Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY [LINK | Article]
Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
“An ambassador is a … gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” (Attributed to Sir Henry Wotton, 1568-1639.)
When Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (“We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations form the scourge of war …”) rose to speak at the UN to address Syria’s ongoing tragedy, on Sunday 25th September, US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, François Delattre, Permanent Representative for France and British Permanent Representative, Matthew Rycroft, metaphorically threw their toys out of the pram and walked out. Anything more infantile and further away from the UN’s founding aspirations would be hard to find.
They would have done well to hear Mr Churkin’s full address (1) it lays out home truths and the reality of international State sponsored terrorism – resulting in Syria’s living nightmare – in succinct detail. He began:
“It is the sixth year that the Syrian people have been suffering a grave tragedy. In 2011, Washington and some other Western capitals decided to continue the reshaping of the geopolitical space of the Middle East and North Africa, which started with the US and UK criminal invasion in Iraq in 2003. Besides, both in Libya and Syria they continued to ‘use an axe’ without any disdain for the support of terrorist groups … consequences of countries’ break-ups and flows of millions of refugees were qualified as an unforeseen ‘irritant’.”
Samantha Power, however, has never seemingly found a conflict she would not embrace (safely, from afar, of course.) The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria, “liberation” by annihilation seemingly ever her preferred option. The UN welcomes some unlikely Representatives to uphold its founding aspirations.
“What Russia is sponsoring and doing in Aleppo is not counter terrorism, it is barbarism”, railed Ms Power.Clearly she has forgotten the US led, multi-country barbarisms above and further that Russia has been invited to work with Syria to attempt to resolve the country’s terrorist crisis. The US and their “allies” – in the air and on the ground – are illegals, in contravention of a swathe of international law.
She appears to also have forgotten the numerous substantiations of the US (and allies)funding and arming the head chopping, organ eating, child murdering other illegal immigrants from over one hundred foreign countries, according to varying analysts. Another irony is America appointing itself the “world’s policeman” – as the world is seeing what its policemen are doing at home.
Also dropped through Ms Powell and her fellow UN absconders memory hole seems to be General Wesley Clark’s near immediate post 9/11 revelation from a Pentagon colleague that:
“ … we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Moreover, not to be forgotten is that the plans for Syria’s destruction were plotted in detail from within the then US Embassy in Damascus. (2)
Interesting is also the UK walkout Representative’s background, recalling that the UK is ever willing killer-in-arms with the US.Matthew Rycroft has trailed around varying war zones or war enablers in a “diplomatic” capacity since graduation from Oxford University in 1989.
An early placement was at the NATO desk in the British government’s bailiwick, Whitehall. After various Foreign Office placements he joined the British Embassy in Washington in 1998, from where he was seconded to both the US State Department and US Congress. On returning to the UK he became, in February 2002, Private Secretary Foreign Affairs, to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, according to his evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq. (3 pdf.)
February 2002 was of course the time the planning in the Foreign Office was concentrating on Tony Blair’s now infamous meeting with George W. Bush in Crawford Texas in the coming April. Rycroft denied having any involvement in those plans, however he had integral involvement in the infamous Downing Street memo of 23rd July 2002. (4)
The memo related to the plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein, discussed at a meeting held by Tony Blair at which Rycroft was one of the attendees. His memo began:
“SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY “DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 “cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell “IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY “Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. “John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest (Joint Intelligence Committee) assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action … “C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” (Emphasis added.) In the memo’s “Conclusions” Rycroft’s first is: “(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action … “
The rest is Nuremberg’s “supreme international crime …” and bloody, genocidal history. Ongoing.
Rycroft has now turned his attentions to Syria. On walk out day, the 25th September in a speech to the UN (5) which includes too many inaccurate and misleading statements (many might say mistruths) to address here, he includes:
“ … the death and destruction that the sectarian Assad regime has unleashed upon them. Nor will they forget that Russia aided and abetted this ruthless sectarian dictator in waging war against his own people.”
Goodness, word for word out of the US-UK Saddam Hussein hand book – “waging a war against his own people”, “sectarian dictator.” As Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Syria is secular and the government is fighting a war to rid the country of the terrorists who flooded in as a result of the fruition of the US plans formulated in 2006
Rycroft also alleged the use by the government of chlorine bombs – he had clearly not read, or chosen to ignore the various Reports, including by the UN, categorically disproving this.
Iraq had the US inspired “Iraq Liberation Act” of 1998 held over the nation’s head until destroyed by the US and UK in 2003. Syria has the “Syria Accountability and Liberation Act” (6) of July 2009. Apart from imposing draconian sanctions of the sort that resulted in the deaths of half a million children between 6th August 1990 and 12th May 1996 in Iraq, the Act:
“Sets forth diplomatic measures intended to isolate the government of Syria.”
And:
“Authorizes the (US) President to provide assistance to support a democratic transition in Syria.”
In another re-run of the Iraq lies, Rycroft adapts the “Saddam starves his own people” line – when in fact the US-UK driven embargo even denied baby formula – and accuses President Assad of “failing to stop starvation.”
Incidentally, in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, Matthew Rycroft was awarded the CBE: “ … an honour awarded to an individual by the Queen for a leading role at a regional level or a prominent … role at a national level in any activity. The definition of CBE is Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.” The cynic might speculate that his part in “Empire’s” Iraq slaughter might have been a contributory factor.
But he has not lost talent for plotting and economy with the truth, it would seem. But then, between experience in the Foreign Office, the State Department and Congress would be a peerless education. An example:
On 12 September, the eve of the ill-fated ceasefire: “President Dr. Bashar Al-Assad vowed to regain every inch of Syria from the terrorist forces.
“The Syrian President made this promise during his visit to the rural Damascus town of Darayya on Monday.
“In addition to his promise to recover every inch of the country, the Syrian President stated that his government will rebuild Darayya after the four year long battle left the town in ruins.” (7)
On 15th September, Matthew Rycroft translated this statement in a address to the UN as: “Earlier this week, Assad said it was his objective to regain the entire country by force …” (8) He surely learned well from his part in Iraq plotting.
Meanwhile, on 25th September (clearly a very busy plotting day) the UK’s new Foreign Secretary (it is hard to think of anyone less suitable to be a diplomat) was in Turkey. He tweeted:
Boris Johnson
@BorisJohnson
Follow #Turkey is a vital partner to the UK. Pleased to visit for first time as Foreign Sec for talks with Govt, civil society & #SyrianOpposition 9:34 AM – 25 Sep 2016
Meeting “opposition” head choppers, eh?
Another shocking international conspiracy against a small, proud nation, which threatens no one. The onslaught against Syria, the betrayal of a fellow Member of the United Nations will be added to the list of crimes of enormity laid at the feet of the “Special relationship” – the barbarism of the US-UK alliance.
Incidentally, diplomacy: “The art of dealing with people in a sensitive and tactful way.”
Barbarism in Words and Deeds. Barbarism of U.S. Imperial Wars is Unmatched
By Prof. James Petras
Global Research, October 03, 2016
“What Russia is sponsoring and doing [in Syria] is not counter-terrorism it is barbarism” Samantha Power, US Representative to the United Nations
The US representative to the United Nations, Ambassador ‘Ranting Sam’ Samantha Power, accused the Russian and Syrian governments of ‘barbarism’, claiming Moscow or Damascus had attacked an unarmed United Nations humanitarian convoy delivering aid to civilians in Aleppo. No evidence was presented. Rants and threats do not require facts or proof; they only require vehement emotional ejaculations and compliant mass propaganda organs.
‘Barbarians’, to be clear, evoke images of leaders and groups, which abjure all civilized norms and laws. They only respond to armed force.
In the present context Power’s charges of barbarism against Russia and Syria was used to justify the US aerial bombardment of a Syrian army outpost,which killed and maimed almost 200 government troops engaged in combating ISIS terrorists and jihadi invaders.
In other words, accusing Syrian soldiers of ‘barbarism’ was Ambassador Power’s cynical way of dehumanizing the young victims of an earlier and deliberate US war crime.
Let’s analyze the appropriate context for the use and abuse of the language of ‘barbarism’ – and its rightful application.
Barbarism: the Deed
Over the past decade and a half, the US and its allies have invaded, occupied, killed, wounded and dispossessed over ten million people, in countries from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Military and civilian officials have systematically destroyed entire economies, fostered ethno-religious wars, undermined ancient community and family ties and placed corrupt political puppets in power.
Promoted by the US, torture, arbitrary arrest and incarceration have become the norm creating lawless and chaotic societies, which had once been productive and stable. The shredding of social structures has provokes massive population flight, with millions of desperate refugees fleeing invasions, wars and total society breakdown.The result of these deliberate imperial policy decisions has been emptied cities and neighborhoods, broken families, destroyed lives and futures for many millions of young Arabs and Muslims.
As the human toll mounts and Western Europe is flooded with the results of US aggressive wars, the imperialists have sharpened their shrill rhetoric, labeling all of their adversaries and critics as ‘accomplices in war crimes’, and ‘barbarians’.
The greater and more sustained the policy of wanton imperial pillage, the more intense the frustration of its leaders over its ultimate failures, and the greater the recourse of its ‘diplomats’ to vituperative language. [vituperative = harshly critical / scathing ]
Barbarism in Search of Barbarians:
[DIAGRAM AT SOURCE]
The principal adversaries to US aggression, Russia, China and Iran, have not invaded any sovereign countries, nor have they provoked the desperate flight of millions of refugees.Russia was invited to aid its Syrian government ally confronting an invasion of terrorist mercenaries who are intent on dividing the country. Crimea peacefully re-joined Russia via elections. Moscow rejected playing any military role in support of Western wars against Iraq, Yemen and Libya.None of this rose to the level of US-EU barbarism.
In Asia, the West has invaded and devastated Viet Nam, the Philippines and Afghanistan.Japan, now a US ally, had invaded China, Korea and Southeast Asia. China for its part has not engaged in any imperial war of conquest for centuries.
Iran has not invaded any country in modern times. On the contrary, Iraq invaded Tehran in the 1980’s with US support and waged a decade-long war which caused millions of casualties.
In truth, if waging wars, staging invasions, destroying whole societies and causing millions of deaths are the measure of barbarism, then the US, Europe and Japan have been clearly barbaric.
To claim otherwise and follow the ranting script of Ambassador Samantha Power is to enter into a tunnel of hallucinations where the language of liberal values embellishes truly barbarian acts.
The entire language of politics has been perverted and converted into an artifice of self-delusion.Terrorist militias are re-packaged as ‘rebels’ and ‘moderates’,spreading barbarism from the imperial Western center to the periphery. The deliberate spread of terrorism is itself a barbaric deed, which degrades the status of Western powers.
Conclusion
In ancient Greece, the barbarians were those outside of the empire who did not speak the language of civilization.They were savage invaders seeking to pillage the wealth and culture of the empire.Today the barbarians emerge from inside the empire and spread outward. The imperial leaders have engaged in serial wars of destruction and pillage, even as their own societies and economies wallow in ignorance, misery, debt, addiction and criminality. Imperial barbarians devastate whole cultures, erasing the great historical legacy of ancient civilizations like Iraq and Syria, while imposing their culture of morons, drugs and electronic gadgets, which has already infantilized its own population.
The empire of barbarians is infested with moneychangers and corrupt speculators. They have debased the entire legal system and legislative bodies. The public space has become a private latrine for the elite, closed to any real public discourse and debate.
Electoral spectacles, rather than reasoned debates, undermine republican principles. Imperial conquerors, enmeshed in a military metaphysic, cannot reconstruct a devastated society into a productive colony,nor can they learn or benefit from the best and brightest among its captives, as Rome did with Greece,because it has sown such destruction and salted the very soil under the feet of its conquered peoples.
The barbarian-imperial world order is constantly at war with ‘others’ and can never assimilate and learn from the precious human treasures it has so wantonly destroyed. It rules by terror abroad and deceit at home.As so crudely displayed by the imperial rants of Ambassador Samantha Power, its oratory at international forums reflect the hysteria of mediocre functionaries: mindless barbarians raving among themselves in marbled echo chambers.
In the end, the imperial barbarians will be besieged by their own fleeing vassals and puppets. When they finally confront their own decay and internal dissolutionthey have to decide whether to engage in a last global conflagration or dismantle the imperial barbaric order and choose justice, law and civilization.
Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley
Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York
adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
published on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues
received the Western Political Science Association's the Best Dissertation award (1968),
Career of Distinguished Service Award from the American Sociological Association's Marxist Sociology Section
Robert Kenny Award for Best Book of 2002
author of: over 62 books published in 29 languages over 600 articles in professional journals, incl.
American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology
Social Research and Journal of Peasant Studies
published over 2000 articles
publications eg.
New York Times
The Guardian
The Nation
Christian Science Monitor
Foreign Policy
New Left Review
Partisan Review
Le Monde Diplomatique
previously wrote: Spanish daily, El Mundo
currently writes: monthly column Mexican newspaper, La Jornada
Founding member of the Young Socialist Alliance
Long history of commitment to social justice
Petras has worked directly with indigenous workers as an organizer, decades
Brazilian Landless Workers Movement
unemployed workers' movement in Argentina
Defended the rights of the indigenous in Latin America
Advised left-wing presidents:
President Andreas Papandreou (Greece 1981-84)
President Salvador Allende of Chile (1970–73)
President Hugo Chávez
1973-76 Petras worked on the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America
IRAQ
Referred to American policy towards Iraq as "The US/Iraqi Holocaust (UIH)" "an ongoing process spanning the last 16 years (1990-2006) provides us with a striking example of state-planned systematic extermination, torture and physical destruction designed to de-modernize a secular developing society and revert it into a series of warring clan-tribal-clerical-ethnic based entities devoid of any national authority or viable economy."
IRAN "Describing the struggle in Iran as pitting "high income, free market oriented capitalist individuals" reformists against Ahmadinejad's "working class, low income, community-based supporters of a 'moral economy'", he denounced the claim that the election was stolen as a "hoax" perpetrated by "Western opinion makers"."
MIDDLE EAST AGGRESSION Petras alleged that "It was the massive infusion of financial contributions that allowed the [Zionist Power Configuration] (ZPC) to vastly expand the number of full-time functionaries, influence peddlers and electoral contributors that magnified their power – especially in promoting US Middle East wars, lopsided free trade agreements (in favor of Israel) and unquestioned backing of Israeli aggression against Lebanon, Syria and Palestine...No economic recovery is possible now or in the foreseeable future...while Zionist power brokers dictate US Mideast policies. [14][15] 2008 interview in which Petras stated that [U.S.] presidents are at the disposal of "Jewish power" [16] ... "the greatest threat to world peace and humanity." [17] 2008 interview ... "it’s one of the great tragedies that we have a minority that represents less than 2% of North American’s population but has such power in the communications media" and that the reason "why the North American public doesn’t react against the manipulations of this minority...[is] because the Jews control the communications media." [18] 2010 article ... Arab American News, Petras stated that:
"For the U.S. mass media the problem is not Israeli state terror, but how to manipulate and disarm the outrage of the international community. To that end the entire Zionist power configuration has a reliable ally in the Zionized Obama White House and U.S. Congress." [19]
Samantha Power Slams Russia's 'Support' For Assad, Downplays ISIS Threat
Written by Daniel McAdams
Monday September 14, 2015
More evidence that the current "Russia invaded Syria" media frenzy is a Washington-engineered psy-opto provide cover for a final US push against Bashar al-Assad, is provided in today's outburst from US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, the fuel injector in the neocon "regime change" engine.
While the US has conducted more than 2,500 airstrikes against ISIS in Syria over the past year to very little effect, Power has taken to warning Russia that its claimed "military deployment" to Syria is "not a winning strategy."
One can only imagine the guffaws in Moscow over the architect of the USinterventionist fiascos in Libya and Syria advising anyone on how to craft a winning foreign policy strategy. But Power, evidently utterly incapable of seeing the world as those of us in the reality-based community see it, takes to revising history to provide "evidence" for her Russia advice. [... lol]
Power repeats on CNN today the old discredited claim that Assad "gassed his own people" back in 2013 -- a claim so flimsy that Obama was forced to back down on his promise to begin bombing the country in retaliation. In other words, in the below statement to CNN today, the US Ambassador to the UN lied and she knew she was lying when she warned Russia that:
Doubling down on a regime that gases its people, that barrel bombs its people, that tortures people who it arrests simply for protesting and for claiming their rights -- that's just not going to work.
Meanwhile, Power downplays the threat of ISIS vis Assad, suggesting that it is "Machiavellian" to get too worked up over the possibility of an ISIS victory in Syria:
Even if you were Machiavelli and all you cared about was ISIL, to support a regime like this and to not take account of the views of the vast majority of the Syrian people that want to go in a different direction is not going to either bring peace or actually succeed in defeating terrorism, which is what President Putin says his priority is.
Of course Power has no way of knowing what the majority in Syria prefer. But we do know that when asked, they clearly prefer Assad over ISIS. So she lied again.
While the US and its allies -- Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the other Gulf States -- have openly trained, funded, and equipped radical jihadists to further their policy of regime change in Syria, Power displays again her astonishing chutzpah by blaming the ensuing rise of terrorism on...Russia and Iran!
Russia and Iran may be the place really where one should lodge much of that criticism for supporting a regime that is carrying out these monstrous attacks against civilians, and again fueling -- whether wittingly or unwittingly -- the rise of terrorism.
But the "humanitarian" Power, is "just focused on what is going to make things better in the here and now" in Syria. To her this apparently includes damning Russia for its opposition to al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and continuing to promote these same groups.
Power's chutzpah does not stop there -- indeed it seemingly knows no bounds. While US intervention and regime change policy has directly led to the massive exodus from the country and resulting refugee crisis in Europe, the US diplomat pins the blame on...not enough US interventionism!
You can't look at 12 million people being displaced from their homes, and desperate families washing up on shores and be satisfied with where we are. I think the challenge is to find what is the policy tool that's going to make things better.
Here's a suggestion: leave Syria alone! Let those in the neighborhood like Iran and Russia take care of the jihadist problem. The more the US "helps" the Syrians, the more Syrians die.
Funny article. Even funnier video after reading the article. :)
Not so funny for the people that are victims of this kind of Machiavellian aggression and deceit, US proxy war (ie US & ally funded & equipped terrorist op to destabilise and effect regime change in Syria) and far from funny for victims of imminent US 'intervention' -- ie more US aggression.
By Robert Parry, Consortium News, September 7, 2015
Introduction by New Cold War.org:
The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change,” as Robert Parry reports.
Amidst the righteous humanitarian concern over the fate of millions of refugees in the Middle East seeking to flee the devastation of their homelands, Parry provides a needed reminder of the source of the crisis which mainstream news reporting and many analysts are ignoring, namely, the military interventions and austerity policies of the U.S., European Union and NATO military alliance into the region.
Importantly, Parry explains the disastrous consequences of the extension of that intervention into Ukraine, leading to ‘regime change’ there in late 2013/early 2014.
* * *
The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change”.
On Aug 30, 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims to have proof that the Syrian gov't was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited
[State Department photo]
Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe.
Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change”.
For instance, The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed “realists” for the cascading catastrophes. Hiattcastigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for “regime change.”
But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.
In early 2014, the neocons and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in Geneva by blocking Iran’s participation and turning the peace conference into a one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad’s representatives who then went home.
All the while, the Post’s editors and their friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad’s forces.
The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings back into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement first emerged as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way and Obama had conducted a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad’s military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red with blood.
But now a year later, the likes ofHiattstill have not absorbed that lesson and the spreading chaos from neocon strategies is destabilizing Europe.
As shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it should have come as much of a surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their wake.
When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central America to play with.
President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them, bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan.
But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the Mideast and Europe. Those strategic areas went to the “adults,” people likeJames Baker, George Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft.
The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide against peasants, students and workers. The result – not surprisingly – was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States.
The neocon “success” in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called “feet people” through Mexico to the southern U.S. border. Messing up the Mideast
But the neocons weren’t satisfied sitting at the kids’ table. Even during the Reagan administration, they tried to squeeze themselves among the “adults” at the grown-ups’ table.
For instance, neocons, such as Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz, pushed Israel-friendly policies toward Iran, which the Israelis then saw as a counterweight to Iraq.
That strategy led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair, the worst scandal of the Reagan administration. [See Consortiumnews.com’s When Israel /Neocons Favored Iran.]
However, the right-wing and mainstream U.S. media never liked the complex Iran-Contra story and thus exposure of the many levels of the scandal’s criminality was avoided. Democrats also preferred compromise to confrontation.
So, most of the key neocons survived the Iran-Contra fallout, leaving their ranks still firmly in place for the next phase of their rise to power.
In the 1990s, the neocons built up a well-funded infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets, benefiting from both the largesse of military contractors donating to think tanksand government-funded operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, headed by neocon Carl Gershman. The neocons gained more political momentum from the U.S. military might displayed during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.
Many Americans began to see war as fun, almost like a video game in which “enemy” forces get obliterated from afar. On TV news shows, tough-talking pundits were all the rage. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn’t go wrong taking the most macho position, what I sometimes call the “er-er-er” growling effect.
Combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the notion that U.S. military supremacy was unmatched and unchallengeable gave rise to neocontheories about turning “diplomacy” into nothing more than the delivery of U.S. ultimatums.
In the Middle East, that was a view shared by Israeli hardliners, who had grown tired of negotiating with the Palestinians and other Arabs. Instead of talk, there would be “regime change”for any government that would not fall into line.
This strategy was articulated in 1996 when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Israel and compiled a strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next cameSyria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table.
In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol, called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but President Bill Clinton balked at something that extreme.
The situation changed, however, when President George W. Bush took office and the 9/11 attacks terrified and infuriated the American public.
Suddenly, the neocons had a Commander-in-Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein– and Americans were easily persuaded although Iraq and Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. [See Consortiumnews.com’s The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.]
The death of ‘realism’ The 2003 Iraq invasion sounded the death knell for foreign policy “realism” in Official Washington. Aging or dead, the old adult voices were silent or ignored.
From Congress and the Executive Branch to the think tanks and the mainstream news media, almost all the “opinion leaders” were neocons and many liberals fell into line behind Bush’s case for war.
And, even though the Iraq War “group think” was almost entirely wrong, both on the WMD justifications for war and the “cakewalk” expectations for remaking Iraq, almost no one who promoted the fiasco suffered punishment for either the illegality of the invasion or the absence of sanity in promoting such a harebrained scheme.
Instead of negative repercussions, the Iraq War backers – the neocons and their liberal-hawkaccomplices – essentially solidified their control over U.S. foreign policy and the major news media.
From The New York Times and The Washington Post to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, the “regime change” agenda continued to hold sway.
It didn’t even matter when the sectarian warfare unleashed in Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead, displaced millions and gave rise to Al Qaeda’s ruthless Iraq affiliate.
Not even the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent, changed this overall dynamic. Rather than standing up to this new foreign policy establishment, Obama bowed to it, retaining key players from President Bush’s national security team, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and by hiring hawkish Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, who became Secretary of State, and Samantha Power at the National Security Council.
Thus, the cult of “regime change” did not just survive the Iraq disaster; it thrived.
Whenever a difficult foreign problem emerged, the go-to solution was still “regime change,” accompanied by the usual demonizing of a targeted leader, support for the “democratic opposition” and calls for military intervention.
President Obama, arguably a “closet realist,” found himself as the foot-dragger-in-chief as he reluctantly was pulled along on one “regime change” crusade after another.
In 2011, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Council aide Power persuaded Obama to join with some hot-for-war European leaders to achieve “regime change” in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi had gone on the offensive against groups in eastern Libya that he identified as Islamic terrorists.
But Clinton and Power saw the case as a test for their theories of “humanitarian warfare” – or “regime change” to remove a “bad guy” like Gaddafi from power. Obama soon signed on and, with the U.S. military providing crucial technological support, a devastating bombing campaign destroyed Gaddafi’s army, drove him from Tripoli, and ultimately led to his torture-murder.
‘We came, we saw, he died’
Secretary Clinton scurried to secure credit for this “regime change.” According to one email chain in August 2011, her longtime friend and personal adviser Sidney Blumenthalpraised the bombing campaign to destroy Gaddafi’s army and hailed the dictator’s impending ouster. “First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it,” Blumenthal wrote on Aug. 22, 2011.
“When Qaddafi himself is finally removed, you should of course make a public statement before the cameras wherever you are, even in the driveway of your vacation home. … You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment. … The most important phrase is: ‘successful strategy.’”
Clinton forwarded Blumenthal’s advice to Jake Sullivan, a close State Department aide.
“Pls read below,” she wrote. “Sid makes a good case for what I should say, but it’s premised on being said after Q[addafi] goes, which will make it more dramatic. That’s my hesitancy, since I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get.”
Sullivan responded, saying “it might make sense for you to do an op-ed to run right after he falls, making this point. … You can reinforce the op-ed in all your appearances, but it makes sense to lay down something definitive, almost like the Clinton Doctrine.”
However, when Gaddafi abandoned Tripoli that day, President Obama seized the moment to make a triumphant announcement.
Clinton’s opportunity to highlight her joy at the Libyan “regime change” had to wait until Oct. 20, 2011, when Gaddafi was captured, tortured and murdered.
In a TV interview, Clinton celebrated the news when it appeared on her cell phone and paraphrased Julius Caesar’s famous line after Roman forces achieved a resounding victory in 46 B.C. and he declared, “veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Clinton’s reprise of Caesar’s boast went: “We came; we saw; he died.” She then laughed and clapped her hands.
Killary Clinton
Gaddafi was captured, tortured & murdered
Presumably, the “Clinton Doctrine” would have been a policy of “liberal interventionism” to achieve “regime change” in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action. [TokyRose Note: similar scenario - done by Clinton No. 1: Yugoslavia]
But the problem with Clinton’s boasting about the “Clinton Doctrine” was that the Libyanadventure quickly turned sour with the Islamic terrorists, whom Gaddafi had warned about, seizing wide swaths of territory and turning it into another Iraq-like badlands. On Sept. 11, 2012, this reality hit home when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was overrun and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomatic personnel were killed.
It turned out that Gaddafi wasn’t entirely wrong about the nature of his opposition. Eventually, the extremist violence in Libya grew so out of control that the United States and European countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Since then, Islamic State terrorists have begun decapitating Coptic Christians on Libyan beaches and slaughtering other “heretics.”
Amid the anarchy, Libya has become a route for desperate migrants seeking passage across the Mediterranean toEurope. A war on Assad Parallel to the “regime change” in Libya was a similar enterprise in Syria in which the neocons and liberal interventionistspressed for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government in 2011 cracked down on what had quickly become a violent rebellion led by extremist elements, though the Western propaganda portrayed the opposition as “moderate” and “peaceful.”
For the first years of the Syrian civil war, the pretense remained that these “moderate” rebels were facing unjustified repression and the only answer was “regime change” in Damascus. Assad’s claim that the opposition included many Islamic extremists was largely dismissed as were Gaddafi’s alarms in Libya.
On Aug. 21, 2013, a sarin gas attack outside Damascus killed hundreds of civilians and the U.S. State Department and the mainstream news media immediately blamed Assad’s forces amid demands for military retaliation against the Syrian army.
On Aug 30, 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerryclaims to have proof that the Syrian gov't was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21, but evidence failed to materialize or was later discredited [State Department photo]
Despite doubts within the U.S. intelligence community aboutAssad’s responsibility for the sarin attack, which some analysts saw instead as a provocation by anti-Assad terrorists, the clamor from Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists for war was intense and any doubts were brushed aside.
But President Obama, aware of the uncertainty within the U.S. intelligence community, held back from a military strike and eventually worked out a deal, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical-weapons arsenal while still denying any role in the sarin attack.
Though the case pinning the sarin attack on the Syrian government eventually fell apart – with evidence pointing to a “false flag” operation by Sunni radicals to trick the United States into intervening on their side – Official Washington’s “group think” refused to reconsider the initial rush to judgment. In Monday’s column, Hiatt still references Assad’s “savagery of chemical weapons.”
Any suggestion that the only realistic option in Syria is a power-sharing compromise that would include Assad – who is viewed as the protector of Syria’s Christian, Shiite and Alawite minorities – is rejected out of hand with the slogan, “Assad must go!”
The neocons have created a conventional wisdom which holds that the Syrian crisis would have been prevented if only Obama had followed the neocons’ 2011 prescription of another U.S. intervention to force another “regime change.”
Yet, the far more likely outcome would have been either another indefinite and bloody U.S. military occupation of Syria or the black flag of Islamic terrorism flying over Damascus.
Get Putin
Another villain who emerged from the 2013 failure to bomb Syria was Russian President Putin, who infuriated the neocons by his work with Obama on Syria’s surrender of its chemical weapons and who further annoyed the neocons by helping to get the Iranians to negotiate seriously on constraining their nuclear program.
Despite the “regime change” disasters in Iraq and Libya, the neocons wanted to wave the “regime change” wand again over Syria and Iran. Putin got his comeuppance when U.S. neocons, including NED President Carl Gershman and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), helped orchestrate a “regime change” in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and putting in a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border.
F*ck the EU
CIA Ukraine Coup
Victoria Nuland
As thrilled as the neocons were with their “victory” in Kiev and their success in demonizing Putin in the mainstream U.S. news media, Ukraine followed the now-predictable post-regime-change descent into a vicious civil war. Western Ukrainians waged a brutal “anti-terrorist operation” against ethnic Russians in the east who resisted the U.S.-backed coup.
Thousands of Ukrainians died and millions were displaced as Ukraine’s national economy teetered toward collapse. Yet, the neocons and their liberal-hawk friends again showed their propaganda skills by pinning the blame for everything on “Russian aggression” and Putin.
Though Obama was apparently caught off-guard by the Ukrainian “regime change,” he soon joined in denouncing Putin and Russia.
The European Union also got behind U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia despite the harm those sanctions also inflicted on Europe’s already shaky economy. Europe’s stability is now under additional strain because of the flows of refugees from the war zones of the Middle East.
A dozen years of chaos So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under the spell of neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” strategies.
According to many estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with several million more refugees flooding into – and stretching the resources – of fragile Mideast countries.
Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe, putting major strains on the Continent’s social structures already stressed by the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling to meet their citizens’ needs.
Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well.
And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too.
We now see the human tragedies of neocon/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the suffering of theSyriansand other refugees floodingEurope and the death of children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by “regime change.”
But will the neocon/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of “regime change” prescriptions in the future?
Not if the likes of The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt have anything to say about it.
The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of “regime change” but on the failure to undertake even more “regime change.
The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a belated “realism” will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such as Syria, Libya and Ukraine.
Rather than more and more tough-guy/gal confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at reconciliation.
But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves deeply inOfficial Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave dangers created by neocon policies.
Ran into a problem formatting above copy article. Best to go to original for easy read: this copy's for me. lol
Lost my paragraph formatting while editing layout after highlighting (long story), not far off being ready to publish post.
Having spent ages highlighting, I've had to recreate the paragraphs. Hopefully I've not put in too many additional paragraphs.
The videos didn't appear in the linked-to article source.
I really love this article.
I think Parry's being too kind to Obama.
Obama's on the same plutocratic / Wall Street team as everybody else: so the Ukraine coup came as no surprise to Obama.
Those horrible women using 'humanitarianism' to destroy countries (and people), have never had anything to do with humanitarian concerns; that's just the cover and an excuse for destruction.
And these same neocon animals are now destroying Europe - with the cooperation of neocon swine European politicians who don't care about the future of their own people or nations.
The proposed 'Clinton doctrine' goes way back to the early 1990s Balkans under Bill 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman' Clinton (and probably earlier than that). So, this is not that new.
We're all screwed. What we see in the United States is pretty much what controls the entire West, via the US neocon foreign policy that is backed by various toady politicians in US-allied countries, who are replicas acting on behalf of the same monied interests (rather than national interests).
The 'opposition' are just more replicas of these neocons and are their accomplices, no matter what they publicly pay lip-service to.
Now I need to go away and digest all of this. lol
This means that Western governments don't care about us or our societies, and that they routinely lie to us.
It also means that Western media routinely lies to us, as well.
Assange Transnational Security Elite, Carving Up the World Using Your Tax Money London
EU-NATO IMPERIALISM ❌ 
