Official Washington’s Delusions on Delusions
Official
Washington operates in its own bubble of self-delusion in which the
stars of U.S. politics, policy and media don’t realize how the rest of
the world sees their sociopathic behavior. This craziness is now
reaching a crisis point on Iran and Russia.
By Robert Parry
March 11, 2015 "ICH" - "Consortium News"
- The chasm between reality and the U.S. political/media elite
continues to widen with Official Washington’s actions toward Iran and
Russia making “the world’s sole remaining superpower” look either like a
Banana Republic (on Iran) or an Orwellian Dystopia (regarding Russia).
On
Iran and the international negotiations to rein in its nuclear program,
the American people witnessed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
striding into the U.S. Congress – like some imperial proconsul – to
deliver a faux State of the Union address that undermined the sitting
U.S. president. Then, 47 Republican senators furthered Netanyahu’s
intent to denigrate President Barack Obama by sending an open letter to
Iranian leaders designed to prevent a deal.
Yes,
I know many Republicans and their overwhelmingly white “base” don’t
consider the African-American Obama the legitimate President despite his
two election victories. But never in American history has a major
political party as brazenly challenged the constitutional authority of a
sitting president to conduct foreign policy.
The letter to
the Iranian leaders warned that once Obama is out of office in 2017,
“the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the
stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the
agreement at any time.” In other words, the Republicans were telling
Iran’s leaders that whatever they plan to sign with Obama and five other
world leaders isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.
This
stunning congressional intervention into U.S. diplomacy was signed not
just by a few backbenchers but by the Senate’s Republican leadership and
several prospective GOP presidential candidates, including Sen. Rand
Paul, R-Kentucky, who had been viewed by some on the Left as well as the
Right as a person who would not toe the Israeli line on Middle East
issues.
This double
whammy of Netanyahu’s extreme rhetoric on Iran and the Republicans’
extraordinary subversion of the Iranian nuclear talks left people around
the world wondering whether the U.S. government had completely lost its
bearings. Meanwhile, the U.S. news media continued veering off into its
own Bermuda Triangle.
What
is particularly striking about this current moment is how the madness
that permeates the U.S. government equally pervades the mainstream U.S.
media, which is now incapable of covering major international events
except through the lens of State Department propaganda, a situation that
has reached extreme levels in the reporting on the Ukraine crisis.
The
only filter that the MSM can place on the events in Ukraine is one
endlessly vilifying Russian President Vladimir Putin. Though this
technique of personalizing foreign policy disputes has become standard
operating procedure for the U.S. press corps – think of Daniel Ortega,
Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Yanukovych, etc.
– the U.S. media’s “group think” on Russia may even surpass those
earlier examples.
Plus,
nothing from the Ukraine crisis can ever be blamed on the U.S.
government, even though Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland
helped orchestrate the violent coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected
government in February 2014 and threw the nation of 45 million people
into a bloody civil war.
‘Russian Propaganda’
On Monday, the Washington Post delivered what
could become a textbook case of journalistic self-delusion – noting
that the Russian people have developed an intensely negative view of the
United States but only because the Russian media portrays the U.S.
government in a hostile way.
The
Post article by Michael Birnbaum blamed the collapse of U.S. popularity
on “furious rhetoric [that] has been pumped across Russian airwaves … a
passionate, conspiracy-laden fascination with the methods that
Washington is supposedly using to foment unrest in Ukraine and Russia.”
Citing
recent polling, the article noted that more than 80 percent of the
Russian people hold negative views of the United States. But that
couldn’t be because of American behavior! No, it’s impossible that
anyone looking at the U.S. today could possibly find anything to
criticize! It had to be Putin’s fault, spreading spurious criticism of
the U.S. via Russian media. Or as the Post put it:
“Fed
by the powerful antagonism on Russian federal television channels, the
main source of news for more than 90 percent of Russians, ordinary
people started to feel more and more disillusioned [about the U.S.]. The
anger seems different from the fast-receding jolts of the past,
observers say, having spread faster and wider.”
The
article quoted Lev Gudkov, director of the polling firm Levada Center,
explaining: “This anti-Western propaganda radically changed the
atmosphere in the society. … It has become militarist.”
Another
voice cited by the Post was Maria Lipman, described as “an independent
Moscow-based political analyst,” saying: “What the government knew was
that it was very easy to cultivate anti-Western sentiments, and it was
easy to consolidate Russian society around this propaganda.”
In
other words, it wasn’t what the U.S. government has done around the
world that has provoked this antipathy – from the endless boasting about
America’s “indispensable” and “exceptional” qualities to its
destructive behavior, including spreading bloody havoc via “regime
change” schemes in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.
And,
it’s not that the U.S. government looks clownish when the majority
party in Congress expresses doubts about global warming and other
scientific judgments. Nor is it the continued examples of racism and the
police shootings of unarmed blacks. Nor the global spying by the
National Security Agency. Nor the national self-degradation when members
of Congress behave like trained seals jumping up and down to
applaud Israel’s Netanyahu.
No,
the only reason that the Russian people look askance at the United
States is that they are being deceived by the lying “propaganda”
dictated by the evil Vladimir Putin. By contrast, the American people
always get the straight story from their mainstream U.S. news media, the
gold standard for the world!
Official
Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have taken on the
characteristics of a male stalker who can’t understand why his female
target finds him repulsive. It must be because someone is poisoning her
mind with negative comments about his sterling personality. We now live
in a system of delusions built upon delusions.
Investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its
connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy
includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here
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