Playing Chicken with Nuclear War
Exclusive: U.S.-Russian tensions keep escalating now surrounding the murder of
Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov yet almost no one on the American side
seems to worry about the possibility that the tough-guy rhetoric and proxy war
in Ukraine might risk a nuclear conflagration, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry (Updated with Washington Post editorial on March 3.)
The United States and Russia still maintain vast nuclear arsenals of mutual
assured destruction, putting the future of humanity in jeopardy every instant.
But an unnerving nonchalance has settled over the American side which has become
so casual about the risk of cataclysmic war that the West’s propaganda and
passions now ignore Russian fears and sensitivities.
A swaggering goofiness has come to dominate how the United States reacts to
Russia, with American politicians and journalists dashing off tweets and op-eds,
rushing to judgment about the perfidy of Moscow’s leaders, blaming them for
almost anything and everything.
These days, playing with nuclear fire is seen as a sign of seriousness and
courage. Anyone who urges caution and suggests there might be two sides to the
U.S.-Russia story is dismissed as a wimp or a stooge. A what-me-worry “group
think” has taken hold across the U.S. ideological spectrum. Fretting about
nuclear annihilation is so 1960s.
So, immediately after last Friday night’s murder of Russian opposition figure
Boris Nemtsov, the West’s media began insinuating that Russian President
Vladimir Putin was somehow responsible even though there was no evidence or
logic connecting him to the shooting, just 100 meters from the Kremlin, probably
the last place Russian authorities would pick for a hit.
But that didn’t stop the mainstream U.S. news media from casting blame on Putin.
For instance, the New York Times published an op-ed by anti-Putin author Martha
Gessen saying: “The scariest thing about the murder of Boris Nemtsov is that he
himself did not scare anyone,” suggesting that his very irrelevance was part of
a sinister political message.
Though no one outside the actual killers seems to know yet why Nemtsov was
gunned down, Gessen took the case several steps further explaining how while
Putin probably didn’t finger Nemtsov for death the Russian president was somehow
still responsible. She wrote:
“In all likelihood no one in the Kremlin actually ordered the killing, and this
is part of the reason Mr. Nemtsov’s murder marks the beginning of yet another
new and frightening period in Russian history. The Kremlin has recently created
a loose army of avengers who believe they are acting in the country’s best
interests, without receiving any explicit instructions. Despite his lack of
political clout, Mr. Nemtsov was a logical first target for this menacing
force.”
So, rather than wait for actual evidence to emerge, the Times published Gessen’s
conclusions and then let her spin off some even more speculative
interpretations. Yet, basing speculation upon speculation is almost always a bad
idea, assuming you care about fairness and accuracy.
Remember how after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, some terrorism “experts”
not only jumped to the false conclusion that the attack was a case of Islamic
terrorism but that Oklahoma was chosen to send a message to Americans that no
part of the country was safe. But the terrorist turned out to be a white rightwing extremist lashing out at the federal government.
While surely hard-line Russian nationalists, who resented Nemtsov’s support for
the U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime in Kiev, should be included on a list of early
suspects, there are a number of other possibilities that investigators must also
consider, including business enemies, jealous rivals and even adversaries within
Russia’s splintered opposition though that last one has become a target of
particular ridicule in the West.
Yet, during my years at the Associated Press, one of my articles was about a CIA
“psychological operations” manual which an agency contractor prepared for the
Nicaraguan Contra rebels noting the value of assassinating someone on your own
side to create a “martyr” for the cause. I’m in no way suggesting that such a
motive was in play regarding Nemtsov’s slaying but it’s not as if this idea is
entirely preposterous either.
My point is that even in this age of Twitter when everyone wants to broadcast
his or her personal speculation about whodunit to every mystery, it would be
wise for news organizations to resist the temptation. Surely, if parallel
circumstances occurred inside the United States, such guess work would be
rightly dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”
Nuclear Mischief
Plus, this latest rush to judgment isn’t about some relatively innocuous topic
like, say, how some footballs ended up under-inflated in an NFL game this
situation involves how the United States will deal with Russia, which possesses
some 8,000 nuclear warheads — roughly the same size as the U.S. arsenal — while
the two countries have around 1,800 missiles on high-alert, i.e., ready to
launch at nearly a moment’s notice.
Over the weekend, I participated in a conference on nuclear dangers sponsored by
the Helen Caldicott Foundation in New York City. On my Saturday afternoon panel
was Seth Baum of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute who offered a sobering
look at how the percentage chances of a nuclear war though perhaps low at any
given moment add up over time to quite likely if not inevitable. He made the
additional observation that those doomsday odds rise at times of high tensions
between the United States and Russia.
As Baum noted, at such crisis moments, the people responsible for the U.S. and
Russian nuclear weapons are more likely to read a possible computer glitch or
some other false alarm as a genuine launch and are thus more likely to push
their own nuclear button.
In other words, it makes good sense to avoid a replay of the Cuban Missile
Crisis in reverse by edging U.S. nuclear weapons up against Russia’s borders,
especially when U.S. politicians and commentators are engaging in Cold War-style
Russia-bashing. Baiting the Russian bear may seem like great fun to the toughtalking politicians in Washington or the editors of the New York Times and
Washington Post but this hostile rhetoric could be taken more seriously in
Moscow.
When I spoke to the nuclear conference, I noted how the U.S. media/political
system had helped create just that sort of crisis in Ukraine, with every
“important” person jumping in on the side of the Kiev coup-makers in February
2014 when they overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
Since then, nearly every detail of that conflict has been seen through the prism
of “our side good/their side bad.” Facts that put “our side” in a negative
light, such as the key role played by neo-Nazis and the Kiev regime’s brutal
“anti-terrorism operation,” are downplayed or ignored.
Conversely, anything that makes the Ukrainians who are resisting Kiev’s
authority look bad gets hyped and even invented, such as one New York Times’
lead story citing photos that supposedly proved Russian military involvement but
quickly turned out to be fraudulent. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Retracts
Russian Photo Scoop.”]
At pivotal moments in the crisis, such as the Feb. 20, 2014 sniper fire that
killed both police and protesters and the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 killing 298 passengers and crew, the U.S. political/media
establishment has immediately pinned the blame on Yanukovych, the ethnic Russian
rebels who are resisting his ouster, or Putin.
Then, when evidence emerged going in the opposite direction — toward “our side”
— a studied silence followed, allowing the earlier propaganda to stay in place
as part of the preferred storyline. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s
“President Gollum’s ‘Precious’ Secrets.”]
A Pedestrian Dispute
One of the points of my talk was that the Ukrainian crisis emerged from a fairly
pedestrian dispute, i.e., plans for expanding economic ties with the European
Union while not destroying the historic business relationship with Russia. In
November 2013, Yanukovych backed away from signing an EU association agreement
when experts in Kiev announced that it would blow a $160 billion hole in
Ukraine’s economy. He asked for more time.
But Yanukovych’s decision disappointed many western Ukrainians who favored the
EU agreement. Tens of thousands poured into Kiev’s Maidan square to protest. The
demonstrations then were seized upon by far-right Ukrainian political forces who
have long detested the country’s ethnic Russians in the east and began
dispatching organized “sotins” of 100 fighters each to begin firebombing police
and seizing government buildings.
As the violence grew worse, U.S. neoconservatives also saw an opportunity,
including Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who told the protesters the United States
was on their side, and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland, who passed out cookies to the protesters and plotted with U.S.
Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt on who would become the new leaders of Ukraine. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine.“]
Thus, a very manageable political problem in Ukraine was allowed to expand into
a proxy war between nuclear-armed United States and Russia. Added to it were
intense passions and extensive propaganda. In the West, the Ukraine crisis was
presented as a morality play of people who “share our values” pitted against
conniving Russians and their Hitler-like president Putin.
In Official Washington, anyone who dared suggest compromise was dismissed as a
modern-day Neville Chamberlain practicing “appeasement.” Everyone “serious” was
set on stopping Putin now by shipping sophisticated weapons to the Ukrainian
government so it could do battle against “Russian aggression.”
The war fever was such that no one raised an eyebrow when Ukraine’s Deputy
Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told Canada’s CBC Radio last month that the
West should no longer fear fighting nuclear-armed Russia and that Ukraine wanted
arms for a “full-scale war” against Moscow.
“Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in
Ukraine,” Prystaiko said. “However dangerous it sounds, we have to stop [Putin]
somehow. For the sake of the Russian nation as well, not just for the Ukrainians
and Europe. What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in
the spine a little.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ready for Nuclear War over
Ukraine?”]
Instead of condemning Prystaiko’s recklessness, more U.S. officials began lining
up in support of sending lethal military hardware to Ukraine so it could fight
Russia, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who said he
favored the idea though it might provoke a “negative reaction” from Moscow.
Russian Regime Change
Even President Barack Obama and other U.S. leaders who have yet to publicly
endorse arming the Kiev coup-makers enjoy boasting about how much pain they are
inflicting on the Russian economy and its government. In effect, there is a U.S.
strategy of making the Russian economy “scream,” a first step toward a larger
neocon goal to achieve “regime change” in Moscow.
Another point I made in my talk on Saturday was how the neocons are good at
drafting “regime change” plans that sound great when discussed at a think tank
or outlined on an op-ed page but often fail to survive in the real world, such
as their 2003 plan for a smooth transition in Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein
with someone of their choosing except that it didn’t work out that way.
Perhaps the greatest danger from the new neocon dream for “regime change” in
Moscow is that whoever follows Putin might not be the pliable yes man that the
neocons envision, but a fierce Russian nationalist who would suddenly have
control of their nuclear launch codes and might decide that it’s time for the
United States to make concessions or face annihilation.
On March 3, the Washington Post’s neocon editorialists emphasized the need for
ousting Putin as they praised Nemtsov and other anti-Putin activists who have
urged an escalation of Western pressure on Russia. The Post wrote: “They say he
[Putin] can be stopped only by steps that decisively raise the cost of his
military aggression and cripple the financial system that sustains his regime.”
The Post then added its own suggestion that Putin was behind Nemtsov’s murder
and its own hope that Putin might be soon be removed, saying: “It’s not known
who murdered Mr. Nemtsov, and it probably won’t be as long as Mr. Putin remains
in power.”
Yet, what I find truly remarkable about the Ukraine crisis is that it was always
relatively simple to resolve: Before the coup, Yanukovych agreed to reduced
powers and early elections so he could be voted out of office. Then, either he
or some new leadership could have crafted an economic arrangement that expanded
ties to the EU while not severing them with Russia.
Even after the coup, the new regime could have negotiated a federalized system
that granted more independence to the disenfranchised ethnic Russians of eastern
Ukraine, rather than launch a brutal “anti-terrorist operation” against those
resisting the new authorities. But Official Washington’s “group think” has been
single-minded: only bellicose anti-Russian sentiments are permitted and no
suggestions of accommodation are allowed.
Still, spending time this weekend with people like Helen Caldicott, an
Australian physician who has committed much of her life to campaigning against
nuclear weapons, reminded me that this devil-may-care attitude toward a showdown
with Russia, which has gripped the U.S. political/media establishment, is not
universal. Not everyone agrees with Official Washington’s nonchalance about
playing a tough-guy game of nuclear chicken.
As part of the conference, Caldicott asked attendees to stay around for a lateafternoon showing of the 1959 movie, “On the Beach,” which tells the story of
the last survivors from a nuclear war as they prepare to die when the
radioactive cloud that has eliminated life everywhere else finally reaches
Australia. A mystery in the movie is how the final war began, who started it and
why with the best guess being that some radar operator somewhere thought he saw
something and someone reacted in haste.
Watching the movie reminded me that there was a time when Americans were serious
about the existential threat from U.S.-Russian nuclear weapons, when there were
films like “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” and “On the Beach.” Now, there’s a
cavalier disinterest in those risks, a self-confidence that one can put his or
her political or journalistic career first and just assume that some adult will
step in before the worst happens.
Whether some adults show up to resolve the Ukraine crisis remains to be seen.
It’s also unclear if U.S. pundits and pols can restrain themselves from more
rushes to judgment, as in the case of Boris Nemtsov. But a first step might be
for the New York Times and other “serious” news organizations to return to
traditional standards of journalism and check out the facts before jumping to a
conclusion.
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.
The Rise of a ‘Democratic’ Fascism
Traditional fascism is defined as a right-wing political system run by a
dictator who prohibits dissent and relies on repression. But some analysts
believe a new form of fascism has arisen that has a democratic façade and is
based on relentless propaganda and endless war, as journalist John Pilger
describes.
By John Pilger
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the
great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness.
Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping
blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal
societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating
danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
“To initiate a war of aggression,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946,
“is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime,
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole.”
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have
happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of
aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and
Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are
the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are
the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the
precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its
virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than
a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities
of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves,
and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of
ten.”
Gaddafi’s Torture/Lynching
The public sodomizing of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel”
bayonet was greeted by the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with
the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his
country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide”
against his own people.
“We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Barack Obama,
“Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have
reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government
forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we
saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for
NATO’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention.”
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would
become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic
Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO
bombers.
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic
independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil
reserves in U.S. dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial
power.
Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by
gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor
countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very
notion was intolerable to the U.S. as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe
African governments with military “partnerships.”
Following NATO’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama,
wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which
Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the
African gold backed dinar currency.”
The Kosovo Model
The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal
hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO
to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against
ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.
David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as
many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” might have been
murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the
Second World War.”
The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal
record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to
call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along
with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international
forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The
FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team
did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war
propaganda machines.”
A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count
of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs
and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie.
The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
Expanding Markets
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely
independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic
bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was
publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community,
especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its
“natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia.
By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the
disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize
Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the U.S. saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied
World Bank loans. NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as
imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in
France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics.
The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the U.S. delegation
inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of
Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the
implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all
government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed
swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the
catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
American Interventions
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69
countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s
modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their
popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and
their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a
crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis
estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is
over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In
fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in
Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.
“The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,”
said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in
any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians
and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and
much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic
Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of U.S. policies from
Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and
dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit
of power is not a goal that commands popular passion. . . . Democracy is
inimical to imperial mobilization.” He is right.
As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state
is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Jimmy Carter’s
National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to
Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
Afghan’s Shining Moment
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on
earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978.
The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and
declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for
all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic
minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files
publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was
abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were
unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and
women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants
and the majority of teachers.
“Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school
and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to
go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen
to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started
winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was
funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any
Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of
liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if
Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would
offer the “threat of a promising example.”
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal
“fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over
$500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow
of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government.
In August 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’
larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government],
despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms
in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the
CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the
faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not
launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central
Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet
Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.”
His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General
Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence
agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the
Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.
Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at
an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a
CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was
celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed
Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was
hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was
September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror,” in which
countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim
world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s
message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”
Threads of Fascism
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American
invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral
damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of
civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the U.S.; yet only one massacre, at My Lai,
is remembered.
In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an
epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which,
from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own
ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of
entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s
victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA
“kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He
then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will
die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless
aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with
their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a
“bugsplat.”
“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the
seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the
bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and
executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
American Exceptionalism
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American
exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations
of national fetishism from the 1930s.
As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee,
Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This
sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized
as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized
brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the
march, its conceit insinuates western culture.
I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion.
I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war
machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, U.S. losses,
including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at
the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places —
just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s
violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this
year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and
nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture
which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”
There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second
World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought
heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967,
the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in
Brazil and most of Latin America.
Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes
against humanity were given safe haven in the U.S.; many were pampered and their
talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror
bomb and the U.S. space program.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became
military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given
their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and
Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was
rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”
The Ukraine Coup
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5
billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-
Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh
Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other
scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first
deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the
governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On Feb. 14, Parubiy announced he was
flying to Washington to get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.”
If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of
Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a
Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich
Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for
opposing the U.S. arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defense
Minister as “the minister for defeatism.”
It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert Kagan, a
leading “neo-con” luminary who was a co-founder of the Project for the New
American Century, which began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998. She was
a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup in Ukraine did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing
Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly
Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev
in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the
1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There
was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the
east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the
manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They
used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank
accounts, stopping social security and pensions.
More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western
media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian
invasion.” The NATO commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might
have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000
Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he
offered none.
Repressing Ethnic Russians
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the
population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic
diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not
“separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and
oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous
“states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been
explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade
union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro
Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In
the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting
from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people
collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda
warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new
clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire
Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for
its “restraint.”
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah”
role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On Jan.
29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost
inadvertently dismissed the very basis for U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia when
he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with
the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who
were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This
was not news.
Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war”
with nuclear-armed Russia.
On Feb. 21, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a
bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate
presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing
into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of
Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin
Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its
president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter.
Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who
revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since
Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war
on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet
across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to
cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well
established.
“If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did
into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness
over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
Nuremberg Lessons
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use
made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each
major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a
press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German
people psychologically for the attack.
“In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the
radio that were the most important weapons.”
In the Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, called, in
effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And
sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might
“nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked
the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America
has the best kit.”
In 2003, Garton-Ash repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large
quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what
remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a
“Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote, “Now we
face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”
The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” —
are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a
Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader.
The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page
advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the
Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This
American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model
predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a
Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not
only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister,
Natalie Jaresko, is a former senior U.S. State Department official who was
hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the
board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of
GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming
soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize
or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As
the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy
riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border.
Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s
economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a
sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the
reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken
the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern
imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our
minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is
assured, and a holocaust beckons.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web
site is: www.johnpilger.com
Netanyahu’s Big Gamble
By going over President Obama’s head to Congress, Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu is taking a big gamble, apparently hoping that he can block any U.S.
rapprochement with Iran and heighten tensions in the Middle East, a strategy
that lacks both facts and logic, says Ted Snider.
By Ted Snider
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Iranian policy not only doesn’t make
sense, it is becoming a threat to Israel’s own self interest. The Iran policy
suffers from a self-defeating paradox.
Netanyahu seems to believe that preventing America from making a nuclear deal
with Iran, and, indeed, preventing America from any dealing with Iran, is
essential to maintaining Israel’s special relationship with America. But his
very action of preventing America from making a nuclear deal with Iran is
threatening Israel’s special relationship with America.
The determination to isolate Iran and vilify it in the international community
makes no sense, and the indictment is riddled with false premises.
The first flaw in the case is the very insistence by Netanyahu that Iran is
building a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu has long warned that Iran is rounding the
corner on the road to the nuclear bomb. But his due dates have come and gone.
Why? According to the U.S., it’s because Iran is not building a nuclear bomb.
National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.) represent the collective conclusions of
the top analysts of all of America’s many intelligence agencies. The 2007 N.I.E.
said with “high confidence” that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in
2003 (there is no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program
before 2003 either). That conclusion has been “revalidated every year,”
according to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
The most recent N.I.E. delivered by the intelligence community provides even
“more evidence to support that assessment,” according to sources of
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. General James Clapper, who was
responsible for preparing the N.I.E., said that “the bottom-line assessments of
the [2007] N.I.E. still hold true. We have not seen indications that the
government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.”
When Senate Armed Service Committee chair Carl Levin asked General Clapper if
the level of confidence that Iran has not restarted a nuclear weapons program
was high, Clapper answered, “Yes, it is.” Hersh quotes a retired senior
intelligence officer as saying “none of our efforts –informants, penetrations,
planting of sensors — leads to a bomb.”
But that’s American intelligence? Perhaps Israeli intelligence disagrees. But it
has long been know that it does not. Yuval Diskin, the man who headed Shin Bet,
the Israeli domestic intelligence agency, for six years, accused Prime Minister
Netanyahu of “misleading the public on the Iran issue.”
Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, then Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense
Forces, insisted that Iran has not “made the decision” to pursue a nuclear
weapons program and that the “Iranian leadership is composed of very rational
people” who are unlikely to build a bomb.
Netanyahu only knows what his intelligence community tells him. They are his
eyes and ears, and we only know what our eyes and ears tell us. But perhaps
Netanyahu’s certainty that Iran is building a bomb comes from higher up in his
defense department.
Not according to then Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who has clearly stated that
“it is not the case” that “Iran is determined to . . . attempt to obtain nuclear
weapons . . . as quickly as possible.” He then added rhetorically, “To do that,
Iran would have to announce it is leaving the inspection regime . . . . Why
haven’t they done that?”
So how does Netanyahu know Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb? He doesn’t.
Failed Predictions
In September 2012, Netanyahu gave his memorable UN address in which he insisted
that Iran was 70 percent of the way to completing its “plans to build a nuclear
weapon,” and that “[b]y next spring, at most by next summer, at current
enrichment rates, [Iran] will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to
the final stage.”
A month later, Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, was telling
South Africa in a classified assessment that Iran was “not performing the
activity necessary to produce weapons,” and that Iran “doesn’t appear to be
ready to enrich uranium to the higher levels needed for a nuclear bomb.”
On a historical timeline, Netanyahu’s public international insistence that Iran
was nearly finished building a nuclear bomb would overlap with his intelligence
agency’s private “bottom line” assessment that it was not.
The second premise of Netanyahu’s argument against Iran is that it is not only
pursuing a nuclear bomb, but that it would constitute a serious existential
threat to Israel if it had one, because Iran had threatened “to wipe Israel off
the map.”
Leaving aside that Iran has a new administration now, despite the stubbornly
persistent reportage by the media and charges by politicians, the former Iranian
administration under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened “to wipe
Israel off the map.”
The mistranslation has been irresponsibly repeated despite the constant
authoritative corrections. Amongst the translation errors, Iranian expert Trita
Parsi states that “Ahmadinejad’s statement has generally been mistranslated to
read, ‘Wipe Israel off the map.’ Ahmadinejad never used the word ‘Israel’ but
rather the ‘occupying regime of Jerusalem,’ which is a reference to the Israeli
regime and not necessarily to the country.”
Not only is the “Israel” part mistranslated, but so is the “wiped off the map”
part. The line, according to Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, is
properly translated as, “this regime occupying Jerusalem must disappear from the
page of time.” This statement is a reference to a wish for a future time when
the Israeli government no longer occupies Palestinian territory. This wish is
not for the end of the state of Israel or her people, but for the end of the
occupation, and is not, therefore, a threat of aggression, but a wish no
different from the official wish of the United States.
Jonathan Steele adds that Ahmadinejad went on to make an analogy between the
elimination of the regime occupying Jerusalem and the fall of the Shah of Iran,
clearly showing that he is wishing for a regime change and not the elimination
of a nation and her people, unless he is suicidally wishing for the elimination
of himself and his own country.
And it is not just Iran experts who deny Ahmadinejad’s murderous wish for
Israel. Dan Meridor, Israeli minister of intelligence and atomic energy and the
deputy prime minister at the time, admitted to his Al Jazeera interviewer that
“They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out.’ You are right.”
Not only did Iran not threaten to annihilate Israel, it promised to recognize
and open relations with Israel. At the 2002 Arab League Summit, Iran was among
the signatories of the Saudi Peace Initiative that promised to recognize the
State of Israel and establish normal relations with it in exchange for an
Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory and a just settlement for
Palestinian refugees. The initiative was reaffirmed in 2009.
In Search of Logic
So Netanyahu’s Iran policy makes little sense. Neither does his strategy for
approaching that policy. Netanyahu has recently vowed to “act in every way to
foil the bad and dangerous agreement” between Iran and the P5+1 (the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council plus German). But his promise to
sabotage the talks has backfired, and his efforts seem, not to have slowed talks
between America and Iran, but, instead, threatened the special relationship
between Israel and America that his efforts at sabotage are meant to protect.
It has not only placed the two allies in a position of “very real differences,”
as President Obama called it, it has led to Israel being cut out of the loop: an
extraordinary shift in the relationship between two countries who seemed to
share everything on Iran and the Iran negotiations. Because the Obama
administration now believes that Netanyahu has cherry-picked sensitive details
about the nuclear negotiations and leaked the misleading information to Israeli
journalists, it has now begun to limit the scope, quality and depth of the
information it shares with Israel.
So, rather than preserving or enhancing the special relationship between the two
countries, the U.S. administration now perceives them as having “a conflict of
interest regarding the Iranian issue.” Netanyahu’s Iran strategy seems to make
no sense because, in his attempt to hang on to the special relationship with the
U.S., his attempts to sabotage America’s pursuit of its own foreign policy
issues seems to have had precisely the opposite effect. America now sees Israel
as a saboteur who is not allied with its interests but in conflict with them.
Netanyahu’s acceptance of the Republican back-door invitation to address
Congress has only enhanced this rift in the relationship. In the past, AIPAC
(the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) could count on having its policy
conference being “attended by more members of Congress than almost any other
event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address.”
However, the Israeli Prime Minister’s willingness to offer himself as an
alternative to the American President in the American Congress has led to
several members of Congress staying away from the AIPAC conference this year.
But the change in the relationship is not only demonstrated by the congressional
absences. This year’s American delegation will be headed by national security
advisor Susan Rice and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, both of whom
will speak at the conference. Though both speakers are high-ranking officials,
the delegation seems to telegraph an important downgrade from recent years when
President Obama, Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry
addressed the AIPAC conference. It is also telling that no high-ranking U.S.
official will agree to meet with Netanyahu while he is in Washington.
Netanyahu’s actions seem to expose an Israeli vulnerability. The special
relationship between Israel and the United States sprouted in the latter half of
the 1960s and continued to grow throughout the Cold War when the U.S. feared
Soviet encroachment into the Middle East. Different Middle Eastern states allied
with different super powers, and, in return, the different super powers
protected different Middle Eastern states.
Israel also feared Soviet influence in the region. In particular, Israel feared
Egypt’s relationship with the U.S.S.R., the U.S.S.R.’s protection of Egypt and
the possibility of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser spreading a pan-Arab
communism in the Middle East. Israel offered itself as a bulwark against Soviet
expansion and interference with American interests in the Middle East.
From the American perspective, then, the special relationship with Israel is
based in large part on Israel being a regional ally to American foreign policy
interests. If Israel takes a conflicting interest to that of America’s foreign
policy interests and even goes so far as to attempt to sabotage them, then the
value of the special relationship becomes questionable from an American
perspective.
Recently, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan has said that Netanyahu’s sabotaging of
American interests has put Israel at “intolerable” risk. Dagan said that “An
Israeli prime minister who enters into conflict with an American administration
must ask himself what are the risks. . . . The veto umbrella provided by the
Americans could vanish, and Israel would promptly find itself facing
international sanctions. The risks in this confrontation are intolerable.”
And now Dagan has been joined by 200 retired and reserve officers all with a
rank equivalent to general. The group, calling itself Commanders for Israel’s
Security, says that Netanyahu has become a “danger” to Israel and that he is
“wreck[ing] our strategic interests with our closest ally.”
Finally, Netanyahu’s approach to Iran now faces one more vulnerability. The
recent U.S. trial of Jeffrey Sterling has made it clear to the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that countries hostile to Iran could “plant a
‘smoking gun’ in Iran for the IAEA to find.” This real possibility may lead the
IAEA to reassess some of the evidence that it has used to criticize Iran.
As James Risen revealed in State of War, the CIA passed on flawed nuclear
blueprints in a bungled attempt to lead Iranian nuclear scientists down the
wrong road, revealing the possibility that other documents were planted in Iran.
If the IAEA reassesses evidence it has used against Iran to see if they are
fake, there could be more damage to Israel from its anti-Iran strategy. Several
of the most damaging pieces of evidence against Iran including laptop documents
about sites at Parchin and Marivan have been suspected of being Israeli
forgeries, as argued by Gareth Porter in his book Manufactured Crisis and, more
recently, elsewhere. Revelation of Israeli forgeries to implicate Iran could
damage Israel and backfire in its attempt to convict Iran of duplicitously
building nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu’s Iran policy makes little sense, not only because of the questionable
veracity of its premises, but, perhaps even more importantly, because of the
self-defeating nature of the strategy. In an attempt to preserve Israel’s value
to America after the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Russia as a
threat to the Middle East, Netanyahu seems to perceive the need to maintain Iran
as a threat to American interests to maintain the need for Israel as a friendly
and powerful partner in the region.
But in pursuing the strategy of preserving the perception of the Iranian threat
in order to maintain the special relationship with the United States, Netanyahu
is pursuing strategies that sabotage America’s own foreign policy interests and
jeopardize the very special relationship with the United States that the
strategy is meant to preserve.
Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns
in U.S. foreign policy and history.
Neocons Want ‘Regime Change’ in Iran
A curious trait of America’s neocons is that they never change course or learn
from past mistakes. They simply press on for more and more “regime change,”
explaining their determination to sink the Iranian nuclear talks to reopen the
pathway to more war, as Jonathan Marshall explains.
By Jonathan Marshall
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address Congress on Tuesday to
warn of the imminent danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. He’s been
sounding the same alarm ever since 1992, contrary to the findings of Israel’s
own intelligence community. It’s time to look through the smokescreen of his
rhetoric to the real issue.
For Netanyahu and his followers in Congress, the goal isn’t a “better” nuclear
deal, it’s a better regime in Tehran. Extreme economic sanctions serve that end
precisely because they will derail a deal. Just as nothing Saddam Hussein did to
comply with weapons inspectors could satisfy the pro-war crowd in 2002-3, so
Tehran can do nothing to satisfy the hardliners in 2015. They fear that any
agreement limiting its nuclear capabilities will take the steam out of sanctions
and give the regime a longer leash on life.
A few members of Congress come right out and admit it. Sen. Tom Cotton, RArkansas, was refreshingly candid at the Heritage Foundation’s Conservative
Action Summit in January, when he called for “crippling new sanctions” against
Iran:
“First, the goal of our policy must be clear: regime change in Iran. . . .
Second, the United States should cease all appeasement, conciliation and
concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain
voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now lest
Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always
absent moderates in Iran. But, the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended
consequence of Congressional action, it is very much an intended consequence. A
feature, not a bug, so to speak.”
Congress all but officially embedded regime change as a goal of U.S. foreign
policy in Public Law 111-195, otherwise known as the Comprehensive Iran
Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010. It doesn’t predicate the
end of tough sanctions on a verifiable nuclear deal. Rather, it requires the
president to certify that the government of Iran has:
(1) released all political prisoners and detainees;
(2) ceased its practices of violence and abuse of Iranian citizens engaging in
peaceful political activity;
(3) conducted a transparent investigation into the killings and abuse of
peaceful political activists in Iran and prosecuted those responsible; and
(4) made progress toward establishing an independent judiciary.
As one critic has noted, “Many U.S. allies, such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia,
could not satisfy all these conditions. So even if Tehran were to stop all
uranium enrichment and dump all of its centrifuges into the Gulf and shutter its
nuclear program entirely, Iran would still continue to be sanctioned by the
U.S.”
In the same vein, tough new sanctions legislation, which the Senate Banking
Committee approved in January with the support of pro-AIPAC Senate Democrats
like Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, states that the United States should
continue to impose sanctions on the Government of Iran as long as it engages in
“abuses of human rights” or supports the Assad regime in Syria.
Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, is as
dedicated to regime change as any Republican in Congress. Indeed, he is an
outspoken defender of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a cult-like anti-regime Iranian
exile group that was listed until September 2012 by the State Department as a
foreign terrorist organization.
Congress delayed a vote on the sanctions bill late March, ostensibly giving the
Obama administration time to reach an iron-clad deal with Iran. But Illinois
Republican Mark Kirk, who likened Iran’s leadership to a “pyromaniac psycho,”
said, “The notion that the Iran sanctions effort can be stopped was killed by
the American people at the ballot box when they elected a Republican Senate.
This is going to move forward in the Senate regardless of what the President’s
feelings are on it.”
Conservatives outside of Congress have been drumming up support for regime
change for years. Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, speaking to
journalists in Israel last month, said of Iran, “When you’re dealing with
snakes, you’re dealing with an entity with which you cannot reason. You can’t
pet the snake, you can’t feed it, you don’t try to make friends with it, you
don’t invite it into your home, you kill the snake, because the snake will bite
you if it has the chance.”
Support for regime change is strongest from neoconservatives who brought us the
“liberation” of Iraq. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton, who joined the
neoconservative Project for the New American Century to promote regime change in
Iraq, says “Instead of focusing on overthrowing Assad or aiding his enemies, we
should be vigorously pursuing regime change in Iran. As Alexander Haig once put
it, ‘go to the source.’”
Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies, a leading neo-conservative think tank funded by billionaire casino
mogul Sheldon Adelson, wrote in 2012, “if we are going to pursue tougher
international sanctions against Iran — and we should — the goal should be regime
change in Iran, not stopping proliferation. . . . Designing sanctions to make
[Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei relent in his 30-year quest for the bomb is
a delusion; sanctions that could contribute to popular unrest and political
tumult are not.”
John Hannah, a senior fellow at the Foundation and former national security
advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, titled a recent column,”It’s Time to
Pursue Regime Change in Iran.”
Michael Rubin, a neoconservative firebrand at the American Enterprise Institute,
wrote in Commentary magazine, “Simply put, the chief impediment to peace and
stability in the Middle East is Iran, and it’s long past time the United States
begins to realize that there will be no breakthrough on any issue of concern to
U.S. national security until the Islamic Republic no longer exists. It should be
the policy of the United States to hasten that day.”
Rubin argued with much justification that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities
would rally support for the regime without delaying its military capabilities
for more than a few years. That’s why Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt argued in the
influential pages of Foreign Affairs that “it would be better to plan an
operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the
regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all.”
Fly, a former member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and Schmitt,
a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and secretary of the
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, argued with the breezy confidence
characteristic of their ilk that by targeting “key command and control elements
of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated
with other key government officials,” U.S. forces could “compromise severely the
government’s ability to control the Iranian population” and open the door to
“renewed opposition to Iran’s current rulers.”
Given the bitter experience of America’s many interventions over the past half
century, it’s hard to take such arguments seriously. The ongoing carnage in
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and other theaters is proof that the United
States doesn’t have a clue how to change regimes for the better.
As Robert Wright commented, “You’d think that our eight-year adventure in Iraq
would have raised doubts about the extent to which changed regimes will hew to
our policy guidelines. There we deposed an authoritarian leader and
painstakingly constructed a government, only to see the new regime (a) tell
America to get the hell out of the country; and (b) cozy up to an American
adversary (Iran!).”
For that matter, you’d think that America’s prior history of regime change in
Iran itself would give interventionists more pause. The theocratic regime that
rules Iran today came to power in part thanks to bitter resentment against the
U.S.-British operation to overthrow the country’s democratically elected prime
minister in 1953, after he nationalized Iran’s oil. Following the Islamic
revolution in 1979, Washington turned to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a
counterweight to the Khomeini regime, offering military support for Hussein’s
invasion of Iran and setting the stage for the tragic wars of 1991 and 2003.
President Barack Obama has directly acknowledged that the U.S. role in the 1953
coup contributed to the “difficult history” of mistrust between Iran and the
United States. And he addressed Tehran’s legitimate fears directly when he told
the United Nations General Assembly in 2013, “We are not seeking regime change
(in Iran), and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful
nuclear energy.”
For the neoconservatives who today have the upper hand in the Republican Party
and in Congress, President Obama’s attempts at reconciliation with the Axis of
Evil are nothing less than a sin. These hawks demand regime change over
reconciliation. But if they succeed through extended sanctions in derailing an
agreement, the only guaranteed outcome will be conflict and chaos.
Jonathan Marshall is an independent researcher living in San Anselmo,
California. His last articles for Consortiumnews were “Unjust Aftermath: PostNoriega Panama”; “The Earlier 9/11 Acts of Terror”; and “America’s Earlier
Embrace of Torture”; and “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions.“