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If you live on Okinawa, Japan, count your blessings if you don’t get murdered, assaulted, raped, robbed, burglarized, arsoned and vandalized by one of the 49,000 Americans occupying this tiny island the size of Luxembourg, not to mention the disgusting environmental degradation. You don’t have to look hard. There is one US occupier for every 30 local citizens. Pictured above, a map of Okinawa showing where the 34 American military bases are installed.

Eighty-five percent of Okinawans are against the American occupation of their land and for good reason. The statistics and reality of daily life there tell a typically tragic story of empire. Listen to author Jeff J. Brown of China Rising Radio Sinoland, based in China and invited on Press TV, to explain why Okinawans are rightfully indignant. [All of the basic facts, speaking to democratic wishes of the population are simply ignored and buried by both the US media and much of the Japanese media.]

Press TV video news program:

You can also listen to and/or download this audio podcast on Stitcher Radio and iTunes (links below), as well as at the very bottom of this web page:

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“China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations” by Jeff J. Brown on Ganxy!function(d,s,i){var j,e=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(i)){j=d.createElement(s);j.id=i;j.async=true;j.src="https://ganxy.com/b.js";e.parentNode.insertBefore(j,e);}}(document,"script","ganxy-js-2");

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China Rising Radio Sinoland Outlets

And Jeff J Brown’s social media outlets: 

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Balance? Objectivity? Those are phony code words used by the corporate media to pretend impartiality and comprehensiveness in their reports. In reality, truth doesn’t have two sides or many sides. It is what it is. And we’re not afraid to seek it and tell it, with apologies to no one. 

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[PHOTO: “Guided missile destroyer USS Nitze (DDG 94) has launched Tomahawk missiles against Yemen’s Houthi fighters …” (Naval Today)]

Yesterday (10/13/16) the U.S. openly attacked Yemen by firing cruise missiles against old Yemeni radar stations. This, allegedly, in response to four missiles fired on two days against a U.S. destroyer at the Yemeni coast. The U.S. Navy said the missiles fell short. They were unable to reach the ship. No one but the navy, especially no one in Yemen, has seen or reported any such missile launches – short or long.

The U.S. is in alliance with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries in bombing Yemen for 18 month now. They totally blockade the coast of the country that depends on imports of food and medicines. The actively fighting countries are heavily supported by the U.S. military. This has been widely admitted by U.S. officials and in military reports. The U.S. government even feared of being help legally responsible for the carnage it causes.

But since the launch of the cruise missile U.S. media have totally forgotten all of this. Now the U.S. “has been attacked”, without any recognizable reason, and is only “defending” itself. No legal consequences are to fear now. Anyone who believes that the U.S. is somehow responsible for the at least 10,000 dead and the many starving people in Yemen must somehow believe in a mysterious conspiracy.

Just consider this New York Times headline, from today, after the U.S. attack on Yemen.

Yemen Sees U.S. Strikes as Evidence of Hidden Hand Behind Saudi Air War.

The NYT tweeted the piece with this text:

New York Times World @nytimesworld
For the U.S., it was retaliation; for Yemen’s Houthi rebels, it confirmed a long-held belief nyti.ms/2e9mKyb
6:30 PM – 13 Oct 2016

Wow. The Houthi rebels “believe” in a “hidden hand”. Must be crazy people. They unreasonably attacked. And they deserve such strikes.

The NYT piece reads:

WASHINGTON — For the United States, it was simple retaliation: Rebels in Yemen had fired missiles at an American warship twice in four days, and so the United States hit back, destroying rebel radar facilities with missiles.But for the rebels and many others in Yemen, the predawn strikes on Thursday were just the first public evidence of what they have long believed: that the United States has been waging an extended campaign in the country, the hidden hand behind Saudi Arabia’s punishing air war.

How could the Houthis come to “believe” of such a “hidden hand”? Was it really because the strike was the “first public evidence”? Or was it because the NYT and all other media reported many times over that the U.S. actively supports the Saudi attacks? Did the Houthi probably read yesterday’s NYT piece on Yemen written by the very same main authors?

Up to now, the Obama administration put limits on its support for the Saudi-led coalition, providing intelligence and Air Force tankers to refuel the coalition’s jets and bombers. The American military has refueled more than 5,700 aircraft involved in the bombing campaign since it began, according to statistics provided by United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

So the “first evidence” of the “hidden hand” were, unlike the NYT today claims, not yesterdays strikes but official reports on the public CentCom website? Maybe frequent discussions of the war on Yemen the U.S. Congress held since a year ago also count as evidence? Various public reports over the last 18 month detailing the enormous amount of ammunition the U.S. openly sells to the Saudis were also just sightings of “hidden” hands?

Such reporting as in today’s NYT is just laughable. It flies in face of all reports of the last 18 month as well as extensive evidence given by the U.S. and other governments. The strikes on the radar sites were just “retaliation”. They have no larger context. This is a typical reflection of the U.S. myth of “immaculate conception” of U.S. foreign policy. According to that believe the U.S. always only reacts to being “attacked” or “threatened” for completely incomprehensible reasons when it bombs this or that country and kills thousands or even millions of foreign people.

That is even more evident in the reports by CNN and others. These reports only mention the 18 month of extensive U.S. support for the Saudi campaign down in the middle to end of their pieces. For any but a thorough reader the alleged “missile attacks” and all Yemeni enmity against the U.s. has no history at all. It comes from unreasonable and hostile people who willfully misunderstand U.S. well-meaning.

Thus no U.S. attack is ever unjustified or just a cruel continuation of decades of U.S. insidiousness, hostility and greed. It is always the other side that initiates the fight.

It is easy for the U.S. government propaganda to make such false claims. And U.S. media don’t report such but perpetrate anticipatory stenography. They write what the U.S. government wants and U.S. imperialism demands even when not directly ordered to. That is no longer astonishing.

Astonishing is how easy the U.S. public swallows this without any self awareness and protest.

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Note to Commenters
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We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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By LUCIANA BOHNE

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“Do you think we would be better off under Hillary or Trump,” asked the members of my Writing Group, at the meeting first Sunday in October.

“It’s not an either/or matter. I can’t give you a short answer.”

But afterwards, I wrote the answer here.

We have political democracy in America but scarce economic democracy. We have the political structures of democracy, but they teeter on foundations of exceptions. These check the advance of genuine democracy from below. We have democracy for the few and exclusion for the many. We have socialism for capital and capitalism for the rest. Every political right or freedom, moreover, is provisional. It comes with clauses of exception in small print or loopholes accrued over time. These preserve the state’s privilege to rescind them.

We have a democracy that contradicted itself from inception. It professed that “all men” were born equal, except those un-people who were legalized chattel—the property of men who bought them. This infant democracy, too, restricted the vote to men of property, encouraging ownership by theft of lands belonging to those other un-people—the native nations. That pattern of dispossession is evident today in the systematic violence against black youth. Black men are 6.6 percent of the population; they are 40 percent of 2.3 million of the incarcerated population, up from 375.000 in 1970. Six million citizens who have served their sentences are not allowed to vote.

The nature of our democracy

Property, not the demos, was engineered as the nec plus ultra of vital interests into the DNA of our constitutional machinery. Ostracism waved the semaphore on top of the shining hill of white post-colonial America. We seized, we owned, we profited, or we didn’t belong to the utopian enclave—the exalted den of zealous profiteers.

The ethic of greed and competition hardly insures social harmony. It is secured by buying public opinion. This means building a superstructure of ideological control. It means conditioning the public to adopt as their own the values and interests of the ruling elite. Therefore, the inculcated belief in the sanctity of property induces the ruled to believe that “the pursuit of happiness” consists in the acquisition of material goods—not, as understood by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the acquisition of the right to self-development, denied under the rigid social structures of feudalism.

The notion of property in capitalism predicates exploitation. It is not the guarantee of public welfare, harmony, and security. Property is the mother of racism, war, genocide, and inhumanity. We have, in our huckster democracy, good citizens who oppose war and racism, but opposing wars and racism in a property-obsessed state is like opposing the fire in Hell. Fire is the nature of Hell as property is the nature of our state. We must call for abolishing Hell.

“It is quite obvious,” wrote the young Frederick Engels in his first published book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, observing the emerging democracy of the industrial age in England, “that all legislation is calculated to protect those that possess property against those who do not.”

The swindle

When you have political democracy without economic justice, you have form without content. Karl Marx, who with Engels studied the emerging constitutions of liberal Europe, especially after the revolutions of 1848-49, wrote it all up in The Holy Family, and called this vested, partial democracy, “the democratic swindle.” He considered the US the model country of this “swindle,” the most democratic in constitutional form, the most effective for regulating the people’s passions within the limits of ruling class interests, insuring social peace in the vise of its brutal liberal embrace.

To be sure our constitution was the most democratic of the emerging liberal age.

In Europe, for example, nascent liberal constitutions were blighted by a reactionary impulse toward the preservation of degrees of despotism. Not ours. In writing, we repudiated kings and despots. We were “we the people.” We ruled. We had graduated from subjects to citizens.

It was a brilliant hoax, the illusion of power resting with the people. “For god’s sake, let them vote; don’t be afraid of elections,” whispered the US elites to their fretful counterparts in Europe in the late 19^th century. “Let them warrant their own subjection with the vote. Let them think they rule the state. You will have social harmony at a cheaper rate than you do now with the expenditures on dungeons and gendarmes.”

Europe listened because the socialist movements took off in massive earnest at the end of the 19^th century, demanding social and economic justice. They listened because international socialism threatened to unite in common struggle against imperialism the subject peoples of the colonies with the subject masses in the imperial motherland. The laboring masses of Europe realized that if the sun never set on the British Empire, it never rose on British slums.

To reassert social harmony, concessions were made. Then the socialist movement was wiped out in the First World War, both a class and an inter-imperialist war. The rising tide of consciousness of general oppression subsided and crashed on the mud of Flanders and the trenches of the Western front. On the Eastern front, the tide held, wiped out autocracy in Russia, and began the experiment of people’s rule. One thing the imperialists did not take into account when they egged on the people of each nation to kill the people of the other was the reflection that wars are the crucible of revolution. If there is a silver lining in the ongoing butchery of today’s wars by the West against post-independence colonial places it is the hope that history will repeat itself in a blow-back of global revulsion and revolt.

Neoliberalism sets in

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince 1945, the American two-party system succeeded brilliantly in maintaining a controlled social order, playing a game of pretend conservative and progressive opposition. In reality, the game was played to confine the people to a political closet of stiflingly narrow proportions, a suffocating space of political choices, in which all the people were expected to do was face-off over whatever trivial or expense-free concession the state threw at one group or the other. Keep them agitated but leashed; give them the impression that in dissenting and debating, they live in a free society. This is how the rulers liked it: the people divided but hemmed in. True, occasionally the people broke out and took to the streets, but minimal concessions were made, and they returned to the closet to squabble over their merits or demerits.

In the 1970s, the rulers made a momentous decision. They noted that the rate of profit on investments within the welfare state was flat. They noted that maintaining the industrial economy had too many overhead costs. They noted that concessions made to insure social harmony had accumulated to a tipping point at which the freedom of capital to expand was at risk. They decided to take it all back: the industrial investment in the country’s continuing development; the progress of workers’ rights; the cost of social services; the regulations on banking; the restrictions on financial schemes and gambles. In short, they wanted the pre-Great Depression undisciplined Wall Street casino back.

They knew they were embarking on social warfare. They knew the people would suffer, but they trusted that the ravages of neoliberal scorched-earth policies would take time to bite home. The predictable revolt against pauperization could be delayed by retribalizing society into identity groups, each seeking the attention of the state to a single issue. We became a nation of Balkanized minorities because the state knew that our strength—our only weapon—was united in numbers. Atomized, we could be dealt with

When in the late 1970s, the steel industry left Pittsburgh for Brazil, though the rate of profit was 12%, the area was economically devastated. Teaching composition 90 miles north of Pittsburgh, I read essays in the 1980s from students at the working-class public university where I taught. The essays told heart-wrenching stories of family’s distress—steelworker fathers who lost their jobs, drank, quarreled with wives, divorced.

More painful to read, however, were the causes the students attributed to the insecurity of their young lives. They cited too stringent environmental laws; excessive corporate taxation; union greed. They surrendered their reason to the passion of resentment which the Republican Party stoked using the cudgel of racism. They supposed democracy had gone too far with Affirmative Action, favoring one group over another. They agreed that “government was too big” and welfare too lavish. The philistines in the Republican Party compensated their misguided trust with pedantic lucubrations on family and religious values, the “sanctity of life,” the sobriety of the death penalty as social discipline—measures that did not deplete the defense budget or the corporate subsidies by a single cent. The prison complex became a lucrative site for private investment and exploitation—the Workhouse of the British 19^th century.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, preached racial tolerance but passed draconian laws incarcerating the most vulnerable—the young, the poor, and disproportionately black. They “reformed” welfare, and led resentful whites to believe that uppity blacks were losing their handouts. In reality, most people on welfare were poor whites. The Democratic Party launched the discourse of multiculturalism, ghettoizing social groups by single-issue politics, which further fractured social cohesion, solidarity, and cooperation.

What lay buried under the discourses of values and identity was class, the unmentionable, the proscribed. The American working class ceased to exist as a linguistic entity in public and intellectual discourse. It ceased to exist politically, because when language dies, the people’s history, culture, and consciousness die, too. So the Democrats passed NAFTA and CAFTA, acts of economic aggression against labor at home and abroad. They repealed the Glass-Steagall Act to throw the door open to untrammeled financial license, which gave us the crash of 2007-8, when the bullshit of both parties finally hit the fan. The hitherto divided and apathetic polity broke out in a chorus of irate rage against “the rich.” Here was the political backwardness of the American people, so assiduously cultivated by both parties, awakening to a perception of class as a social relation of unequal power in society.

Social harmony breaks down

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this year’s presidential electoral campaign, we’ve seen the grip of control by both parties loosening. The halcyon days of class conciliation and of cooperation by the working population with the interests of economic elites have clearly come to some sort of beginning of the end. The somnambulist voters who had formerly lined up behind the candidate selected by their respective parties —Republicans to the fake right, Democrats to the fake left—suddenly woke up, broke out of their apathy in disorderly, riotous, unexpected disobedience.

Twelve million voters joined the campaign of “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders, who offered himself as the candidate of democratic socialism. 13.3 million became partisans of the billionaire real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump, the upstart rogue candidate of the Republican Party. In reality, neither candidate acknowledged the magnitude of the problem of world capitalism in crisis, the root cause of the return to rapacious capitalism, advanced by neoliberalism. Neither grasped or confessed to grasp that neoliberalism was a necessity for capitalism’s survival. Thus, both proposed to set the clock back to a time when the American people prospered, Sanders to the economics of the New Deal; Trump to the days of industrial Fordism, two options specifically trashed by neoliberal economics. Hillary Clinton, as Bill Clinton’s partner in neoliberal ideology and practice, does understand that neoliberalism is the last battle for the global hegemony of international capital. That is why she’s the candidate of the Bush Neo-Cons.

But the people, driven by their increasingly dire material conditions, had finally had enough. The Obama years had put paid to any hope for change—to any lingering trust in the promises of both parties. The wars continued and intensified, raising the defense budget to over 600 billion dollars; the military-industrial complex garnered riches to raise the envy of Croesus; surveillance intensified; the banks recovered and profited, while the people chewed on the crumbs of austerity; the export of capital rushed out of a country badly in need of investments; the job market offered precarious, insecure, and underpaid work; the anti-labor, anti-sovereignty international trade deals pressed on. Corruption. Police violence. Scapegoating immigrants—and massive deportations. Media control. Lies. Belligerence. Destructive foreign policy: military aggression and regime change. Shredding of international law and treaties. Fake humanitarianism. Loss of the “good opinion of the world,” which the Constitution so anxiously bid the people of the United States to cultivate. In lieu of good neighbors, our rulers aspire to become abusive landlords of the globe.

The people are ashamed. In some corner of their darkening conscience, they are ashamed of their country. Increasing poverty strips them of their dignity. They must feel shame for the conditions of their private and national lives. And that is not good for the rulers: shame is an emotion where revolutionary consciousness begins. Who can live long without self-respect before resorting to revolt or succumbing to loathing humanity so as to displace self-loathing, as fascists do? Above all, who can live long in a society where endemic violence is a clear symptom of its doleful absence of love?

Conclusion

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]rump or Hillary? Wrong question. Rather, we need to realize that in so far as it is the choice the leaders propose, it is a trap, which now we cannot escape but from which we can take instruction for the future. In the liberal culture in which we have all been educated—Republicans or Democrats– we are used to looking for saviors from above. We attach ourselves to the powerful. We look upward for emancipation, but radical change and democratization come from below. That’s where the hardness is, but that’s what scares us. We are soft because we don’t know our own strength, and as long as we don’t know it, we are subjects–not citizens.

We should see in both the Trump and the Sanders partisan defections from the mainstream parties the glimmer of a potential—in fact, a necessity– of organizing a party of the people. We could even call it Party of the Basket of Deplorables, for if we exclude the “messy masses” (the term Marx and Engels used, to mock the contempt in which they were held by the arrogant elite), we admit that democracy hasn’t a prayer. They are “messed up,” but are they to blame, who have ceased to matter, or even exist, on the front of the class war that has been launched against democracy—that is, against us all?

The color line must be erased. That is an imperative for unity. In America, racism is the endemic, the recurring plague. It is the root of our political disunity. So that is the first task: educate it out of existence. Engels, who shared his life with Mary Burns, Irish Republican radical, well understood the racism against the Irish pervading the English working class. This was no mere psychological disorder. It arose because the manufacturers of the Midlands imported Irish labor as scabs to break strikes. Nevertheless he saw in the English working class the strength required for a social revolution:

“England exhibits the noteworthy fact that the lower a class stands in society and the more ‘uneducated’ it is in the usual sense of the word, the closer is its relation to progress and the greater is its future.”

I have tried “to patiently explain”—Lenin’s maxim—and, in the length of the explanation that is not even a “straight” answer, I may have exhausted the reader’s patience, but it is important to know, that if we vote for either of the two candidates, we do so without the illusion that elections give us power. If we vote for the “lesser evil” let it be for the last time, for evil it will be.

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Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

What will it take to bring this nation to live according to its own propaganda?

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

REMEMBER: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

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The American bombing of Syrian soldiers was no “mistake” – it was a mutiny by the War Party in the U.S. military and government, who want victory for the jihadists. “The war hawks have never forgiven Obama or ceased denouncing his failure to ‘finish off’ Assad” in 2013. They hope that a President Hillary Clinton “will launch the final, crushing strike” against Assad – “if the jihadists can just hang on until Inauguration Day.”

“The big question that has to be asked is, ‘Who is in charge in Washington?’”

The decades-long U.S. policy of deploying Islamic jihadists as foot soldiers in U.S. imperial wars — the world’s most unholy alliance — has led to a catastrophic split at the highest civilian and military levels of the U.S. State. Last weekend’s American air attack on Syrian Army positions at Deir al-Zor that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers and resulted in a temporary victory for ISIS forces was a blatant bid by the Pentagon and the CIA to sabotage any prospect of cooperation between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. In a very real sense, it is a mutiny [3] against a lame duck president who, certainly since 2013, has attempted to achieve regime change in Syria without allowing the jihadists to take power in Damascus.

The mutineers include civilian and military elements of the Pentagon — probably including Obama’s own Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter – the CIA and other intelligence services (but not the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose analysts warned of the rise of ISIS in 2012). They are encouraged and emboldened by the prospect that a President Hillary Clinton will declare a “no fly zone” over Syria – a move that would necessitate, under U.S military doctrine, an all-out attack on all of that country’s aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons systems, resulting in a war with Russian forces. The Russians know what’s up, and they are distressed and alarmed. “The big question that has to be asked is, ‘Who is in charge in Washington?” said Russia’s UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, on Saturday.  “Is it the White House or the Pentagon?’”

The cease-fire agreement arrived at between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart calls for the U.S. and Russian armed forces to collaborate, after a period of seven days, in targeting both ISIS and the al Qaida force formerly known as the al Nusra Front, the military backbone of the West’s proxy war against the Syrian government. If the U.S. superpower, whose military assets in the arena far outweigh Russia’s, honestly adhered to the agreement, the war against the Assad government would collapse. The mutineers see the waning weeks and months of the Obama presidency as a make-or-break moment for their jihadist proxy strategy in the region. The contradictions of that strategy have now come fully home to roost, confronting President Obama with a real-life “Seven Days In May [4]”-type scenario.

“They are encouraged and emboldened by the prospect that a President Hillary Clinton will declare a ‘no fly zone’ over Syria.”

It is impossible to fully comprehend the current crisis unless one understands why the U.S. has acted as “both midwife and sugar daddy [5]” to the international jihadist network since the rise of a left-wing government in Afghanistan, nearly four decades ago. Although the U.S. is a superpower, there is no large social base of potential support for U.S. imperial aims among the peoples of the region. (In recent decades, the stateless and desperate Kurds have become an exception.) The colossal failure of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq made it domestically impossible to repeat the deployment of massive U.S. forces on the ground. America’s allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies are fat, kleptocratic, feudal regimes whose militaries are largely made up of mercenaries. Turkey is a former imperial power whose troops would not be welcome in the old “provinces” of the Ottoman Empire. In 2011, the U.S. lost its big proxy Arab military “stick” in the region, with the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

 

The Arab monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, which partnered with the U.S. in nurturing the global jihadist network in Afghanistan, were terrified that the rebellion in Tunisia and the (at least, temporary) sidelining of Egypt’s huge standing army would expose their own corrupt regimes to insurrection — fears shared by the U.S. and western Europe. Their answer to the so-called “Arab Spring” was to attack Muammar Gaddafi’s secular government in Libya, acting as an air force for jihadists on the ground. Once Gaddafi had been removed (“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton cackled), the West and the Gulf monarchies and Turkey mobilized the entire international jihadist network to bring the same fate to Bashar al-Assad, in Syria, at a cost, so far, of nearly half a million deaths. The jihadists were not merely auxiliaries, but the irreplaceable, frontline soldiers of empire.

“The DIA was warning that ISIS was about to emerge as a direct result of the West’s policies.”

With Gaddafi gone, the Obama administration thought it was on a roll, recouping ground and prestige lost in Bush’s failed war in Iraq. As we wrote [5] in May of 2012:

“The Americans doubtless think they are in control of events in the Mideast and North Africa, but the jihadis know better. The Arab world wants the U.S. and the Europeans out of their countries. That certainly includes the jihadis – who are glad to take the West’s weapons, but have dedicated their lives to a Higher Power whose address is not London, Paris or New York. The Mother of All Blowbacks is coming. And when those jihadis turn on the Americans, Washington will have no place else to go.”

Analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency attempted to sound the alarm [6], warning that jihadists might soon establish a “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition [meaning, America’s allies] want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

In other words, the DIA was warning that ISIS was about to emerge as a direct result of the West’s policies, and that this seemed to be the intention of “the supporting powers.” The DIA charged that the Pentagon was suppressing or altering its reports – which is why the agency went “off channel” with its complaint in a memo that was not made public until years later. The split in the military over Syria — or, at least, in military intelligence – goes back at least four years.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e cannot know if President Obama was made aware of the memo at the time, but the next year he certainly behaved as if he had reconsidered the logic of the U.S. jihadist strategy. Following the (false flag) chemical attack on civilians in suburban Damascus in late August of 2013, Obama was under great pressure to bomb Syria for having crossed his “line in the sand.” But, instead, he cancelled the attack and opted for Russia’s proposal that Syria rid itself of all chemical weapons. The conventional wisdom is that Obama was deterred by the British Parliament’s moves to disassociate the UK from any U.S. assault on Syria, and by the threat that the French might do the same. But, since when has the U.S. allowed the opinions of other countries’ legislatures to deter its military actions? Obama had only recently defied a huge block of opinion in his own legislature, refusing to acknowledge the relevance of the War Powers Act to his conquest of Libya. No, what stopped Obama from bombing Syria in August of 2013 was the realization that that al Nusra and ISIS, which had announced its presence in April of that year, would be marching into Damascus if Syria’s army were destroyed.

The war hawks have never forgiven Obama or ceased denouncing his failure to “finish off” Assad. Hillary Clinton has encouraged them to believe that she will launch the final, crushing strike — if the jihadists can just hang on until Inauguration Day. The cease-fire agreement, to be followed by a joint Russian-American blitzkrieg against al Nusra and ISIS, could so deplete the jihadist ranks, there would not be enough of them for Hillary to rescue.

“What stopped Obama from bombing Syria in August of 2013 was the realization that that al Nusra and ISIS would be marching into Damascus.”

The war hawks in the State Department feared that Russia and Syrian successes on both the battlefield and in world political forums threatened to doom their jihadist enterprise. In June of this year, more than 50 co-called “diplomats” [7] signed an internal memo calling for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process” – diplo-speak for a bombing campaign against Syrian government targets. It was a Foggy Bottom mutiny of the militarists, on an unprecedented scale, by people who would not take such political risks unless they believed they were protected by comrades in high places and would soon serve under a more jihadist-friendly president.

The contradictions inherent in sponsoring international jihad have caught up with America, splitting its ruling circles and fomenting defiant insubordination within its military. Last weekend, the United States acted as an air force for ISIS, helping them to overrun a Syrian army base. It was not a mistake, not an elaborate ploy orchestrated at the White House; it was the result of a mutiny by the War Party, which refuses to wait for Hillary’s arrival to assert its will. Jihadism has wrecked the Empire’s system of government — bin Laden’s revenge — and brought humanity to the very brink of obliteration.

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NOTES

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/us_rulers_split_over_syria

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/us_rulers_split_over_syria

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-syria

[3] http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/20/rogue-mission-did-the-pentagon-bomb-syrian-army-to-kill-ceasefire-deal/print/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May

[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/bragging-about-killing-osama-bin-laden-old-blowbacks-and-new

[6] http://www.globalresearch.ca/defense-intelligence-agency-create-a-salafist-principality-in-syria-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/5451216

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-airstrikes-diplomats-memo.html

[8] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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