John Chuckman

COMMENT ON IRAN’S ADMISSION THAT IT ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED A UKRAINIAN AIRLINER

 

Iran has apologized for its terrible error, and it did so promptly. And in judging, everyone should keep in mind the terrifying pressure Iran has been put under by the United States (see footnote).

Has America apologized for any of the pain and death and destruction it has inflicted on the Middle East in recent years?

America’s Neocon Wars in the Middle East (2003 – present) have killed something like two million people, destroyed many treasured historic and religious sites, reduced millions to primitive living conditions (eg, to this day, much of Iraq’s electricity, deliberately destroyed by America in its 2003 invasion, still has not been restored), and created so many desperate refugees that Europe’s stability was threatened.

Going back before the Neocon Wars, we have the Iraq-Iran War (1980-88), an extremely bloody war facilitated by the United States to hurt Iran’s revolutionary government of 1979. In that war, America shot down an Iranian civilian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655), killing 290 people.

A United States warship, the USS Vincennes, was in Iranian waters of the Strait of Hormuz and fired missiles at the plane, claiming to mistake the airliner, flying a well-established route, for a hostile plane.

The Captain of the American warship was later actually awarded a medal, the Legion of Merit.

The United States absolutely refused to apologize or pay damages for its obvious destruction of a civilian airliner.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s, as the result of a lawsuit, that the United States properly acknowledged what it had done and paid damages to survivors.

 

WHAT IRAN FACED AT THE TIME OF ITS MISTAKEN DOWNING OF AN AIRLINER – INDEED WHAT IT FACES STILL

 

Iran has been under constant threat by the Trump White House, and for no good reason since Iran has started no wars in its modern history and is recognized as complying with its treaty obligations.

Trump started by suddenly ripping-up a valid international nuclear agreement, one which had been scrupulously kept for four years. He followed that by imposing war-like sanctions which seriously hurt millions of ordinary people. Iranian assets abroad have been seized, and every effort has been made to disrupt Iran’s economy.

Trump sent fleets of warships and nuclear-capable bombers to intimidate the country. He made many public threats, including the barbaric threat to destroy Iran’s national heritage sites. Trump even once bellowed he would “obliterate” Iran’s eighty million people.

Just before the airliner’s destruction, Trump had committed a set of murders in neighboring Iraq, including the murder of an Iranian national hero, General Qasem Soleimani. Iran had been put on the highest war alert.

John Chuckman

COMMENT – ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON TRUMP’S IRAN CRISIS AND AMERICAN IMPERIAL DECLINE

 

The American empire has overreached itself in recent decades, in places like Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen and even in Iraq. America has basically lost all of those wars in the sense of having created enduring unstable conditions and great hostilities, not peace or stability and not democratic values. All those places are wrecks with smoldering conflicts continuing and outcomes uncertain. The Neocon Wars of the Middle East have been a disaster, but Trump is closely tuned into the Neocons. He is literally surrounded with them.

Even though America clearly won the Iraq War, a war advocated for directly by Ariel Sharon, with a victory memorialized in the blood of a million Iraqis, it was a kind of technical victory, because the key result was something completely unwanted, that is, greatly strengthening Iran as a regional power. Iraq was a war that should not have been fought, but Washington was incapable of seeing that as a result of both its imperial hubris and its vulnerability to Israel’s tireless efforts to influence. Iraq’s invasion has been called by a number of experts America’s greatest strategic blunder ever.

Just as many Israelis live in a kind of foggy fantasy of sentimental Biblical names and notions combined with efforts to recreate American middle-class urban society in a hostile environment – Ozzie and Harriet on the Desert – all floated on an immense Noah’s Flood of American subsidies, public and private, many of them do not realize the full impact of what they do in the region. They believe America is there to bail them out no matter how badly they behave towards others and create unnecessary hostilities. America can flatten Iraq. American can topple Syria. And America can topple Iran. The thinking is terribly wrong and self-indulgent and dangerous. And people subservient to the Neocons, like Trump, are immersed in it.

Trump now seems perilously close to repeating the mistake of Iraq, only on a far grander scale, with Iran. There are many powerful Israeli interests who want to see America go to war with Iran, something they realize is beyond the capacity of Israel despite its rhetoric and threats. The assassination of General Soleimani seems almost certainly to have been a trap designed for that purpose, and Trump just thoughtlessly walked into it. If Iran had not proceeded in the carefully considered way that it did, giving Trump room to slip out of the trap, and without being humiliated, we would have a big new war.

The set of events carries important lessons. First, there is the remarkable steadiness and rationality displayed by Iran’s leaders. They are responsible for avoiding a gigantic, unnecessary conflict.

Second, I think are the unmistakable signs of American imperial decline. Iraq has asked America to leave. Iran has promised new pressures for America to leave. Syria is also effectively telling the United States to leave. America has been reduced to sophomoric jokes about stealing oil, and its treatment of the Iran nuclear agreement has made its word for many close to worthless. It’s pretty hard to stay in a place where the people don’t want you and where long and costly efforts have yielded little of worth. Especially as the near-term future promises nothing but continued relative economic decline for the United States with the privileged position of the dollar gradually disappearing.

Trump has listened to Israel’s bad advice time after time. And the assassination was just the most explosive instance. You do not increase stability or security with such acts. You actually create instabilities that weren’t there before. They may not all be matters to appear in tomorrow’s headlines, but they are like new fault lines in an earthquake-prone zone.

In the end, despite all the bluster, Trump was unwilling to retaliate against Iran. Of course, Iran made it as easy as possible for him with its orchestrated missile attack, an event perhaps better described as an orchestrated missile demonstration. Trump now looks more ineffectual and less in command than ever. The only people looking to him are special interests in Israel, dangerous ones that view him as a big piñata to be poked at with sticks for gifts, and the degree to which he listens to them measures our risk of war.

Trump is likely aware that Iran holds some important cards. No, Iran cannot possibly defeat the United States in a war, but Iran has never sought a war.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak of “cannot possibly defeat the United States.” We must never forget what the tough and resourceful people of Vietnam achieved vis-à-vis the United States. Wars can go on for very long periods of time, and sometimes a less wealthy, less complex society is able to absorb the costs and demands better than a wealthier, privileged opponent. There have been other instances of that. Note that the United States has been killing peasants for eighteen years in Afghanistan, and the Taleban still controls major parts of the country, as much or more of it than when America started.

If you invade or attack someone without a clear and powerful purpose, you are condemning yourself to an unhappy future. It’s like trying to pour concrete without a mold. And the United States has done that time after time, confident just in its arrogant sense of overwhelming superiority. It is foolish, and absolutely no one is more subject to the illusion of American superiority and exceptional status than Donald Trump.

First, a war means Iran’s hurling fleets of missiles against Israel. It has the missiles. The missiles are very capable, as has been demonstrated several times. They are highly accurate. Iran has literally thousands at its disposal. Underground bunkers packed with them. So, unavoidably, the reason for starting a war against Iran, Israel’s intense and unwarranted hostility against Iran, will result in large-scale destruction of Israel.

The effort to build a deterrence has been one of Iran’s national projects, especially after the ghastly Iraq-Iran War, 1980-88, inflicted upon it.

That deterrent capacity is why Trump wants to strip Iran of its missiles, demanding, as he does, that missile technology be added to the terms of his notion of a new nuclear agreement. But that is like asking Iran to disarm itself and doing so at gunpoint. It will not happen.

Israel makes a rather compact target, meaning a determined opponent can saturate it. Iran can accurately target most of what is worth targeting in Israel. Israel’s anti-missile defenses would be overwhelmed. Besides past incidents demonstrated those defenses fail in part even under the highly favorable circumstances of a limited number of unsophisticated missiles.

Iran can also do the same thing to a number of American bases in the region.

Places like the Saudi oil facilities and the facilities of the Strait of Hormuz could quickly be rendered totally inoperable, bringing the world’s oil economy to a desperate crisis.

Iran several times has demonstrated how resourceful it can be at unconventional or guerilla operations. Any war with the United States would see these capabilities used fully.

Those and other hard facts do make starting a war with Iran an act of madness.

But if you put yourself into a bad situation deliberately, as Trump does, madness can easily happen.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Fear of a Major Mideast War

“Fears of a major war in the Middle East exploded Thursday night with the U.S. assassination of arguably the second most powerful man in Iran” [General Qassem Soleimani] 

 

It appears Trump has given Israel control of some portion of the American military in addition to major parts of Palestine.

This is classic Israeli extrajudicial killing, an Israeli practice for over seventy years (a recent book claimed Israel is responsible for more than 2,700 of them), but now America takes responsibility on its behalf.

Just as with the Neocon Wars, all for Israel’s benefit and all done so that Israel does not have to take direct blame for the immense violence it generates in the region.

Hard to know what Trump’s thinking here is. War before an election does not seem a good idea, especially if you are a candidate who has failed so far to achieve anything of substance around past promises to reduce America’s involvement in Mideast wars.

Remember that a crucial slice of the votes that put the man into office was not from his prime political base, the “pick-up truck and Jesus” set, but from those concerned with peace and better relations with Russia.

But prodding Iran to attack could allow Trump to play commander-in-chief defending the country. And Americans just instinctively support even the worst possible presidents at war. You might call it the George Bush Effect. The frightened puppy grabbing the nearest pantleg after a loud noise.

Of course, now when it comes to campaign contributions from American Oligarchs whose chief political concern is what Israel wants, Trump’s coffers will be overflowing.

I suspect Iran will take its time and carefully plan a response, and that response may not be clear and unambiguous, and it might be multi-faceted and done over time.

The men running Iran are careful men, none of them impetuous. Chess players. The United States has more than forty years of bellowing, open hostility towards the country, and we have not seen Iran’s leaders act foolishly in all that time despite many provocations.

I do not believe Iran will be driven to war – that would be playing the Israeli-American game with Israeli-American rules.

Clandestine and hybrid efforts, that is what Iran is best at. They have serious capabilities these days, and the United States, with all its bases abroad, has great vulnerabilities.

Of course, there’s also the option of Iran’s just leaving the nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) that Trump idiotically tore-up and proceeding quietly with weapons development. Iran, despite Israel’s dishonest claims, never has pursued weapons development, only efficient use of nuclear power and legitimate scientific research. Perhaps it is time to reconsider that policy

Iran has substantial deposits of uranium, and the enriched-uranium bomb is simpler to build than the plutonium bomb. Maybe there is some possibility for covert assistance from North Korea, another country treated like crap by Trump’s Washington Braintrust?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROGER PUMPER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“‘Guess That’s It for Us,’ Islamist Terrorists Say

“They all give up now”

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/guess-thats-it-for-us-islamist-terrorists-say/

 

Crap propaganda, very thinly disguised as satire.

As long as the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are willing to sign paychecks and supply goods, “Islamic terrorists” in the Middle East will be around.

They have served many useful purposes for the states supporting them.

Oh sure, “Islamic terrorists,” but you never saw any of them once attack Israeli interests of the interests of the fat corrupt princes of Saudi Arabia or indeed any Americans hanging around – all the obvious natural targets for any genuine “Islamic terrorists.”

They all busied themselves attacking what America and Israel wanted attacked, such as the government of Syria.

Gee, I wonder why that would be?

“You don’t bite the hand that feeds you” is the old cliché.

Al-Baghdadi was an American/Israeli asset from the start.

If he is dead, which I tend to doubt, it’s only because the states destroying so much of the Middle East had some change of plans. Such men are always regarded as expendable when they are no longer useful or there is some possibility for embarrassing revelations.

Even on the home front, look at Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein’s fate when his usefulness ended and threats existed through new legal proceedings for some truth being revealed.

Look at the doubtful death back in 1991, of British media tycoon, Robert Maxwell, a man acknowledged in Israel to be one of the country’s most important spies ever. And, by the way, his daughter, Ghislaine, was long-time companion and helper to Epstein.

Indeed, getting rid of a man like al-Baghdadi, or pretending to do so, gives idiotic Trump something to crow about.

Cui bono?

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON EVENTS IN SYRIA INCLUDING THE KILLING OF ISIS LEADER ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI AND THE SENDING OF AMERICAN TROOPS BACK INTO PART OF NORTHEASTERN SYRIA, THIS TIME WITH HEAVY ARMOR

 

Well, the United States is claiming that it has killed the fabled leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in northern Syria.

The United States has made such claims in the past, and they’ve always proved false, so much so that many have speculated that al-Baghdadi was always a Western agent. More than one source has speculated that al-Baghdadi was an American agent or asset, possibly even an Israeli one, and there are some grounds supporting such suggestions.

There are old photographs of the late John McCain with al-Baghdadi and some others. McCain was, after all, America’s tireless peripatetic advocate for bombing runs everywhere.

The ISIS operations in Iraq and in Syria generally served American objectives, giving it a reason for illegally keeping well-armed troops there and building bases in someone else’s country with no permission. There is absolutely no record of ISIS ever attacking even the most minor Israeli or Saudi interests, the very groups, along with any Americans who happened to be around, who would be the prime targets for the kind of Jihadi group ISIS is supposed to be.

Now and then, the United States may have targeted elements of ISIS, but, after all, when you are dealing with kind of rag-tag mercenary killers and adventurers attracted by such outfits, you do get some folks who don’t follow directions well or who get ideas of their own, or who, much like Trump himself at a G-7 meeting, sit with scowling looks on their faces and their arms tightly folded over their chests, refusing even to respond to others in the room.

If so, they are easily enough brought back into line by bombs, and they have no one in the West sympathetic with them. While their past theatrical shows of brutality were deliberate efforts to terrorize the very people the United States wanted terrorized, they served also to advertise to the West what an ugly bunch it was that America “was bravely fighting.”

The Syrian Army, supported by Russia and Iran as legal allies, has done all the heavy-lifting against ISIS, treating it always as the terrorist organization that it is, one consistently working to hurt Syria. The whole past record of what ISIS attacked and who it hurt is very much in agreement with the idea of its serving American and Israeli aims.

Much of America’s past bombing – as also that of its allies, Britain and France – really has been more of a covert operation against Syrian infrastructure, to hurt Syria’s national government while pretending to attack ISIS. America has been sarcastically described in the past as providing an air force for ISIS. And American and Israeli helicopters in the past have been observed moving around ISIS groups. The same for other terror groups, as al-Nusra, doing pretty much the same work.

The Russian military, fairly recently, said that if there was one place al-Baghdadi was not to be found, it was in northern Syria where Trump is claiming to have killed him, and no one has any better intelligence on the region than the Russians who have been so active in the air and on the ground.

The United States just loves blubbering about killing “masterminds,” just as it did for Osama bin Laden, but such talk is often pure comic-book stuff. The notion appeals to the black-and-white thinking Washington loves to foster while it pursues its many shadowy projects. Black-and-white thinking is the thinking useful to propaganda because it is easily absorbed by large numbers of people who appreciate having an “explanation” for what is mysteriously going on.

In a sense, it is almost irrelevant whether the new claim is accurate or not. Al-Baghdadi ‘s “death” now serves a useful purpose. It helps justify America’s turnaround in evacuating all its troops from Syria, sending some back in from the places in Iraq they also illegally occupy, accompanied by heavy armor. “See, we told you, ISIS is still a threat in the region.”

The place where al-Baghdadi is said to have been killed was quickly destroyed by American air strikes. How very convenient.

Just as when Osama bin-Laden’s body was buried unobserved at sea. I don’t think there was any suspicion of Osama’s having worked for American interests, but many believe he actually died long before his “killing” in Pakistan by American special forces. I don’t know or make any claim that way, but such is the stuff that swirls around all of America’s secretive, murderous work in the Middle East.

I should qualify the first part of that last sentence. Osama did effectively work for American interests in the 1980s, when he helped fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He was with the mujahideen groups who were covertly subsidized and supplied with weapons by the CIA. By all accounts, he was a brave and able fighter, and the Taliban faction, who came later to rule Afghanistan after a post-Soviet period of chaos, gladly gave Osama, a Saudi, refuge in recognition of that fact.

And “we need to protect Syria’s crude oil fields from falling into the hands of ISIS, who would use them to finance their evil operations.” ISIS is an outfit that has served a lot of useful American purposes in the region. Of course, what the United States is doing is undoing much of what Trump has bragged about doing in recent days.

It sure helps to have a big diversion on hand when you reverse yourself as extremely as Trump has, a diversion identifying you with something good in the comic-book world, like killing an evil “mastermind.”

If Trump isn’t going to have quite the withdrawal of troops that he thought he’d have as a key bragging point for his re-election (vis-à-vis any of the war-supporting Democrats who are likely opponents), at least he has this to demonstrate why he needed so quickly to alter his plans.

The real reason is that Israel and its supporters have been extremely unhappy at the idea of the United States returning northeastern Syria back to Syria’s national government. This grabbing with armored columns of an important national resource has no other reason but to weaken Syria and make a little profit while doing so.

Russia spy-satellite photos have shown that the United States has been stealing oil in the region already. Russian officials are calling America’s behavior, “banditry,” and it is hard to see how any informed person can argue with that.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

 

Information reported from northeastern Syria starkly displays the utter cynicism and cruelty of America’s position there.

The commander of [American partner] Syrian Kurdish forces in the area has apparently angrily told the United States, “You are not willing to protect [my] people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us. This is immoral.”

“I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these [Turkish] bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and [Syria] now and invite their planes to protect this region.”

The Turkish invasion has already killed many hundreds of Syrian Kurds. The Kurds are fighting the invading Turks, but the Kurds are comparatively lightly armed, and Turkey is coming on with fighter planes, tanks, and heavy artillery.

Several vicious incidents are reported of Turkish irregular groups shooting unarmed Kurds, prisoners and a well-known woman politician.

American forces sit back watching while the very people they have been working with, the Syrian Kurds, are bombed and shot by an American ally, Turkey, in an effort to make Turkey happy.

Turkey is being allowed to do just enough killing of Syrian Kurds to reassure itself about its own border security, because, after all, Turkey is a key ally in NATO and one with whom there have been some recent unpleasant disagreements, but don’t let the Syrian Kurds turn to the government of Syria and its Russian ally to fight against invasion from Turkey.

After all, America’s plan for hiving off this chunk of someone else’s country – to weaken Syria for Israel’s benefit, the main purpose of the long ugly proxy war killing half a million in Syria – are being changed only to the extent that a big slice of northeastern Syria will become effectively part of Turkey.

The various public threats the United States has been making against Turkey and sanctions it is calling for are intended only to limit the depth of Turkey’s invasion, not to stop it. They serve also as a public relations exercise so as to not seem to be doing what you are in fact doing.

Trump gets to make noise for the hometown election crowd about withdrawing some American forces while in fact doing virtually nothing, moving a few troops around in order to let Turkey come in and do some killing.

The Syrian Kurds, with whom the United States has been working illegally inside Syria, and whom it refers to as an “ally,” are left to absorb a Turkish invasion of their homes while being told not to seek help elsewhere.

Although it is hard to have too much sympathy for the Syrian Kurds because they have in fact betrayed what was their own country, Syria, by working with America to help break it up.

Such are the glorious realities of America’s fight for freedom in the Middle East.

 

NOTE:

I tend to doubt Trump will have much political success here because his belly-over-the-belt political base, the ones who wear red MAGA hats on shopping trips to Walmart, the border-wall crowd, are not the same people who supported him to get out of the Middle East wars.

He still has done nothing real about America’s vicious, cynical wars.

 

LATE DEVELOPMENT:

Later, the same day I wrote this piece, we have from Aljazeera:

“Syrian government troops will deploy along the border with Turkey to help Kurdish fighters fend off Ankara’s military offensive in northern Syria, the Kurdish-led administration in the region has announced.”

“The move, announced on Sunday, represents a major shift in alliance for Syria’s Kurds and came hours after the United States said it was withdrawing its troops from the area to avoid getting caught in the middle of the fast-escalating conflict.”

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROBERT FISK IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“A year on from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia is lurching towards hysterical chaos

“This whole wretched saga is beginning to look less like ‘War in the Middle East’ and more like ‘Carry On Up the Gulf’”

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-iran-jamal-khashoggi-donald-trump-middle-east-a9126601.html

 

A good piece, and deadly accurate.

The truth is, I’m sure, that America’s government has no great affection for the Crown Prince or for Saudi Arabia.

He is a useful tool for Israeli and American imperial intentions.

A key new part of America’s great bloody effort to remake the face of the Middle East, “the birth of a new Middle East” as Condoleezza Rice charmingly put it when the bombs and screams started to be heard.

All the Neocon Wars – which have killed a couple of million people, created immense floods of refugees, and destroyed several well-functioning states – are part of that plan.

The effort resembles something like trying to pave over everything within hundreds of miles of Israel, America’s de facto colony in the region.

The new Crown Prince was a blessed discovery in the cause, someone suddenly appearing, unbelievably ambitious and willing to kill and kill, and someone who covertly gets along just fine with pals in Israel.

The Crown Prince knows very well that the key to excellent relations with Washington’s power establishment is demonstrating excellent relations with Israel, something Saudi Arabia never did, say, twenty years ago.

It’s only because of the Crown Prince’s attitudes and inclinations that Israel permitted the United States to sell him tens of billions in new armaments, something that wouldn’t have been tolerated not that many years ago.

So, the Prince gets to play powerful ruler of a kind of regional power, something, along with killing, he clearly enjoys.

Only trouble is, there’s that basic reality of traditional Saudi corruption and incompetence showing through, perhaps ultimately threatening the whole house of cards.

Saudi corruption and incompetence flow directly from the fact that the country’s rulers are a gang of immensely rich and spoiled people who want to soil their hands with nothing ordinary or menial. What could you expect in a fairly closed and authoritarian society where hundreds of billions of dollars change hands regularly and in secret? The Saudis try buying everything.

Well, the death the other day of the old King’s faithful bodyguard at Jeddah, Major General Abdul-Aziz Al-Faghm, someone who knew a lot of secrets and an event assigned a highly implausible explanation, accompanied by a huge fire at the new high-speed Jeddah rail station may well signal a new chapter in the Kingdom’s ongoing bloody melodrama.

Saudi Arabia’s disastrous recent failures involving Yemen and Iran’s heroic resistance to America’s undeclared and unwarranted war, “maximum pressure,” against it may indeed signal the coming of a new Middle East, one the United States may not like.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SOUTHFRONT

 

“IRAQI INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI [LEADER OF ISIS] IS HIDING NEAR PALMYRA, PLANNING TO ENTER IRAQ”   

 

I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Mossad or the CIA.

That’s why he’s had so many miracle escapes.

That’s why they never catch him and often don’t even know where he is.

And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets.

Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years.

ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN MONDOWEISS

 

“The US mainstream media is ignoring the Israel-Saudi Arabia de facto alliance”

 

Yes, and it’s all part of American effort to reshape the entire Middle East, an effort which so far has cost about 2 million lives.

The Crown Prince is regarded as a key part of the future of that effort.

He serves the hyper-aggressive new American drive for empire worldwide.

And, of course, Israel really is a de facto American colony in the Mideast.

Actually, the Saudis and Israelis have always had a lot in common, contrary to popular notions.

Both represent privilege in the region, extreme privilege.

Both represent forms of wealth. The Saudis, oil. The Israelis, American and British dual-citizen investors.

Both want to have a lot of “clout” in the region. That’s the problem with Iran for both of them. Its size – about the population of Germany – and oil wealth make it the “natural” dominant country in the region.

Israel’s problems with Iran have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. That accusation is just another weapon for beating down an unwelcome competitor for influence.

Importantly, both represent outsider interests. The House of Saud only goes back a little while, a decade or so, before re-created Israel. It is not an ancient kingdom, although they like to create that impression.

Israel was re-created and is run by Ashkenazim, a group of Germanic origin whose native language is Yiddish, a derivative of German. The word Ashkenazi means “German.” Nothing Middle Eastern about it, except a sentimental attachment to the land of the Bible for believers, but belief gives you no legitimate real estate claims. If it did, the world would be an even bigger mess than it is.

After 9/11, the Saudis were desperately looking for ways to improve their standing in Washington’s eyes.

They did not “do” 9/11 but there were lots of shady matters that made them look bad. Payments to Osama intended only to keep him out of Saudi Arabia. Saudi citizens in the hijack crowd.

After all, from almost any point of view, America’s invading Saudi Arabia, even though they weren’t guilty, would have made immensely more sense than the pointless invasion of Afghanistan. So, the Saudis felt keenly the need to please.

Cozying up to Israel was one of their main methods of attacking the problem. They’ve been working on it now for years. The tone of all press and publicity coming out of Saudi Arabia is unrecognizable from, say, 15 years ago.

And the Crown “usurper” Prince takes things even further, just what Washington wants.

Washington loves men with highly flexible morals and principles. They are useful to the cause of empire. A version of Hitler’s willing helpers, if you will.

The Saudis won creds for covertly supporting the slaughter in Syria, a pet project of Israel’s.

Bombing the crap out of Yemen gave them some gold stars too.

As did their internal assaults on a small Shia minority, Shia Islam being identified with some of Israel’s most hated states.

The Khashoggi Affair is an embarrassment, but they’re doing their best to work around it.

The extra couple of days Pompeo gave them for a “thorough” investigation is for them to get their story straight and decide on the fall guys.

Interestingly, Turkey keeps revealing grisly details to pressure for things they want. They do know exactly what happened.

 

Here is some additional information on the Saudi-Israeli alliance:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/john-chuckman-comment-is-something-big-about-to-break-in-saudi-arabia-we-have-the-most-fascinating-bit-of-dirty-work-in-years-revealing-flat-footed-lies-and-hypocrisy-from-the-united-states-it/

Readers may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/john-chuckman-comment-here-is-what-the-turks-know-about-the-khashoggi-murder-there-really-cannot-be-a-doubt-that-this-was-planned-to-happen-exactly-as-it-did-and-no-doubt-authority-came-from-the-to/

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALEX KRAINER IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“I Wrote a Book Exposing Bill Browder’s Deceptions Because He Could Trigger a Major War With Russia

“Having experienced, first-hand, a vicious war in Yugoslavia, caused by the same kind lying Browder engages in, this author felt he had to speak up.”

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/i-wrote-book-exposing-bill-browders-deceptions-because-he-could-trigger-major-war-russia/ri24782

 

This is a well-written piece. I hope it stimulates people to read the book.

“Today most westerners seem ready to believe that Putin is a tyrant, that he routinely has critics and political rivals assassinated, that he amassed a vast personal fortune and that he runs Russia as his own personal fiefdom.”

Yes, and why is that? Our newspapers and broadcasts are larded with negative stuff about Russia all the time. I can’t recall a time recently seeing a good story about Russia, a huge country with all kinds of diverse and interesting things going on. Some of the stories reach frightening levels of paranoia, as this, following, not long ago in The Guardian (I could cite many more from that truly threadbare excuse for a newspaper, but this one marks a peak in their relentless efforts):

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/john-chuckman-comment-absurd-lengths-to-which-our-press-goes-to-attack-russia-britains-guardian-holds-hate-russia-day-today-some-of-its-stuff-is-so-ham-fisted-it-reads-like-1959-pravda-atta/

When it isn’t actual accusations of some unproved event, such as Theresa May’s weird Skripal Affair, it is just a clear assumption and tone that our press – always following our dishonest politicians as closely as baby ducks imprinted to waddle behind their mothers – is speaking about a country that is somehow “other,” a country that doesn’t operate by the same rules good old America does.

But it really shouldn’t surprise anyone who has a little history and who observes and thinks about things.

First, we must always remember that America waged a 24 hour-a-day internal propaganda war for decades on the subjects of Russia and communism. The FBI worked tirelessly on the subject, as did the CIA, and the press simply was constantly putting attitudes and perspectives “out there” instead of news or facts.

I still remember, as a young man in my home town of Chicago, when Lyndon Johnson first started committing men towards what would literally become an American-created holocaust in Vietnam, seeing a disturbing editorial in one of the more “liberal” papers in the city, the Chicago Sun-Times – liberal, that is, only by comparison with something like the Chicago Tribune, an unrelenting advocate for all things on the extreme Right. The editorial was headlined, I still remember, “The Reds Are at the Gates!”

Well, decades of that kind of stuff does leave some toxic residue, even after the world has changed. That’s why Germany carried on a long and intense campaign against Nazism after the Hitler years. But voraciously anti-Russia, anti-communist America never has made any effort to expunge the memories and results of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton.

And, today, America’s establishment has new reasons for not doing so and indeed for re-igniting the old fires. It is determined to dominate the globe and force advantages from other nations as a means of avoiding its inevitable relative economic decline and the future change in political influence that that entails. The Neocon Wars in the Middle East have been only one part of an effort in many directions and through many means, including threats and sanctions and coups and attacking international organizations of every description.

Russia and China, naturally enough, are seen as barriers against this intense new effort, but Russia’s geography, touching, as it does, America’s unofficial satrapy of Europe and with proximity to the Middle East containing America’s much-privileged colony of Israel, plus its capacity to literally obliterate the United States, make it the greatest target of establishment hate. Russia today and a number of other states welcome a coming multi-polar world. America’s establishment regards it only with fear and loathing.

America has done nothing now abroad but bomb and kill people for over a decade and a half. I don’t know the actual number of deaths – American sources are very coy about how many people they kill, as we learned in the First Gulf War where the number of Iraqis killed was never offered, although we know it was huge with B-52s dropping full loads on sand forts in the desert – but I’m sure the total comes in at no less than two million.

They’ve destroyed, or attempted to destroy, a number of societies – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and others. And they work away at threatening and manipulating still others, everywhere from Iran to Venezuela or Nicaragua. They also tolerate atrocities by Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, to somewhat a lesser extent, by Egypt, because those governments serve and support their overall purpose. Browbeaten governments like Britain and France work as willing helpers while constantly misrepresenting to their own people what it is they actually are doing, as with the cutthroats of ISIS or al Nusra in Syria, whom they have supported and assisted.

And then there are the millions of desperate refugees created by all that destruction, so many they nearly destabilized Europe, and discussion of refugees in the United States, in its politics and in some popular culture, has turned into a national festival of hate, as though refugees did nothing but rob and rape and kill. And I am not exaggerating in the least.

Trump has been a keen promoter of these views and attitudes, but his words do not go out to an unreceptive audience. There are large portions of American society very receptive to such stuff, just as they are receptive to crude stuff about Russia.

And, of course, we have a hi-tech state-operated extrajudicial killing machinery that carries on day and night murdering people no one even knows anything about. The victims are selected by the very folks doing the killing, the thugs and psychopaths at the CIA. And when I say “victims” I’m not even referring to the many innocents killed in the explosions of Hellfire missiles, deemed as “collateral damage,” I’m referring to the targets themselves, victims in every sense of the word, people condemned to be burned alive with no charges or lawyer or trial or rights of any kind.

Now, while all that inhumanity and brutality from their own government goes on, you would be hard put to find large numbers of Americans who know much about it. Their press and politicians never directly speak in such terms. Everything reported is couched in euphemism or they just recite downright lies. And there is the fact that Americans often take very little interest in what is going on abroad – in part because America is itself such a large and noisy and dynamic and time-consuming society. But it is an attitude which very much assists the government in its great volume of dirty work. Surprisingly few people abroad I think appreciate this important fact.

When George Bush was running for president, he once bragged and laughed over telling people he never read the international section of his newspaper. It was the kind of stupid joke you expect from a very stupid man, but the anecdote is notable in that Bush felt very comfortable in making it while appealing for votes. The irony of the presidency now being an office having more to do with events abroad (in the imperial wars and manipulations of others around the world) than events at home is lost on many Americans. Their attitudes are extremely naïve.

There is also the tendency in people – especially people with strong ideological beliefs as many Americans have, which work to insulate the mind against outside influence, exactly the way strong religious beliefs do – to not really see what they are looking at. The best example of many I could cite, is Israel’s current relentless slaughter of unarmed marchers in Gaza. Organized gangs of snipers behind fences, week after week, shoot into crowds of people demonstrating for some rights. Something like 18,000 have been injured and something like 180 killed in cold blood, including women and children and even well-marked medics. Yet, Americans see this atrocity and cling to the narrative that Israel is only defending itself from terror, even showing “restraint,” and their press and politicians faithfully work hard to reassure them of that.

Of course, all of this stresses the importance of the press abroad, Russia’s being extremely important today because the press in American-dominated places like Britain and France reads and sounds a great deal like the press in America, mostly making the same assumptions and promoting the same narratives. It is actually quite a distressing phenomenon to anyone seeking decent information or even a little different perspective on events.

No critically-minded person automatically accepts the truth of everything in the Russian press either. Russia has its own efforts at persuasion and motives for evasion at times, but on many international issues it is clear that some valid information is supplied by Russia. That can be confirmed in many ways, from the voices of truly independent, respectable journalists to the rare authoritative voice speaking out from within a country such as Britain or the United States.

And even where it cannot be confirmed, the time-honored analytical technique of comparing what two very different sources, like the United States and Russia, claim about a story can be quite helpful in revealing roughly where the truth is. After all, that’s precisely what judges and juries in our courts do all the time. It is a valid technique, but you must have that other side of the story to use it.

If you are someone in the United States or Britain, say, who relies, day-in, day-out, on some single news source such as CBS or The Washington Post or the BBC or The Guardian, I can absolutely assure you, at least on the matters discussed here, that you are misinformed.

That’s a sad reflection on our Western society, with its claims to Enlightenment and humanitarian principles, but I can’t think of another broad statement that is any truer. The motives for deception and the size of the stakes for doing so rise tremendously with the dirty work of empire and aggression, the very work in which the American government is now engaged full-time.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

“As Merkel’s Star Fades, This Is What Is Really Happening Behind the Scenes”

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Response to a comment which said: “A simple solution for the EU would be to not follow the US into illegal wars, support of terrorists and proxy wars then they wouldn’t be in this mess and for those politicians who were involved in destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria…”

That really goes to the heart of the matter.

America today pushes aggressive and destructive policies everywhere.

Europe’s leaders just quietly go along, often joining in with varying degrees of token participation to buy American good-will. This really gives America the freedom to describe its aggression as multi-national in character, as the work either of NATO or of such ad hoc constructs as “the coalition of the willing,” rather than as what it truly is, just plain American imperialism.

Europe is left, so to speak, holding the bag, for all the ensuing consequences. This happened with so-called “international terror attacks,” which are just blow-back from America’s Neocon Wars. It has now also happened with floods of refugees nearly destabilizing the continent, the refugees being entirely a product of American bombing and support for rag-tag mercenaries like those operating in Syria.

America takes no responsibility for the consequences of its rampages, especially the huge, years-long one through the Middle East. Of course, the consequences of all that bombing and destruction include millions of desperate refugees. But officials in Washington just brutally ignore the problem.

America’s general public has been conditioned, by politicians and by the commercial press which always supports America’s ugly campaigns abroad, to treat the refugees with sarcasm and contempt. Desperate migrants are spoken of in the best tradition of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his phantom “communists,” a delusional concept which that closet-drunk used to destroy many innocent lives.

Donald Trump perfectly embodies attitudes of a fair part of the American public about refugees, and that fact provides the driving engine of his political support.

America, in fact, has never taken responsibility for the horrors it creates in its imperial wars. It left Vietnam literally as a hell on earth, giving it no help or aid after all those years of destruction – carpet bombing, napalm, Agent Orange, land mines, cluster bombs, and armies of night-crawling assassins. The plight of today’s refugees in the Middle East results directly from the same American national trait of not taking responsibility.

The refugees, which should bring tears to the eyes, are ignored, and they are even laughed at, as are those who do try to help them, such as Merkel, ignored, despite being the direct result of America’s horrific violence.

Merkel, seeing what America had created, was only trying to show some humanity with her now much-despised refugee policy. She may also have felt twinges of guilt about not having stood up to America’s savage policies in the first place.

There was also the consideration that Germany, being an advanced country, simply does not replace its own population anymore. This situation is true for all advanced countries. Economists refer to it as having passed through Demographic Transition.

Populations will inevitably decline in all such countries without migration. All advanced countries are destined to more resemble the early United States or Canada as countries of immigrants, rather than continuing as they are used to thinking of themselves, countries of long-fixed identity and language and culture. I’m sure Merkel understands this.

But an almost uncontrolled, sudden flow of migrants is not really welcomed anywhere. And, in this case, great differences in religion and appearance and customs only fueled resentments and prejudices and hatreds, the very stuff burning and smoldering in Trump’s United States.

So, while I think Merkel had humane and decent intentions – informed also by an understanding of Germany’s, and Western Europe’s, changing population-age structures – her policy was an unavoidable failure owing to the problem’s suddenness and huge size. And it now serves to help the political ambitions of Europe’s own right-wing extremists resembling Trump.

One can only hope that reflecting back on this experience may help Europe’s leaders to begin standing up to some of America’s irrational, unfair demands, such as isolating Iran for no good reason or trying to tell Europe where it should buy its natural gas. These are simply the demands of a bully, and the bully needs to be told.

You know, there was a very telling change, not widely publicized, in the official mission statement of the Pentagon recently. The central purpose of the US military went, with the stroke of a pen, from “deter war,” something with which anyone might agree, to “sustain American influence abroad,” something which reflects almost no other country’s interests.

Of course, that’s exactly what we’ve been experiencing anyway with all the American aggression across a dozen lands, but now it is a stated public purpose. No more pretense. It’s imperialism.

America’s establishment, recognizing its relative decline in the world’s economy since its fortunate glory days after WWII when all competitors and potential competitors were flattened, now is going to use its considerable remaining power simply to muscle its way to every possible future advantage. It’s a business model with which the mafia is long familiar: you give us a piece of the action, or we’ll burn your business down.

Trump’s bull-headed, shameless approach to relationships of every description – in trade, in treaties and agreements, in international organizations, in alliances – seems almost custom-designed to suit the establishment’s need, which is the reason I laugh at all the claims that he heroically fights the establishment, or “the swamp,” as he likes to put it in comic-book terms.

It is already rather late in the day, but Europe’s leaders must try standing up to this challenge. Europe is one of the few political entities in the world capable of resistance, along with China and Russia and, hopefully, India. If Europe is to have any future beyond being an American order-taker and a polite debating society, it must act, although it is now in such disarray – stemming from its past failure to resist American policies such as those creating the refugees – it is not clear whether it still has the capacity.

If it does still have the capacity, the difference will come from that essential, but often elusive, concept, leadership. We get no change without it.

We are entering a “brave new world,” a very dark one, quite different in its form to that Shakespeare’s phrase was intended to describe, a world in which a powerful pretender to high principles acts, in fact, with almost no principles.

Europe’s leaders need to wake up to the new reality. It’s too easy to drift on in old familiar terms about America, as though Jimmy Stewart’s sincerity and sentiments still represented it. They do not. Russia, as you can see in the statements of Putin and Lavrov, is keenly aware. China’s Xi very much is, too, as you can see in his recent proposal to Germany’s leader to combine efforts between Europe and China.

The brave new world we face is one where the bravery of America is on the level of Trump’s getting out of Vietnam service in 1968 with the pathetic excuse of “heel spurs,” an excuse which came from a man playing on the college basketball team, a man now ready to drop bombs or tear-up treaties anywhere. An American bomb now drops somewhere every twelve minutes.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TRUTHNEWS

 

“The disturbing truth about the UK’s special relationship with Israel [Theresa May’s insipid effort to mention Israel’s extreme Gaza violence to a visiting Netanyahu]”

 

This cozy, ethics-free British relationship with Israel has been a fact at least since Tony Blair’s day. It actually goes back further – Churchill was a great promoter of Israeli interests, Churchill, the great pretender on democratic values, was always ready to do any dirty deal he thought would help secure Britain’s Empire – but Blair gave the whole business new life and impulse in our time.

One of the chief aspects of Blair’s “New Labour” rebranding of the old Labour Party was just such a relationship with Britain’s Israel lobby, although you will never find that openly discussed in the press. But you could see it clearly in Blair’s actions.

Just as in the United States – a place where the practices are even more flagrant, perhaps because politics there is so openly and completely steeped in money – the rewards for politicians coming to such arrangements are generous. There is generous campaign funding, favorable mainline press treatment (plus the avoidance of its opposite, embarrassing or demeaning treatment), and the assistance of talented individuals associated with the lobby on various political problems and projects over time.

It’s a pretty attractive package which finds a lot of takers, the only price being that you leave behind any sense of fairness concerning the people of the Middle East and that you simply ignore endless brutality and oppression by the state of Israel. You must have a tough hide, as they say.

Since it is simply a fact that high-level politics, as a career, tends to attract narcissistic personalities and even sociopathic ones – and there is no better, clearer example than Tony Blair – the more normal range of human emotions and sympathies and moral concerns play very little role.

Blair joined the illegal and highly destructive Iraq invasion because the Israel lobby strongly favored it. He simply ignored the rest of the world, including the UN where the matter had been debated and rejected, and made a compact with the devil in the form of the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush presidency to launch an illegal invasion.

He accepted the fraudulent American-produced “evidence” about weapons of mass destruction, added still more of his own by pressuring security services to do what it is security services do, lie and cheat for an end, and ignored what all the experts in weapons inspection were telling us in public, that there were no such weapons. The invasion was effectively for the direct benefit of Israel, never mind all the disinformation at the time about oil.

Afterwards, Blair was rewarded, for his help in killing a million people and destroying a modern society for at least a generation, with the Israel “Peace” Prize of a million dollars plus a number of lucrative sinecures and favors.

And Blair remains at the forefront of the attack against Jeremy Corbyn’s current leadership of the Labour Party, a massive attack which has tended to center on totally specious grounds of accommodating anti-Semitism in the Party’s ranks. There’s been a genuine Joe McCarthy-style witch hunt in Britain, and at length, around that subject.

The truth is, I believe, Corbyn is much disliked by Israel and its lobby in Britain because, one, he is a genuine liberal, something always mistrusted and even hated in Israel, and, two, he is fair-minded about the Israel-Palestine horror.

You really aren’t allowed to be “fair-minded” where Israel is concerned. The undercurrent on that subject always reminds of the brutal ugliness in the United States at the time of its Vietnam holocaust, that last a word well justified by the fact that the United States killed, often in the most horrible fashion, about three million people there, was further instrumental in the killing of another million in Cambodia, and left behind a truly hellish legacy of landmines and soil drenched with agent Orange.

But “Love it or leave it!” “My country, right or wrong!” “The Reds are at the gates!” was what you heard shouted in the streets of America as all that got underway.

David Cameron and Theresa May certainly have never even pretended to be fair-minded about the Middle East or ever raised any difficulties over the most destructive American policies and practices there.

By the way, Britain, under these last two national leaders, has been covertly and deeply involved in yet another Israel-related project, the destruction of Syria by mercenary armies posing as jihadis, the use of disguised mercenaries being a lot cheaper and less risky than mounting a massive traditional invasion as was done in Iraq.

The inaccurately-described Syrian Civil War has been, from the beginning, a covert project of the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, and, originally, Turkey.

Again, the war’s purpose has been to destroy a country whose leadership did not toe the line of American policy in the Middle East, especially where it concerns Israel. You are not allowed to be independent-minded, and you are not allowed to say that your own country has interests which American policy takes no account of. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the millions of refugees created, the destabilization of Europe by refugee floods, and the vast destruction in a truly beautiful and historic land.

Britain has lied steadily for half a dozen years about what it has been doing in Syria, and May maintains the same line.

France, too, has always lied about its role in Syria. Macron and Hollande both have displayed almost embarrassing deference towards Israel’s brutal thug, Netanyahu, while they cooperate in efforts to destroy or dismember Syria.

The various “terror attacks” in Paris were simply “blowback” as a result of France’s destructive participation in Syria, Libya, etc. Such attacks only represent young men trying to get back at a powerful state for its secret organized destruction of their places and relatives and friends. They bear no resemblance to the stories we are fed constantly by our mainline press about terror out of fanatical hatred for Western values and religious intolerance.

Our entire popular concept of terror is a deliberately-promoted construct to support America’s rampage through the Middle East, its Neocon Wars of the last fifteen years, and its unblinking support for an Israel which everyone with eyes can see treats millions of people as less-than-human and with unending brutality.

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Response to a comment, ‘Amazing — Israel can murder people with illegal dumdum bullets and that is just “securing their borders:”’

We literally live in a kind of Twilight Zone where foreign policy and Israel are concerned.

I don’t think there has ever in memory been such gross hypocrisy and open lying.

Standards have hit bottom as the concept of “might makes right” is pretty well openly embraced in the West under American pressure.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON INVESTMENTWATCH

 

“Syria Is All About the Petrodollar, Assad Is the Victim of a False Flag from the CIA”

Mostly nonsense.

Syria is a key part of a long-term plan to create a new Middle East.

It’s been in the works for years at the State Department in coordination with CIA and Israel, its main beneficiary and long-time advocate-lobbyist. The arrogant people running Washington, of course, do not announce such things to mere citizens, the people who vote and pay the costs in taxes and bear any consequences, which, in this case, absolutely includes the whole phenomenon of “international terror” – just angry young men trying to pay back for what’s been done to their countries – plus massive armies of miserable refugees created.

But we’ve had several indirect or cryptic references over the years, including George Bush’s Condi Rice referring to “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” her gracious way of describing the screams of thousands dying and being made homeless.

America’s permanent establishment government, within the elected government, is busier than ever trying to extend American authority to every corner of the globe. There are many reasons for this, but they very much include the Neocons with their philosophy of “if you have the power use it to get what you want,” words with which Hitler would have had not the least quarrel, having gained an upper hand.

Plus, there has been a dawning awareness that America’s relatively carefree years of global dominance, built on the fortunate event of every competitor and potential competitor having been flattened in WWII, are drawing to a close as new, extremely serious competitors in everything rapidly emerge. It is the natural reaction of some of the more aggressive and greedy among us to simply strike out in every direction, hoping some of what they do can stop the process of natural evolution or at least slow it down.

What we have seen happening in the Neocon Wars and the phony CIA-induced Arab Spring (you always give a cheerful name to a dirty project, just as the example of “Patriot Act” being used to cover measures to suppress citizens’ rights) and in such recent events as the CIA-induced coup against a democratic Ukraine – a blatant effort to box-in and threaten Russia – plus all the public relations hype around a “resurgent” Russia, as it merely responds normally and cautiously to extremely provocative acts right next door, is simply aggression, and on a very broad front. There is no other word suitable to describe it although America seems able to come up with a whole corps of hacks like Nikki Haley or Samantha Power or John Kirby to try telling us that war is peace and slavery is freedom.

Israel, which is de facto America’s colony in the region benefits by having all the independent-minded leaders eliminated and having a kind of cordon sanitaire created for hundreds of miles around it. But you will never hear that said in Washington.

Israel, in turn, is expected do whatever the American establishment’s future bidding in the region is. It will serve as a kind of enforcer for the American empire. Once, this role was taken to some extent by the Shah of Iran, whom the U.S. heavily armed, after Washington assisted in creating a coup to end Iran’s democratic government in 1953. But the Shah bungled the job, generated a revolution by his brutality, and then he went and died.

Well, no chance of that happening in Israel with all those layers of hogwash about biblical homeland and thousands of years wandering. Yes, biblical homeland and thousands of years wandering for a European people, the Ashkenazi, who native language is a variant of German and who date back, by actual DNA tests, about nine or ten centuries in Eastern Europe. Besides, they come with a kind of naturally fanatical version of the Pretorian Guard in the sizable settler-ultra-Orthodox crowd.

And, bottom line, a great many Israelis come from the United States and maintain dual citizenship, a state the U.S. was once loath to recognize. People go back and forth all the time creating a web of attachments and privileges and access to important institutions. No one is better “connected.”

Israel could have itself done much of the dirty work in Middle East, but only at the cost of achieving an even worse reputation in the world than it already has as a pariah state with almost no regard for law and international norms and even rules of war.

No, the big part of the murderous job had to be taken on by America.

But even America could not afford, reputation-wise, to just go invading directly, country after country, as it did in Iraq. That outright aggressive invasion produced a great deal of negative publicity and lingering ill will.

So, it developed a system of using rag-tag mercenaries, giving them arms, supporting them covertly in many ways, and often ending up by demanding a “no-fly zone” from the UN, which sounds harmless but every time gets turned into an opportunity to bomb a country with no opposition and look like you are only responding to “bad guys.”

It’s all a terrible set of events allowing the CIA and Pentagon to play God in country after country, and, of course, playing God gets addictive, so we even have a faction ready to be extremely hostile to Russia.

Americans do not realize how much power these agencies of government have acquired for themselves in the process. So, the dirty works of empire also affect the homeland in many ways from an immense network of spying and limits of all kinds imposed to the distribution of military equipment to internal police agencies and the arming of outfits like Homeland Security (another one of those sunshine names for a nasty reality).

The establishment couldn’t care less about the effects on normal Americans, just as it could not care about the two million or so they have killed in the Neocon Wars over the last decade and a half. The message could not be clearer from the behavior of the national government: you do not matter. We matter, and the security agencies which support us and extend our reach matter, and our dark allies abroad are important, but you are not.

Some thought this was the one crucial area in which Trump might make a difference, but the futility of that hope is crushingly apparent.

America’s Bill of Rights has effectively been legally neutered, and you, the average American, think you still have rights which in fact you do not have anymore.

It all reminds me of science fiction scenarios about how robots – or the owners of the robots – will treat the general population of humans in the future when artificial intelligence has effectively taken control of jobs and professions and responsibilities everywhere.

Old East Germany and its Stasi seem primitive and almost comic-bookish compared to what is emerging in the US, what in fact has largely emerged.

“We the people” has become “We the herd.” The establishment – the wealthy individuals and corporate senior people, whose tools the Pentagon and the CIA are along with the corporate press – is engaged in an effort to control just about everything. Today, it effectively rules in perhaps a more intense way than the Old Order in France did before the Revolution, but it is all hidden from direct view, and even scrutiny, of the public.

Two centuries of revolutions and democratic and human-rights principles and struggles of every kind are pretty close to being wiped out in America, while America’s establishment relentlessly works to control the world.