believes that those who are not “born again” and accept Jesus will be doomed to hell. Most Dispensationalists think that the second coming will be preceded by a world war centered in the Middle East referred to as Armageddon, which will pit good against evil. How that shapes Pompeo’s thinking vis-à-vis encouraging a major armed conflict with Iran is certainly something that war-weary Americans should be considering.
One of the really interesting things about fanatics like Pompeo and his dos amigos Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Advisor John Bolton is how they are unable to figure out what comes next after the “lying, cheating, stealing” and shooting are over. After American air and naval power destroy Iran, what comes next? If Iraq and Afghanistan are anything to go by, “next” will be kind of figured out as one goes along. And as for an end game, fuggedaboutit.
Now let us suppose that with the crushing of the Mullahs all the requirements for Armageddon will be met and Jesus Christ makes his second appearance, what happens after that when the world as we know it ends? Presumably the rapture itself is painless but when Pompeo and Pence arrive at heaven what will they do all day? Play cards? There will be no television one presumes and no Muslims or Latinos to kick around as they will all be in hell. Drinking and smoking are probably not allowed and acquiring a girlfriend will likely be discouraged. One suspects that engaging in philosophical symposia to pass one’s time is not particularly favored by either gentleman.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 