March 27, 2015 "ICH" - Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the author of many important books. His latest is The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity.
Chossudovsky shows that Washington has globalized war while the US
president is presented as a global peace-maker, complete with the Nobel
Peace Prize. Washington has military deployed in 150 countries, has the
world divided up into six US military commands and has a global strike
plan that includes space operations. Nuclear weapons are part of the
global strike plan and have been elevated for use in a pre-emptive first
strike, a dangerous departure from their Cold War role.
America’s
militarization includes military armament for local police for use
against the domestic population and military coercion of sovereign
countries in behalf of US economic imperialism.
One
consequence is the likelihood of nuclear war. Another consequence is
the criminalization of US foreign policy. War crimes are the result.
These are not the war crimes of individual rogue actors but war crimes
institutionalized in established guidelines and procedures. “What
distinguishes the Bush and Obama administrations,” Chossudovsky writes,
“is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture
chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention,
which sustain ‘the global war on terrorism’ and support the spread of
‘Western democracy.’”
Chossudovsky
points out that the ability of US citizens to protest and resist the
transformation of their country into a militarist police state is
limited. Washington and the compliant foundations now fund the dissent
movement in order to control it. He quotes Noam Chomsky and Edward S.
Herman about manufacturing consent. He lets Paul Kivel describe how
funding of dissent by the elite results in the co-option of grassroots
community leadership. The same thing is happening to environmental
organizations. Black Americans also have lost their leaders to the
elite’s money and ability to bestow position and emoluments.
Chossudovsky
notes that progressive, left-wing, and anti-war groups have endorsed
the “war on terror” and uncritically accept the official 9/11 story,
which provides the basis for Washington’s wars.
Having accepted the lies, there is no basis for protest. Thus its absence.
As
Professor Stephen Cohen has observed, dissent has disappeared from
American foreign policy discussion. In place of dissent there is
exhortation to more war. A good example is today’s (March 26, 2015)
op-ed in the New York Times by neoconservative John R. Bolton, US
ambassador to the UN during the George W. Bush regime. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0
Bolton
calls for bombing Iran. Anything short of a military attack on Iran,
Bolton says, has “an air of unreality” and will guarantee that Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey will also develop nuclear weapons in order to
protect themselves from Iran. According to Bolton, the Israeli and
American nuclear arsenals are not threatening, but Iran’s would be.
Of
course, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program,
but Bolton asserts it anyway. Moreover, Bolton manages to overlook that
the agreement being worked out with Iran halts the Iranian enrichment
program far below the level necessary for nuclear weapons. Bolton’s
belief that Iran would be able to hide a weapons program if permitted to
have nuclear energy is unsubstantiated. It is merely an implausible
assertion.
The
neoconservatives constitute a war lobby. When one war doesn’t work,
they want another. They have an ever expanding war list. Remember, the
neoconservatives are the ones who promised us a 3-week “cakewalk” Iraq
war costing $70 billion and paid for by Iraq oil revenues. After 8 years
of war costing a minimum of $3,000 billion paid for by US taxpayers,
the US gave up and withdrew. Today jihadists are carving a new country
out of parts of Syria and Iraq.
It
is now a known fact that the neocon Bush regime’s Iraq war was totally
based on lies, just as is every other neocon war and the current drive
for war with Russia and Iran. Despite their record of lies and failure,
the neocons still control US foreign policy, and neocon Nuland is busy
at work fomenting “color revolutions” or coups in the former Soviet
republics of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
Without
the support of the New York Times, the neocons could not have got the
Iraq War going. Now the New York Times, faithful to the neocons but
faithless to the American people, is helping the neocons get a war going
with Iran and Russia.
I
have friends who are college presidents who still read and believe the
New York Times. The wars with Iran and Russia that the New York Times is
encouraging will be much more dangerous than the wars with Iraq and
Afghanistan. Humanity might not survive them.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.
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