America’s Deceitful Secret Support of Al Qaeda



BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES


In a recent article, I documented that “U.S. Again Supports Al Qaeda in Syria”.

In a prior article, I had documented that since 2012 the U.S. Government has cooperated with the Sauds’ plan to install in Syria a fundamentalist-Sunni government to replace Syria’s existing secular Government, and that the fundamentalist-Sunni organization Al Qaeda has been the U.S. Government’s chief organization on the ground in Syria providing the leadership to that Saudi-U.S. effort. Part One of that report is especially important in order to understand the continuity between the policies of the current U.S. President Donald Trump and the prior U.S. President Barack Obama, in Syria.

The present article will provide the broader historical documentation behind this, starting in 1949, when the U.S. CIA, under President Harry S. Truman, did its second coup d’etat, overthrowing a democratically elected progressive Government (the first having been Thailand 1948, where the CIA had installed an extremely barbaric dictator replacing the democratically elected government that had been headed by a staunch anti-fascist, and simultaneously set up the CIA’s off-the-books supplementary funding mechanism from the international narcotics-trade — a CIA practice which has continued till perhaps the present; and, furthermore, the infamous Nugan-Hand affair, which involved Thailand, definitely involved the CIA’s Michael Hand and William Colby; so, clearly, the CIA is funded off-the-books from the narcotics business, and America’s anti-narcotics laws thus are actually keeping drug-prices and resultant burglaries and CIA profits artificially high, funneling that illicit money into CIA coffers; and any method to defund the CIA down to its core intelligence-gathering function and to eliminate its coup-function, which is the function that took control in Thailand and Syria and then Iran and many more, would need to regulate — instead of to continue outlawing — drugs, which might be the main reason why it hasn’t yet been done: illegal drugs provide wealth to the CIA and other gang-lords, including some U.S. Government officials).


Europe — the EU — gets the refugees from America’s invasions and coups (including not only from the Middle East but also from America’s 2014 coup in Ukraine), but still allies itself with the U.S. Government, which nominally represents the American people, though actually representing only the billionaires in three countries: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States. (What’s especially key to understanding U.S. foreign policies is that whereas the U.S. aristocracy is primarily focused against Russia, the Saudi-Israeli alliance is primarily focused against Iran.)

The 1949 coup in Syria overthrew the democratically elected Syrian Government, which had blocked construction of a U.S.-Saudi oil pipeline through Syria into Europe. The CIA imposed upon Syrians a military dictatorship which was so bad, Syria’s military decided that their being stooges of the U.S. wouldn’t really work for them, after all; so, the generals allowed the democratically elected President to run again in 1955, and he won again. In 1957, the CIA tried to overthrow him yet a second time, but failed. The generals wouldn’t cooperate this second time around. In 1958, that democratic Syrian President merged Syria into Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser’s United Arab Republic, which ended in 1960. Thereafter, a series of frequently replaced Syrian leaders ended in 1970, when the popular head of the institutionally secular Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party – Syria Region, Hafez al-Assad, came to power, and he included, in his Government, leaders from the Sunni, Shiite, and Christian, communities, in order to achieve a national Government that would be acceptable to all three of those communities, as well as to Syria’s many seculars. The CIA’s consistent plan has been to break Syria into religiously warring sub-states so that the Sunni one would allow the Sauds’ pipeline; and this plan became placed on-hold until the CIA’s plan for the “Arab Spring” rebellions succeeded in 2011 and seemed to make possible the U.S. regime’s ’democracy’ in Syria, this time meaning a breakup of Syria into Kurdish, versus fundamentalist-Sunni (Saudi-controlled), versus Shiite (pro-Iranian) nations. This also would please another U.S. and Saud ally, Israel, because then the Golan Heights part of Syria which Israel stole in 1967 would be able to become legally Israeli territory.

That 1949 coup in Syria was to enable America’s Bechtel Corporation to construct through Syria the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline for the Sauds’ and Rockefellers’ oil from Saudi Arabia to supply European countries and thus to crowd out oil from Russia. The EU is the world’s biggest energy-importer, and by far the largest energy-supplier to the EU is Russia. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently headlined, regarding all of the Saudi-U.S. aristocracies’ grabs for Syria, “Syria: Another Pipeline War”. Syria has important (to the oil and gas industries) real estate. And the destruction of Syria by these foreign thugs has unfortunately resulted from this fact.

Syria is the most secular of all governments in the Middle East, and is the only government that’s committed, both in philosophy and in practice, to separation between church (or clergy) and state (government). I documented in that previous article America’s determination to overthrow the decidedly secular Ba’athist-Party Syrian Government, which is headed by Bashar al-Assad, whom both Riyadh and Washington demand to become “regime-changed” — replaced by a regime that’s acceptable to the rulers of Saudi Arabia (the royal Saud family) and of those rulers’ vassal-nation, the United States. In the present article I shall document that the Sauds have even been allowed by the U.S. regime to select the people who supposedly represent the Syrian public at the U.N.-sponsored Syrian peace talks — those are actually ‘peace’ talks not between the Syrian people and the Syrian Government (to settle a civil war, like the U.S. and its allies claim it is), but instead between the Saud family and the Syrian Government (to stop a foreign invasion, which it really is); this is what the U.S. regime actually supports: the Sauds, against Syria — the invader and its allies, against the victim and its allies. It’s the reality, even if all the ‘news’media are portraying it to be anything but a foreign invasion of the sovereign nation of Syria (which they, of course, are).

Europe — the EU — gets the refugees from America’s invasions and coups (including not only from the Middle East but also from America’s 2014 coup in Ukraine), but still allies itself with the U.S. Government, which nominally represents the American people, though actually representing only the billionaires in three countries: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States. (What’s especially key to understanding U.S. foreign policies is that whereas the U.S. aristocracy is primarily focused against Russia, the Saudi-Israeli alliance is primarily focused against Iran.) Europe subordinates itself to that group of billionaires, but especially to the American ones, since the American ones control the NATO alliance and basically created the EU. (Whether America ever wears-out its welcome amongst European publics will be shown by the extent to which those publics repudiate both NATO and the existing EU, since those two organizations are the immediate agencies of U.S. control there; and the IMF and other U.S.-created entities are global, not merely European entities of these billionaires’ empire.)

Also documented in the prior article was an important part of the back-story to the present one, that:

The U.S., and the royal family of Saudi Arabia, had created Al Qaeda back in 1979, to be their “boots on the ground” against the Soviet Union, and used them not only in Afghanistan but also in Russia’s own Chechnya region, to weaken, first the Soviet Union itself, helping to break it up, and then, after the Cold War ended on the Russian side in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended, America and the Sauds continued arming and funding Al Qaeda, so as to create terror in Russia, and to overthrow Russia’s allies abroad, such as Assad.

This U.S.-Saudi support of jihadists, in order to topple allies of Russia’s Government, and ultimately even to overthrow Russia’s Government itself, continues till the present day, under U.S. President Donald Trump.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat’s most important to make clear up-front, in order to show that America is waging the Sauds’ war against Syria — that the Sauds aren’t waging America’s war there — is that the U.S.-supported U.N.-managed peace talks in Geneva on the Syrian war are between the Syrian Government and the Saud family; the U.S. ceded to the Sauds the right to select the individuals who represent “the Syrian opposition” at those ongoing ‘peace talks’:

On 9 December 2015, as was reported to Europeans by AFP, the Saud family held an international conference in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, which AFP said was “Saudi-organized talks.” AFP said that these “talks” aimed “to go some way towards establishing an opposition negotiating team” against the Syrian Government. The Saud family had selected this conference’s invitees, in order to consider their applications to become the leaders, or even merely members, of this negotiating team under U.N. auspices, which would be called by the U.N. the “High Negotiations Committee” or “HNC” supposedly representing the people of Syria. However, no one was invited to this two-day Riyadh conference who “argues that Assad’s fate should be decided by the Syrian people.” The U.S. Government and the royal Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and the royal Thani family who own Qatar, had previously established something they had called the “National Coalition.” Its deputy head was Hisham Marwa, who utterly rejected the idea that “Assad’s fate should be decided by the Syrian people.” AFP’s report said that Marwa was delighted at being surrounded at this conference by “the presence of military and political figures. This is the real opposition.” To him, the Syrian people were not. He was pleased that the Syrian people “will not affect the equation.” And they didn’t — but the royal Saud family did: they actually ran the HNC. Assad’s Government has been ‘negotiating’ against King Saud. That’s the reality, in the U.N.’s ‘peace talks.’

On 20 January 2016, the BBC headlined “Syria conflict: Islamist rebel named opposition chief negotiator”and reported that “A Syrian opposition committee has named an Islamist rebel as its chief negotiator at peace talks that the UN hopes to convene in Geneva on Monday. Mohammed Alloush is the political leader of the powerful, Saudi-backed group Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam).”

On 3 February 2016, the Saud-affiliated UAE’s The National newspaper bannered, “Why Jaish Al Islam and Ahrar Al Sham are at the heart of Geneva squabbles: While the groups both oppose ISIL [otherwise called ISIS], they are allies of Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra,” and reported that “Jaish Al Islam … already has a central role in the discussions, with its leader Mohammed Alloush acting as chief negotiator for the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee team in Geneva. … Jaish Al Islam’s former leader Zahran Alloush spoke of Alawites and Shiites in derogatory terms and at times advocated that they be cleansed from parts of Syria.” The Alloushes, who had always been jihadists and pro-Saud Syrians, hated Shia just like the Sauds have hated Shia for hundreds of years (since 1744).

So: that’s how the U.S. Government ended up supporting, as constituting the supposed ‘representatives of the Syrian people’ ‘negotiating’ against Syria’s Government, in these U.N.-sponsored ‘peace’ talks, a team consisting of, and even being led by, agents who had been selected by the Saud family, who were determined to impose Sharia Law upon Syria.

It continues a lengthy U.S.-and-Saudi history of trying to replace Syria’s secular Government.

Here are key passages from historian Douglas Little’s excellent “1949-1958, Syria: Early Experiments in Covert Action”:

Declassified records confirm that beginning in November 1948, [CIA operative Stephen] Meade met secretly with Syrian Army Chief of Staff Col. Husni Zaim at least six times to discuss the “possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship.” U.S. officials realized that Zaim was a “‘Banana Republic’ dictator type” with a “strong anti-Soviet attitude.”

Building the Arabian American Oil Company’s Trans-Arabian Pipe Line from Saudi Arabia to Syria.

Meade and Zaim completed plans for the coup in early 1949. On 14 March, Zaim “requested U.S. agents [to] provoke and abet internal disturbances ‘essential for coup d’ etat’ or that U.S. funds be given him [for] this purpose.” Nine days later, Zaim “promised a ‘surprise’ within several days” if Meade could secure U.S. help. As rumors of a military coup grew stronger, Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee arrived in Damascus, ostensibly to discuss resettling Palestinian refugees but possibly to authorize U.S. support for Zaim. Shortly thereafter, … Meade reported on 15 April that “over 400 Commies [in] all parts of Syria have been arrested. … On 16 May, Zaim approved ARAMCO’s TAPLINE. … However, on 14 August, Zaim was overthrown and executed by Col. Sami Hinnawi. … On December 19, 1949, Col. Adib Shishakli ousted Hinnawi in Syria’s third coup in nine months. … Shishakli had a “cordial 2 hour discussion” with the CIA’s Miles Copeland and others at the U.S. embassy on November 23, 195l. When Ma’aruf Dawalibi, long regarded by U.S. observers as pro-Soviet, announced a week later that he would head Syria’s eighth cabinet in less than two years, Shishakli dissolved parliament and set up a military dictatorship. [This was the CIA’s 2nd Syrian coup; and it, too, established a dictatorship there.] … In short order, Syria initiated mutual defense talks with Turkey and renewed the TAPLINE concession. Shishakli was willing to consider a peace treaty with Israel and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in Syria provided substantial U.S. financial and military aid was forthcoming. In 1952, the Truman administration pressed the World Bank to expedite Syria’s request for a $200 million loan. … CIA director Allen Dulles agreed that “the situation in that country is the worst of all the countries in that area.”  … U.S. Ambassador Moose suggested on 8 January [1955] that “thought be given to other methods,” including an “anti-Communist coup” engineered by the SSNP. In March, Allen Dulles and CIA Middle East chief Kermit Roosevelt flew to London, where they worked out the details for the [third CIA Syrian] coup with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). …

During an unprecedented New Year’s [1957] Day meeting with key legislative leaders, Eisenhower requested congressional authorization to use U.S. troops to counter Soviet subversion in the Middle East. He “cited Syrian developments as evidence of Russian intent.” The House approved, 355 to 61 on January 30, 1957, and the Eisenhower Doctrine went into effect.

In August, Washington apparently gave authorization for Operation Wappen, the code name for the new U.S. covert operation against Syria. Howard Stone, a CIA political action specialist with experience in Iran and Sudan, had been planning a coup with dissidents inside the Syrian army for three months. Meanwhile, Shishakli assured Kermit Roosevelt [author of the CIA’s plan] that he was ready to reassume power in Syria. …

Syrian counterintelligence chief Sarraj reacted swiftly on August 12, expelling Stone and other CIA agents, arresting their accomplices and placing the U.S. embassy under surveillance. Left-wing Colonel Bizri used the fiasco as an excuse to wrest control of the army from his moderate rivals.

The U.S. encouraged Turkey and Iraq to mass troops along their borders with Syria. …

Eisenhower gradually edged away from the provocative scheme but the Turks refused to demobilize the 50,000 troops they had massed along the Syrian frontier. …

On July 15, Eisenhower pondered U.S. problems in the Arab world. “The trouble is we have a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments but by the people.”

The U.S. regime’s enemies here were not any government, but instead “the people.” These people had good reason for hating America’s Government. Syrians didn’t want American thugs to control their lives. Already, the U.S. had become a dictatorship; and not only was it that: it became a dictatorship which is determined to be dictators to the entire world. The U.S. aristocracy demanded this, and still does.

The U.S. gang (the U.S. Government) weren’t dealing with a sufficiently psychopathic military in Syria; so, America’s rule over that country didn’t last long. But, finally, the born CIA asset Barack Obama tried his best to conquer Syria, and he too failed; and, now, the businessman Trump is settling for controlling merely portions of Syria, which the Sauds and the billionaires in Israel and in the U.S. still are demanding.

Thus, Syria hasn’t been sufficiently corrupt to satisfy the U.S.-Israeli-Saudi gang. Syria’s Government still represents the Syrian people. (Even Western polls of Syrians confirm it. And 72% of Syrians are opposed to the U.S. regime’s demand that Assad be removed from power prior to the next Syrian election and not be allowed to run again for the Presidency. And yet the U.S. says it supports democracy — even while trying to block it in Syria.) America’s aristocrats have tried mightily in Syria, many times, but have failed, each time.

What brought down the Soviet Union — Al Qaeda, supported by the aristocracies of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia — has consistently failed to bring down Syria, except to destroy it — and the perpetrators of that destruction (not only America’s dictators, but the Sauds, plus the Thanis who own Qatar, plus Turkey’s Erdogan) even have the gall now to blame their victims, for that $250-billion-plus reconstruction expense. That’s the perfection of conservatism: it’s the epitomization of the blame-the-victim ideology. It is fascism. 


About the author

EricZuesse

ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

horiz-long grey
uza2-zombienation
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]




Full Spectrum Arrogance: US Bases Spanning the Globe

By Ann Garrison, BAR contributor


Full Spectrum Arrogance: US Bases Spanning the Globe

“There are 50,000 troops still in Germany, still winning World War II three quarters of a century later.”

Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases from holding its first conference at the University of Baltimore from Friday to Sunday, January 12 to 14.

Here are just a few voices from the conference:

Leah Bolger, retired US military commander, full-time peace activist, and past President of Veterans For Peace:

“This conference is the first action, the first event, of a relatively new coalition, which is a coalition against US foreign military bases that has come together with 13 charter organizations. We are joined to address the issue of US foreign bases which are everywhere—somewhere between 800 and 1000. It’s ridiculous.”

David Swanson, co-founder of World Beyond War and author of the books “War is a Lie ” and “War is Never Just ”:

“Y’know, I watch a lot of basketball games because the University of Virginia is so darn good and I’m just disgusted because at every single game, they thank the troops for watching from 175—sometimes they even say more than 177— countries. They thank the “almost a million” men and women serving our country. They don’t explain what the service is, they don’t explain why they have to be in 177 countries. They don’t explain that there are only about 200 countries on earth, and that there are at least a dozen more countries they’re not telling us about. These are the ones they admit to.

Anytime you have this nation attacking another nation, that is a crime that all of us can be united in opposing.”

“What are they doing there? What are they needed for? In some cases, it’s thousands; in some it’s ten thousands. There are 50,000 troops still in Germany, still winning World War II three quarters of a century later. It’s insanity and of course it costs hundreds of billions of dollars. People who think that we’re running low on money and we can’t afford things should understand that we could afford anything we wanted if we didn’t do things this stupid.”

Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report Editor, Founder of the National Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 Green Party vice presidential candidate:

“We have a task before us this weekend. We have to struggle among ourselves to build a base line for unity because we know that all of us may not be there in terms of being prepared to take a clear class line, we may not be in full agreement about what national oppression and national liberation mean, we may not agree about the character of this state. But we can agree that anytime you have this state involved in direct intervention, anytime you have this nation attacking another nation, that is a crime that all of us can be united in opposing.”

The Real News Network, based there in Baltimore, livestreamed the event from gavel to gavel, and I produced a brief KPFA Radio-Berkeley News report while watching and downloading audio. However, I seemed to be the only other press beyond the websites of the conference participants themselves to take any interest. So on Monday I nominated the conference and its full spectrum arrogance video archive for a Project Censored Award. I recommend all eight sessions now on the YouTube :

  1. Public Meeting/International Night,
  2. The Environmental and Health Impact of U.S. Foreign Military Bases,
  3. History and Economic Costs of U.S. Foreign Military Bases,
  4. US Foreign Policy and the Strategic Role of Foreign Military Bases,
  5. South America and Guantanamo,
  6. The Middle East: US/NATO Plan,
  7. AFRICOM and the Invasion of Africa,
  8. unity statement and plan the next conference. The location isn’t yet set, but it will take place on US-occupied foreign soil, so there’s a world of possibilities.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or ann@kpfa.org  

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

 CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]




El Salvador’s Worst Shitholes Are ‘Made in America’

My journalist’s hiking boots still have leftover feces and dirt from the ultimate shitholes of El Salvador: its mass graves. Many of the thousands of graves that my sources there have mapped were dug by U.S.-trained and funded security forces in the 80s. Most of the rest were dug more recently by L.A.based-gangs steadily deported to El Salvador by U.S. immigration authorities since the 90s.

Protest against US involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War in Chicago, Illinois, in March 1989 (Linda Hess Miller/ Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)


[dropcap]D[/dropcap]onald Trump’s characterization of Africa, Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes” disturbed me, but I wasn’t sure why. The comments were made during a discussion about the temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran, Haitian and other immigrants Trump had just rescinded. In search for an answer, I went home and pulled out and studied my boots , which were tattered after too many visits to mass graves, mass graves with the remains of Salvadorans—in El Salvador, in Mexicoand in the deserts of south Texas. Wearing my hiking boots during visits to numerous sites along this chain of devalued life led me to the conclusion that mass graves were the ultimate shitholes.

What made me most uncomfortable was less about Mr. Trump’s choice of word than how he used it: he mistook the shithole part for the whole country. Trump’s rhetorical fallacy feels like a cover-up, a distraction from the fact that El Salvador’s mass graves contain fingerprints and other evidence that point to the United States as an accomplice to the mass murder and violence that created them. Viewed from this perspective, Trump’s “shithole” comment said in words what all US presidents have said with their policies towards countries like Haiti and El Salvador.

Consider, for example, the Salvadoran case of El Mozote, the site of the massacre of almost a thousand peasants, a crime whose irresolution still haunts many. Some 37 years after the mass massacre, forensic evidence from mass graves proved that  553 of those victims were children, many of them under six years old.


Victims of the El Mozote Massacre (Photo by Susan Meiselas, Magnum Photos/ Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States)

El Mozote is the best documented of El Salvador’s thousands of mass graves, many of which remain unexcavated. Forensic experts with El Salvador’s Institute for Legal Medicine and the world renown Argentine forensic team told me that their evidence —bones, shoe marks, hair samples, bullet shells— of the mass killing at El Mozote pointed to elite Salvadoran soldiers trained in places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, Georgia, formerly known as the notorious “School of the Americas.” Evidence from recent Salvadoran and international court cases corroborates this. The boots, bullets, weapons, helicopters and uniforms used during the massacre were all Made in the U.S.A. And the evidence trail isn’t limited to El Mozote.

A United Nations Truth Commission established by agreement between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN guerrillas at the end of the civil war in 1992 concluded that U.S. trained security forces had perpetrated 85% of the killings of innocents during the war that left over 75,000 dead. Most of the perpetrators remain free. The forensic evidence left by El Salvador’s US-trained and funded military is undeniable at El Mozote, in the murder of El Salvador’s only saint, Monseñor Romero, in the case of the 4 Maryknoll nuns raped and killed in 1980, just as it is in the cases of the tens of thousands of other, lesser-known slaughtered innocents.



[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he war-era mass graves I visited around an area called Panchimalco are located right next to the more recent mass graves dug by gangs in the area. Like the weapons and training used by the Salvadoran military, the gangs themselves were also born in the United States, specifically Los Angeles’ Pico Union neighborhood. I remember because I was there in the early 90s,  when police of the Rampart police division —the site of the worst police scandal in U.S. history— started pushing the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs to escalate the warfare between them. The Rampart division’s well-documented tactics —planting guns for false arrests, taking a young man in gang from one neighborhood into the hostile territory of rival gangs, shooting and even killing gang members and make it seem like rival gangs did it— did much to foment violence among the gangs.

Most damaging for El Salvador and its shitholes was the way LAPD then broke sanctuary laws designed to protect people fleeing extreme violence and other disasters from deportation. In the early 90s, the LAPD and INS began the fatal practice of handing the young gang members over to the then Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for deportation. In the process, these agents of US policy helped create a gang culture in a country with no history of U.S.-style gangs and gang warfare. These gangs have since gone on to fill the mass graves that mark El Salvador as one of the most violent countries on earth.

In immigration terms, the shithole is a distraction. Calling the countries shitholes, but also designating them as counties ready to both receive hundreds of thousands of deportees and lose billions of dollars sent home by them is also a logical —and tragic— fallacy, another policy failure. But if the President is going to use such language, he should back up his words with policy that recognizes U.S. responsibility for the foreign war and immigration policies that create catastrophes. In other words, I would prefer Trump walk the shithole talk—and can give him the hiking boots to do it with.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Roberto Lovato is a writer and journalist based at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

 CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]




Gabbard: North Korea Has Nukes Because They Saw What The US Did To Libya



horiz-long grey

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


At the end of her interview yesterday on ABC’s This Week, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was asked by an incredulous George Stephanopoulos [one of the many prominent media worms crawling around in the decomposing media carcass] if it was a mistake for the United States to “take out” deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and deceased Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“It was, absolutely,” replied Gabbard, because you can’t say “It was, absolutely, you fucking idiot” on ABC.

In what political commentator Zach Carter has accurately called “One of the most honest statements ever made by a member of Congress,” Gabbard took yet another bold stand that will doubtless earn her many fans and many enemies, calling upon President Trump to sit down at the negotiating table with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “without preconditions” with the understanding that the DPRK has obtained its nuclear arsenal precisely because Pyongyang has been observing the way America treats nations which don’t fall into line with its interests.

“I’ve been calling for President Trump to sit across the table from Kim Jong Un without preconditions, work out the differences, figure out a way to build this pathway towards denuclearization,” Gabbard said. “Because there is so much at stake.”

Asked about Kim Jong Un’s assertions that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, Gabbard responded that it’s essential during negotiations to have a clear understanding of why that is.

“Our country’s history of regime change wars has led countries like North Korea to develop and hold onto these nuclear weapons, because they see it as their only deterrent against regime change,” said Gabbard. “And this is what’s important for President Trump to recognize. It is critical that we end our policies of regime change wars to provide that credible guarantee that the United States is not going to go in and topple the North Korean regime, so that these conversations can begin toward denuclearization.”

“Just to be clear, you’re saying that Kim Jong Un’s nuclear arsenal is our fault?” Stephanopoulos asked in response.

Gabbard’s epic response reads as follows:

“What I’m saying is that Democrat and Republican administrations for decades, going back over 20 years, failed to recognize the seriousness of this threat, failed to remove it. And we know that North Korea has these nuclear weapons because they see how the United States, in Libya for example, guaranteed Gaddafi, we’re not going to go after you; you should get rid of your nuclear weapons. He did, then we went and led an attack that toppled Gaddafi, launching Libya into chaos that we are still seeing the results of today.

North Korea sees what we did in Iraq, with Saddam Hussein, with those false reports of weapons of mass destruction. And now seeing in Iran how President Trump is decertifying a nuclear deal that prevented Iran from developing their nuclear weapons, threatening the very existence and the agreement that was made.

So yes, we’ve got to understand North Korea is holding on to these nuclear weapons because they think it is their only protection from the United States coming in and doing to them what the United States has done to so many countries throughout history.”

The congresswoman is absolutely correct. According to the Trump administration’s own Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, the lessons the world learned from America’s interventionism in Libya was “If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

And that is indeed exactly what we can expect from Pyongyang, because whatever his other flaws, Kim Jong Un is neither stupid nor crazy. Neoconservatism and institutionalized American supremacy has led to a demented foreign policy in which any government which does not bow and grovel in the interests of the US power establishment is branded a “rogue nation” and slammed with sanctions, provocations, CIA sabotage, terrorism, and, ultimately, regime change with the collaboration of sycophantic international coalitions.

The official argument for this policy is that America’s victory over its only rival superpower in the Cold War against the Soviet Union means that the United States has been selected by history to be the leader of the world, and it needs to do everything necessary to maintain that leadership role. Allies must be rewarded for acting in accordance with the will of the US power establishment, and enemies must be punished viciously until eliminated.

The trouble with this neoconservative agenda, of course, is plainly evidenced by what it leads to. US interventions in places like Iraq and Libya have, as Gabbard rightly claims, been spectacularly disastrous. Iraq alone is reason enough for the world to tell the US defense/intelligence complex to fuck right off forever, but since we’ve all seen what happens to the few governments with the balls to do that nobody ever speaks up.

I am aware that this is pure fantasy on my part, but if the world ever did decide that it wants to get nuclear weapons out of the hands of “rogue nations” there is a surefire way to accomplish this. An international, aggressively enforced law against any nuclear-armed nation attacking or invading a non-nuclear nation in any way, shape or form would cause governments like North Korea to give up their nukes and prevent governments like Iran from obtaining them. The international community would essentially be dividing the world’s warfare into a two-tiered system and making any warfare between those two tiers into a war crime. If a nation wants to have nukes to protect itself that’s fine, but they may only go to war with other nuclear powers.

Such a move would of course be wildly unprecedented, but it would definitely be enforceable. If America decided it wants to regime change yet another small, weak country due to noncompliance, all it would take is international sanctions and the dissolution of treaties to cost it its superpower status.

I won’t hold my breath, but I just wanted to remind my fellow humans that there are other options out there besides allowing a few sociopathic plutocrats to imperil us all with dangerous nuclear escalations and psychotic ecocidal corporatism.

Remember: Kim Jong Un has explicitly said that the DPRK won’t use nuclear weapons unless its sovereignty is encroached upon. The United States has a longstanding policy of never making such assurances. There’s one nation posing a clear and present danger to our world, and it ain’t North Korea.

Podcast about this article.

_______________

Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, bookmarking my website, throwing some money into my hat on Patreonor Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

About the Author
 
Caitlin Johnstone
is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 


 Creative Commons License  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

horiz-long grey

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

 

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 


black-horizontal




President Trump’s Jerusalem Decision: The End of Hegemony?


HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


The Donald with pampered son in law Kushner. Zionism in the first family's very bosom.

INTRODUCTION

The Trump regime proclaimed that the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a strategic US decision.

Both President Trump and his bombastic UN Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened that all decisions and agreements regarding alliances, loans, aid and diplomatic relations were at stake.

Moreover, the Trump regime clearly defined the style and substance of US imperial dictates: All UN member nations (large and small) must grovel in the most abject manner to his orders. Ambassador Haley demanded that each nation on earth accept Trump’s and the racist-Zionist Netanyahu’s declaration that the ancient city of Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided and ethnically managed capital of the Jews. Trump’s message was loud and clear - he was the great ‘decider’ and the UN votes would identify America’s true friends and enemies. “We are making a list... and there will be consequences...”

Clearly Trump’s boast of US power and Haley’s assumption that her terrifying threats would ensure that Washington had a majority vote in the ‘gifting’ of Jerusalem to Zio-fascism. They believed that US dominance and global hegemony was absolute and unassailable. The vote proved something else, something very new was happening.

The US suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat, one that kept Ambassador Haley dexterous fingers busy ‘taking notes’: 128 nations demanded that the Trump regime withdraw its declaration that Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital for Jews. Only 9 micro-nations (some mere postage stamps and a few death-squad banana-stans) voted with the Trump-Haley decision, 35 mendicant-states put their heads down and abstained while 21 timorous ambassadors chose to hide their shamelessness in the toilet stalls rather than show up for this important vote.


Political Context

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]irst and foremost it is important to discuss the steps leading up to the US suffering such a crushing debacle. In other words, who was responsible for leading the Trump Administration by the nose down the blind alley of submission to the dictates of Zio-fascism.

The leader and driving force behind the UN disaster was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose quest to seize Jerusalem and convert it into the ‘eternal’ capital of the Jews was his top priority. For decades the entire world has rejected Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem and its conversion into an ethnically cleansed capital for the ‘Jewish’ state. The UN and international jurists denounced Israel’s colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.


Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel is an strategic and diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.

Netanyahu took charge with the election of Donald Trump as President. Operation Jerusalem was his first order to Puppet Donald. A number of Israel-First multi-billionaires, who financed Trump’s electoral campaign, demanded an immediate pay-off from their puppet: The Administration’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s agenda.

Despite protests from the rest of the world, especially the US closest European allies, Trump plunged the nation right into the Zionist soup: a Jewish Jerusalem; the systematic eviction of all Arabs, Christian, Muslim and secular, and the eventual annexation of all of Palestine; as well as an increasing military confrontation with Iran.


Like other Israeli leaders who preceded him Netanyahu is both an extremist and a terrorist, not to mention a proficient and shameless liar. No American paper or television channel dare criticize him.

Real estate speculator, Jared Kushner, Trump’s pampered son-in- law, and a complete Netanyahu flunky, became the senior advisor for the Middle East. Kushner pressured Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn to intervene with Russia on behalf of Israel’s take-over of Jerusalem. Flynn was subsequently prosecuted for discussing global US Russian relations and the ‘good soldier’ is falling on his sword on behalf of the Zionists. Not surprising, the Congressional Democrats, the FBI and the Special Prosecutor found it easier to prosecute Flynn for his discussion regarding de-escalating the tense US- Russian relations provoked by the Obama administration than his discussions with the Kremlin in support of Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem!

Netanyahu’s operational weapons in manipulating US policy involved Jared Kushner, the billionaire Israel-First donors, the AIPAC and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Tel Aviv succeeded in securing Trump’s commitment to the Israeli agenda, despite opposition from the entire UN National Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly. In the style of a typical authoritarian, US President Trump grovels at the feet of his ‘superior’, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while tearing at the throats of his ‘inferiors’, the 193 member nations of the UN General Assembly.

Netanyahu’s vitriolic bar room threats against the entire membership of the UN prior to the vote ensured the repudiation of all Security Council representatives with the exception of his South Carolina puppet, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump and Haley backed the blustering Netanyahu by issuing gangland threats to all UN representatives who dare to oppose Washington’s dictates.

In this way, Prime Minister Netanyahu secured the greatest diplomatic and political success of his career – the total submission of the US to his agenda, at the risk of a major humiliation in the UN. This, in effect, formalized Israeli hegemony over Washington, for the world to see.

In contrast to Netanyahu’s beaming success, the US suffered a historic diplomatic defeat: Fourteen times as many nations voted against the demands of the US President over– Netanyahu’s grab of Jerusalem.

What makes the defeat even more striking is the fact that all major allies and most of the biggest aid recipients openly defied the US threats. Eight of the ten biggest US aid recipients voted against Trump–Netanyahu–Haley. This bizarre troika is now left with an enemy list circling the entire globe, and a few timorous allies in the South Pacific and among the death squads of Guatemala.

Trump’s total and puerile embrace of the raving Netanyahu has exposed and widened fissures in US global hegemony.

Apart from ‘capturing’ Netanyahu’s vote, the other pro Trump nations included a handful of insignificant Pacific islands (Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia), Togo, a corrupt African mini-state and two banana-sized ‘death squad democracies’, Honduras and Guatemala. The latter two regimes hold power via stolen elections backed by narco-thugs in the pay (dubbed ‘foreign aid’) of the US.

All of the leading Asian and Western European countries voted against Trump. They openly rejected the crude blackmail of the US-Israel duet. Subservient regimes in Eastern Europe, corrupt regimes in Latin America and some horrifically impoverished nations in Africa and Asia chose to abstain or excuse themselves to the bathrooms of Times Square. Narco-neo-liberal regimes in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic abstained. Even rightwing Eastern European regimes, which usually give unquestioned support to all US demands, like Romania, Bosnia, Poland and Latvia defied Nikki Haley’s ‘name taking’ by abstaining. The ‘no-shows’ (hiding in the toilets) included US puppets like Georgia, Samoa, St Kitts and Tonga.

An openly humiliated UN Ambassador Haley was left with the task of thanking the abstainers and ‘no-shows’ for their courage and preparing a few bags of goodies (matzos, Mogan David wine and discounts to the brothels of Tel Aviv) for the torturers of Honduras and half-drowned ‘leaders’ of Palau in gratitude for such loyalty.

Conclusion

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]learly Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel is an strategic and diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.

Trump’s decision to demonstrate total loyalty to his Zionist billionaire campaign ‘donor- owners’ and his Israel-First son-in-law in his first major foreign policy decision failed to impress any of the influential nations of the world – East or West. Indeed, it showed how fractured and dangerously dysfunctional the US Administration had become.

Most important, Trump’s proclamation of a unipolar world based on his notion of the US’s economic power has collapsed. Israel, despite Haley’s bluster and list-taking, has no legitimacy. It’s continued Mossad assassinations of leading Palestinians and others and the increasing IDF slaughter of the spontaneous Palestinian civilian resistance has failed to improve its international standing – except among Guatemalan torturers.

However, it is not clear that the US has lost its big power influence regarding other regional conflicts. The subsequent UN Security Council vote in favor of Washington’s demands for added sanctions against North Korea demonstrated Trump’s power to intimidate the oligarchs and leaders of China and Russia.

In other words, limits on US power still depend on the issues, the allies, the diplomatic appeals, the adversaries and the distribution of benefits and costs.

In the case of Jerusalem, Real Estate Mogul Trump’s bizarre decision to hand an entire city over to the Zionists alienated all Muslims and Christians the world over, as well as the secular Western liberal nations and emerging powers, like Russia and China. The US tied its prestige to the whims of a paranoid nation arrogantly flaunting its racist superiority complex, backed by groups of immensely wealthy overseas dual citizens.

Diplomatically, Israel’s vituperative responses to any legal criticism from world bodies undermines its chances of coalition building.

Finally, Washington’s support for Israel’s perpetual and overt violation of international law and its bombing of humanitarian missions makes Israel a very costly ally.  


  James Petras is a world-renowned public intellectual. He is a retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published extensively on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.

black-horizontal
[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]