US, a psychotic superpower bidding for hair trigger

US, a psychotic superpower bidding for hair trigger

A file photo of a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress

Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:57AM

By Finian Cunningham

The Western public, in particular, should forget about all sorts of imagined evil enemies, and just focus on this one fact: the safety of the world and the future of mankind are being held hostage by the US government, its shadow agencies and the financial-military-industrial complex that it serves.

The US has become a psychotic superpower, high on paranoia induced by its own poisonous propaganda. This unstable, lawless rogue state, armed to the teeth and deluded by its own self-righteousness, poses the greatest risk to world security.

The Western public, in particular, should forget about all sorts of imagined evil enemies, and just focus on this one fact: the safety of the world and the future of mankind are being held hostage by the US government, its shadow agencies and the financial-military-industrial complex that it serves.

This week sees an ominous move towards the psychotic superpower being placed on a hair-trigger. According to the US-based Foreign Policy publication, the Pentagon is being advised by its own deluded people - the Defense Science Board - to create a doomsday retaliation force in the event of a «catastrophic cyber-attack».

The retaliation force is to be maintained as a separate entity from the conventional military structure. It would include B52 bombers with nuclear weapons that are ordered to strike on foreign enemies if the US government should «experience» a fatal cyber threat. Note the subjectivity here…

What makes this development disquieting is the self-fulfilling tendency. In recent months, American politicians and so-called news media have taken to accusing foreign states of launching computer virus attacks. China in particular has been singled out for allegedly carrying out hacking raids on American government and news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

As with so many other recent secretive official US claims and decisions, the accusations of cyber attacks are not convincingly evidenced. Just like the Pentagon`s assassination drone program, the public is expected to accept the word of shadowy US government agencies about «imminent» foreign terrorism.

American claims of cyber warfare conducted by China, Russia and Iran seem unfounded and indeed betray a mindset that is hysterical, if not duplicitous. No doubt all governments conduct some level of computer spying and invasion as a modern technological extension of age-old espionage activity. But the claim made by the US that it is being subjected to an unprecedented wave of unilateral cyber attacks appears to be unhinged hysteria.

China in particular has denied any wrongdoing and in fact Beijing has produced data that purports to show that it is the one coming under massive cyber attack - from American sites. It is also conclusive that the US, along with its Israeli cat`s paw, has been sabotaging Iranian sites with the Stuxnet and Flame viruses.

The very real danger, therefore, is that the US is creating a cyber doomsday pretext to justify its long-held prerogative to launch war and destruction against any country that it so designates - regardless of fact or international law.

Whereas before, the US would have had to mount a lengthy, time and cost-consuming, politically tricky process of fabricating a cause for war, now the cyber trigger can be pulled in a secretive and efficacious manner.

Now, presumably, it would be so easy to set up a cyber Pearl Harbour incident or 9/11 type false flag to pin on any designated enemy. The lights go out in Washington for a few hours, social panic sets in with the help from the dutiful news media, and before you know it the B-52s are on their way to turn some alleged miscreant country back to the Stone Age. Stage then set for American-led capitalist neo-colonisation.

Since at least World War II, the genocidal propensity and practices of the US are proven, if not widely known, especially among its propagandized public.

The atomic holocaust of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of the long shadow cast upon the world by this deranged superpower.

For a few decades, the crazed American giant could hide behind the veil of the «Cold War» against the Soviet Union, pretending to be the protector of the «free world». If that was true, then why since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago has there not been peace on earth? Why have conflicts proliferated to the point that there is now a permanent state of war in the world? Former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan have melded into countless other US-led wars across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The «War on Terror» and its tacit invocation of «evil Islamists» have sought to replace the «Cold War» and its bogeymen, the «evil communists». But if we set aside these narratives, then the alternative makes compelling sense and accurate explanation of events.

That alternative is simply this: that the US is an imperialist warmonger whose appetite for war, plunder and hegemony is insatiable. If the US had no official enemy, it would have to invent one.

The Cold War narrative can be disabused easily by the simple contradictory fact, as already mentioned, that more than 22 years after the collapse of the «evil» Soviet Union the world is no less peaceful and perhaps even more racked by belligerence and conflict. The War on Terror narrative can likewise be dismissed by the fact that the «evil Islamists» supposedly being combated were created by US and British military intelligence along with Saudi money in Afghanistan during the 1980s and are currently being supported by the West to destabilize Libya and Syria and indirectly Mali.

So what we are left to deduce is a world that is continually being set at war by the US and its various surrogates. As the executive power in the global capitalist system, the US is the main protagonist in pursuing the objectives of the financial-military-industrial complex. These objectives include: subjugation of all nations - their workers, governments and industries, for the total economic and political domination by the global network of finance capitalism. In this function, of course, the US government is aided by its Western allies and the NATO military apparatus.

Any nation not completely toeing the imperialist line will be targeted for attack. They include Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. In the past, they included Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chile and Panama. Presently, others include Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali undergoing attack operations.

The difference between covert and overt attack by the US hegemon is only a matter of degrees. The decades-long economic sanctions on Iran, the cyber sabotage of that country’s industries and infrastructure, the assassination of nuclear scientists, deployment of terrorist proxies such as the MKO, and the repeated threat of all-out war by the US and its Israeli surrogate, could all qualify Iran as already being subjected to war and not just a future target.

Likewise with Russia: the expansion of US missile systems around Russia’s borders is an act of incremental war. Likewise China: the American arming of Taiwan, relentless war gaming in the South China Sea and the stoking of territorial conflicts are all examples of where «politics is but war by other means».

What history shows us is that the modern world has been turned into a lawless shooting gallery under the unhinged misrule of the United States of America. That has always been so since at least the Second World War, with more than 60 wars having been waged by Washington during that period, and countless millions killed. For decades this truth has been obscured by propaganda - the Cold War, War on Terror etc - but now the appalling stark reality is unavoidably clear. The US is at war - against the entire world.

The latest move by the US ruling elite to give itself a thoroughly modern hair trigger for its warmongering global plunder - the secret, un-provable cyber trigger - is the culmination of its psychotic depravity to rule the world.

This article was originally posted at Strategic Culture Foundation website.

FC/HMV

Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT.