John Chuckman

COMMENT – THOUGHTS ON THE TALE OF RUSSIA AGAIN TRYING TO INFLUENCE AMERICA’S ELECTION

 

Political and ideological tales in America enjoy a remarkably long shelf life. I think the fact has to do with unchanging, iron-bound ideology and a simple lack of imagination.

Already, the stuff about Russia working to influence the approaching American election has resurfaced like a bloated corpse floating in a stagnant pond. It’s being repeated by American intelligence officials, American media, and Democratic politicians. 2016 redux.

Hillary Clinton used it as one of several fall-back explanations for her loss, something she had a brutally difficult time accepting as reality, having spent more money than some nations’ space programs have at their disposal. About 1.2 billion dollars.

The charges about Russia were silly then, and they are only sillier now.

But it is an intimidation tool in a country which listened to J. Edgar Hoover blubber for decades about “the communist conspiracy,” trying to tell voters that their votes are supporting Russia.

Russia wouldn’t dream of getting caught trying to manipulate an American election. There really is no reward important enough to be worth the risk.

Of course, facts make no difference in this kind of mumbo-jumbo, but Julian Assange already told us that Russia did not give him the damaging material about the Democrats in 2016.

Several distinguished American technical experts have repeatedly said that the material came from downloading to memory sticks by someone with access to DNC computers, not from hacking. That is the kind of statement that can be made definitively in such matters by an expert who recognizes the telltale signs.

Anyway, what has Trump done for Russia that possibly could have rewarded an effort on his behalf? Nothing.

Of course, individual Russians, both politicians and others, and news sources have their election favorites, just as is the case in America.

I believe a fair part of the Russian establishment does favor Trump, but there are some easy-to-understand explanations for the fact, and they have nothing to do with conspiracy.

First, Russia is a remarkably conservative country. This fact jumps out at you if you read some of its news sources, as I do regularly.

Second, while both American political parties are Pentagon-embracing War Parties with very little real difference between them, the Democrats do seem to make the most noise around hostility towards Russia.

Third, Putin is a very clever and subtle man. He knows what a hopeless putz Trump really is. There are reports of Putin and associates making fun of Trump in private.

If he does favor Trump, it is only because he knows how bad Trump is for America’s interests, America being a nation with about a century of hostility towards Russia. A poor leader like Trump making blunders and creating enemies with everything he does is a lovely situation to chuckle over with some vodka in Moscow.

Putin wouldn’t dream of doing anything to influence the matter, beyond his influence over Russia’s own now extensive English-speaking press, but so what? America’s press never stops talking about Russia, and in disparaging terms, calling it everything from a “regime” to a “kleptocracy.” And it is overwhelmingly the case that most Americans never see the Russian press.

John Chuckman

NOTES ON THE INSANITY GRIPPING THE UNITED STATES – RUSSOPHOBIA AND MEANINGLESS WARS WITH THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF PROPAGANDA

 

[Note to readers: this is a collection of thoughts loosely related to the title above rather than a finished essay]

 

In all American mainline publications, you will find Russo-phobia. It comes in many forms and variations, just as is always the case with propaganda and disinformation.

That sense of its being vaguely “everywhere” should serve as a warning for what is a universal characteristic of a certain kind of propaganda. Call it synthetic gossip.

Such propaganda follows the logic of big advertisers who want you to be as continuously aware of their products as it is possible to make you. That is why the Internet now is plagued by advertising, a longstanding reality of print and broadcast journalism and we see “product placement” in the films we pay to see.

That warning largely goes unheeded, just as for most people advertising saturating everything is just taken for granted as part of the atmosphere, part of the air they breathe.

And being “part of the air everyone breathes” has its real effects. In the early days of television, when advertising began to appear in everyone’s living room, often by the deceptively open and honest face of the star or host of a show, it quickly became apparent how powerful its effects were. Companies noted immediate jumps in sales of advertised products.

It had been so for radio, too, with its intimacy of a friendly, attractive voice listened to closely by families from the comfort of their living-room couches and armchairs, especially at certain evening hours.

But television was even more so with a friendly or sympathetic famous face seen glowing in a dimly-lighted room, almost a form of enchantment. A great deal of early television advertising was of the form of a program’s host or star taking a minute from the work of the program to talk to you directly about something he or she especially liked. Neighborly. Chatty. Cozy.

The approach is no longer “cozy” – Arthur Godfrey or Rod Serling or Bob Cummings taking a moment from his show to focus on you with a friendly word of recommendation – because American society in large part has moved on from “cozy.”

Part of the impact of post-early television technology has been to atomize and de-centralize society, each member of a family, for example, focusing on his or her own interests through various “media’ and devices.

A trace of the early form of personal advertising has survived in the endorsements now so widely used in every written or image format from labels to boxes. Companies pay such people great sums of money for lending their influence with fans or followers to the company’s interest of selling its product.

Advertising works as a form of suggestion in the human mind, and as with suggestion, not everyone is equally susceptible, but virtually everyone is to some degree. That’s why advertising works and why companies spend countless billions of dollars every year to place their “suggestions” “out there,” ideally in forms and in places where the most susceptible population will be exposed.

Propaganda and disinformation work exactly the same way. It is naïve to believe, as I am sure most Americans very much believed during the height of the Cold War, that only in authoritarian states is propaganda used on the people of a country. That belief was itself a suggestion constantly reinforced in television shows, movies, and in magazines and newspapers. It was inescapable.

Over the decades, advertising and propaganda have grown not just in volume but in sophistication and complexity. There is still some room for the simplistic stuff of an earlier time, but the dark arts have largely moved on.

The ideal is to plant a “targeted” suggestion in your mind, one targeted to appeal to your tastes and preferences because such suggestions are the most powerful. And ideally, that is accomplished in a manner so that you are really not aware of what is even taking place.

That is part of why we have in our daily-living environment something almost resembling a cosmic storm among the stars, a storm of cosmic rays and particles of every description bombarding everything entering a region.

That’s a pretty good description of Russo-phobia in the United States. It isn’t just in political speeches, it isn’t just in government and political publications, nor is it only in newspaper articles and television programs, it is virtually everywhere in one form or another, including just the word choices writers and speakers make and the attitudes they strike.

It is the contemporary sophisticated descendent of such rather clumsy propaganda as a television series, “I Led Three Lives” in the 1950s, or “The FBI” of the late 1960s, each episode of which had a brief personal anti-communist message at the end from J. Edgar Hoover himself.

Such shows were only one of countless ways that the “Soviet menace” was made almost tangible inside America. Politicians speeches, newspaper and broadcast story selection and emphasis and editorials kept fueling the fires.

I vividly remember, near the real start of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War, a local newspaper in Chicago, and certainly not the most conservative one, having an editorial with a big bold headline, “The Reds are at the Gates!” That was likely 1964.

Even the assassination of John Kennedy was employed in the cause. Books and articles suggesting Russia was directly or indirectly involved, or that Russian-supported Cuba was, appeared for many years after his death, another measure of the size and intensity of historical anti-Russian activities.

Those suggestions were interesting because the assassination was almost certainly about the opposite of those claims and suggestions. It was about ending Kennedy’s efforts to form new communications with, and policies towards, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

In the case of Cuba, during the early 1960s, an entire industry had become established in the United States to promote hostility and war.

The CIA and FBI had massive investments in everything from radio and newspaper propaganda to gun-running operations, the training of private armies, the writing of manuals, the regular mounting of a range of terrorist operations against Cuba, plus many other activities right down to relationships with mafia interests who were offended by events in Cuba and keen to display their patriotism through cooperation with agencies like CIA and FBI.

All of it was supported by the vast resources of the State Department and other agencies and departments of government. I think few Americans today, younger ones anyway, are aware of the scale of the enterprise. Well, Kennedy very much got in its way, and it was unquestionably elements of that enterprise who killed him.

I do not mean to diverge into the 1960s or the assassination, a subject of great past interest to me.

I’m only touching on the massive legacy of anti-Russian feelings and notions fixed into the very fabric of the country. It still helps support any new anti-Russian initiatives. That always includes the Pentagon and CIA and FBI – it’s just their gut institutional instinct – but it also very much includes American political interests, and from both parties, each party’s emphasis varying over time.

In America it often takes a very long time for the public consensus to reach a conclusion about something you might think should have been apparent fairly early.

But when the establishment sets its mind to doing something, it is virtually impossible to stop it. And it has so many avenues for influencing people and keeping them confused – from corporate newspapers and broadcasters and hack writers and speakers at many institutions to virtually the entire national political establishment of both parties.

Since America is so much less a democracy than many recognize, it really isn’t necessary to fool all the people all the time. Far from it. And the flow of “information” from establishment sources is constant, virtually around the clock. It becomes part of the air you breathe.

Besides, Americans work very hard, and many have little time for becoming informed about such matters as, say, foreign affairs. If they have to trust someone with the idea of truth, it will tend to be the establishment voices easily accessed.

Most hardworking people at any level have little time or inclination to search for and assess different sources of information, as independent or foreign ones. And, truth be told, there are relatively few solid independent voices out there despite the apparent crush we can see on the Internet.

Apart from outfits on the Internet that now function virtually as agents for the establishment – outfits like Facebook, Wikipedia, or Google – the establishment has a good many inauthentic “independent” publications that it keeps going. The CIA always followed that practice with magazines and news sources during the Cold War, and it does still with sites many believe are independent voices.

Major Western European news sources today – as in Britain, France, or Germany – are in virtual lockstep with their American counterparts. If you think the Washington Post is biased – and it is, heavily – try The Guardian or BBC. They are often toe-scrunchingly insincere.

At the higher end of the employment scale in America, up-and-coming corporate and large professional office types work long hours, ten and twelve hours a day is not unusual, and often more than five days a week. It’s just expected of them. It keeps you looking like someone suitable for promotion. And the competition of others looking for promotions reinforces the discipline. When you do get home, there’s all those middle-class obligations, from the kids’ sports teams or music recitals or meetings at school to walking the dog or attending a service club meeting.

At the low end of the employment scale, millions of Americans must work more than one job just to make a go of things. Or, many jobs demand unusual hours and days. On public transit, for example, pretty good-paying working-class jobs, it is common to have “swing shifts,” where you are responsible for two periods each day. Yes, the hours between are free, but they are often effectively not very useful with not enough time to travel home and do anything substantial. These realities of everyday American economic life are I think not widely appreciated abroad.

For all its reputation for individualism, too, the United States in many matters exhibits very little of it. It is a remarkably lockstep society at a certain social level, the level that counts in influencing anything. I’ve never quite understood where that reputation for individualism, as touted in movies or novels, comes from.

The Vietnam War was a decade-long killing spree in defense of an artificially created rump state, South Vietnam, which for its entire existence was run by dictators. Although run by dictators, Americans were steadily given vague assurances that they were fighting for the values of American democracy.

The rump state served almost exclusively the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. It served as a toehold in Southeast Asia, a kind of colony, a base for American corporations to market their wares. A pied-a-terre for the CIA. Those were the only American values ever really being served.

The big fighting got started not too long after the flimsiest of excuses, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in the summer of 1964. It was a non-event, even as described in the news at the time, and later we learned it was truly a non-event with virtually nothing having happened.

But it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in so many other places since, and notably in Syria where non-existent poison gas attacks, supposedly by the government, gave America the excuse to hurl fleets of cruise missiles at people it wanted to hurt anyway, the Syrian Army.

Of course, it was the presence of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that gave America the excuse to invade Iraq, destroying one of the most advanced societies in the Arab world and ultimately killing about a million people with all the violent aftermath included.

The destruction of Iraq’s basic facilities was so thorough that all these years later many in Iraq do not have dependable drinking water and electricity. The term “Shock and Awe” was coined by the public relations flacks at the Pentagon for the opening massive, overwhelming destruction, a term which gives some idea of the intensity and one, by the way, with clear bloodlines to Hitler’s concept of “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war).

Once America got into heavy fighting in a protracted war, Vietnam became many other things, including a testing ground for new methods of mass killing, an important part of a supply chain into North America for hard drugs, a laboratory for mass CIA terror tactics attempting to influence a population, and a place of endless lies.

While not all the details were apparent to anyone at the start, enough was understood by a good many to question the United States ever seriously entering the war. John Kennedy, who was inclined not to get involved beyond the level of a significant body of military advisors, was replaced by perhaps the most corrupt and ruthless man ever to become President, Lyndon Johnson, who had his chance to be a “war president,” and he wasted very little time getting things moving.

Today, we have among other wars, the war in Afghanistan. The pointlessness of the war in Afghanistan – that 18 years of bombing peasants and strafing wedding parties – was apparent to a good many from the start. I wrote a number of essays on the subject.

At the time of the invasion, I felt it was just a brute need for some kind of vengeance over 9/11, even if they didn’t know who to take vengeance on. I could imagine certain Americans sitting at bars across the country doing a lot of elbow-pumping and hooting and yelling at the first broadcasts of bombs dropping in Afghanistan, something resembling a scene from a big football game.

But the Taliban were not terrorists, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. They are not pleasant people, but that is common enough in poor places where people earn hardscrabble livings. And I think my original view remains valid.

Recent revelations by The Washington Post (which to a certainty reflect someone in high places leaking for political purposes, not the investigative thoroughness of a newspaper which always doggedly supports America’s wars with the same enthusiasm as the late John McCain) tell us that even inside the military, no one understood why the United States was fighting in Afghanistan.

Yet America still fights there.

And will be still after Trump makes his election-campaign withdrawal, whose size is said to amount to a fraction of the troops.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALAN MACLEOD IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Government, in Their Own Words”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/20/how-journalists-demonize-venezuelas-government-in-their-own-words/

 

A very interesting piece.

And anyone expects truth in anything from America?

Inside and outside the country, Americans walk through a dense haze of lies.

It resembles a science-fiction tale, but it is real.

It’s what happens when you have an empire instead of a country.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Beware of ISIS retaliation in wake of leader’s death, experts say

“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead after U.S. targeted mission on Saturday night”

 

It is not at all clear that Trump is telling the truth, and it would hardly surprise anyone to discover, once again, that he isn’t. I think it fair to say that Trump, after a lifetime’s practice, can no longer distinguish truth from what he wants to be true.

Trump’s presentation of the “facts” is dubious. His words and tone are almost ridiculously unsuitable for the nature of what he discusses.

And al-Baghdadi has been reported as being killed many times in the past.

It is not known whether he escaped previous efforts or has been kept “alive” for American disinformation purposes. Some past reports were given in very strong terms.

This time, he is said to have blown himself up with a suicide vest.

However, American planes immediately did numerous bombing runs over the area, effectively destroying any evidence to be discovered.

They were supposedly destroying any possibility of a future shrine to the man, but that is a ridiculous claim. Muslim mosques contain no representation of people. They have none of Christianity’s statues and icons and paintings because Muslims do not worship human figures the way Christians do.

So, with all that immediate destruction, it is hard to see how Trump can possibly know what he claims to know.

We must consider the fact that Trump – given his just sending back troops into northern Syria, this time accompanied by heavy armor – needed some kind of strong attention-getting counter to his at least partial reversal of “policy” in Syria.

The man only ever thinks about his own re-election – that’s all the “withdrawal” in Syria ever was about, so he could face a war-supporting Democrat, which is what all the likely candidates, such as Biden or Warren, indeed are.

Trump has a large political base, but it is not large enough to elect him without pulling in anti-war voters also, as he did in 2016.

This killing of al-Baghdadi smells strongly of a stunt, while American troops busy themselves plundering Syrian oil, activity spy satellites have already photographed, and the Russians have published.

As for ISIS as a threat to the West, that has never been established. Given the record of what they actually have attacked over their brief history (which just happens to correspond to America’s activities in the region), all things America and its allies wanted attacked, like the Syrian government and certain elements in Iraq, you might well regard such talk of threats as propaganda.

 

INTERESTING AFTERNOTE:

Russian news sources have reported the following.

While Trump said, “Russia treated us great. They opened up – we had to fly over certain Russia-held areas.  Russia was great,” the Russian Defence Ministry said they are unaware of providing cooperation to American air units entering airspace over the Idlib in Syria.

“No airstrikes performed by US aircraft or aircraft belonging to the so called ‘international coalition’ were detected on Saturday or during the following days,” Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.

“Since the moment of the final Daesh’s defeat at the hands of the Syrian government army supported by Russian Aerospace Forces in early 2018, yet another ‘death’ of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not have any strategic importance regarding the situation in Syria or the actions of the remaining terrorists in Idlib.”

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Maria Butina: Russian agent who tried to infiltrate the NRA released from prison and deported”

 

Just the headline is ridiculous.

The Independent should be ashamed.

She admitted to what her torturers insisted. Otherwise, she faced never again seeing the light of day.

Imagine, a gun enthusiast from another country who was a university student in the United States being accused of “spying” for joining a private organization that lobbies for gun owners?

The case provides a powerful measure of the extent of America’s Russia-phobia mental disorder. She was effectively tortured and intimidated for months by American officials.

Just absurd… and vicious.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MATT TAIBBI IN ZEROHEDGE

 

“Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war …”

 

A good piece, capturing some fundamental truth about America’s power establishment.

In the early summary of the costs of the War on Terror, however, we find this:

“What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million?”

Well, it is far greater than that.

Just in Syria, at least that many have been killed.

The total for the invasion of Iraq, including all the aftershocks set off by it, is perhaps a million souls.

Then there’s Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and several lesser spots.

I think a fair rough number is around 2 million.

And the number of hopeless refugees?

Many million. At least 3 million are in camps in Turkey. Germany took around a million. Terrible old Syria took about 2 million originally from Iraq.

No, the consequences of this American insanity are immense and will affect people for a couple of generations.

Meanwhile, the expenses-paid lunches in Washington likely swelled to record amounts.

It’s called the abuse of power.

It’s also called corruption, and Lord Acton had it so right with his words about power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

America’s power establishment arrived at that last point in the dictum quite some years ago.

The amazing thing for me is how any American can believe his country would be free of these basic forces shaping human society?

Americans are somehow purer of heart? I do think there is some of that. Remember George Bush’s pathetic, blubbering Sunday School teacher words about America when some of the military’s war crimes came to light?

Take a bunch of privileged and ambitious insiders, give them hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on questionable projects with no well-defined purpose, give them all the secrecy they demand, give them no real accounting for their acts, and give them a blizzard of favorable propaganda to cover whatever they do.

What possible other results could you get?

The naivete of average Americans in just accepting this from their (bought-and-paid-for) politicians and never questioning what’s in their (bought-and-paid-for) corporate press is astonishing.

Astonishing but a fact.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Democracy Now’s ‘Alt Media’ Platform for Humanitarian Imperialism in Syria

“Sprinkle it with bleeding heart rhetoric and pinkos will eat up all the western imperialism they are served and scream for seconds”

 

The headline is a bit over-the-top, but I understand where it comes from. I do object to anyone’s disparaging liberalism in general, something all too common these days. Genuine liberalism is sturdy and has its roots in the work of some of Europe’s finest political and philosophical minds over the last three centuries.

Amy Goodman does not represent that. She represents a brand of faux-liberalism, one found typically in contemporary America, which always features squishy political correctness and acceptance of American imperialism. They are in large part spokespeople for a “kinder, gentler” empire, truly odd hybrid types whose influence has widely extended into Western Europe and Canada now.

In effect, Amy Goodman and others like her are CIA shills.

Her brand of fluffy, ineffectual liberalism is just fine, if that’s what she wants, but if you examine the net effect of her views, she unquestionably represents CIA interests.

There are a number of American liberals in this same category, and there long have been. Publications, distinguished ones, too, serve and have served this role. The old Saturday Review, Time Magazine, the New York Times, etc, etc. Some were actually penetrated by CIA and some were heavily subsidized.

What more effective way to help guide or control American domestic opinion? It’s a gimmick that has been used by security services many times, and it works.

I have no idea whether she is aware or not of her situation. Often people in a position such as hers are quietly and secretly supported by the security services in their work and never know it.

Of course, she’s happy to have a good, cozy job with a fair amount of ego-satisfying public exposure, and I’m sure she actually believes she is working for the common good.

But America is not, and never has been, a genuinely liberal nation.

And I’m talking about real liberalism – the philosophy that always respects human rights and democratic values and rule of law and always abhors bullies and aggressive war. That does not exist in America, except in scattered micro-populations.

How else could it be in a brutal empire, straining to control every last square inch of earth?

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘Russia has been spying on the Skripals for at least five years, Britain claims”

 

That is hardly any logical person’s idea of proof.

Just one more government spokesperson, in effect, saying the same thing but using some embroidered details to make it interesting for the press.

And, of course, the press happily complies in publicizing it.

By the way, the claim that Russia took an active interest in the Skripals for five years is close to laughable. He was never a truly important spy, and his active service goes back too many years to make him of the least threat to Russia.

Not one of the real and hard questions about this matter has been answered. Not one. Such as how you can touch nerve gas but walk around for a considerable length of time before collapsing? Or why the doctor, who first treated the daughter on an emergency basis where she was discovered collapsed on a bench, was wholly unaffected? Or why Salisbury was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off upon the poison’s “discovery”? Or why no one can speak to the Skripals? All those questions and many more.

This then seems to have become the standard of British justice, at least in all matters involving Russia: accuse and punish before proving anything. And Theresa May and Company have now proved they can get away with doing so.

The same standard was applied to the missile strike in Syria. The international chemical weapons investigators, the OPCW, who are to closely examine the area where it is claimed the Syrian government used poison gas, had not even yet fully deployed to begin their work before the attack. Why the rush?

This is just sick, and anyone supporting such a standard deserves the contempt of all honest thinking people.

What could drive Britain – with the United States and France, as though three bullies somehow made an assertion into hard proof and made their acts just – to behave in this extraordinary way?

The answer is clear for those who follow events closely, but of course most people have neither the time nor inclination to do so, making it easy for governments  like Britain’s to behave in such awful ways.  The war in Syria is basically lost. A six-year investment in recruitment, training, paying, supplying, and covertly assisting gangs of mercenaries posing as jihadi types is pretty much down the drain.

The goal was the destruction of Syria and its effective Balkanization, exactly the same fate imposed upon Libya and Iraq. All part of a long-term American-Israeli plan for the “birth of a new Middle East,” a “birth” which so far has cost about two million lives and millions of desperate refugees with the promise of yet more ahead.

Only in Iraq, national armies were openly used. Here, in Syria, the effort was to avoid having to do that and yet achieve the same result.

Of course, the use of national armies – U S and British – had many disadvantages in the Iraq War, from being accused of illegal invasion – exactly what Iraq was – to having leaders like Blair and Bush end up publicly disgraced.

Besides, that cost a great deal of money. This phony-jihadi approach has been largely financed by Saudi Arabia’s princes – people, by the way, for whom the presence of large foreign armies in the Middle East becomes a serious domestic political liability. The Saudi princes are also people who have worked for years trying to regain the good will of America after 9/11. They are willing to do almost anything which doesn’t generate instability at home.

So, America teamed up with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey to launch and sustain a six-year work of destruction in Syria. Because the actors employed were “rag-heads,” it was possible to sit back and pooh-pooh the horrors you were in fact assisting.

Britain and America pretended to bomb outfits like ISIS while largely in fact destroying Syrian infrastructure, thus providing ISIS and other ugly mobs like al-Nusrah effectively with an air force. All of the above-named countries supplied weapons to the mercenaries – many caches have been discovered by advancing Syrian forces with the countries of manufacture clearly stamped on them – and they periodically sent in covert special forces to assist them. British and Americans have been spotted there in the past, and, of course, now France openly moves troops illegally into the Kurdish region.

But the effort in Syria has largely failed, and the Israel Lobby is very unhappy about the fact. The evidence for that is seen in a score of little clues – Israel is hardly going to publicly “own” the Syrian horror although it always verbally attacks Assad, even while its own army is busy slaughtering unarmed Palestinians – clues from renewed attacks on Jeremy Corbyn – whose true glaring fault is that he does not support this kind of nasty stuff – to calls by various Israelis and Israeli apologists in the United States openly calling for Assad’s assassination.

Only the other day, an apologist at the American Enterprise Institute, one of America’s privately-endowed “think-tanks” which basically serve as academic-looking propaganda mills, Michael Rubin, openly suggested that it was time to kill Assad.

His call just mimicked the recent words of an Israeli minister, almost like an effort to give a public call for state murder some respectability. That’s sure my idea of a principled approach, but that is just a part of the ugly realities of the Syrian War – so often deliberately misrepresented as a civil war.

After all, with the disappearance of the Syria we know, Israel hoped not only to further legitimize its illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights but to grab still another slice of Syrian property for its Greater Israel project. It also would see a neighbor who did not agree with all its illegal and unethical behavior swept conveniently away.

Well, now with all the missile explosions in Syria – again, all completely illegal under international law – Trump and May and Macron can crow and boast and thump their chests like the apes they imitate. They get to strut around and tell their people what strong leaders they are. Maybe get a little adulation and support, all of them being unpopular in their own countries. After all, it is well-known effect on the psychology of populations that they tend to close ranks in conflicts.

And they want to be seen as leaders of such high principles as that no injured child could possibly go unrevenged. America should try telling that to the parents of the vast pile of child corpses which it left in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Iraq, and in still other places.

A million children killed by this wonderful country would be an extremely conservative estimate. You see, in poorer countries, populations are very young with a high proportion of children compared to adults, and when you bomb such places, you absolutely kill vast numbers of children. And, boy, does the United States like bombing such places.

Even were the United States not in fact what it is – the world’s greatest killer of children over the last half century or so – who or what appointed them to revenge events in other places, even were the events genuine, as they very much are not Syria? America completely ignored many genuine mass murders – in Rwanda, in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in the Iraq-Iran War, in Chile, in Palestine. Why? Because there was nothing politically to be gained. America’s self-appointed role as “punisher of injustice” seems limited only to countries where it is politically engaged and has something to gain.

The attack was carefully planned not to affect Russia, who had made it very clear what the consequences of doing so would be, and, in truth, it accomplished little. The dirty foreign-inspired Syrian War is mainly over, and the bad guys lost.

 

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON AMERICAN AND BRITISH ACCUSATIONS OF SYRIA’S USING CHEMICAL WEAPONS:

The authorities responsible for what is virtually certain to have been a staged false gas attack in Syria have little regard for the intelligence of their citizens.

Why would Syria, which has pretty close to won its war against foreign terrorists, even think of doing this at this time in this place? And for so little advantage to themselves?

If Syria still had chemical weapons, why confine their use to this little patch?

At this moment when a whole renewed public controversy had been raised in Britain with the questionable Skripal affair?

It makes no sense. Syria could have used such weapons in multiple areas, saving some hard street fighting in many instances, but it did not.

Further, even were the attack genuine, using real chemical weapon, why would the cutthroats trying to destroy Syria not be the likely candidates?

Why is Assad automatically accused? And without a bit of evidence?

Absolutely none of our corporate press, despite running story after story with glaring accusatory headlines, has even a single reporter on the spot. They’ve questioned no real authorities either. There is zero journalism behind those headlines, such as we’ve seen in The Guardian for days.

In all such matters, whose word do you give more weight to? Russia, which has destroyed its stocks under the international chemical weapons treaty or the United States, which still has not done so?

Remember, the greatest independent investigative reporter on the planet, Sy Hersh, told us clearly a while back that the United States ran an operation out of Gadhafi’s smashed Libya, an operation supervised by Hillary Clinton, transferring quantities of the murdered Gadhafi’s stocks of nerve agent to the mercenaries in Syria so that a “red-line” event could occur, allowing Obama to freely and self-righteously bomb Syria and reduce it to the chaos that had been made of Libya?

And remember, only a major Russian diplomatic effort prevented the fraud at that time. Syria surrendered, under international supervision, its existing stocks of chemicals for destruction by Russian experts. Syria, like Libya, had maintained such weapons as a counter to Israel’s unacknowledged and totally illegal nuclear arsenal.

Remember also, in the run-up to America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, America and Britain lied day after day about Saddam having such weapons? We had foolish scenes at the UN and foolish dossiers published, all created as part of a stage play to tell the world that Saddam had what he did not have at the time, chemical weapons.

Remember further, in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a terribly bloody war secretly encouraged by the United States to weaken revolutionary Iran, chemical weapons were used heavily by Iraq to slaughter many thousands of Iranians who seemed about to prevail.

Where did those weapons suddenly come from? And did you hear any great outcry over that genuine atrocity at the time?

No, in these matters, people who follow events understand that the unsubstantiated word of the United States or Britain is proven worthless by recent history.