by
Paul Craig Roberts
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.
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.
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 terrorists 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.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment