Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured more than a century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK Axis don’t want this important slice of history resurrected to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

William Knox D’Arcy, having obtained a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia and with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 and completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually cancelled the D’Arcy agreement and took the matter to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were slightly improved but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company was re-named Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco shared profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls to nationalise its oil could no longer be ignored. In March of that year the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, cancelling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable:

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. The coup by MI6 and the CIA was successful and in August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

For his impudence Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He was imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

Smouldering resentment for more than 70 years

The British-American conspiracy that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. It all backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word MOSSADEQ – the Iranian who dared to break the chains of slavery and servitude to Western colonial interests.

Is Britain incapable of playing fair? During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

The company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment and we were mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. They had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it?

Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

In 2022 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Now we’re playing dirty yet again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 77 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when the Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration and support. UK prime minister Starmer much prefers to talk about “the malign influence of Iran”

The excuse this time is that Iran’s nuclear programme might be about to produce weapons-grade material which is bad news for Israel. There’s a blanket ‘hush’ over Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes. The US and UK and allies think it’s OK for mad-dog Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran which has to live under this horrific Israeli threat. Then there’s America’s QME doctrine which guarantees Israel a ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ over its Middle East neighbours.

Then consider that Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yes, it’s quite evident that the Zionist entity, not Iran, is the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

So our brand-new prime minister has refused to rule out UK military involvement in any Israeli response to Iran’s recent missile attack, condemning what he calls Iran’s “malign role” in the Middle East.

And he refused to say whether MPs would get a vote beforehand on any military action. “We support Israel’s right to defend herself against Iran’s aggression, in line with international law, because let’s be very clear, this was not a defensive action by Iran, it was an act of aggression and a major escalation in response to the death of a terrorist leader.

“It exposes, once again, Iran’s malign role in the region: they helped equip Hamas for the seventh of October attacks, they armed Hezbollah, who launched a year-long barrage of rockets on northern Israel, forcing 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes, and they support the Houthis, who mount direct attacks on Israel and continue to attack international shipping.”

Of course, Starmer didn’t mention the many attacks Israel had made on Lebanon and Iran over the years or explain why Hamas and Hezbollah came into being.

Be honest: who exactly are the “malign” influences in the Middle East?

Just as Britain and America would like everyone to believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7 last year, when it had been going on since 1948 (and before), they’d like us to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured a whole century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK-Israel Axis don’t want this important slice of history to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

In 1901 William Knox D’Arcy, a Devon man, obtained from the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia. The Persian government would receive 16% of the oil company’s annual profits, a rotten deal as they would soon realize.

D’Arcy, with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually canceled the D’Arcy agreement and the matter went to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were an improvement but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951, while Aramco was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis, Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls for nationalizing its oil could no longer be ignored. In March 1951 the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavorable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, canceling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable: “Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

“Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.” (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

For his impudence he would be removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

America was reluctant at first to join Britain’s destructive game but Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. In August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

The CIA-engineered coup that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. The British-American conspiracy inevitably backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word: MOSSADEQ.

But Britain seems incapable of playing fair. In 2022, when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband back in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Smoldering resentment for more than 70 years

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

As it happens the company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment. We were just mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. Britain had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it? Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

Alston acknowledged that “there is an understandable inclination to exact revenge in such cases” but warned that “to permit such instincts to prevail only sends the message that the rule of law continues to be mocked in Iraq, as it was in Saddam’s own time”.

So now we’re playing dirty again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 76 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. A century later it is quite evident that Zionism has been the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration for it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Major U.S. foreign policy decisions after World War II — Vietnam War, Lebanon intrusion, Somalia incursion, Afghan/Soviet War, Afghan occupation, Iraq War, support for Shah of Iran, and Libyan Wars — have been counterproductive, not resolving situations and eventually harming the American people. The one-sided relationship the United States has with Israel is another counterproductive policy that is harmful to the American public

Persistent attention to Israel and its dubious position in the world may seem overkill, except this attention is one of the most important, mortally affecting the U.S. public. Until a complete report of fatal relations with Israel is placed on the desks of U.S. congresspersons and they act positively upon the contents, attention to the issue is incomplete and peril continues. Surveying U.S. policies that favored Israel collects a horrendous list of American fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against fortress America.

Two questions. How have the expensive arrangements, Velcro attachments, and highly supportive measures for Israel benefitted the United States? What has Israel done for Americans, not for American politicians, but for those who vote them into office? A convenient means for obtaining the answer is to have a leading “think tank” in the United States supply the information. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which “seeks to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East and to promote the policies that secure them” has a 2012 article on the topic, “Friends with Benefits: Why the U.S.-Israeli Alliance Is Good for America,” by Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, Nov 7, 2012, and is a likely source. Some of its major recommendations:

U.S.-Israeli security cooperation dates back to heights of the Cold War, when the Jewish state came to be seen in Washington as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East and a counter to Arab nationalism….Israel remains a counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism. It has prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region by thwarting Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs.

(1) The reason the Soviet Union acquired influence in the Middle East was Washington’s refusal to sell arms to the Arab nations, while “indirectly supplying weapons to Israel via West Germany, under the terms of a 1960 secret agreement to supply Israel with $80 million worth of armaments.“ Less secret deliveries of MIM-23 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in 1962 and M48 Patton tanks in 1965 told the Arab nations they could not collaborate with a government that armed their principal adversary and they should seek military assistance elsewhere.
(2) Arab nationalism has developed, and developed, and developed; so, how did Israel counter Arab nationalism? Did Israel stimulate Arab nationalism?
(3) What has Israel done to protect others as a “counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism?” The answer is nothing. Radical forces, political Islam, and violent extremism emerged immediately after Israel’s formation and grew, and grew, as Israel grew.
(4) Iraq and Syria sought nuclear weapons to counter Israel’s nuclear weapons developments, which the U.S. could have and should have prevented. No nukes in Israel; no nukes in Syria or Iraq. Why did the U.S., dedicated to preventing nuclear proliferation, allow Israel to obtain the atomic bomb?

Dozens of leading U.S. companies have set up technology incubators in Israel to take advantage of the country’s penchant for new ideas. In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region, having recently eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the top market there for American products.

(1) U.S. companies have subsidiaries worldwide and hire talent in all nations. What’s significant about Israel?
(2) “In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region…” Was that good? In 2022, U.S. exports to Israel were $20.0 billion and imports were $30.6 billion, adding $10.7 billion to Washington’s trade deficit, not a good economic statistic. Without Israel’s trade, the U.S. exported $83 billion in goods and services to Middle East nations and had a trade surplus of $5.3 billion, a better statistic.

U.S. companies’ substantial cooperation with Israel on information technology has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success. At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year. If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli  researchers.

These bites of public relations win the all-time Pinocchio award. Is The Washington Institute a legitimate “think tank” or a covert lobby?

(1)    “Israel has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success.” Next, we’ll hear that Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Whitney.
(2)    “At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year.” Intel has 131,000 employees in 65 countries — 11,000 in Israel, 12,000 in China, and approximately 7,500 employees at its 360-acre Leixlip campus in Ireland. The company develops the processors, not the country or specific engineers; it can develop the same processors anywhere in the world and has capably developed its major microprocessors for 45 years in the good old United States of America.
(3)    “If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli researchers.” Another Pinocchio award. Let’s be more accurate: “If you’ve been scammed in a financial transaction, had your messages hacked, or had someone purchase an item with your PayPal account, thank Israeli researchers.”

In its one-sided presentation, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy does not show the U.S.-Israeli alliance is good for America. The Institute has not considered the other side, the harm that Israel has visited upon its most essential partner. Reality shows the U.S. government and its people have dealt with Israel in a suicidal manner and in a zero-sum game, where the U.S. is the “zero,” or actually minus, and Israel receives the sum of all the benefits.

Recognition of Israel

From its inception, Israel betrayed the United States and the U.S. betrayed its commitment to a just and peaceful post-WWII world. President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the new state, only 11 minutes after its declaration, did not consider its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah militias against civilian populations, and certified the exclusion of a Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked who represented the 400,000 indigenous Palestinians in the declared Israeli state that was almost equal in population to the 600,000 Jews, most of whom were recent immigrants and not decidedly permanent.

Suez Canal War

Several years later Israel again betrayed its principal benefactor. While President Eisenhower attempted to broker a peace agreement between Egypt and France and Great Britain that would resolve the crisis emerging from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Israel held secret consultations with the British and French. Considering Nasser a threat to its security, desirous of incorporating the Sinai into its small nation, and with a plan to extend Israel to the Litani River in Lebanon, Israel devised a strategy with the two European powers that permitted its forces to invade Egypt and advance to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Pretending to protect the vital artery, Britain and France parachuted troops close to the canal. An enraged Eisenhower threatened all three nations with economic sanctions, which succeeded in having all three militaries withdraw their forces and relinquish control of the canal to Egypt.

Six-Day War

The six-day war brought the first American blood in the U.S. commitment to Israel. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel patrolling in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 17 nautical miles off the northern Sinai coast. The crew suffered thirty-four (34) killed and one hundred seventy-three (173) wounded. A declassified Top Secret report details the CIA version of the attack and exonerates Israel by claiming mistaken identity. This has not satisfied USS Liberty survivors, who felt Israeli pilots had many opportunities for proper identification and performed the attacks to prevent the ship from obtaining important intelligence information.

1973 Yom Kippur War

Next came the 1973 Yom Kippur War and an economic catastrophe for the American people. The U.S. maintained it needed Israel to offset Soviet influence in the Arab world. The combined Egyptian and Syrian attempt to retake lands lost in the 1967 war prompted the Nixon administration to use taxpayer money and supply massive shipments of weapons to the beleaguered Israel state. An excuse for providing the armaments shipments ─ Israel might use the Samson option and nuke its adversaries ─ is regarded as a manipulation to pacify opponents of the arms deliveries. The controversy is reported in Wikipedia.

Dayan raised the nuclear topic in a cabinet meeting, warning that the country was approaching a point of “last resort.” That night, Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton-of-TNT(84 TJ) tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles at Sdot Micha Airbase and F-4 Phantom II aircraft at Tel Nof Airbase. They would be used if absolutely necessary to prevent total defeat, but the preparation was done in an easily detectable way, likely as a signal to the United States. Kissinger learned of the nuclear alert on the morning of 9 October. That day, President Nixon ordered the commencement of Operation Nickel Grass, an American airlift to replace all of Israel’s material losses.

The U.S. contribution in enabling Israel to achieve a decisive victory resulted in an oil embargo that drove up oil prices, set Americans into a frantic rampage in trying to keep their cars on the road, a stagnant economy, and huge inflation, which the Federal Reserve stopped by raising interest rates to record highs and led to the 1982 recession.

Lebanon War

Despite a truce with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and wanting to rid Lebanon of the PLO and Syrian dominance in Lebanon affairs, Israel used a failed assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, as an excuse to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Where Israel went, U.S. diplomacy was sure to follow, and the U.S. joined a multinational peacekeeping force.

U.S. presence in Lebanon had detractors. On April 18, 1983, a car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in West Beirut, killing dozens of American foreign service workers and Lebanese civilians. On October 23, 1983,  after U.S. gunships in the Mediterranean shelled Syrian-backed Druze militias in support of the Christian government, a truck crashed through the front gates of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and exploded. Beirut barracks were destroyed and 241 marines and sailors were killed in the explosion. Soon after, President Reagan withdrew all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

International Terrorism

For several decades, al-Qaeda, the most prominent international terrorist organization, posed the most serious threat to America’s peace and stability. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda associates bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa. Twelve Americans were among the two hundred and twenty-four people who died in the terrorist actions. Three years later, the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. caused 2,750 deaths in New York and 184 at the Pentagon. Forty more Americans died when one of the hijacked planes crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. In addition, 400 police officers and firefighters perished in attempts to rescue people and extinguish the fires at the New York Trade Center.

Where did it all start? Why, and how did master terrorist Osama bin Laden develop his plans? There is no one factor, but, in several documents, bin Landen mentions Zionist control of Middle East lands and its oppression of an Arab population as significant factors. America’s support for Israel was one of bin Laden‘s principal arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the last sentences of a “Letter to America.”

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

During the 1990s, two other documents,“Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.

[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.

So now they come to annihilate … this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Afghanistan

The hunt for Osama bin Laden and efforts to annihilate the al-Qaeda organization led to the invasion of Afghanistan and a twenty-year clash between the U.S. and the Taliban. Result: 2,402 United States military deaths, 20,713 American service members wounded, and Taliban regaining control.

Iraq

It’s difficult and punishing to agree with Osama bin Laden, but he may be correct or have a perspective that needs more examination. Did Bush order the invasion of Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which any child could ascertain he could not possibly have, or did the Neocons, Israel’s voice in the administration, convince him to use Americans, their resources, and their money to rid the Middle East of Israel’s most formidable enemy? Was George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq another example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests? Other international terrorist operations emerged during the Iraq war and brought U.S. military personnel into more battles. Finally, in 2019, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the best-equipped and largest of all the terrorist factions, which caused havoc in Syria and Iraq, was defeated, and international terrorism moved out of the Middle East and into parts of Africa.

Iran

It is taken for granted that Iran and the United States are natural enemies, except the hostility may be manufactured and the factory might be in Tel Aviv. Iran has a government and internal problems that disturb the U.S., but so do many other nations, especially Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. maintains relations with these nations. Confrontations have occurred and are escalating and that demands toning down rather than ratcheting up, and more diplomatic confrontations to prevent the physical confrontations. Sanctions that harm Iran’s economy and people, assistance to Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists, and use of the powerful computer worm, Stuxnet, to cause mayhem in Iran’s nuclear program are counterproductive provocations. The U.S. has no specific problem with Iran that cannot be ameliorated. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and incursions into the Haram al-Sharif are problems that Iran has with Israel, and they cannot be ameliorated until the oppression stops. Cunningly, Israel has tied its problems with the Islamic State to U.S. problems with Iran and uses the U.S. to challenge Iran.

Other

·         In defiance of U.S. restrictions and the U.S. supplying Israel with advanced military equipment, Israeli companies sold weapons to China without a permit.

·         The U.S. gives Israel the sum of $3.1 B every year to purchase advanced weapons, from which Israel became a major exporter of military equipment and has been able to compete effectively with its patron.

·          Israeli governments have scoffed at all U.S. entreaties to halt settlement expansion, even insulting then Vice-President Joe Biden by authorizing settlement expansion one day before Biden arrived for talks.

·         Two Navy SEALs are missing and assumed dead after a maritime operation to intercept weapons from Iran heading to Houthi fighters. This episode is a result of the U.S. participating in Israel’s war against Gaza.

·         The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been attacking air bases housing U.S. and Iraqi troops in western Iraq “as a part of a broad resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as a response to Israel’s operations in Gaza.”

Toward the Abyss

The verdict is clear; the United States derives no benefit from its close relationship with Israel. Maybe, during the confusing Cold War, desk strategists determined the Soviets had an influence with Middle Eastern nations and thought it wise to have a place where the Pentagon would be welcome. Soviet influence disappeared after the 1979 Camp David Accords; Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement and Soviet diplomats and military vanished from the desert sands.

From September 11, 2001, to October 7, 2023, the U.S. continually suffered fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against Fortress America. Why did U.S. administrations pursue a “special relationship” with Israel and find themselves victims of the “war on terror” and involved in numerous wars? The current U.S. administration, which did not use its clout to prevent the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, has permitted Israel’s self-inflicted problems to bring the U.S. people into supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people, promoting the U.S. as the leading killer of indigenous peoples.

It took a long time to turn the murmurs of genocide in Palestine into a forceful expression that others would accept and fearlessly repeat. Murmurs of sabotage and treason by elected government officials are being heard, but they are legal terms for crimes, and, legally, U.S. legislators’ activities may not be considered in those categories. Treachery is a better word, gaining federal office by treacherous means — pandering to those that represent the interests of a foreign power to obtain campaign funds and press coverage — and using that office to satisfy the wants of the foreign power, despite the damage done to American constituencies. Past and present U.S. executives and legislators are guilty of treachery and that word should be shouted in the halls of Congress. Sound the alarm, get them out before it is too late, and elect into office those who represent the American people and not a foreign government. MAGA – MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN.

Aiding the genocide has put the U.S. in severe moral decline; escalating internal divisions are leading to social and political decline; and an economy that can no longer compete in the international markets, together with increasing resistance to use of the dollar, is leading to economic decline. The signs of civil strife have yet to appear and when they do they will push the U.S. off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

In 2003, this culpable troika sneered, ignored and soiled such international institutions as the United Nations, the rule of law, the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, and a number of conventions, by invading Iraq.  The country, weakened and crippled by years of sanctions, leaving its hospital system crushed with bulky lists of dead children (all worthwhile, according to the late former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright), was apparently a mortal threat to Western civilisation.

The Baathist regime, led by Saddam Hussein, was purportedly armed to the teeth with a doomsday inventory of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that he was bound to use at any given moment against freedom loving types in Washington, London and Canberra.  (It is true he had previously had such weapons, much of it supplied by Western arms corporations with the blessing of intelligence agencies such as the CIA.)  He had, apparently, refused to disarm, obdurate in the face of United Nations weapons inspectors.  And he had flirted with those evil representatives of cataclysmic eschatology, al-Qaida, despite being hostile to such millenarian groups.  The report card, spottier than ever in the shadow of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States, suggested that he had to go.  The results: lusty sectarian violence, a catastrophically devastating, often imbecilic occupation by US-led forces, the seeds of emboldened fundamentalism, the offshoot movements such as Islamic State, and multigenerational trauma.

With another new year beckoning, the Australian National Archives have released approximately 240 cabinet papers from 2003 on the decision-making process behind a number of policy decisions.  A few snippets are offered regarding road to war.  Cabinet’s National Security Committee had kept an eye on developments in Iraq, though the released materials do little to reveal what, precisely, took place in conversations between Howard and Bush.

In September 2002, one document notes how “cabinet noted an oral report by the prime minister on his discussion with the president of the United States on the American position in relation to efforts by Iraq to secure and maintain weapons of mass destruction.”  A fortnight later, the then-foreign minister Alexander Downer, is noted as furnishing cabinet with an “oral report” regarding “developments” regarding the proposed UN Security Council resolution on the Saddam regime’s “possession of, and attempts to secure or maintain, weapons of mass destruction, and on the prospects for passage of the resolution”.  That such oral revelations were not accompanied by thick, detailed submissions, is telling about the obedient, inevitable train of thinking afflicting the Howard government.  A war, started by Washington, would come, and Canberra would be along for the ride.

By March 2003, Howard was demanding action.  He informed members of his cabinet that Bush had issued Saddam with an ultimatum of thuggish import.  “Saddam Hussein and his sons,” the US president stated, “must leave Iraq within 48 hours.  Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”

Howard was drunk with intelligence assessments from the United States, including such claims that Iraq had put out feelers for yellowcake in Niger.  Couple this with such stretched confections as non-state terrorist actors, hankering for WMD spoils from sponsor states, and the prime minister was swooning.  In 2013, his cringeworthy apologia given to the Lowy Institute reflected on the fictitious Niger angle as “unmistakable” in its “strength”.  Had it been accurate – a sly way of escaping the prosecutor’s legal brief – and Saddam “left in place, only to provide WMDs to a terrorist group, for use against the US, the Administration would have failed in its most basic responsibility to protect the nation.”  When crooks of state are found out, they tend to cite public duty as appropriate justification.

As far as legality for any military intervention outside the formal channels of authorisation of a UN Security Council, Howard was armed with a memorandum signed by a first assistant secretary from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and his equivalent from the Attorney-General’s Department.  Fantastically and irresponsibly, the cod ordinary advice suggested that Australian involvement in an invasion would be entirely legal, given the Saddam regime’s recalcitrance in not allegedly complying with previous Security Council resolutions.  It seems that the public servants in question, instead of offering a panoramic view about the pitfalls of a dangerous adventure in the Middle East, were merely keen to satisfy the bloodletting urges of their political paymasters.

The cabinet minute from March 18, 2003 showed agreement from the Attorney-General with the spurious reasoning of the first assistant secretaries.  It also noted that the Australian Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, holder of that old office of the British empire as the monarch’s representative, had been consulted.  Approval from him, however, was not mandatory.

Cabinet, won over with no evident demurral, and previously buttered up by oral reports, approved the measure to commit Australia to another failed military mission of murderous, bungling incompetence.  The United States would receive no resistance in getting its pound of Australian flesh for an illegal enterprise, and the Australian public, many of whom had participated in some of the largest anti-war demonstrations the country had ever seen, would be ignored.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – because most pilots admit this kind of close-curved maneuver necessary to hit the towers was impossible to carry out by a pilot.

The world was told the perpetrators were a group of some 12 Saudi terrorists. An outright lie. One of the first ones – to be followed by countless others – all in the name of instilling fear to control mankind, to eventually upgrade the war to a killing machine – leading onto the infamous UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, and the all-digitizing, QR-code -crowned Fourth Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and CEO proudly claims as his brainchild.

Who else could come up with a new world order based on linearism, digitalized transhumanism, 180-degrees opposite of what life, the universe is – an infinite multitude of dynamism – life in multiple dimensions, evolving naturally as a cog in the universe’s endless wheel?

Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.

The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.

And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the people on the plane that apparently crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. No debris and no people were ever found. Here too, no media coverage, no investigation – just destined to be forgotten.

What happened to the dozens of policemen and firefighters who were near the WTC towers and in their basements, reporting on hearing explosions underground and in the lower strata of the extremely solid constructions just before they collapsed in the well-known style of purposeful city demolition techniques? Most of them were never seen again. “Victims” of the accident?

Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.

The onslaught of wars began. The US invasion of Afghanistan, barely a month after the suspected auto-coup of the 9/11 Twin Towers implosion. The pretext was Osama Bin Laden, an Al Qaeda CIA recruit, who, the George W. Bush Administration lied, having orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, had to be eliminated by invading the mountainous and resources-rich Afghanistan landlocked in the center of Asia.

Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.

True reasons for invading Afghanistan were several: The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Gas Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAPI Pipeline, was to bring natural gas from the world’s second largest gas fields in Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, discharging 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the Gulf of India. Washington wanted control over this largest gas transit, potentially disrupting US petrol giants market dominance.

The ever-closer relations between Afghanistan and China were a thorn in the eyes for US political supremacy, and finally the extreme mineral riches especially rare earths, vital for production of electronics and chips used for military equipment as well as for multiple civilian uses.

Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.

The Afghanistan invasion was followed by the May 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the hydrocarbon richest countries in the Middle East, with a leader, Saddam Hussein, who was at the point of defying OPEC rules of trading hydrocarbons in US-dollars only. Saddam wanted to trade Iraq’s hydrocarbons in Euros. Iraq was also labeled an al Qaeda terrorist country.

A “Shock and Awe” attack should eliminate the country’s leader and bring Iraq to her knees before the almighty US of A. By now we know that it did not exactly happen that way. It was probably also planned as an endless war.

Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.

Syria. From 2011 forward Washington’s secret service created a “civil war” applying the principle of divide to conquer. In September 2014 the conflict culminated in the US intervening, siding with the [US-created] Syrian rebels, fighting the Islamic State, the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” in what was labeled international war against the Islamic State.

In truth, Washington wanted to get rid of the highly popular and democratically elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Again, the interest was control over the large Syrian oil and mineral resources.

Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.

Coincidentally – though, there are no coincidences – the Ukraine war also started in [February] 2014, by the US instigated coup against the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Remember Victoria Nuland’s recorded phone conversation with the US Ambassador in Kiev – “f**k Europe”?  And the recent admission by NATO boss, Jens Stoltenberg, that the Ukraine War started already in 2014?

Other US-initiated wars and conflicts followed.  In Sudan in 2006 / 2007 after the broken Darfur Peace Agreement; in Pakistan in 2011 under the pretext and on the heels of several targeted killings in Karachi, leaving hundreds of people dead. US presence never left the country, as Pakistan was attempting establishing closer relations with China.

To the “war on terror” may also be counted the October 2011 US / French / NATO lynching of Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country as of this day in a state of constant civil strife and mafia-like killings and enslavement of refugees. Gaddafi was about to introduce the Gold Dinar as a unified currency for Africa to liberate Africa from French and US/K currency exploitation.

The NYC 9/11 was — and is — a war instrument that until this day has not been fully recognized as what it was supposed to be – a precursor to possibly the planned final phase for civilization as we know it, the UN Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset, leading to the full digitization of humanity into transhumanism and simply a One World Order (OWO), run by full control via digitization of everything, complemented with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.

This plan will not materialize.

Lest we forget, it is important to point out that there was another 9/11 “event” 50 years back that took place in Chile. It also killed instantly hundreds of people, and over the following 16 years, until General Pinochet’s demise in March 1990, tens of thousands of people disappeared and were killed.

The purpose of the US-instigated and Henry Kissinger executed military coup in Chile was to get rid of the “uncomfortable” democratically elected, socialist-leaning, President Salvador Allende so that the United States could implement and test a “Chicago Boys” designed neoliberal economic system to run an entire country. Later to be repeated throughout Latin America, a remedy to make sure Latin America would keep their US “Backyard” status, for a long time to come.

The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean and international economists, most of whom were educated in the 1970s and 1980s by arch-conservative Milton Friedman at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.

Also, not to forget, the major coup planner and instigator, was the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Kissinger later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged peace efforts in the Vietnam war which he also “directed”, and following his ordered bombing of Cambodia and Laos to bloody rubble with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Remember the infamous “Killing Fields” in Cambodia?  Well, that was also Henry Kissinger, arguably the most notorious war criminal still alive.

Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.

Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.

There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.

As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.

Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.

In July 2023, Kissinger was received by China’s President Xi Jinping, who apparently greeted Kissinger with a comment, “old friends” like him will never be forgotten. The irony is subtle. The US-initiated meeting was apparently meant to mend frayed ties between Washington and Beijing.

A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.

Back to NYC-9/11

What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.

After 9/11 for many, and for a long time for most, flying has become a nightmare and a huge business for a few. The long security lines, the manual checking – often more reminiscent of groping – of passengers, who often for some medical reasons, have a hard time passing through the control machines without the red-light flashing.

The first US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and associates, became insanely rich by launching the manufacturing of the airport security machines that were imposed worldwide, and which are being constantly upgraded.

Backtracking 

9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.

The Club of Rome, first unofficially meeting in 1956 in Rome, was formally created in 1968 as an initiative of David Rockefeller with Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, founder and President of Africa’s Agang party, and others.

The Club of Rome issued in 1972 the infamous report “Limits to Growth” (LTG), arguing against continued economic and population growth, setting the first marks for a massive eugenist agenda, a population reduction down to about 500 million people from today’s 8 billion-plus, a reduction of about 95%.

Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s “The Limits of Growth”, is a member of the World Economic Forum. He propagates as of this day massive population reduction. See this.

This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.

From it was born covid, the worldwide coercive vaxx mandate, possibly more lab-made “viruses” to come, as well as the climate change hoax, justifying geoengineering of weather, causing droughts, floods, never-seen-before hurricanes and tornadoes, Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) caused forest and other fires, like the destruction of Lahaina on Maui, and others – all bringing about poverty, famine, misery, and death.

Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.

There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

Two planes hitting the twin towers of the NYC World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 – probably remote-controlled – because most pilots admit this kind of close-curved maneuver necessary to hit the towers was impossible to carry out by a pilot.

The world was told the perpetrators were a group of some 12 Saudi terrorists. An outright lie. One of the first ones – to be followed by countless others – all in the name of instilling fear to control mankind, to eventually upgrade the war to a killing machine – leading onto the infamous UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset, and the all-digitizing, QR-code -crowned Fourth Industrial Revolution, what Klaus Schwab, WEF’s founder and CEO proudly claims as his brainchild.

Who else could come up with a new world order based on linearism, digitalized transhumanism, 180-degrees opposite of what life, the universe is – an infinite multitude of dynamism – life in multiple dimensions, evolving naturally as a cog in the universe’s endless wheel?

Right there on NYC’s 9/11, more than 3000 people were killed. Thousands more followed in the immediate aftermath.

The third building that collapsed a day later – seemingly out of the blue – was apparently ripe with documented evidence of the crime. Almost silence by the media.

And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the people on the plane that apparently crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania. No debris and no people were ever found. Here too, no media coverage, no investigation – just destined to be forgotten.

What happened to the dozens of policemen and firefighters who were near the WTC towers and in their basements, reporting on hearing explosions underground and in the lower strata of the extremely solid constructions just before they collapsed in the well-known style of purposeful city demolition techniques? Most of them were never seen again. “Victims” of the accident?

Overall, since the NYC-9/11 millions of people were killed in the aftermath of the trigger to the so-called war on terror, which, in fact, was meant to be — and is — a war on humanity.

The onslaught of wars began. The US invasion of Afghanistan, barely a month after the suspected auto-coup of the 9/11 Twin Towers implosion. The pretext was Osama Bin Laden, an Al Qaeda CIA recruit, who, the George W. Bush Administration lied, having orchestrated the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, had to be eliminated by invading the mountainous and resources-rich Afghanistan landlocked in the center of Asia.

Al Qaeda was a CIA creation of the late 1980’s, already then as an instrument to justify the coming war on terror.

True reasons for invading Afghanistan were several: The Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India Gas Pipeline, also known as Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAPI Pipeline, was to bring natural gas from the world’s second largest gas fields in Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, discharging 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year to the Gulf of India. Washington wanted control over this largest gas transit, potentially disrupting US petrol giants market dominance.

The ever-closer relations between Afghanistan and China were a thorn in the eyes for US political supremacy, and finally the extreme mineral riches especially rare earths, vital for production of electronics and chips used for military equipment as well as for multiple civilian uses.

Afghanistan was the first “leg” on the endless “War on Terror”.

The Afghanistan invasion was followed by the May 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the hydrocarbon richest countries in the Middle East, with a leader, Saddam Hussein, who was at the point of defying OPEC rules of trading hydrocarbons in US-dollars only. Saddam wanted to trade Iraq’s hydrocarbons in Euros. Iraq was also labeled an al Qaeda terrorist country.

A “Shock and Awe” attack should eliminate the country’s leader and bring Iraq to her knees before the almighty US of A. By now we know that it did not exactly happen that way. It was probably also planned as an endless war.

Iraq – another “War on Terror” – emanating from the 9/11 auto-attack.

Syria. From 2011 forward Washington’s secret service created a “civil war” applying the principle of divide to conquer. In September 2014 the conflict culminated in the US intervening, siding with the [US-created] Syrian rebels, fighting the Islamic State, the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” in what was labeled international war against the Islamic State.

In truth, Washington wanted to get rid of the highly popular and democratically elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Again, the interest was control over the large Syrian oil and mineral resources.

Also, under the flag of “War on Terror”.

Coincidentally – though, there are no coincidences – the Ukraine war also started in [February] 2014, by the US instigated coup against the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Remember Victoria Nuland’s recorded phone conversation with the US Ambassador in Kiev – “f**k Europe”?  And the recent admission by NATO boss, Jens Stoltenberg, that the Ukraine War started already in 2014?

Other US-initiated wars and conflicts followed.  In Sudan in 2006 / 2007 after the broken Darfur Peace Agreement; in Pakistan in 2011 under the pretext and on the heels of several targeted killings in Karachi, leaving hundreds of people dead. US presence never left the country, as Pakistan was attempting establishing closer relations with China.

To the “war on terror” may also be counted the October 2011 US / French / NATO lynching of Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country as of this day in a state of constant civil strife and mafia-like killings and enslavement of refugees. Gaddafi was about to introduce the Gold Dinar as a unified currency for Africa to liberate Africa from French and US/K currency exploitation.

The NYC 9/11 was — and is — a war instrument that until this day has not been fully recognized as what it was supposed to be – a precursor to possibly the planned final phase for civilization as we know it, the UN Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset, leading to the full digitization of humanity into transhumanism and simply a One World Order (OWO), run by full control via digitization of everything, complemented with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It is the plan. A scary plan, a plan with the purpose of instilling fear. Thus, it is hoped, making the population defenseless against a tyrannical take-over.

This plan will not materialize.

Lest we forget, it is important to point out that there was another 9/11 “event” 50 years back that took place in Chile. It also killed instantly hundreds of people, and over the following 16 years, until General Pinochet’s demise in March 1990, tens of thousands of people disappeared and were killed.

The purpose of the US-instigated and Henry Kissinger executed military coup in Chile was to get rid of the “uncomfortable” democratically elected, socialist-leaning, President Salvador Allende so that the United States could implement and test a “Chicago Boys” designed neoliberal economic system to run an entire country. Later to be repeated throughout Latin America, a remedy to make sure Latin America would keep their US “Backyard” status, for a long time to come.

The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean and international economists, most of whom were educated in the 1970s and 1980s by arch-conservative Milton Friedman at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.

Also, not to forget, the major coup planner and instigator, was the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, under Richard Nixon’s presidency. Kissinger later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged peace efforts in the Vietnam war which he also “directed”, and following his ordered bombing of Cambodia and Laos to bloody rubble with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Remember the infamous “Killing Fields” in Cambodia?  Well, that was also Henry Kissinger, arguably the most notorious war criminal still alive.

Earlier this year, Henry Kissinger turned 100. This could be natural old age, or it could be old age enhanced by adrenochrome.

Is it sheer coincidence that the Santiago Chile and the NYC Nine-Eleven massacres are exactly 50 years apart? A half a century.

There are no coincidences. Just connecting the dots.

As a reminder 911 is the emergency-call number in the United States. That is hardly a coincidence.

Kissinger is a close buddy, ally and advisor of Klaus Schwab, CEO of the controversial World Economic Forum (WEF). As of this day, Kissinger’s advice is sought by leaders around the world.

In July 2023, Kissinger was received by China’s President Xi Jinping, who apparently greeted Kissinger with a comment, “old friends” like him will never be forgotten. The irony is subtle. The US-initiated meeting was apparently meant to mend frayed ties between Washington and Beijing.

A tremendous attribute for President Xi. He is always open for initiatives potentially leading to improved relations, harmony, and peace.

Back to NYC-9/11

What we, especially the western world’s humanity, currently are living is a colossal crime never seen and recorded before in known history.

After 9/11 for many, and for a long time for most, flying has become a nightmare and a huge business for a few. The long security lines, the manual checking – often more reminiscent of groping – of passengers, who often for some medical reasons, have a hard time passing through the control machines without the red-light flashing.

The first US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and associates, became insanely rich by launching the manufacturing of the airport security machines that were imposed worldwide, and which are being constantly upgraded.

Backtracking 

9/11 sparked “wars on terror” – alias on humanity — that may have had several phases of activation.

The Club of Rome, first unofficially meeting in 1956 in Rome, was formally created in 1968 as an initiative of David Rockefeller with Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King and Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, founder and President of Africa’s Agang party, and others.

The Club of Rome issued in 1972 the infamous report “Limits to Growth” (LTG), arguing against continued economic and population growth, setting the first marks for a massive eugenist agenda, a population reduction down to about 500 million people from today’s 8 billion-plus, a reduction of about 95%.

Dennis Meadows, one of the main authors of the Club of Rome’s “The Limits of Growth”, is a member of the World Economic Forum. He propagates as of this day massive population reduction. See this.

This eugenist plan is as of this day the blueprint for what we are living. It is the core for UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset and All-digitization.

From it was born covid, the worldwide coercive vaxx mandate, possibly more lab-made “viruses” to come, as well as the climate change hoax, justifying geoengineering of weather, causing droughts, floods, never-seen-before hurricanes and tornadoes, Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) caused forest and other fires, like the destruction of Lahaina on Maui, and others – all bringing about poverty, famine, misery, and death.

Closing the circle with NYC’s 9/11 setting the stage 22 years ago.

There is no waiting. We must resist with heart and soul and peaceful spirits. We shall never forget 9/11 and what it triggered, and we shall overcome.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Peter Koenig.

I have already examined, in relation to sadistic motivations, the personality of President Barack Obama (see: “Obama: ‘I’m Really Good at Killing People’,” Dissident Voice, January 2, 2022.  Psychiatrist Justin Frank, M.D. also wrote a detailed psychoanalytic study entitled Obama on the Couch (2011), which is full of subtle and well-stated psychoanalytic insights, especially regarding Obama’s childhood.  Still, psychoanalyst Justin Frank unconvincingly concluded that Obama was “generally in excellent mental health.”²

To my mind, his earlier book Bush on the Couch (2004), which I will refer to here, was unflinchingly probing and perspicacious, a superb tour-de-force in the field of psycho-political studies of presidential personalities and their often horrifically destructive “policies.”  (Parenthetically, ex-President Bush has frequently made revealing Freudian slips during recent speaking engagements.)  So, having already examined the case of Madeleine Albright, let us now examine the authoritarian sadism exhibited by President George W. Bush, a war criminal now almost entirely rehabilitated by the craven, mainstream media.

Case-Study no. 2:  George W. Bush

Former President George W. Bush’s dreadful legacy of destruction rivals that of other modern authoritarian rulers who recklessly trampled human rights and laid waste to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.  But were his injurious policies–from willfully wrecking an entire nation (Iraq), to authorizing illegal torture (Guantanamo and the CIA’s notorious black-sites), to refusing to renew the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons–simply the result of his benighted, right-wing ideology?  Or, was this ideology in itself simply politicized cruelty: mass-murdering a purported “enemy” populace abroad while slashing social programs and criminalizing the poor domestically?  Describing the emotional tenor of Nazism, journalist Ron Rosenbaum brilliantly noted that “an irrational hatred that can assume the guise, the mantle, of an ideological antipathy but which is primitive in the sense of being prior to ideology–its source rather than its product.” ³

In Dr. Frank’s Bush on the Couch, I found the chapter entitled “The Smirk” lucidly revealing as to Bush’s sadistic personality.  Frank offered abundant examples of Bush’s sadism and destructiveness, from his childhood pastime of blowing up frogs with firecrackers to his “branding” of fraternity pledges with a red-hot coat hanger–to his subsequent rubber-stamping of the execution, while governor of Texas, of a record number of death-row inmates (many never given adequate counsel for a fair trial).  Ultimately, Dr. Frank concluded, “The sadism that motivated the war [was] evident in Bush’s lack of a plan for postwar Iraq: the invasion was an end in itself.” ⁴

As to my usage of a concept of compensatory narcissism–often apparent in authoritarian “power-over” and grandiosity–Dr. Frank favored instead a blanket diagnosis of Bush as megalomaniacal.  Unlike Dr. Frank, who chose not to utilize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, I have found the section in the “DSM” on Personality Disorders particularly useful (4th edition, 1994). Some fifty years ago, Freudian psychiatrists with substantial clinical experience of narcissistic and sociopathic personalities spent years seeking further clarification and consensus regarding the clinical (and actual) reality of such personality syndromes.  Finally, a typology (subject to revision) emerged, and such can be found in the aforementioned DSM 4th edition.  I might add that the very concept of “personality disorders” (especially, narcissistic, sociopathic, etc.) was originally derived from the early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s classic Character Analysis (1933), wherein he discussed his clinical cases of pathological character-structures. ⁵

Unfortunately, in subsequently expanded editions over the past thirty years, the APA–against the strong protest of the minority of psychoanalytic psychiatrists–has added innumerable dubious and stigmatizing “conduct disorders” (and such) to the Manual (probably for commercial motives and insurance claims).  The few psychoanalysts who have remained members of today’s APA have been marginalized and largely ignored by the reigning Big Pharma bio-psychiatrists.  (Interestingly, when psychoanalysts still exercised significant influence in the APA, the diagnostic “Sadistic Personality Disorder” was carefully considered and briefly included in the DSM, only to be dropped later.)

Returning to our evaluation of Bush, compensatory narcissistic power-displays, more popularly known as “protest masculinity,” were almost constantly on exhibit in his crude threats and belligerent rhetoric as well as in his flamboyant swaggering in a flight-suit costume on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 (“Mission Accomplished”?).  Again, fifty years ago many publicly respected psychoanalysts such as Erich Fromm might have pointed to childhood origins: a dominant and violently punitive mother (slapping and/or neglect), and a remote, often-absent father.  But such observations are now routinely derided, with the alternative (and potentially racist) claim that psychopathic behavior in adulthood is primarily genetic in origin.

In the 1994 DSM, one finds that youthful cruelty to animals as well as substance abuse–both unquestionably exhibited by Bush–are predisposing factors to a possible diagnosis of “sociopathy” (then also known as “antisocial personality disorder”). As president, Bush, of course, often displayed the roguish charm of the con-artist, as he gratuitously lied or invented “facts,” blithely broke dozens of laws and shredded treaties, and ordered the illegal torture of hundreds of victims, conveniently occurring in locales where U.S. laws prohibiting torture had no jurisdiction.

According to the DSM (and again, I emphasize, the 1994 4th edition), in order to be diagnosed as “sociopathic,” an individual must exhibit at least three of the following: “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors… deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying… impulsivity or failure to plan ahead… irritability and aggressiveness… reckless disregard for the safety of self or others… consistent irresponsibility…[and] lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.”  This diagnostic, which has high co-morbidity with a history of alcoholism (admitted by Bush), is ultimately confirmed in cases where some evidence exists of childhood delinquency (such as bullying and cruelty toward animals).

Moving on to the DSM’s 1994 criteria for narcissistic disorder, at least five of the following must apply to justify the diagnosis: “a grandiose sense of self-importance… fantasies of unlimited success, power… believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique…has a sense of entitlement… is interpersonally exploitative… lacks empathy… is often envious of others… [and] shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.”   Many highly successful individuals,” the DSM entry concluded (with unintended irony?), “display personality traits that might be considered narcissistic.” ⁶

An eminent psychoanalyst, known for his careful study of personality disorders, concluded twenty years ago that the narcissistic syndrome “overlaps considerably with the interpersonal style of anti-social personality–so much so that narcissistic individuals are sometimes considered ‘white-collar’ psychopaths… The distinction [between the two personality diagnostics] is then unclear.” ⁷ It is thus plausible to consider “narcissism” and “sociopathy” as points on a continuum, with fusion of traits a not unlikely outcome (especially in powerful political figures).  I postulated as much over ten years ago in my Dissident Voice article “Sociopathic Narcissism: a Political Syndrome”, October 26, 2012.  Thus, in the year or so following Trump’s “election” as president, I was not surprised to see numerous panic-stricken psychiatrists and political analysts suddenly warn the public of the “sociopathic narcissist” in the White House.

But can sociopathic narcissism ultimately be equated with authoritarian sadism?  According to Dr. Frank, President Bush became a sadistic role-model, thus “normalizing” the unleashing of bullying, aggressive behavior in everyday socio-political contexts.  Bush’s desire to attack Iraq and its people, under the flimsiest of pretexts, exhibited his impatiently awaited delight in cruelty: the anticipated satisfactions of not only crushing Saddam Hussein (dominating him into submission or, preferably, torturing and killing him).  To this sociopathic narcissist, one may even speculate that exercising the power to kill hundreds of thousands of vulnerable, powerless Iraqi people–without impunity– offered the ultimate, grandiose opportunity for sadistic satisfaction.

Similarly, the power-hungry, highly narcissistic Madeleine Albright (discussed in the preceding Part 1) aggressively campaigned for, and attained, the position of Secretary of State.  Ruthless and domineering, the “entitled” Albright was impatient to crush and dominate into submission defiant opponents such as Saddam and Milosevic.  But what of the helpless, ordinary citizens of these nations (and not forgetting Rwanda); i.e., hundreds of thousands including small children, who are by nature weak and defenseless)?  They were all victims for the power-driven, authoritarian sadist. ⁸

END NOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

Here I am focusing on the urge for, and exercise of, “power-over” as a manifestation of compensatory narcissism (a term I prefer, in this essay, to Volkan’s “reparative narcissism”).  As to sadism, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm perceptively described the “dominance-submission” psychology of the authoritarian personality: “the world is composed of people with power and those without it.  The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, and humiliate him.” ² Those individuals who single-mindedly attain such “power-over” may then successfully compensate for the childhood trauma of feeling insecure, under-valued or humiliated.³  Concurrently, the unconscious desire for revenge may be satisfied through displacement onto peoples and nations easily declared to be imminent threats to national security.  (And one should not underestimate the intrinsically pleasurable “power-thrill” involved.)

Case-Study No. 1:  Madeleine Albright

Born in Czechoslovakia the year before British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous, unsuccessful appeasement of Hitler at the Munich Conference, Madeleine Albright (nee Marie Korbelova, 1937-1922) experienced childhood as a refugee.  Her father Josef Korbel held a diplomatic post there, but Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia soon forced the family to flee the country.  The family sought safety in London, only to find themselves under siege by the Luftwaffe’s bombing Blitz (1941).  (In her memoir Prague Winter, Albright passes lightly over the frequent but unpredictable emergency sirens warning of imminent bombs, and alerting Londoners to immediately drop everything and rush for safety down into the Underground Tube.)  In 1948, her father was appointed Czechoslovakian ambassador to Yugoslavia, but with that nation’s takeover by a Communist regime, the family was yet again forced to flee.

Thus, Albright experienced a childhood of bewildering war dangers, constant flights from one safe haven to another, and the inevitable insecurities about vulnerability, abandonment, homelessness.  (Of course, no such feelings are acknowledged in her memoir.)  One traumatic lesson no doubt learned was that power rules the world, and those without it can become victims.  Such a lesson must have also been detected in the decision of her Jewish parents to raise her as a Catholic–a sobering fact that Albright claimed she only first learned when a journalist broke the story in 1997. ⁴ (In her childhood, was she really unaware of the strange absence of contact with any extended family members–who had been ”disappeared” into concentration camps?).

Much later, living as a U.S citizen, and marrying journalist Joseph  Albright–who later divorced her–she eventually, like her father, chose a career in diplomacy, earning a Columbia Ph.D. in international relations under Zbigniew Brzezinski (soon to become National Security Advisor for Democratic President Jimmy Carter).  This connection would pave the way for this ambitious, aggressive woman who, by the time of the first Clinton Administration, was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Previously, under the previous Bush (Sr.) administration, a propaganda-fueled Gulf War (1991) had left Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in ruins, with a destroyed military and hundreds of thousands of casualties.  Even so, Saddam remained in power, and U.S.-backed, draconian UN sanctions were imposed for many years to follow, producing widespread hunger, disease and suffering.  U.S. bombing during that brief war targeted and destroyed water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure, yet the sanctions prohibited the importation of chlorine as well as antibiotics and most foodstuffs.  Such cruel sanctions, as we know, resulted in hundreds of thousands of children’s deaths.⁵

Sitting as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Security Council (1993-1996), Albright aggressively shaped the Clinton policy: extreme pressure on the other members of the Council to continue the sanctions.  But later, as her tenure at the UN was coming to an end, she inadvertently exposed her authoritarian-sadistic motivations to millions, in her now-infamous TV interview on Sixty Minutes (May 12, 1996).  When interviewer Lesley Stahl, pointing out that a UNICEF Study had recently estimated that some 500,000 Iraqi children were now dead because of these U.S.-backed sanctions, Albright–as viewers saw with astonishment–coldly replied that on balance, it was ”worth it.”⁶

As is well-known, the draconian sanctions continued.  A few months later, now U.S. Secretary of State, Albright once more displayed her latent, sadistic-narcissistic motivation: “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted” (March 26, 1997).⁷

It is beyond the scope of the present article to examine her refusal, when on the UN Security Council (1994), to respond to UN General Romeo Dallaire’s urgent request for a few thousand peace-keeper troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda.⁸

As to Serbia’s 1990s involvement in wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, diplomat Albright had little interest in negotiation or humanitarian initiatives. In a seeming obsession with the rise of Hitler at the time she was born, she repeatedly declared that “my mind-set is Munich.” ⁹ The U.S. would not tolerate the expansionist plans allegedly masterminded and directed by Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia).  She initially tried to pressure Gen. Colin Powell for immediate U.S. military action, including heavy bombing: extreme demands which he claimed, in his own self-promoting book, almost caused him to have “an aneurysm.” ¹⁰. Nonetheless, during the later Kosovo conflict (spring 1999), Albright revealed herself once more as an eager warmaker (rather than “diplomat”).  She bullied the 19 member-nations of NATO as junior partners in a 1000-plane daily bombing campaign over Serbia that was prolonged for an absolutely devastating 90 days.¹¹

In her retirement, Albright wrote the usual self-justifying memoirs.  Her unwavering fixation on strength and power–she even wrote proudly that she could leg-press 400 pounds!–was reflected in the very title of one of her books: The Mighty and the Almighty (2006).

ENDNOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

As the world this week mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, journalism experts weighed in on the corporate media's complicity in amplifying the Bush administration's lies, including ones about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons upon which the war was waged.

"Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media—with one notable exception—bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote Sunday.

That "one notable exception" was a group of journalists at the Washington, D.C. bureau of Knight Ridder—which was acquired by McClatchy in 2006—who published dozens of articles in several of the company's papers debunking and criticizing the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq and its WMDs. Their efforts were the subject of the 2017 Rob Reiner film Shock and Awe, starring Woody Harrelson.

"The war—along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials—also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS, and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis," Abcarian noted.

She continued:

That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

"Of course," wrote Abcarian, "there was never any smoking gun, mushroom-shaped or not."

According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative journalism organization, Bush and top administration officials—including then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rice—"made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Those lies were dutifully repeated by most U.S. corporate mainstream media in what the center called "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," David Corn, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones, asserted Monday.

Far from paying a price for amplifying the Bush administration's Iraq lies, many of the media hawks who acted more like lapdogs than watchdogs 20 years ago are today ensconced in prestigious and well-paying positions in media, public policy, and academia.

In a where-are-they-now piece for The Real News Network, media critic Adam Johnson highlighted how the careers of several media and media-related government professionals "blossomed" after their lie-laden selling of the Iraq War:

• David Frum—Bush's lead writer who coined the term "Axis of Evil" to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—is "a well-paid and influential columnist for The Atlantic and a mainstay of cable TV."
• Jeffrey Goldberg, then a New Yorker reporter who pushed conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq, is now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
• MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an erstwhile Iraq War hawk, rebranded himself as a critic of the invasion and occupation, and is a multimillionaire morning show host on that same network.
• Fareed Zakaria hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
• Anne Applebaum, a member of the Post's editorial board at the time who called evidence of Iraq's nonexistent WMDs "irrefutable," now writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
  

In an interview with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the media's role in war and peace—Middle East expert Assal Rad noted:

Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.

While there was some contrition from outlets including the Times as the Iraq occupation continued for years and not the "five days or five weeks or five months" promised by Rumsfeld, journalist Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted that media lies and distortions about the war continue to this day.

"Perhaps the most telling instance of the media's acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion," said Rad, "when President Bush's joke at the White House Correspondents' dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.

Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.

Despite its unmistakable political flavour – the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.

The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.

In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”

Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”

The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.

Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”

It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.

Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.

Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.

The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”

The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.

‘Putin apologists’

But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.

The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.

Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.

The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.

Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.

Should the US not be under severe economic sanctions from the “civilised world” for what it did to Iraq? Should its sportspeople not be banned from international events? Should its billionaires not be hunted down and stripped of their assets? And should the works of its long-dead writers, artists and composers not be shunned by polite society?

And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.

The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.

That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.

And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.

During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.

And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.

Pre-emption excuse

But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.

That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.

In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.

Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.

Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take pre-emptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and Nato were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.

But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.

First, it could have paved the way for Nato stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.

And second, Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbass region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.

In this view, absent a Russian invasion, Nato could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40bn.

Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbour Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.

Proxy wars

Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?

The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.

To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.

With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its Nato allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.

Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defence and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.

He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.

Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.

Butcher versus blunderer

Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”

But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.

A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.

This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.

That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.

It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.

But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.

If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.

• First published in Middle East Eye

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

For the victims of American terrorism far outnumber the American soldiers who have died in its wars, although I consider most U.S. veterans to be victims also, having been propagandized from birth to buy the glory of war, not the truth that it’s a racket that serves the interests of the ruling class.

Such wars, carried out with bombs, drones, mercenaries, and troops, or by economic embargoes and sanctions, are by their nature, acts of terrorism.  This is so whether we are talking about the mass fire bombings of Japanese and German cities during WW II, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombings and the agent orange dropped on Vietnam, the depleted uranium on Iraq, the use of terrorist surrogates everywhere, the economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Syria, etc.  The list is endless and ongoing.  All actions aimed at causing massive death and damage to civilians.

According to U.S. law (6 USCS § 101), terrorism is defined as an act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

By any reasonable interpretation of the law, the United Sates is a terrorist state.

Let me tell you about Bert Sacks.  Perhaps you’ve heard of him.  His experiences with the U.S. government regarding terrorism tell an illuminating story of conscience and hope.  It is a story of how one person can awaken others to recognize and admit the truth that the U.S. is guilty of crimes against humanity, even when one is unable to stop the carnage.  It is a tale of witness, and how such witness is contagious.

In November 1997 Sacks led a delegation to Iraq to deliver desperately needed medicines ($40,000 worth, all donated) that were denied into the country because of US/UN economic sanctions.  For such an act of human solidarity, he was later fined $10,000 by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Sacks had refused to ask for a license to travel to Iraq or to subsequently pay the fine for compelling reasons connected to his non-violent Gandhian philosophy, which teaches that non-cooperation with evil is as much an obligation as cooperation with good.

For years previously, Sacks had been learning, as would have anyone who was following the news, that the American sanctions under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton following the illegal and unjust Gulf War, had been aimed at crippling the Iraqi infrastructure upon which all civilian life depended.  Iraq had been devastated by the U.S. war of aggression, and a great deal of its infrastructure, especially electricity and therefore water purification systems, had already been destroyed. Clinton kept up the sanctions and the bombing in support of Bush’s war intentions. So much for differences between Republicans and Democrats!  Regular Iraqis were suffering terribly.  All this was being done in the name of punishing Saddam Hussein in order to oust him from power, the same Hussein whom the U. S. had supported in Iraq’s war with Iran by assisting him with chemical and biological weapons.

As Sacks later (2011) wrote in his declaration to the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington when he sued OFAC:

Weeks after the end of the Gulf War, on March 22, 1991, I read a New York Times front- page story covering the UN report by Martti Ahtisaari on the devastating, ‘near- apocalyptic conditions’ in Iraq after the Gulf War. The report said, ‘famine and epidemic [were imminent] if massive life-     supporting needs are not rapidly met. The long summer… is weeks away. Time is short.’ The same article explained U.S. policy this way: ‘[By] making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people, [sanctions] will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.’ This sentence has stayed with me for twenty years. It says to me that my government – by inflicting suffering and death on Iraqi civilians – hoped to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, and that we would simply call  it “making life uncomfortable.” [my emphasis]

The years to follow the first war against Iraq revealed what that Orwellian phrase really meant.

In 1994 Sacks read a survey on health conditions of Iraqi children in The New England Journal of Medicine that said:

These results provide strong evidence that the Gulf War and trade sanctions caused a threefold increase in mortality among Iraqi children under five years of age. We estimate that an excess of more than 46,900 children died between January and August 1991.

And that was just the beginning.  For the number of dead Iraqi children [and adults] kept piling up as a result of “making life uncomfortable.”

Anton Chekov’s story “Gooseberries” pops into my mind:

Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. . . . And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism.  There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him —  disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears  others.

Sacks has long been that man with a gentle hammer, far from happy, comfortable, or contented in what he was learning.  In 1996 he watched the infamous CBS 60 Minutes interview of Madeleine Albright by Leslie Stahl who had recently returned from Iraq. Albright was then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be the Secretary of State.  Stahl, in reference to how the sanctions had already killed 500,000 Iraqi children, asked her, “Is the price worth it?” – Albright blithely answered, “The price is worth it.”

In April 1997, a New England Journal of Medicine editorial said that:

Iraq is an even more disastrous example of war against the public health . … The destruction  of the country’s power plants had brought its entire system of water purification and distribution to a halt, leading to epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever, and gastroenteritis, particularly among children. Mortality rates doubled or tripled among children admitted to hospitals in Baghdad and Basra… [my emphasis]

The evidence had accumulated since 1991 that the U.S. had purposely targeted Iraqi civilians and especially very young children and had therefore killed them as an act or war.  This was clearly genocide.  In its 1999 news release, UNICEF announced: “if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.”

The British journalist Robert Fisk called this intentional destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure “biological warfare”: “The ultimate nature of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraqi civilians now became clear. Bomb now: die later.”  In his declaration to the court, Sacks wrote that the Centers for Disease Control, in warning about potential terrorist biological attacks on the U.S., clearly lists attacks on water supplies as terrorism and biological warfare:

Water safety threats (such as Vibrio cholerae and Cryptosporidium parvum): Cholera is an acute bacterial disease characterized in its severe form by sudden onset, profuse painless watery stools, nausea and vomiting early in the course of illness, and, in untreated cases, rapid dehydration, acidosis, circulatory collapse, hypoglycemia in children, and renal failure. Transmission occurs through ingestion of food or water contaminated directly or indirectly with feces or vomitus of infected persons.

By January 1997, as a result of such statements and those of U.S. military and government officials and reports in medical journals and media, Sacks concluded that the United States government was guilty of the crime of international terrorism against the civilian population of Iraq.  And being a man of conscience, he therefore proceeded to lead a delegation to Iraq to alleviate suffering, even while knowing it was a drop in the bucket.

It is important to emphasize that the U.S. government knew full well that its intentional destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure would result in massive death and suffering of civilians.  Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said of such destruction that “If I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing.”  All the deaths that followed were done as part of an effort at regime change – to force Hussein out of office, something finally accomplished by the George W. Bush administration with their lies about weapons of mass destruction and their 2003 war against Iraq that killed between 1-2 million more Iraqis.  The recent accolades heaped on Colin Powell, who as Secretary of State consciously lied at the UN and who led the first war against Iraq – two major war crimes – should be a reminder of how unapologetic U.S. leaders are for their atrocities.  I would go so far as to say they revel in their ability to commit them.  Because he called them out on this by doing what all journalists and writers should do, they have pursued and caged Julian Assange as if he were a wild dog who walked into their celebratory dinner party.

In this 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” you can read how these people think.  And read Thomas Merton’s poem “Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site With Furnaces,” and don’t skip its last three lines and you can grasp the bureaucratic mind at its finest. Euphemisms like “uncomfortable” and “collateral damage” are their specialties.  Killing the innocent are always on their menu.

Bert Sacks and his delegation got some brief media publicity for their voyage of mercy.  He believed that if the American people really knew what was happening to Iraqi children, they would demand that it be stopped.  This did not happen.  His tap with the hammer of conscience failed to awaken the hypnotized public who overwhelmingly had elected Clinton to a second term in 1996 six months after the 60 Minutes interview.  Yes, “Everything is [was] quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics.”

Although the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi children in the 1990s were dying at the rate of at least 5,000 per month as a direct result of the sanctions, very few major media publicized this.  The 60 Minutes show, with its shocking statement by Albright, was an exception and was seen by millions of Americans.  After that show aired, to claim you didn’t know was no longer believable.  And although most mainstream media buried the truth, it was still available to those who cared.  There were some conscience-stricken officials, however.  In his declaration to the court, Sacks wrote:

The first two heads of the “Oil-for-Food” program – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck – each resigned a position as UN Assistant Secretary General to protest the consequences of the U.S. imposed sanctions policy on Iraq. Mr. Halliday said, ‘We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.’ He called it genocide.

There were also doctors, politicians, independent writers, and Nobel Peace Laureates who called the policy genocide and said, “Sanctions are the economic nuclear bomb.”  Sacks told the court that “Finally, this list includes a 32-year career, retired U.S. diplomat – Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism – who says: ‘you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in [terrorist] activities. Ours is one of them.’”

Military planners, moreover, wrote in military publications that it was desirable to kill Iraqi civilians; that it was an essential part – if not the major part – of war strategy.  They called it “dual-use targeting” and called themselves “operational artists.”

Sacks was able to reach a few officials and journalists who realized this was not art but massive war crimes.  This showed that it is not impossible to change people, hard as it is.  The judge in his court case, James L. Robart, while agreeing that OFAC had not exceeded its authority in fining him, acknowledged that the court had to accept as true that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children as reported by UNICEF had come to constitute genocide, but [my emphasis] U.S. law prohibited the bringing of any consideration of genocide into a legal proceeding, which allows the U.S. government to commit this crime while barring any other party from raising the issue legally.

In other words, the U.S. government can accuse others of committing genocide, but no one can legally accuse it.  It is above all laws.

Ten months before his 1997 trip to Iraq, Sacks met with Kate Pflaumer, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington.  He says:

We met in her office and I asked her for the legal definition of terrorism pursuant to the laws of the United States. She asked what could she do for me.  I said “Prosecute me for violating U.S. Iraq sanctions by bringing medicine there.”  She said, “I won’t do that for you!  Can I help in any other way?” I asked for the U.S. legal definition of terrorism.  She pulled out a law book, had her secretary copy the page for me, and didn’t forget my request.  When she left office, she wrote the op-ed on June 21, 2001 …calling U.S. Iraq policy terrorism! The two main elements relevant to the issue here are: (1) it is an act dangerous to human life; and (2) done apparently to coerce or intimidate a civilian population or a government  (see 18 U.S.C. § 2331).

On June 21, 2001, Ms. Pflaumer, then the former U.S. Attorney, wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following:

The reality on the ground in Iraq is not contested. Thousands of innocent children and adult civilians die every month as a direct result of the 1991 bombing of civilian infrastructure: sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, water purification facilities. Allied bombing targets included eight multipurpose dams, repeatedly hit, which simultaneously  wrecked flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power. [Four of seven major pumping stations were destroyed, as were 31 municipal water and sewerage facilities. Water purification plants were incapacitated throughout Iraq. We did this for “long term leverage.” These military decisions were sanctioned by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.]

In May 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reaffirmed that the “price” of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was “worth it. ”

Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” and includes foodstuffs, livestock and “drinking water supplies and irrigation works.

Title 18 U.S. Code Section 2331 defines international terrorism as acts dangerous to human life that would violate our criminal laws if done in the United States when those acts are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.

Thus did Kate Pflaumer, in an act of conscience and upholding her legal obligation as an attorney, call the U.S a terrorist state.  This probably never would have happened without the non-violent hammer of Bert Sacks, who over the years has made nine trips to Iraq with other brave and determined souls who are a credit to humanity.  Messengers of love, truth, and compassion.

Despite their witness, such U.S. terrorism continues as usual.

We cannot let “nothing protest but mute statistics.”  The first lesson in U.S. Terrorism 101 is to become people with hammers, and hammer out truth and justice for the world to hear.  Bert Sacks has done this.  We must follow suit.

Therein lies our only hope.

For by any reasonable interpretation of the law, the United Sates is a terrorist state – beyond the law.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could bring overwhelming and decisive force to bear.  Political goals had to be clear; hostilities would be brief.  There would be no more quagmires, no more Vietnam Wars for the US imperium.  The model for this was his first engagement with Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991.  The other manifestation of this approach was opposing military intervention in Bosnia.

Such ruminations were reached after service in Vietnam, where he made his mark as a major who questioned the account of the My Lai massacre.  Tasked with providing the first response to the Pentagon’s queries spurred on by Ron Ridenhour, he showed an all-establishment view to the butchering of over four hundred villagers, questioning the complaint against Charlie Company as vicious rumour mongering.

This approach served him well, enabling him to get a White House Fellowship, receive patronage from Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assume the role of President Ronald Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor, then National Security Advisor.  The Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs was only logical in the scheme of this alignment, granting him an almost panoptical view of military-intelligence operations.  He directly supervised the teachers of torture from the School of the Americas and learned the importance of keeping the death-squads in the service of US power at arm’s length.  Ridenhour conveys this point with gruesome precision.  “Just keep those big, burly, white American advisers far enough away from the actual mayhem so that they will never be seen splattered with blood on the evening news.”

His briefings during the 1991 Gulf War were famed for being direct and free of jargon.  It stood to reason.  The Vietnam War, for the likes of Powell, had been lost not only because of unclear goals but because of a failure to control army-media relations.

Through the 1990s, he had a certain pop allure that drew him towards a possible tilt at the White House.  He had mastered military greatness and could now be readied as an Ike-redux.  Under heavy spousal pressure, he gave up his bid for office.  Alma Powell had threatened to leave him in the event of him running, fearing potential assassination from a racist’s bullet.  At the time, Christopher Hitchens recalled those “dinner-parties that turned into unspeakable cafard; the TV and radio chat-shows that went null at the mention of his name.”

Slotting into the role of US Secretary of State in the first administration of George W. Bush, he was billed the voice of sane moderation in a cabinet of hawks, the wounds of September 11, 2001 still bleeding.  The military man could still make his mark, despite pretending to prefer ploughshare to sword.

Prior to him taking the reins at the State Department, he had been mocked by his predecessor, Madeline Albright, who always had a touch of the war monger about her.  “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” she chided him with a bloody craving, “if we can’t use it?”  Albright had been a critic of the qualifications suggested by the Powell doctrine, calling it archaic before it even came into practice.  “You know, Gen. Powell wrote a book and one of the problems with writing a book is that it takes a while to get it published.”  She found it “probably ironic that just at the time that this [book] came out, in fact, the limited application of limited force in Bosnia was working.”

Powell would have done his critics proud in abandoning his own doctrine, demonstrating that ideas are there to be vanquished and burned, even by their own creators.  The moment he did so remains dark folklore, a poison of statecraft.  With the Bush administration enthralled by the prospect of war in the Middle East, having marshalled themselves against evidence more counterfeit and conspiratorial than Donald Trump ever could be, Powell played along with gusto. This heralded a conversion from remarks made in February 2001 that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of destruction.  He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.”

His infamous February 2003 address to the UN Security Council accusing Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction was another effort at public relations but of a very different quality.  It proved to be free of accuracy and unburdened by reality, despite Powell’s own vetting efforts of the evidence.  This was a man fully enrolled in the service of regime change and making the case for it.

Every statement, claimed Powell, was “backed up by sources, solid sources”.  They were “not assertions.  What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  The theatrics were ample.  “Let me remind you how ricin works.  Less than a pinch – imagine a pinch of salt – less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, could cause shock followed by respiratory failure.  Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote.  There is no cure.  It is fatal.”  To the US Senate, he could say that these were “real weapons.  We’re talking about anthrax.  We’re talking about botulinum toxin.  We’re talking about nuclear weapons programmes.”

This was heavy going, given that such solid intelligence had been gathered from the quicksand sources of the Iraqi National Congress, a notorious outfit of exile led by the oleaginous Ahmed Chalabi.  Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, noted how many “of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the INC.”

The Secretary of State also ran with the al-Qaida-Iraqi connection, another spurious link manufactured in the aftermath of 9/11 linking the terrorist attacks to Baghdad.  “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaida.  These denials are simply not credible.”  His UN speech makes special reference to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggesting that al-Qaida “affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies throughout Iraq for his network”.

Powell spent subsequent years calling his presentation “painful”, a “blot” that would “always be part of my record.”  But ever mindful of public relations, he could find other more worthy alibis for his conduct.  Blame could be saddled and pinned down elsewhere – for instance, upon the more nefarious Donald Rumsfeld.  Or the devious Vice President Dick Cheney, whose office authored the speech.

For those keen to confine the scope of Powell’s errors and assessments, it is also worth remembering that the taste for regime change did not stop with the placing of boots in Mesopotamia.  As chair for the Bush’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, Powell oversaw the production of a 2004 report advocating various ways the Cuban government might be overthrown.  These were familiar: insinuating market capitalism into the state; introducing multi-party elections; giving Cuban Americans living in the US restitution for losses suffered under the Castro regime.  Accordingly, Washington should “support the Cuban people as they … work to transform themselves” and enable them “to develop a democratic and civic culture … and the values and habits essential to both.”  Such mindful benevolence.

With the imperium in respectful lockstep and sighing deferentially to a departed soldier, Powell’s blemishes can be overlooked by glowing reference to his “service” and patriotism.  But in performing that service, Powell’s legacy will be associated with the murderous, not infrequently incompetent adventurism of US foreign policy and its messianic bent.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes.  For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence.  It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock.  As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed.  In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade.  Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.  “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”

War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight.  The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities.  David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.”  Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area.  Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.”  And so rests the case for the prosecution.

In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts.  Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.

Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office.  Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

The security propagandists have not done much better.  With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial.  “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”

A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention.  Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments.  Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”.  He prefers focusing on scale.  “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.”  Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading.  “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11?  Absolutely.  Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11?  Absolutely.   To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.”  Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”

The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever.  “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month.  “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.”  Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition.  Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe”.  The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.  Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.  In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation.  Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him.  Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda.  Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle.  “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.”  He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise.  The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

That did not matter.  The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus.  Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with.  The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed.  “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute.  In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.”  Not sloppy, is Record.

He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.”  This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq.  The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.”  Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq.  They exclude venality and calculation.  Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole.  The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush.  “I don’t think I ever met the president alone.  I didn’t meet him very often.  [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it.  And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”  What a merry band they make.

Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute.  He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it.  When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes.  “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination.  Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time – not only UBL (Usama Bin Laden)… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “…against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons…”

In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR (National Public Radio) a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

Ferencz:  We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

Clark:  So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Rep. Barbara Lee and Ben Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and me (Medea). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that ”a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them.

Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend“.

Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

As Secretary of State in Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of U.S. foreign policy.

But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among America’s long-time allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

On October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

Now that dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Then we should  pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.

America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time – not only UBL (Usama Bin Laden)… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “…against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons…”

In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR (National Public Radio) a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

Ferencz:  We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

Clark:  So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Rep. Barbara Lee and Ben Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and me (Medea). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that ”a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them.

Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend“.

Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

As Secretary of State in Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of U.S. foreign policy.

But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among America’s long-time allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

On October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

Now that dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Then we should  pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg wrote, quoting Ledeen.

Those like Ledeen, the neoconservative intellectual henchman type, often get away with this kind of provocative rhetoric for various reasons. American intelligentsias, especially those who are close to the center of power in Washington DC, perceive war and military intervention as the foundation and baseline of their foreign policy analysis. The utterances of such statements are usually conveyed within friendly media and intellectual platforms, where equally hawkish, belligerent audiences cheer and laugh at the war-mongering muses. In the case of Ledeen, the receptive audience was the hardline, neoconservative, pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Predictably, AEI was one of the loudest voices urging for a war and invasion of Iraq prior to that calamitous decision by the George W. Bush Administration, which was enacted in March 2003.

Neoconservatism, unlike what the etymology of the name may suggest, was not necessarily confined to conservative political circles. Think tanks, newspapers and media networks that purport – or are perceived – to express liberal and even progressive thought today, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have dedicated much time and space to promoting an American invasion of Iraq as the first step of a complete US geostrategic military hegemony in the Middle East.

Like the National Review, these media networks also provided unhindered space to so-called neoconservative intellectuals who molded American foreign policy based on some strange mix between their twisted take on ethics and morality and the need for the US to ensure its global dominance throughout the 21st century. Of course, the neocons’ love affair with Israel has served as the common denominator among all individuals affiliated with this intellectual cult.

The main – and inconsequential – difference between Ledeen, for example, and those like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, is that the former is brazen and blunt, while the latter is delusional and manipulative. For his part, Friedman also supported the Iraq war, but only to bring ‘democracy’ to the Middle East and to fight ‘terrorism’. The pretense ‘war on terror’, though misleading if not outright fabricated, was the overriding American motto in its invasion of Iraq and, earlier, Afghanistan. This mantra was readily utilized whenever Washington needed to ‘pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall’.

Even those who genuinely supported the war based on concocted intelligence – that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction, or the equally fallacious notion that Saddam and Al-Qaeda cooperated in any way – must, by now, realize that the entire American discourse prior to the war had no basis in reality. Unfortunately, war enthusiasts are not a rational bunch. Therefore, neither they, nor their ‘intellectuals’, should be expected to possess the moral integrity in shouldering the responsibility for the Iraq invasion and its horrific consequences.

If, indeed, the US wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were meant to fight and uproot terror, how is it possible that, in June 2014, an erstwhile unknown group calling itself the ‘Islamic State’ (IS), managed to flourish, occupy and usurp massive swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territories and resource under the watchful eye of the US military? If the other war objective was bringing stability and democracy to the Middle East, why did many years of US ‘state-building’ efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, leave behind nothing but weak, shattered armies and festering corruption?

Two important events have summoned up these thoughts: US President Joe Biden’s ‘historic’ trip to Cornwall, UK, in June, to attend the 47th G7 summit and, two weeks later, the death of Donald Rumsfeld, who is widely depicted as “the architect of the Iraq war”. The tone struck by Biden throughout his G7 meetings is that ‘America is back’, another American coinage similar to the earlier phrase, the ‘great reset’ – meaning that Washington is ready to reclaim its global role that had been betrayed by the chaotic policies of former President Donald Trump.

The newest phrase – ‘America is back’ – appears to suggest that the decision to restore the US’ uncontested global leadership is, more or less, an exclusively American decision. Moreover, the term is not entirely new. In his first speech to a global audience at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, Biden repeated the phrase several times with obvious emphasis.

“America is back. I speak today as President of the United States, at the very start of my administration and I am sending a clear message to the world: America is back,” Biden said, adding that “the transatlantic alliance is back and we are not looking backward, we are looking forward together.”

Platitudes and wishful thinking aside, the US cannot possibly return to a previous geopolitical standing, simply because Biden has made an executive decision to ‘reset’ his country’s traditional relationships with Europe – or anywhere else, either.  Biden’s actual mission is to merely whitewash and restore his country’s tarnished reputation, marred not only by Trump, but also by years of fruitless wars, a crisis of democracy at home and abroad and an impending financial crisis resulting from the US’ mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately for Washington, while it hopes to ‘look forward’ to the future, other countries have already staked claims to parts of the world where the US has been forced to retreat, following two decades of a rudderless strategy that is fueled by the belief that firepower alone is sufficient to keep America aloft forever.

Though Biden was received warmly by his European hosts, Europe is likely to proceed cautiously. The continent’s geostrategic interests do not fall entirely in the American camp, as was once the case. Other new factors and power players have emerged in recent years. China is now the European bloc’s largest trade partner and Biden’s scare tactics warning of Chinese global dominance have not, seemingly, impressed the Europeans as the Americans had hoped. Following Britain’s unceremonious exit from the EU bloc, the latter urgently needs to keep its share of the global economy as large as possible. The limping US economy will hardly make the substantial deficit felt in Europe. Namely, the China-EU relationship is here to stay – and grow.

There is something else that makes the Europeans wary of whatever murky political doctrine Biden is promoting: dangerous American military adventurism.

The US and Europe are the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which, since its inception in 1949, was almost exclusively used by the US to assert its global dominance, first in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, then everywhere else.

Following the September 11 attacks, Washington used its hegemony over NATO to invoke Article 5 of its Charter, that of collective defense. The consequences were dire, as NATO members, along with the US, were embroiled in their longest wars ever, military conflicts that had no consistent strategy, let alone measurable goals. Now, as the US licks its wounds as it leaves Afghanistan, NATO members, too, are leaving the devastated country without a single achievement worth celebrating. Similar scenarios are transpiring in Iraq and Syria, too.

Rumsfeld’s death on June 29, at the age of 88, should serve as a wake-up call to American allies if they truly wish to avoid the pitfalls and recklessness of the past. While much of the US corporate media commemorated the death of a brutish war criminal with amiable non-committal language, some blamed him almost entirely for the Iraq fiasco. It is as if a single man had bent the will of the West-dominated international community to invade, pillage, torture and destroy entire countries. If so, then Rumsfeld’s death should usher in an exciting new dawn of collective peace, prosperity and security. This is not the case.

Rationalizing his decision to leave Afghanistan in a speech to the nation in April 2021, Biden did not accept, on behalf of his country, responsibility over that horrific war. Instead, he spoke of the need to fight the ‘terror threat’ in ‘many places’, instead of keeping ‘thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country’.

Indeed, a close reading of Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan – a process which began under Trump – suggests that the difference between US foreign policy under Biden is only tactically different from the policies of George W. Bush when he launched his ‘preemptive wars’ under the command of Rumsfeld. Namely, though the geopolitical map may have shifted, the US appetite for war remains insatiable.

Shackled with a legacy of unnecessary, fruitless and immoral wars, yet with no actual ‘forward’ strategy, the US, arguably for the first time since the inception of NATO in the aftermath of World War II, has no decipherable foreign policy doctrine. Even if such a doctrine exists, it can only be materialized through alliances whose relationships are constructed on trust and confidence. Despite the EU’s courteous reception of Biden in Cornwall, trust in Washington is at an all-time low.

Even if it is accepted, without any argument, that America is, indeed, back, considering the vastly changing geopolitical spheres in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Biden’s assertion should, ultimately, make no difference.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein entertained a guest at the Presidential Palace in Baghdad: U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. She told the Iraqi president: “I have direct instructions from President (George H.W.) Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait.” Glaspie then asked, point-blank: “Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?”

“As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait,” replied Hussein, deploying his own rendition of wartime spin. “There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance.”

Eight days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and provided the Land of the Free with the pretext it needed to commence a relentless onslaught in the name of keeping the world safe for petroleum. This brings me to a forgotten anniversary. While August 6, 2021, of course, marks the 76th anniversary of the willful nuking of civilians in Hiroshima by the Home of the Brave, it also marks 31 years since the U.S. war against Iraq was initially launched. 

For most people — particularly willfully ignorant anti-war activists — the starting date for the war in Iraq is March 19, 2003. However, to accept that date is to put far too much blame on one party and one president. It also invalidates decades of intense suffering. A more accurate and useful starting date is August 6, 1990, when (at the behest of the U.S.) the United Nations Security Council imposed lethal sanctions upon the people of Iraq.

It is widely accepted that these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-90s was Madeleine Albright. In 1996, Leslie Stahl asked her on 60 Minutes if a half-million dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying to pursue American foreign policy. Albright famously replied: “We think the price is worth it.”

Shortly afterward, Albright was named U.S. Secretary of State by noted liberal Democrat hero, Bill Clinton. Killing brown children by the hundreds of thousands, it seems, is a real boost for the resume in God’s Country.

In the words of the immortal I.F Stone: “Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Your carefully chosen collaborators were outstanding — in “enabling” you to realize your dreams regarding “preventive war.”  Does the date of August 26, 2002 ring a bell?  That was the day that your vice-president, armed with a speech that must have been fine-tuned by an army of P. R. geniuses, stood at the podium of the VFW Convention, solemnly declaring — to repeated applause and cheers — that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…to use against our friends, against our allies, against us.”  This world-historic speech — packed with unusual facts-and-figures which had been uniquely re-arranged, modified, and interpreted in a highly original way — heralded the end of that halcyon summer.  Fall — the ideal time, according to your P.R. adviser, Andrew Card, to promote a “new product” — had officially begun.  And the product you were selling was War, war against Iraq, war against a sovereign state — its people already beaten down and impoverished by the first Gulf War and the draconian sanctions imposed in its aftermath.

Can you remember that time?  The moment in the Oval House when you made one of those terribly difficult decisions that presidents so often make.  (Did you decide that the people of Iraq had not suffered enough?)  In any event, you proceeded boldly, not to say impudently: soon the media was flooded with your voice, an urgent voice that became almost a chant that went something like this:  “Saddam Hussein!!…Weapons of Mass Destruction!!… Saddam!!…WMD!!”  Several months of this “sales campaign” ensued, climaxed by your order to invade and attack — on March 19 of the following year.

Can you even remember those hapless UN inspectors?  Or the ever-polite, ever-so-cautious Kofi Annan?  Probably not — and certainly Americans can’t.  (By now — and you no doubt confidently expected this — most can barely even remember the War itself!)  Anyway, as you might still recall, by 2002 or so the inspectors were coming up empty; it appeared, notwithstanding your innuendos, that Saddam had indeed complied with the Security Council Resolution 687.  What did you do then?  Was this one of your famous “decision points”?

Your advisors quickly offered an alternate (if wildly far-fetched) “reason” for invading Iraq.  Within the shadow of Israel’s large nuclear arms arsenal, and despite the terrible condition of his nation, Madman Saddam was nonetheless tirelessly at work 24/7 — feverishly building an Atomic Bomb!  In those months of 2003, you spoke with great urgency (if not logic) about the diabolical Saddam — a shadowy mastermind who by then had even eclipsed the devilish Osama bin Laden as the personification of pure evil!

Those few conscious, coolly sceptical Americans dimly recalled that an A-bomb requires a good supply of uranium “yellowcake,” which is refined using powerful centrifuges designed for that purpose.  Maybe you “don’t recall” the rather slipshod, forged sales documents involved.  Ambassador Joe Wilson, dispatched to Niger to confirm the sale, found no such thing, and — remarkably — refused to play along with your charade.  Too bad — and on top of that, the supposed centrifuge-arms Iraq had purchased were actually not designed for that purpose at all.

Are you beginning to remember?  It’s surprising how many elderly people, convinced that “it never happened,” are unpleasantly startled by the return of some (unwelcome) memories.  But we who write to you today are among your biggest admirers.  As a machiavellian, you outrank Machiavelli in history (and in notoriety).  Why try to truthfully educate confused Americans — your employers, if we recall the Constitution — when you could, with breathtaking mauvaise foi, ignite a wildfire of fear, hatred, and bellicose vengefulness?

You focused your heroic call-to-arms especially on young Americans, often out-of-work and looking to serve a Cause they could believe in.  Such young people, who were proud to “serve their country” and follow their president’s call, believed you — and why shouldn’t they have? — when you appealed to their patriotic duty to defend the nation against such an Imminent Threat.  But it’s more than a little sad that thousands later returned to the U.S.– under secrecy and at night — in body-bags.  And tens of thousands, maimed physically and/or emotionally by battlefield trauma, returned to the U.S. as shadows of what they once had been.  Tens of thousands more, depressed and despairing veterans, have already committed suicide — but maybe you overlooked that recent news item on your way to the golf course.

In the latter half of 2004, the Occupation Force — having bombed, ravaged, and vandalized Iraq (again) — nonetheless were unwilling to announce the discovery of any (non-existent) WMDs.  You found this absence of WMDs, as you later told a baffled journalist (Helen Thomas), “disappointing.”  But undaunted even by this, you boldly (shamelessly? insolently?) decided on another term.  One can only marvel, once more, at your reckless daring: once again, strutting your lying, boasting personage in front of the beleaguered electorate, you were re-elected!  And, on top of that, you even proved the sanctified Abraham LIncoln wrong: as you no doubt brilliantly predicted, it turns out that “you can fool (most of) the people all the time.”

Even in these benighted and morally confused times, very, very few persons could have mastered, to such a superlative degree, the fine art of being — a scoundrel.  To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, “patriotism is the first resort of a scoundrel.”  After the tragedy of 9/11, you were buoyantly energized in your eagerness for — revenge (no matter how misdirected).  You were, you proudly proclaimed, a “war president.”  Therefore, and in closing, we have formally nominated you to join the exclusive ranks of legendary commanders-in-chief, a truly select company of bold, impetuous conquerors — including Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, Adolf Hitler, and, last but not least, our hero, George W. Bush!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

Long before Donald Trump took aim at irritating facts and dissenting eggheads, Donald Rumsfeld, two times defense secretary and key planner behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was doing his far from negligible bit. When asked at his confirmation hearing about what worried him most when he went to bed at night, he responded accordingly: intelligence.  “The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.”

Hailing from Chicago, he remained an almost continuous feature of the Republic’s politics for decades, burying himself in the business-government matrix.  He was a Congressman three times.  He marked the Nixon and Ford administrations, respectively serving as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Defense Secretary.  At 43, he was the youngest defense secretary appointee in the imperium’s history.

He returned to the role of Pentagon chief in 2001, though not before running the pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle and making it as a Fortune 500 CEO.  It was under his stewardship that the US Food and Drugs Administration finally approved the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame.  A report by a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry had claimed that the drug “might induce brain tumors.”  This did not phase Rumsfeld, undeterred by such fanciful notions as evidence.

With Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and Rumsfeld’s membership of the transition team, the revolving door could go to work. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., was selected while Rumsfeld remained Searle’s CEO.  When Searle reapplied for approval of aspartame, Hayes, as the new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the 1980 findings.  When it became evident that a 3-2 outcome approving the ban was in the offing, Hayes appointed a sixth person.  The deadlocked vote was broken by Hayes, who favoured aspartame.

In responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, Rumsfeld laid the ground for an assault on inconvenient evidence.  As with aspartame, he was already certain about what he wanted.  Even as smoke filled the corridors of the Pentagon, punctured by the smouldering remains of American Airlines Flight 77, Rumsfeld was already telling the vice-chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff General Richard Myers to find the “best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit SH@same time – not only UBL.” (Little effort is needed to work out that SH was Saddam Hussein and UBL Usama/Osama Bin Laden.)

Experts were given a firm trouncing – what would they know?  With Rumsfeld running the Pentagon, the scare mongers and ideologues took the reins, all working on the Weltanschauung summed up at that infamous press conference of February 12, 2002.  When asked if there was any evidence as to whether Iraq had attempted to or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, given “reports that there is no evidence of a direct link”, Rumsfeld was ready with a tongue twister.  “There are known knowns.  There are things we know we know.  We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.  But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”  This was being frightfully disingenuous, given that the great known for Rumsfeld was the need to attack Iraq.

To that end, he authorised the creation of a unit run by the under-secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, known as the Office of Special Plans, to examine intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities independently of the CIA.  Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit a year prior to the invasion, described the OSP’s operations in withering terms.  “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”

One of Rumsfeld’s favourite assertions – that Iraq had a viable nuclear weapons program – did not match the findings behind closed doors. “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program,” claimed a report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “is based largely – perhaps 90% – on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

None of this derailed the juggernaut: the US was going to war.  Not that Rumsfeld was keen to emphasise his role in it.  “While the president and I had many discussions about the war preparations,” he notes in his memoirs, “I do not recall him ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.”

With forces committed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States found itself in the situation Rumsfeld boastfully claimed would never happen.  Of this ruinously bloody fiasco, Rumsfeld was dismissive: “stuff happens.”  Despite such failings, a list of words he forbade staff from using was compiled, among them “quagmire”, “resistance” and “insurgents”.  Rumsfeld, it transpired, had tried regime change on the cheap, hoping that a modest military imprint was all that was necessary. The result: the US found itself in Iraq from March 2003 to December 2011, and then again in 2013 with the rise of Islamic State.  Afghanistan continues to be garrisoned, with the US scheduled to leave a savaged country by September.

Rumsfeld was not merely a foe of facts that might interfere with his policy objective.  Conventions and laws prohibiting torture were also sneered at.  On December 2, 2002, he signed a memorandum from General Counsel William J. Haynes II authorising the use of 20-hour interrogations, stress positions and the use of phobias for Guantanamo Bay detainees.  In hand writing scrawled at the bottom of the document, the secretary reveals why personnel should not be too soft on their quarry, as he would “stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”  The results were predictably awful, and revelations of torture by US troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 led him to offer his resignation, which President Bush initially rejected.

By November 2006, military voices had turned against him.  With the insurgency in full swing and Iraq sliding into chaos, the Army Times called for the secretary’s resignation.  “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.  And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear the brunt.”  Bush eventually relented.

It is interesting that so little of this was remarked upon during the Trump era, seen as a disturbing diversion from the American project.  When Trump came to office, Democrats and others forgave all that came before, ignoring the manure that enriched the tree of mendacity.  The administration of George W. Bush was rehabilitated.

In reflecting on his documentary on Rumsfeld Errol Morris found himself musing like his protagonist.  “He’s a mystery to me, and in many ways, he remains a mystery to me – except for the possibility that there might not be a mystery.”  The interlocutor had turned into his subject.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Major General Hossein Salami, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran, said on January 4 that his country would take “strategic revenge” against the United States for the assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani. The assassination of Soleimani, Salami said, will be later seen as a “turning point” in U.S. interference in West Asia.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif reacted strongly to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s suggestion that Iraqis were “dancing in the street” to celebrate the assassination. On Twitter, Zarif posted pictures of the funeral procession for Soleimani and wrote, “End of US malign presence in West Asia has begun.”

Both the military and the diplomatic wings of Iran’s government are in agreement that it is not Iran that will be weakened by the assassination of Soleimani, but that the United States will suffer the consequences of this action.

Why the U.S. Fears Iran

Why does the United States of America—the country with the largest military force in the world—fear Iran? What can Iran do to threaten U.S. interests?

To understand U.S. fears about Iran, it is important to recognize the ideological threat that Iran poses to Saudi Arabia.

Until the Iranian revolution of 1979, relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran were on an even keel. Both were monarchies, and both were subordinate allies of the United States. Whatever historical animosity remained between the Shia and Sunni—two branches of the Islamic tradition—were on mute.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 shook up the region. The crown of the monarch was set aside, as a specifically religious republic was created. The Saudis have long said that Islam and democracy are incompatible; this is precisely what the Islamic Republic rejected, when it created its own democratic form of Islam. It was this Islamic republicanism that swept the region, from Pakistan to Morocco. Fears of Islamic republicanism brought shudders into the palaces of the Saudi royal family, and into the U.S. higher establishment. It was at this point that the U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that the military defense of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy was a paramount interest of the U.S. government.

In other words, the U.S. military would be used to protect not the people of the Arabian Peninsula but the Saudi monarchy. Since the main threat was Iran, the U.S. turned its entire arsenal of military and information war against the new Islamic Republic.

The Saudis and the West egged on Saddam Hussein to send in the Iraqi army against Iran in 1980; that bloody war went on till 1988, with both Iran and Iraq bled for the sake of Riyadh and Washington. Soleimani and his successor Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani both fought in the Iraq-Iran War. Both Saddam Hussein and later the Afghan Taliban held Iran tight inside its borders.

American Wars, Iranian Victories

U.S. President George W. Bush broke the wall around Iran. The United States prosecuted two wars, which were essentially won by Iran. First, the U.S. in 2001 knocked out the Taliban and delivered an advantage to pro-Iranian factions, who joined the post-Taliban government in Kabul. Then, in 2003, the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party; the pro-Iranian Dawa Party succeeded Saddam. It was Bush’s wars that allowed Iran to extend its influence from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean Sea.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel used several mechanisms to push Iran back into its borders. They first went after Iran’s regional allies: first sanctions against Syria (with the 2003 Syria Accountability Act in the U.S. Congress), and then a war against Lebanon (prosecuted by Israel in 2006 to weaken Hezbollah). Neither worked.

In 2006, the U.S. fabricated a crisis over Iran’s nuclear energy program and pushed for UN, European Union, and U.S. sanctions. This did not work. The sanctions regime ended in 2015.

Attempts to intimidate Iran failed.

Trump’s Incoherence

Trump left the 2015 nuclear deal, and then said that he would get the U.S. a better deal from Iran. The Iranians scoffed.

Trump ratcheted up the economic war against Iran. This hurt the Iranian people, but with Chinese help, Iran has managed to survive the contraction of its economy.

Trump’s policy toward Iran is known as “maximum pressure.” It was this that led to the recent fracas, including the assassinations of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (Hashd al-Sha’abi).

After the assassination, the U.S. sent an envoy to Tehran. The brief from Trump was simple: if Iran does not retaliate, the U.S. will remove part of the regime of sanctions. Soleimani’s life was the price to pay to reduce sanctions. Trump wants to make a deal. He does not understand Iran. His is a policy that is both naïve and dangerous. But it is rooted in the Carter Doctrine, and therefore in the U.S. establishment’s policy framework.

What Will Iran Do?

Iran will not accept Trump’s tawdry deal. It has already set aside its policy of “strategic patience” for a much more forthright “calibrated response” policy.

If the U.S. wants to leave the nuclear deal, then Iran will start to process uranium.

If the West threatens Iranian shipping, then Iran will threaten Western shipping.

If the U.S. attacks Iranian interests, then Iran will attack U.S. interests.

Now, the U.S. has assassinated a senior Iranian military leader—who was traveling from Beirut to Baghdad on a diplomatic passport; will Iran offer a proportionate response?

Where will this U.S. policy of “maximum pressure” lead? Iran has said that it would not bow down to the U.S. pressure.

It has become commonplace to compare the assassination of Soleimani to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to World War I. This is chilling. If the U.S. starts a full-scale war against Iran, what will be the reaction of the other major powers in Eurasia, namely China and Russia? Both China and Russia have condemned the assassination, and both have called for calm.

However, Iran responds, the Iranian officials—such as Zarif and Salami—are correct that U.S. influence in the region has deteriorated and will deteriorate further. The U.S. can continue to thrash about with its superior military force, and it will continue to have bases that ring Iran. But what it can do with that power is unclear. This power was not able to subdue Iraq, nor was it able to overthrow the government in Syria, and nor could it create anything near stability in Libya. The attitude toward the U.S. is dismissive on the streets of West Asia, even as the Saudi monarchy continues to flatter U.S. presidents into its worldview.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.