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US presidential elections: A view from the Middle East

By Sharmine Narwani | RT | April 30, 2016

Although the era of US global hegemony is coming to a close, the Middle East – more than most regions – is still reeling from the nasty last jabs of that Empire in decline.
It is little wonder, then, that the US presidential election season is scrutinized carefully in all corners of the Mideast.

Over here, the debate over the likely victor is less about economic, political and social projects than it is about which candidate is least likely to launch wars against us.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a consensus that Hillary Clinton would be the worst for the region, though of course – like in the United States – that perception changes dramatically when the conversation is with regional elites and ‘liberals.’

And just like their American counterparts, Middle Easterners get bogged down in arguments about Donald Trump’s ‘racism,’ Bernie Sanders’ ‘viability’ and Clinton’s ‘hawkishness.’ Media, after all, has never been more uniform in its pronouncements – we all, universally, receive the same talking points.

But US Presidential Election 2016 means a lot more than US polls in decades past. From the Levant to the Persian Gulf to North Africa, borders have never been so frayed, terrorism so pervasive, security and resources so threatened.

The Middle East is a wretched mess. And at the heart of each and every one of these quagmires stands the United States, imposing itself, its military ‘expertise’ and its humanitarian ‘do-gooding’ into our suffering. Ironically, perhaps, there are few problems in the Mideast that have not been caused or exacerbated by the destructive hand of US foreign policy.

The last playground

The Middle East is the last global playground where the US can act with impunity. Part of the reason for this is that most of the two dozen states that make up the region are still headed by US-backed dictators and monarchs – American proxies that prioritize Washington’s interests over those of its citizenry. The US plays hard in this region because it wishes to maintain this remarkably favorable status quo, which it has lost virtually everywhere else.

Even as the Cold War was drawing to a close – vanquishing the old Soviet bloc proxy leaders in the Mideast and replacing them with US-friendly ones – the 1979 Iranian Revolution flipped the region once more, ushering in a new framework for independence from the ‘Anglo imperialist.’

In the aftermath of Iraq’s war with Iran, which had placed Iranian aspirations on hold for eight long, destructive years, Tehran began to forge regional relationships that formed the underpinnings of a new Axis of Resistance to US and Western hegemonic ambitions.

The US expanded its military role in the Middle East mainly to eradicate this ‘Shia’ thorn in its side – but it has not only failed to do so with each consecutive US administration, it has willfully unleashed the well-contained demons of sectarianism to achieve this goal.

Hello, Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalism. Hello, Al Qaeda. Hello, ISIS.

Why even get into this recent history? It’s important for one main reason. Even as the US now turns its guns on the Frankenstein monster it created from its invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now its intervention in Syria… Washington also has its guns aimed at Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and other entities that are fighting this very terrorism.

When Trump debuted his foreign policy vision earlier this week, he pointed out that current US policy was “reckless, rudderless and aimless” – “one that has blazed the path of destruction in its wake.”

It’s all we’ve heard in recent years – certainly since the start of the Arab ‘uprisings’ – with pundits and commentators alike scratching their heads in confusion over US goals in the region.
American policy is not confused – it is very deliberate. Get your head around this: Washington seeks to thwart the Iranian-led axis by unleashing sectarian, Wahhabi-influenced extremists into parts of the region viewed as Iran’s strategic depth, AND it seeks to counter the proliferation of these extremists by reaching out to Iran, tactically – hence the sudden P5+1 nuclear deal in the midst of all this conflict.

This is what I call America’s “strategic dissonance” – playing both sides to engineer protracted conflict in an effort to gradually drive the two sides into extinction.

Only problem is the unpredictability of it all – and the ensuing chaos, destruction and terrorism that has now poured over these borders into Europe and beyond.

Mr. America versus Ms. Beltway

It is clear that this strategic dissonance has once more led to an American “unintended consequence.” It is equally clear that it will take nothing less than a sledgehammer to alter the destructive bent of US foreign policy.

What’s interesting about this election year is that voters have put their backs behind unlikely candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, mostly, it seems, to buck the establishment.

The two long-shot candidates have delivered scathing reviews of Beltway politicos and the ‘interest groups’ that prop them up – foreign and domestic, both.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton – the ‘deserving’ establishment candidate who was a shoo-in until a few short months ago – has had to fight for every vote in her contests with Democratic Party newcomer Sanders.

And the easiest blows against Clinton have been in the foreign policy arena, where the Beltway hawk has a long record of backing the wrong plan – in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria.

In the Mideast, Clinton’s militaristic leanings scuttle any goodwill one would otherwise have for a Democratic Party candidate. Egyptians lobbed tomatoes, shoes and water bottles at her motorcade when the then-secretary of state made an appearance after the ousting of longtime US ally President Hosni Mubarak.

It was under her stewardship at the Department of State when “foreign hands” began to make their marks on the Arab uprisings – none to the benefit of the Arab masses.

Her support for the ill-conceived US invasion of Iraq, which led to the establishment of Al Qaeda in that country, is a constant refrain here in the Mideast – much as it is in the United States. And her refusal to acknowledge the disastrous consequences of US military intervention in Libya remain proof that she never learned from Iraq.

Like him or not, Clinton’s maniacal laughter over Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s violent death as she sanguinely declared “We came, we saw, he died,” has been forever imprinted on our collective memories.

We have since learned that US President Barack Obama’s decision to militarily intervene in Libya came down to her vote. Libyan blood cannot be washed off those hands.

And now Clinton wants to escalate in Syria by carving out a “safe zone” – which is how her Libyan adventure started.

If Clinton suffers from a likeability problem in the US, she is downright reviled in the Mideast – except among the usual suspects which include dictators, monarchs and other super-wealthy elites who have either contributed to the Clinton Foundation or are desperate to maintain their cushy positions within a US-dominated region.

Then there’s Trump

The highly controversial billionaire businessman Donald Trump has been roundly bashed in this region for his prejudicial comments against Muslims, but there’s a quiet parade of thinkers in the Mideast – from Arab nationalists to progressives to intellectuals – who have been casting coy second glances his way.

“Trump can turn the system upside down,” says a leading Lebanon-based Arab nationalist. “He’s his own man, he will not be dragged into the trappings of the deep state,” says an influential writer.

“Who else is willing to put the brakes on NATO, disengage from lousy alliances, hook up with Putin and others to fight terrorism the right way, prioritize diplomacy over military options? Not Clinton, no way,” a college student rants.

There is that.

Unlike Clinton, there’s not much we know about Trump. He has no foreign policy record, except of course his non-stop reminder that he opposed the US invasion of Iraq and warned that it would be a “disaster.”

But if you’re going to take a chance on a candidate – if you’re going to try to read between the lines of campaign promises – I suggest taking the unconventional, risky declarations more seriously than predictable, voter-friendly platitudes like “I support the state of Israel unconditionally.”

And Trump has some doozies.

On key US ally Saudi Arabia, arguably ground zero for the militant extremism rampant in the region – and a country that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says was prepared to “fight the Iranians to the last American” – Trump warns that he might halt purchases of Saudi oil unless Riyadh commits ground troops to the ISIS fight. His comments mirror those of Gates – as disclosed in a 2010 Wikileaks cable – who said of the Saudis that it “is time for them to get in the game.”

“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, I don’t think it would be around,” suggests Trump, quite correctly.

On Russia, Syria and US support of rebels: “Putin does not want ISIS. The rebel groups… we have no idea who these people are. We’re training people, we don’t know who they are… we’re giving them billions of dollars to fight Assad… If you look at Libya, look what we did there, it’s a mess. If you look at Saddam Hussein, with Iraq, look at what we did there, it’s a mess…”

In what seemed like a swipe at US support of questionable militants in Syria and elsewhere, Trump says: “We need to be clear sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy. We have to be smart enough to recognize who those groups are, who those people are, and not help them.”

Asked if the Mideast would be more secure if Saddam and Gaddafi were still around and Assad were stronger, Trump boldly declares: “It’s not even a contest… Of course it would be.”

And this: “I like that Putin is bombing the hell out of ISIS. Putin has to get rid of ISIS because Putin doesn’t want ISIS coming into Russia.”

In short…

Trump is an unknown quantity, but he is delivering some home truths to restive voters in an unconventional election year.

Clinton is the quintessential establishment candidate, the sure-thing that voters wish they could like, who is running for president at the wrong time for a beltway insider.

Trump has defied all the odds thus far, and there is no reason he can’t continue to do that all the way to the White House. Whether or not he can keep surprising once he is there is anyone’s guess. Will he become co-opted by the system? Will he strike down entrenched Washington dogmas with his trademark arrogance? Nobody knows.

If Trump runs against Clinton, his campaign mantra has to be “Clinton: tons of experience, no judgment.” It’s pretty much the only way he can compete with a seasoned politician who is sure to throw his inexperience back in his face at every opportunity.

For the Mideast, this is not the time to pick the ‘devil we know.’ We know how that story ends every single time: destabilization, chaos, terrorism.

Trump is definitely the lesser evil, whichever way one looks at it. He simply cannot be worse than her.

But there is one solitary upside to a Clinton presidency. If Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States… we will see the world shift decisively into a new multi-polar order. The battle over Syria became a red line for the Russians, Chinese and Iranians, and they placed protective arms around key states, in turn forging closer relations with each other – some of these, military dimensions – and with a number of other ‘middle powers’ that threatened to up-end US hegemonic ambitions once and for all.

Imagine then, the reactions of Russia, China, Iran, Brazil, South Africa and other states irked by US-backed destabilizing campaigns, if a hawk like Clinton is ensconced in the White House.

We’ll slip into a new world order faster than you can say ‘Goldman Sachs.’

Follow Sharmine Narwani on Twitter at @snarwani

Read more:

‘Neocon Clinton courts regime change, isolationist Trump wants less US meddling abroad’

April 30, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Plans ‘Don’t Make A Lot of Sense’

Sputnik – 29.04.2016

Following Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s exploratory foreign policy speech on Wednesday, political analyst Daniel McAdams speaks with Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear to discuss what, exactly, the candidate’s worldview encompasses.

“It is clear that in Washington he has aligned himself with foreign policy advisors that are not the usual neocons. So that’s good news, to a degree. That’s why you have so much gnashing of the teeth in Washington,” McAdams, of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, tells Loud & Clear, referring to billionaire Donald Trump.

“On the other hand, the people that he does have around him are realists, to a degree, but that is not super satisfying to a non-interventionist and an anti-war person because realists… lack the philosophy… of avoiding war and avoiding entangling alliance.”

“… The specific plans that he outlined a) were not very well hashed out, and b) they don’t make a lot of sense,” says McAdams.

While Trump does recognize the failure of Washington’s insistence on pursuing a Cold War-era strategy, the candidate does not see American imperialism as part of the problem.

One example is his opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement.

“This groveling to Israel, this blind condemnation of the Iran nuclear deal… I don’t get his beef and I don’t think he gets his beef. It just makes him sound good, it makes him sound tough.”

On the issue of the Iraq and Syria, the Republican frontrunner seemed to offer contradictory positions.

“This is where I think he’s either very clever or fairly goofy,” McAdams says.

“On the one hand he says something that sounds good to non-interventionists… On the other hand he says something like ‘Obama went in there and bombed Libya and just walked away.'”

“That’s the whole point,” states McAdams. “Not walking away means staying in and doing nation building. So he doesn’t understand what caused the problem. He also promises to use military force to contain radical Islam, and he talks about ‘Why are we not bombing Libya right now?'”

Trump also spoke of restoring the military superiority of America, the country with the largest military budget in the world, shortly after stating that he would pursue peace.

“Rebuild our military from what? We spend more than most of the rest of the world combined. We have an enormous military, we’re involved in over 120 countries,” McAdams says.

“What he means by ‘rebuild’ the military is keep Washington and its environs extraordinarily rich,” he adds, describing the military-industrial complex, which Trump appears to support.

He did, however, offer a surprisingly insightful take on US-Russia relations.

“Here’s what he said exactly. ‘We should seek common ground based on shared interest with Russia.’ He said he’d, ‘Make a deal that’s good for us and good for Russia.’ That sounds terrific. If he follows through with that I think we should be very optimistic.”

April 29, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Worldview: Old Wine in New Bottles

By Stephen Lendman | April 28, 2016

Believe nothing politicians say. They all lie. Trump sent mixed messages in delivering his first foreign policy address. His worldview is more nightmarish than visionary.

His America first agenda features uni-polarity, nativism and US military supremacy while claiming to “want to live peacefully with Russia and China.”

Absent was urging respect for and adherence to rule of law principles along with wanting mutual cooperation among all nations.

He failed to denounce America’s imperial agenda, its phony war on terrorism as a pretext for endless aggression against nonbelligerent states threatening no others.

On the one hand, he called “(o)ur foreign policy… a complete and total disaster.” On the other, his “administration will lead a free world (sic) that is properly armed and funded…”

He lied about the Iran nuclear deal, calling it “disastrous.” In earlier comments, he vowed to rescind it, ignoring the obligation of P5+1 countries to observe agreed on principles – Iran in full compliance.

Saying Tehran “ignor(ed) its terms even before the ink was dry” was willful deception. America alone continues violating terms it agreed to observe.

Stressing “Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” ignores its peaceful program with no military component or indication it seeks one – along with failing to denounce Israel as the region’s sole nuclear armed and dangerous regional state, threatening its peace and stability.

Trump shamelessly called the Jewish state “the one true democracy in the Middle East… a force for peace and justice” – ignoring its longstanding anti-Palestinian genocidal agenda, ongoing viciousness as he spoke.

His address was a litany of misinformation, distortions and Big Lies.

Obama “watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression,” he blustered.

“China… continue(s) its economic assault on American jobs and wealth…” It’s waging cyberwar “to steal government secrets…”

“If President Obama’s goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.”

“We’re a humanitarian nation… (T)he legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess… We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.”

All of the above twists reality demagogically. North Korea threatens no one. For decades, Washington spurned its efforts to normalize relations with the West.

China doesn’t steal US jobs. Corporate America offshores them to numerous low-wage countries, bipartisan US policy doing nothing to stop the transformation of industrial America into a third world nation.

Trump conveniently ignored post-9/11 Bush wars of aggression, bipartisan complicity supporting them.

Clinton’s 1990s Balkan wars preceded them, raping and dismembering the former Yugoslavia.

Obama’s imperial agenda is more of the same, exceeding the worst of George Bush – Hillary Clinton as secretary of state orchestrating naked aggression on Libya and Syria.

Muslims, not Christians and Jews, are at risk in today’s dangerous world. Post-9/11, US foreign policy left millions dead, endless carnage continuing, Congress permitting it with outsized military appropriations for permanent war on humanity.

Who knows what Trump means about everything changing if he becomes president. “America is going to be strong again,” he ranted.

Claiming he wants “radical Islam” halted ignores its US creation and support. Surely he knows, but won’t say, perpetuating the myth of war on terrorism – failing to explain ISIS and similar groups can’t exist without foreign support.

“(W)e have to rebuild our military and our economy,” he blustered. Annual defense authorizations should be greatly reduced at a time America has no enemies.

Billions saved should be invested domestically to create jobs for the one out of four working-age Americans without them – and better ones for the millions of underemployed.

Trump shamelessly calls increasing America’s military strength “the cheapest, single investment we can make…Our military dominance must be unquestioned, and I mean…by anybody and everybody.”

At the same time, he stresses not wasting “one single dollar.” Pentagon policy is a longstanding sinkhole of waste, fraud and abuse. Trump bluster won’t change things.

Putting America first sounds like demanding other nations operate by US rules or else. Saying “I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative” is no different from current imperial policy.

Insisting he wants “peace and prosperity, not war and destruction” suggests a pledge to be breached straightaway in office, continuing dirty business as usual.

Trump differs from rival candidates largely in style. If elected to succeed Obama, expect deplorable continuity, not responsible change.



Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

April 28, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , | 1 Comment

A Note on Hillary Clinton, the Queen of Chaos

By Diana Johnstone – CounterPunch – April 15, 2016

About a year ago, I concluded my book on Hillary Clinton, “Queen of Chaos”, with a fairly pessimistic chapter on the “War Party” which controls United States foreign policy. At the time, I wrote:

“A last-minute peace candidate would be a divine surprise. But a real alternative to the War Party must be built up over time…”

In fact, this primary campaign has produced a couple of surprises, more earthly than divine. Both surprises reveal widespread grassroots discontent with both Hillary Clinton and the whole American political establishment. However, this discontent so far fails to focus on the point of my book: the need to combat the ideology and practice of U.S. war policy personified by Hillary Clinton. Where is the effective alternative to the War Party?

Donald Trump has made it clear he wants to end the current hysterical anti-Putin pre-war propaganda and do business with Russia. This sounds like a major step toward preventing nuclear war. All to the good. The problem is, Trump is a lone wolf. Many of his supporters seem more excited by style than by content. Their multiple incoherent grudges against the system do not add up to an anti-war movement. Trump is unpredictable, and it is hard to see where he would find the foreign policy team and the support needed to overthrow the entrenched foreign policy elite.

With Bernie Sanders, things are a bit the other way around. The Sanders campaign is creating an enthusiastic popular movement, with specific aims in domestic policy. Bernie calls for a “political revolution” and insists that he cannot accomplish all this by himself. All to the good. But Bernie Sanders has said little about foreign policy. The radical shift in domestic priorities advocated by Bernie implies drastic cuts in military spending, but he has not been spelling this out. Despite his strong opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he has been susceptible to the “humanitarian” war cries of the liberal interventionists, who would certainly strive to take charge of his foreign policy should he miraculously be elected.

So, Trump has the defiance, and Bernie has the movement.

What is still lacking in this campaign is clear denunciation of the very worst of Hillary Clinton’s many negative traits: her eagerness to go to war.  And it is not merely Hillary who needs to be defeated: it is the entire militaristic power structure she represents.

One hopeful sign is the resignation from the Democratic National Committee of Hawai’i Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in order bring her strong voice against “regime change” wars into the Sanders campaign. There is a chance that as it develops, anti-war sentiment may grow more explicit in the Sanders movement, influencing Bernie himself and providing the social force needed to confront the liberal interventionists within the Democratic Party.

The occasion of this campaign should be seized not only to expose the lies of Hillary Clinton, but also to seek freedom from America’s seven decades of subjugation to the military-industrial complex and its organic intellectuals who never cease conjuring up “threats” and “enemies” to justify the war economy. This entire policy needs to be exposed, denounced and rejected. That is what I tried to do in Queen of Chaos.

CounterPunch invited me to write this letter to advertise my book at this crucial time, but I prefer to quote someone I admire, David Swanson, who wrote:

“Diana Johnstone’s forthcoming book, Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, succeeds in providing an understanding of Hillary Clinton’s own worldview like nothing else I’ve read — and it does so despite being largely not about Hillary Clinton. Johnstone’s book is culture and political criticism at its finest. It’s a study of the American neo-liberal, with a particular focus here-and-there on Clinton. I strongly recommend reading it, whatever your level of interest in the ‘Queen of Chaos’ herself, for its illumination of the ideologies underlying U.S. adventurism, exceptionalism, and ‘responsibility to protect’, obsession with identifying believable threats of ‘genocide’ in nations disloyal to Washington or Wall Street.”

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. 

April 18, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | 1 Comment

Trump “the Fascist”

By James Petras | April 12, 2016

From left to right a raucous chorus has emerged to denounce Republican Presidential primary frontrunner Donald Trump as a ‘fascist’. They cite his campaign promises to build an Israeli-style wall along the US border; his threats to expel eleven million undocumented immigrants; and to restrict foreign Muslims from entering the US, as well as the way his pugnacious face and arm resemble those of Benito Mussolini (‘he juts out his chin, he raises his arm’). They decry his extreme nationalism as ‘resembling Hitler’s policy’, by which they mean his opposition to detrimental free trade agreements and his slogan to “Make America Great… Again.”

In this article I will critically address the current cartoonish image of fascism with fascism’s historical reality, and then proceed to analyze the so-called “lesser evil” politics behind the re-invention of an American fascist in the guise of billionaire Donald Trump.

Fascism: Fact and Fiction

Historically, fascist politics involved organized mass movements, armed militia and paramilitary groups who assaulted political opponents and violently censored critical speech and suppressed the right to assemble. Fascists scapegoated minorities, especially Roma and Jews, and burned trade unions and leftist headquarters, assassinating their leaders and beating their members. Programmatically, they attacked pacifists and defended overseas wars and empires in the name of ‘living space’. Evoking a past imperial glory, they were not ‘isolationists’.

Candidate Trump has not organized anything resembling a mass movement, let alone an armed militia. There are no ‘Trumpeting Brown Shirts’. At most, the police and a handful of his (often elderly) white supporters have punched a few KKK-dressed provocateurs who have physically disrupted and threatened Trump’s public meetings and his exercise of free speech. In fact, the ‘fascist’ disruption of democratic freedoms seems to be mostly organized and practiced by his political rivals.

Trump, far from scapegoating the powerful Jewish minority in this country, gave a shamelessly Israel-centric speech and received a standing ovation from nearly 18,000 mostly prominent Jews at the March 2016 meeting of the major pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC).

His rhetoric, concerning the expulsion of 11 million undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America and the building of a border wall, is a far cry from the practice of imprisoning and violently expelling over two million undocumented Latinos under the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton regimes. At its worst, Trump promises to continue the existing federal policy on immigration and not create a ‘fascist’ rupture with past administrations. Is a ‘rhetorical cement wall’ worse than the real wall of armed border police, helicopters and armed carriers that have operated under the Presidencies of Clinton – Bush – Obama/Clinton with its hundreds of migrant deaths in the desert? Are declarations of a repressive immigration policy more ‘fascist’ coming from Trump’s loud mouth than the actual official practice of violently seizing undocumented workers from their homes and workplaces with long-term imprisonment and expulsion? Expelling youth, raised and educated in this country, or violently splitting up productive, well-integrated families and imprisoning their main breadwinners for lack of documents…that’s the official policy of the current and past three administrations.

There is far less of the truly fascist embrace of pre-emptive war and invasion in Trump’s speeches than in the actual policies pursued by the Clinton-Bush-Obama/Clinton regimes. In fact, among Trump’s numerous critics, especially his Republican rivals and the Hillary Clinton camp, we hear the loudest denunciations of his non-interventionist foreign policy (isolationism), which is “out of line” with the interventionist, overseas wars of current and past Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump’s critics and media pundits are ‘horror-struck’ at his apparent willingness to co-operate with Russian President Putin against common enemies, such as ISIS. Is his pragmatic regard of Russia more or less fascist than his rivals’ support for the Ukrainian putsch, orchestrated by the Obama regime in alliance with bona fide armed anti-Semitic Ukrainian fascists? His calls to dump NATO as an expensive drain on US treasure and manpower have the elite howling in outrage!

The propagandists, who paint Trump as a modern American fascist, cite his crude sexist remarks as ‘examples of a misogynist totalitarian’ while pointing favorably to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as potentially the ‘first feminist President’. In regard to his alleged misogyny, ‘the Donald’ pointed to Madame First Lady, Senator and Secretary Clinton’s promotion and critical role in US wars against Libya, Iraq and Syria where well over one million women have been rendered refugees, raped, injured or killed. Which is worse, one may ask: Crude locker room jokes or millions of orphaned boys and girls denied parents, homes, education and any future in the Middle East and North Africa? That is the world Midwife Hillary Clinton had helped to deliver.

Misogyny is the in the eye of the deceiver.

Are Trump’s verbal attacks on the practice of US multi-nationals relocating abroad to avoid US taxes and Wall Street financial houses hiding billions of the US elites’ obscene wealth in offshore tax shelters, more detrimental to ‘American values’ (as charged) than Hillary Clinton’s pandering to Wall Street while pocketing over $300,000 for each 45 minute sycophantic performance (marketed as her ‘policy lectures’), or her decades of actively promoting globalization – including the US job-destroying NAFTA?

Clearly Trump currently lacks program, organization and practice that define a fascist politician. At the very worst, he parrots the general line of attack against immigrants and Muslims. So far he would just bar them from the US but not bomb them ‘to the stone-age’. This should be contrasted with the actual policies carried out by the war-criminals Clinton/Bush/Obama-Clinton. It would be hard for Donald to ‘trump’ Hillary when she threatened to ‘obliterate Iran’ and its scores of millions of citizens because of Iran’s fictitious ‘nuclear program’.

On the other hand, Trump’s own meetings and rallies have been the victim of repeated disruption by organized groups acting like fascist thugs. Role reversal in real life: Trump, the target of rabid sustained mass media attacks, is pronounced the fascist …

Bashing Trump: Backdoor Backing of Hillary the Militarist Psychopath

If the objective case for labeling Trump ‘a fascist’ is weak or non-existent, why do so many prestigious academics and journalists play this stupid game of name-calling?

The commonsense explanation of their ruffled bluster is because they are setting up ‘Trump-the-Straw-Dragon’ in order to promote the poisonous Madame Secretary Hillary Clinton as the ‘lesser evil candidate’ for President of the United States.

No serious observer minimally aware of Clinton’s carnal embrace of multiple simultaneous disastrous and destructive wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Libya, could possibly support her – unless if they are convinced that a greater danger looms on the horizon and “we have to defeat fascist Trump at all cost”? No serious democrat or wage and salaried employee can ignore Madame Clinton’s role as Wall Street’s most shameless pimp unless they ‘believe’ that a loud-mouth New York ‘fascist is worse than Wall Street’.

The phony scaremongering about Trump’s “fascism” just serves to cover up Clinton’s most servile promotion of traitorous wars for the benefit of Israel. One should envision the thousands of desperate Syrian refugees clinging to decrepit boats in the Mediterranean when reading excerpts of Clinton’s private e-mails: According to WikiLeaks, Hillary declared that “the best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability (sic) is to help (sic) the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. … The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies”. Not a bad thing for Israel – but a cruel and criminal policy against a sovereign nation and multi-ethnic society. Madame Clinton followed through with these demented pronouncements, which can only be viewed as genocidal! Clinton promoted the most violent proxy war, uprooting over half of the civilian population of Syria and killing hundreds of thousands, while shredding a sovereign nation. She thus pandered to her Israeli mentors and Pluto-Zionist funders.

To justify backing a serial war monger, a US Secretary of State who has served Israel’s interests, and a politician who has carnalized her ‘feminist principles’ with Wall Street billionaires, Hillary Clinton’s smarmy supporters have had to invent an opponent who is even worse: Creating and then denouncing “Trump the Fascist” serves as a backdoor justification for supporting a proven political psychopath!

April 13, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Why the Establishment Hates Trump

By John McMurtry | CounterPunch | April 5, 2016

On the face of it, Donald Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world.

While Trump’s narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again, the dominant media and political elite relentlessly denounce him as an implicit fascist and disastrous fake. Something deeper is afoot. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and proposed a concrete solution always denied of his candidacy. From his promise to halve the Pentagon’s budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation payrolls, the public money that the big corporate lobbies stand to lose from a Trump presidency are off the charts. But his attackers dare not recognize these explosive issues because they are all part of the problem.

The public money stakes may be bigger than the US corporate stakes behind the foreign wars the US state has initiated since 1991. The takeaway promised by Trump’s policies threaten almost every big lobby now in control of US government purse strings. It grounds in the military-industrial complex spending close to $2,000,000,000 a day for its endless new untested weapons and foreign wars both of which Trump opposes. But the cut-off of hundreds of billions of public giveaways to the Big Corps do not end here. They hit almost every wide-mouthed transnational corporate siphon into the US Treasury, taxpayers’ pockets and the working majority of America. Masses of American citizens increasingly without living wages and benefits and in increasing public squalor and insecurity are paying attention to what the political establishment and corporate media have long buried and continue to silence.

Trump has raised the great dispossession from impotence into the establishment’s face, and this is why he is a contagion on the American political scene. He is pervasively mocked, accused and slandered in non-stop public fireworks of ad hominem hits, but the counter-attacks never engage what Trump has set his sights on – the long stripping of America by
corporate globalization selecting for the limitless enrichment of the very rich living off an ever-growing take from public coffers and the impoverishment of America’s working people. A primal rage unites the political establishment across party lines, but they can’t say why. No defaming scorn and abuse is off limits, but Trump’s underlying betrayal of the ruling game remains unspeakable on the stage.

The electoral dynamite of all the Americans who have lost all their good blue-collar jobs, social benefits and public infrastructures is recognized only in class condescension. But the facts cannot be denied of a corporate globalization effectively stripping the lower middle classes and the public realm itself with no-one in Washington establishment saying a word against the greatest transfer of wealth to the 1% in history.

Trump may deserve back as bad he gives. But this understanding keeps our eyes on the ego-contest which is the standard spectacle to avoid the real issues. The personal attacks only tells us how deep the rupture has become between Trump’s campaign and the establishment on the issues kept out of sight. This is why the corporate politicians and media are almost as wound into one-way demonization of Trump as they are when they beat the drums of war against a designated Enemy abroad.

In the end, it may get to him – as when he tries to find angry millions again from onside with an evangelical trumpet of abortion-is-murder just before the primary in Wisconsin.

Trump is a shameless opportunist, no doubt. Yet we continue to revolve within an ad hominem circle until we go deeper than the establishment morality tale of the evil of the stigma object – the oldest propaganda trick in the book. The major money interests that are really at stake in the conflict between Trump and the political-economic establishment remain unconnected and blocked out. “Who will stop Trump’ is not only now asked across America, but the world’s media in China too. But nothing is less talked about than the globally powerful interests he has promised to rein back from the public troughs bleeding the country’s capacities to build for and to employ its people. On this topic, there is only silence or abusive distortion frothing from the mouth.

Joining the Dots of the Great Silence

Eventually people may ask why the establishment unanimously abhors Trump across party divisions which are otherwise unbridgeable. Even if he is a caricature of American privilege and self-promotion, who else could fight the corrupt corporate-state and media establishment? Who else could ever get public support from dispossessed masses and from inside the Republican Party base itself? Who else could take on the supra-dominant corporate interests of the war state, drug monopoly, health insurance racket, lobby-run foreign policy, off-shore tax evasion, and global trade with only corporate rights to profit taking jobs in the tens of millions from home workers, and still hold a large and right-wing voter base onside?

Conversely, what else than Trump’s threat to the corporate-state establishment can explain the unity of voice and venom against an American paragon of wealth and chupzpah? What else could motivate a cross-party and corporate media hate campaign where there is nothing else in common across the condemning voices? Only those citizens depending on the deep system corruptions he promises to reverse are really threatened by Trump’s candidacy. But how do these huge private interests go on getting away with a corporate-lobby state transferring every more public wealth and control to them at the expense of the American majority and their common interest when most people already dislike and are systemically exploited by them? They get away with it by no-one being able to do anything about it.

Trump represents a threat to these gargantuan public-trough interests that even the super clean and informed Ralph Nader candidacy for president never did. The corporate media and party machines just shut him down on the electoral stage so few even knew he was a presidential candidate. You can’t do that with Trump. That is the very big problem for the otherwise seamless political and media establishment who are all in on the fabulous payoffs of this corporate state game. Trump’s entire strategy is based on getting public attention, and he is a master at it, unbuyably rich, and the most watched person in America across the country and the world. He can’t be shut up. Personal stigmatization and attack without let-up are the only way to gag his policies and turn the tide against him at the same time.

Maybe it will work in the end. It’s how disastrous and bankrupting foreign aggressions and wars have been sold whatever the ruinous costs to the public paying for them.

Until Wisconsin

When you join the dots to Trump also preaching a policy revolt against the insatiable corporate jaws feeding on trillions of dollars of public budgets in Washington, the meaning becomes clear. But that connected meaning is blacked out. In its place, the corporate media and politicians present an egomaniac blowhard bordering on fascism who preaches hate, racism and sexism. But the silenced policies he advocates are more like jumping into a crocodile pit. He is on record saying he will cut the Pentagon’s budget “by 50%”. No winning politician has ever dared to take on the military-industrial complex, with even Eisenhower only naming it in his parting speech. Trump also says that the US “must be neutral, an honest broker” on the Israeli-Palestine conflict – as unspeakable as it gets in US politics. Big Pharma is also called out with “$400 billion to be saved by government negotiation of prices”. The even more powerful HMO’s are confronted by the possibility of a “one-payer system”, the devil incarnate in America’s corporate-welfare state.

Trump even challenges “the Enemy” cornerstone of US ideology when he says “wouldn’t it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?” Not very fascist of him. He was also open to nationalizing the Wall Street banks after 2008. None of this sees the light of day in the hate-Trump culture that been effectively mounted across even left-right divisions. Most of all, Trump rejects the whole misnamed “free trade” global system because it has “hollowed out the lives of American workers” with rights to corporations to move anywhere to get cheaper labour and import back into the US tariff-free. But again the connected meaning is repressed. That Trump also wants to get the US out of foreign wars at the same time, the other great pillar of corporate globalization, is the real danger to the transnational corporate state he has set in motion.

All these policies threaten only the ruling money interests of America that depend on the superpower public purse to extend their transnational monopolies and multiply their wealth. This is the real establishment interest that has so far evaded the glare of publicity and critique of the Donald Trump phenomenon, bigger now with Bernie Sanders than any political challenge to the US system since the 1960’s. Trump is certainly not a working-class hero. He is a pure capitalist, with all the furies of private interest and greed that capitalism selects for. But at this time he is a capitalist who is not rich from looting the public purse as the biggest annual cash flow, nor from exporting the costs of labor and taxes to foreign jurisdictions with subhuman standards that come back to the US as “necessary to compete”. Trump has initiated a long overdue recognition of parasite capitalism eating out the life capacities of the US itself.

cancerstageJohn McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.

April 5, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Trump Way to the Left of Clinton on Foreign Policy – In Fact, He’s Damn Near Anti-Empire

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | March 30, 2016

If the Bernie Sanders campaign has propelled the word “socialism” – if not its actual meaning – into common, benign American usage, Donald Trump may have done the world an even greater service, by calling into question the very pillars of U.S. imperial policy: the NATO alliance; the U.S. nuclear “umbrella”; the global network of 1,000 U.S. bases; military “containment” of China and Russia; and U.S. “strategic” claims in the Persian Gulf. Were the U.S. to actually rid itself of these strategic “obligations,” the military hand on the doomsday clock would immediately be rolled back, giving humanity the breathing space to tackle other accumulated crises.

Of course, Donald Trump may over time rephrase, reverse or “clarify” out of existence some of his profoundly anti-imperial, “America First” foreign policy points, elicited in extended interviews with major U.S. media. However, if Trump’s tens of millions of white, so-called “Middle American” followers stick by him, despite his foreign policy heresies – as seems likely – it will utterly shatter the prevailing assumption that the American public favors maintenance of U.S. empire by military means. If the rank and file right wing of the Republican Party is not a pillar of such policies, then who is? – rank and file, Black, white and brown Democrats? If the Trump candidacy can continue to thrive while rejecting the holiest shibboleths of the bipartisan War Party, then we must conclude that the whole U.S. foreign policy debate is a construct of the corporate media and the corporate-bought duopoly political establishments, and that there is no popular consensus for U.S. militarism and no true mass constituency for war in either party.

If Donald Trump is to be the catalyst for such a revelation, then may all the gods bless him – because lots of assassins will be out to kill him.

Trump’s language is sloppy, but there can be no mistaking the thrust of his position on key points. He calls NATO, the globe-strutting Euro-American military juggernaut that extended its domain to Africa with the 2011 war of regime change in Libya, an alliance that is “unfair, economically, to us.” Trump told the New York Times that NATO should focus on “counter-terrorism” – clearly a fundamentally scaled-down mission.

He repeated his often-expressed willingness to withdraw U.S. forces from Japan and South Korea, where American troops have been stationed since the end of World War Two, unless both countries pay a lot more money to maintain them. Trump actually seems eager to get out of the region, based on the number of times he has brought the subject up in his campaign. As with everything else in the Trump paradigm, he hooks the alliance to his quest for a “better deal” – but the point is that he doesn’t think the “price” of the far-flung U.S. military commitment is “worth it.” Trump’s stated intention to renegotiate virtually all of the “deals” the U.S. has made around the world – the military architecture of imperialism – means he is pointedly applying a cost-benefit test to the 1,000 U.S. bases around the globe. He is reluctant to offer other nations the “protection” of U.S. nuclear weapons.

The crucial point is: Trump does not accept the fundamental premise that these bases exist for U.S. “security” interests, but rather, he frames them as a kind of “service” that the clients should pay for. Once the “national security” veneer is withdrawn, the military-imperial rationale evaporates and all that is left is a business transaction – not enough to call a nation to war, or to risk a world over.

Trump appears to welcome a strategic break with Saudi Arabia, threatening to cut off U.S. purchases of oil from the kingdom unless it “substantially reimburse[s]” Washington for fighting the Islamic State, or unless the Saudis and the other rich oil states commit troops to the anti-jihadist battle – at their own expense. It’s all nonsense, of course, since Washington and Saudi Arabia have been partners in global jihadism for two generations – but so what? Trump seems to relish the idea of severing the Saudi connection. “If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, I don’t think it would be around,” he said. His threat to withdraw the “cloak” unless the potentates pay for protection would negate the U.S. “national security” rationale in the Persian Gulf going back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1943 declaration that “the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” President Carter, another Democrat, upped the ante in 1980 with his doctrine that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its “national interests” in the Persian Gulf. Bush presidents One and Two were simply building on these previous national security rationales. Trump recognizes no such imperative, without which U.S. imperial policy in the region has no political basis.

Trump plays the trade card rather than the military gambit in dealing with China. He would threaten economic retaliation for China’s fortification of islands in the China Sea – not military encirclement. “We have tremendous economic power over China, and that’s the power of trade,” he said. The same, presumably, would apply to Russia.

The presidential candidate shows no interest in “spreading democracy,” like George W. Bush, or assuming a responsibility to “protect” other peoples from their own governments, like Barack Obama and his political twin, Hillary Clinton. On the contrary, Trump has stated that the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq and Libya and killed their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, because they killed terrorists – in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s macabre cackling over Gaddafi’s body. He opposed the U.S. proxy war against the al-Assad government in Syria, for similar reasons.

He even briefly defied the ultimate taboo, using the word “neutral” to describe the stance he would take on Palestine.

In sum, albeit sloppily, and with no guarantee that he won’t change his mind at any moment, Trump has rejected the whole gamut of U.S. imperial war rationales, from FDR straight through to the present. For who knows what reason, Trump is busily delegitimizing U.S. imperial policy since World War Two.

It’s not that the Empire has no clothes, but that it is being stripped of its rationale to march around the planet in battle gear. Thanks, not to Bernie, but to The Donald.

Trump has reduced white American nationalism to Race, his “trump” card – but without his hero, Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet sailing the world to plant the flag on distant shores.

The first effect of Trump’s intervention in the Republican primaries was to demonstrate that his white hordes really don’t give a damn for the GOP establishment’s corporate agenda; indeed, Trump gave them a chance to show they hated what global capitalism has done to “their” jobs. The fact that this cohort despises and fears non-whites of whatever citizenship status is nothing new – it’s a constant in U.S. politics, which is why there has always been a White Man’s Party. What makes this electoral season different – and, hopefully, a turning point in U.S. history – is that much of the rank and file of the White Man’s Party, the GOP, is rejecting the economic agenda of its corporate masters. If the Republican voters accept Trump’s assault on the ideological rationale undergirding U.S. foreign policy and its imperial structures, there will be nothing left of the GOP for the corporate rulers to defend. The Republican house of cards is collapsing, inevitably throwing the whole duopoly system out of whack.

The job of the Left, at this historic juncture, is to ensure that the two-party duopoly is permanently broken, to create the space for a much broader national discourse and, especially, to free Black America from the “trap within a trap” of the corporate-controlled Democratic Party. As we have written before in these pages, the best scenario of 2016 would be a fracture at both ends of the Rich Man’s Duopoly. It is insane – although perfectly explainable – that the most leftish constituency in the nation, Black America, is aligned with the right wing of the Democratic Party in the person of Hillary Clinton, while white Democrats man the barricades for the nominal socialist, Bernie Sanders. Blacks are the most pro-peace ethnicity in the nation, but have also been the indispensable bloc behind Hillary Clinton, the warmonger who is on her way to becoming the sole candidate of both Wall Street and the Pentagon.

It is magnificent, grand and glorious that the duopoly system is in deep trouble. But it is sad beyond measure that the near-extinction of independent Black politics has placed African Americans in the most untenable position imaginable at this critical moment: in the Hillary Clinton camp. Fortunately, key elements of the Movement for Black Lives have pledged not to endorse any candidates this election season. We hope that they stick with that commitment, continue to build a grassroots movement, and resist the corporate Democratic hegemony that has strangled and subverted Black politics for the past 40 years. The Black Left, broadly defined, must engage in a thorough reassessment of its politics and practice, in light of the great fissures that are occurring in the structures of the rulers’ system. That’s why the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is holding a National Conference on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the Struggle for Black Self-Determination, on April 9th, in Harlem, New York City. This electoral season will see massive realignments of parties and coalitions – events that will happen whether Black people are organized or not. But Black self-determination is only moved forward if people push it. The most optimum time to press issues of Black self-determination is when the larger polity is in flux, such as exists today – thanks, in great measure, to the racist billionaire, Donald Trump.

Actually, there’s no need to thank him. That wealth-born son-of-a-rich-developer has already been paid. And by his own standards, that’s all that matters.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

April 1, 2016 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , | 1 Comment

Anti-Trump NYT Blasts His Foreign Policy

By Stephen Lendman | March 30, 2016

He’s a serious presidential contender with unorthodox views on some issues – making him appear anti-establishment, worrying duopoly power brokers and media scoundrels supporting them.

Wide-ranging interviews with NYT and Washington Post editors, as well as opinions expressed separately, showed his foreign policy views differ considerably from other candidates.

“I want to get along with Russia,” he said, calling good relations “very good… I’d get along very well with Vladimir Putin.”

“I want to get along with all countries, and we will,” he said, calling his approach to world affairs “unabashedly noninterventionist.”

He opposes expensive worldwide nation-building projects while America’s infrastructure deteriorates.

He’s against massive US military buildups in Europe and East Asia. “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore. NATO is costing us a fortune…”

“Why are we (risking) potentially (a) third world war with Russia?” He questions involvement in protecting allies like Japan and South Korea, wanting them to do more on their own.

US intervention abroad caused more problems than solutions, notably in the Middle East, he said.

“Every bad decision that you could make in the Middle East was made.” If Obama and Bush “just (went) to the beach and enjoyed the ocean and the sun, we would’ve been much better off… than all of this tremendous death, destruction, and… monetary loss. It’s just incredible,” he stressed.

He called NATO obsolete, preferring an alternative organization focusing on counterterrorism. He questioned the benefit of America’s global empire of bases.

He called nuclear weapons “the biggest problem the world has,” saying he’d use them only as “an absolute last step,” instead of renouncing them altogether.

The New York Times is America’s leading establishment media organization – supporting policies favoring wealth and power interests exclusively.

It editors called Trump’s foreign policy views “dangerous babble,” uneasy about an administration under his stewardship curbing its warmaking appetite – hyping nonexistent “Russia(n) aggressive movements in Ukraine and threats to the Baltics…”

Saying “this is no time (for) Washington” to restrain its global militarism. Trump’s views “are contradictory and shockingly ignorant.”

Times editors support US military involvement worldwide, its wars of aggression in multiple theaters.

They call today’s world “dangerous,” failing to explain Washington allied with Israel and other rogue states bear full responsibility for its deplorable state.

Trump if elected president will differ from traditional candidates largely in style. At the same time, if he favors more cooperation and less confrontation with other nations, “that’s a good thing” as he puts it in his own words.


Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

March 30, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Trump and Clinton: Censoring the unpalatable

By John Pilger | March 29, 2016

A virulent if familiar censorship is about to descend on the US election campaign. As the cartoon brute, Donald Trump, seems almost certain to win the Republican Party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton is being ordained both as the “women’s candidate” and the champion of American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil One.

This is drivel, of course; Hillary Clinton leaves a trail of blood and suffering around the world and a clear record of exploitation and greed in her own country. To say so, however, is becoming intolerable in the land of free speech.

The 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama should have alerted even the most dewy-eyed. Obama based his “hope” campaign almost entirely on the fact of an African-American aspiring to lead the land of slavery. He was also “antiwar”.

Obama was never antiwar. On the contrary, like all American presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for George W. Bush’s funding of the slaughter in Iraq and he was planning to escalate the invasion of Afghanistan. In the weeks before he took the presidential oath, he secretly approved an Israeli assault on Gaza, the massacre known as Operation Cast Lead. He promised to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo and did not. He pledged to help make the world “free from nuclear weapons” and did the opposite.

As a new kind of marketing manager for the status quo, the unctuous Obama was an inspired choice. Even at the end of his blood-spattered presidency, with his signature drones spreading infinitely more terror and death around the world than that ignited by jihadists in Paris and Brussels, Obama is fawned on as “cool” (the Guardian).

On March 23, CounterPunch published my article, “A World War has Begun: Break the Silence”.  As has been my practice for years, I then syndicated the piece across an international network, including Truthout.com, the liberal American website.  Truthout publishes some important journalism, not least Dahr Jamail’s outstanding corporate exposes.

Truthout rejected the piece because, said an editor, it had appeared on CounterPunch and had broken “guidelines”.  I replied that this had never been a problem over many years and I knew of no guidelines.

My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a “review” and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout’s “editorial committee”. The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:

Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama … The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system … As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies– just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”.

The “editorial committee” clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme danger to the world.  Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my work to a “process of revision” meant she had to take it off her “publication docket”.  Such is the gatekeeper’s way with words.

At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent. Like Obama’s “hope”, Clinton’s gender is no more than a suitable facade.

This is an historical urge. In his 1859 essay “On Liberty,” to which modern liberals seem to pay unflagging homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required.

“It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the British historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open ended nature – its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self righteous fanaticism.” He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, in which Blair promised to “reorder this world around us” according to his “moral values”. The carnage of a million dead in Iraq was the result.

Blair’s crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, some 69 countries — more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. With the demise of the European empires, this has been the project of the liberal flame carrier, the “exceptional” United States, whose celebrated “progressive” president, John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

“If we have to use force,” said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton and today a passionate campaigner for his wife, “it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

One of Hillary Clinton’s most searing crimes was the destruction of Libya in 2011. At her urging, and with American logistical support, NATO, launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, according to its own records, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. See the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the UNICEF report on the children killed, “most [of them] under the age of ten”.

In Anglo-American scholarship, followed slavishly by the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic, influential theorists known as “liberal realists” have long taught that liberal imperialists – a term they never use – are the world’s peace brokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified “failed states” (nations difficult to exploit) and “rogue states” (nations resistant to western dominance).

Whether or not the targeted regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. In the Middle East, western liberalism’s collaborators have long been extremist Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while cynical notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest and mayhem — as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras. See the record of those good liberals Bill and Hillary Clinton. Theirs is a standard to which Trump can only aspire.

Follow John Pilger on Twitter @johnpilger and on Facebook

March 29, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | 1 Comment

Candidates double down on Israel at AIPAC

What They Said

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • March 29, 2016

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might just have a solution for dealing with the recent bombing attacks in Western Europe. The countries involved should follow Israeli practice and demolish the homes of those accused of carrying out terrorist acts, thereby punishing whole families and making the consequences of misbehavior more severe. He might have also suggested that Arabs should be shot in the head when they are incapacitated and lying on the ground. That saves the trouble of having to go through a trial and also sends an even stronger message.

Some American presidential wannabes also agree that tougher is always better. Donald Trump has again spoken up in favor of torture while Ted Cruz is advocating using police “to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in the United States.

Hillary Clinton opted for security to preempt privacy, stating that “We have to toughen our surveillance, our interception of communication.” John Kasich hyperbolically called the bombings “attacks against our very way of life and against the democratic values upon which our political systems have been built” though he mercifully did not single out Muslims for retribution.

When it comes to beating down on Muslims there is a certain unanimity of opinion that unites Israel and the United States. To an extent, it evidently derives from the unsurpassed love that American politicians appear to have for Israel, a sentiment that was on display in its most effusive form last Monday at the annual summit meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC.

I confess to having watched the Donald Trump speech live and in its entirety in the vain hope that he would tell AIPAC to get stuffed. The other speeches I saw after the fact on YouTube or C-Span with occasional pauses to allow my blood pressure to recede. Plus there are transcripts of all the speeches but Cruz’s available online. At a certain point all the presentations blended together, as if they had been written by the same person working for AIPAC, which might indeed have been the case, though there were some individual touches.

But for random obligatory shots at the apparently subhuman and hopelessly terroristic Palestinians one might well have thought that the AIPAC summit conference was all about Iran. As Iran is the bête noir of Netanyahu and his thug-like government it was perhaps inevitable that the candidates should follow suit in their carefully coached presentations.

Hillary, who has promised to move the U.S.-Israel relationship up to the “next level” of subservience, started with the obligatory loud sucking noises about how much she loves Israel before citing “Iran’s continued aggression.” In the past she has threatened to “obliterate” Iran. Regarding the recent nuclear agreement, she demanded “vigorous enforcement, strong monitoring, clear consequences for any violations and a broader strategy to confront Iran’s aggression across the region. We cannot forget that Tehran’s fingerprints are on nearly every conflict across the Middle East, from Syria to Lebanon to Yemen. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies are attempting to establish a position on the Golan from which to threaten Israel, and they continue to fund Palestinian terrorists… Iranian provocations, like the recent ballistic missile tests, are also unacceptable and should be answered firmly and quickly including with more sanctions. Those missiles were stamped with words declaring, and I quote, ‘Israel should be wiped from the pages of history.’ We know they could reach Israel or hit the tens of thousands of American troops stationed in the Middle East. This is a serious danger and it demands a serious response.”

Hillary’s extraordinary comments depicting Iran as if it were a latter day Soviet Union or Nazi Germany leave one gasping for an adequate rejoinder. But her observations were more intriguing in that she actually made an attempt to pretend that there is an American interest in joining Israel in confronting Iran consisting of the poor, defenseless tens of thousands of American troops in the region. She inevitably failed to note that the troops are all based in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, not in Israel, demonstrating the utter irrelevancy of Tel Aviv to U.S. defense. No Israeli has ever died as an “ally” of the United States, but that is perhaps a tale best explored another day.

Donald Trump was, if possible, even more outrageous than Hillary opening his rant with a prolonged encomium on “… our strategic ally, our unbreakable friendship and our cultural brother, the only democracy in the Middle East, the state of Israel,” nearly every element of which is either a lie or a misrepresentation. He then took on Iran, saying “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… The problem here is fundamental. We’ve rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion, and we received absolutely nothing in return… The biggest concern with the deal is not necessarily that Iran is going to violate it because already, you know, as you know, it has, the bigger problem is that they can keep the terms and still get the bomb by simply running out the clock. And of course, they’ll keep the billions and billions of dollars that we so stupidly and foolishly gave them.”

“When I’m president, I will adopt a strategy that focuses on three things when it comes to Iran. First, we will stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region… Now they’re in Syria trying to establish another front against Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights… And in the West Bank, they’re openly offering Palestinians $7,000 per terror attack and $30,000 for every Palestinian terrorist’s home that’s been destroyed. A deplorable, deplorable situation… Secondly, we will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network which is big and powerful, but not powerful like us. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetuated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the Western Hemisphere, very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world. And we will work to dismantle that reach, believe me, believe me… Third, at the very least, we must enforce the terms of the previous deal to hold Iran totally accountable. And we will enforce it like you’ve never seen a contract enforced before, folks, believe me… Iran has already, since the deal is in place, test-fired ballistic missiles three times. Those ballistic missiles, with a range of 1,250 miles, were designed to intimidate not only Israel, which is only 600 miles away, but also intended to frighten Europe and someday maybe hit even the United States. And we’re not going to let that happen. We’re not letting it happen. And we’re not letting it happen to Israel, believe me.”

So Trump will both dismantle and strictly enforce the multi-party agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, and, like Hillary, he detects a threat to the United States, for him in the form of missiles that will “someday maybe hit even the United States.” If The Donald is speaking honestly his desire to end America’s role as international policeman will find an exception if Israel is somehow involved. Taking him at his word he would start a worldwide crusade against Iran and its presumed proxies, all on behalf of Israel.

John Kasich repeated the reasons why all true red blooded Americans love Israel, which apparently includes having wealthy Jewish supporters in Ohio whom he identified by name. He boasted of his sponsorship of a Holocaust memorial in Columbus before doubling down on Iran, stating that “we share a critically important common interest in the Middle East, the unrelenting opposition to Iran’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. In March of 2015, when the prime minister spoke out against the Iran nuclear deal before a joint session of Congress, I flew to Washington and stood on the floor of the House of Representatives that was in session, the first time I had visited since we had been in session in 15 years. And I did it to show my respect, my personal respect, to the people of Israel. And I want you all to know that I have called for the suspension of the U.S.’s participation in the Iran nuclear deal in reaction to Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests. These tests were both a violation of the spirit of the nuclear deal and provocations that could no longer be ignored. One of the missiles tested had printed on it in Hebrew, can you believe this, ‘Israel must be exterminated.’ And I will instantly gather the world and lead us to reapply sanctions if Iran violates one crossed T or one dot of that nuclear deal. We must put the sanctions back on them as the world community together. Let me also tell you, no amount of money that’s being made by any business will stand in the way of the need to make sure that the security of Israel is secured… And I want you to be assured that in a Kasich administration there will be no more delusional agreements with self-declared enemies. No more.”

One might note that Kasich, who also claimed that Palestinians embrace a “culture of death,” did not even make an effort to identify an American interest. He refers to Netanyahu as “the prime minister.” It was all about Israel. But even Kasich was outdone by Ted Cruz, who started his talk by stating that “Palestine has not existed since 1948.” And he promised that if a resolution on Palestinian statehood might come up at the United Nations he would “fly to New York to personally veto it myself.”

Cruz went on to claim that Palestinian children killed by Israeli weapons in Gaza had died because Hamas was using them as human shields before declaring that he would rip up the agreement with Iran, which he compared to “Munich in 1938,” and demand that it close its existing nuclear research program or “we will shut it down for you.” Like Hillary and The Donald before him he declared Israel to be a “steadfast and loyal ally” before defending military aid to Israel as “furthering the vital national security interest of the United States of America.” He did not elaborate on either point.

My citations from the candidates’ presentations are, of course, selected by me and intended to establish a certain narrative. Anyone who is truly desirous of experiencing just how awful the complete speeches were should look up the YouTube and C-Span originals and watch them. The obscene pandering to a bunch of wealthy and politically connected fifth columnists who are in love with a country and government that is not their own is shameful, particularly as the speakers are de facto ceding national sovereignty by committing Washington to become militarily engaged no matter how Israel behaves. The calls to enter into something not unlike a state of war with Iran, a country that does not threaten the United States, just because Tel Aviv considers it an enemy is something that in another place and time would equate to treason. Excluding only Bernie Sanders, that every other man and woman currently in the running for the presidency of this country representing America’s two major parties should be complicit in this outrage defies belief, but their own words tell the tale.

March 29, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

WaPo slams Trump on climate because nuke weapon explosion is ‘hypothetical’

Junk Science | March 23, 2016

“The problem with this response is that man-made climate change is real and happening now. The detonation of a nuclear bomb is a hypothetical.”

From the WaPo :

Screen Shot 2016-03-23 at 8.16.06 AM

March 26, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

Kosovo: An evil little war (almost) all US candidates liked

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | March 24, 2016

Although the 2016 presidential election is still in the primaries phase, contenders have already brought up America’s failed foreign wars. Hillary Clinton is taking flak over Libya, and Donald Trump has irked the GOP by bringing up Iraq. But what of Kosovo?

The US-led NATO operation that began on March 24, 1999 was launched under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine asserted by President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. For 78 days, NATO targeted what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – which later split into Serbia and Montenegro – over alleged atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo. Yugoslavia was accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” as bombs rained on bridges, trains, hospitals, homes, the power grid and even refugee convoys.

NATO’s actions directly violated the UN Charter (articles 53 and 103), its own charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The war was a crime against peace, pure and simple.

Though overwhelmed, Yugoslavia did not surrender; the June 1999 armistice only allowed NATO to occupy Kosovo under UN peacekeeping authority, granted by Resolution 1244 – which the Alliance has been violating ever since.

US Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, was considered the most outspoken champion of the “Kosovo War.” She is now a vocal supporter of candidate Clinton, condemning women who don’t vote for her to a “special place in Hell.”

Clinton visited the renegade province in October 2012, as the outgoing Secretary of State. She stood with the ‘Kosovan’ government leaders – once considered terrorists, before receiving US backing – and proclaimed unequivocal US support for Kosovo’s independence, proclaimed four years prior.

“For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign policy issue, it is personal,” Clinton said. Given the Kosovo Albanians had renamed a major street in their capital ‘Bill Clinton Avenue’ and erected a massive gilded monument to Hillary’s husband, her comments were hardly a surprise.

She is unlikely to be condemned for those remarks by her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. While arguing that Congress should have a say in authorizing the intervention, Sanders entirely bought into the mainstream narrative about the conflict, seeing it as a case of the evil Serbian “dictator” Slobodan Milosevic oppressing the unarmed ethnic Albanians. He saw “supporting the NATO airstrikes on Serbia as justified on humanitarian grounds.”

One Sanders aide, Jeremy Brecher, resigned in May 1999 arguing against the intervention as it unfolded, since the “goal of US policy is not to save the Kosovars from ongoing destruction.”

Trouble is there was no “destruction.” Contrary to NATO claims of 100,000 or more Albanians purportedly massacred by the Serbs, postwar investigators found fewer than 5,000 deaths – 1,500 of which happened after NATO occupied the province and the Albanian pogroms began.

Western media, eager to preserve the narrative of noble NATO defeating the evil Serbs, dismissed the terror as “revenge killings.” NATO troops thus looked on as their Albanian protégés terrorized, torched, bombed and pillaged across the province for years, forcing some 250,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other groups into exile.

After George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, his administration adopted the Clinton-era agenda for the Balkans, including backing an independent Albanian state in Kosovo. None of the Republicans, save 2012 contender Ron Paul, have criticized the Kosovo War since.

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump actually has been critical – though back in 1999, long before he became the Republican front-runner and the bane of the GOP establishment. In October that year, Trump was a guest on Larry King’s CNN show, criticizing the Clintons’ handling of the Kosovo War after a fashion.

“But look at what we’ve done to that land and to those people and the deaths that we’ve caused,” Trump told King. “They bombed the hell out of a country, out of a whole area, everyone is fleeing in every different way, and nobody knows what’s happening, and the deaths are going on by the thousands.”

The problem with Trump, then as now, is that he is maddeningly vague. So, these remarks could be interpreted as referring to the terror going on at that very moment – the persecution of non-Albanians under NATO’s approving eye – or the exodus of Albanians earlier that year, during the NATO bombing. Only Trump would know which, and he hasn’t offered a clarification.

Though he has the most delegates and leads in the national polls for the Republican nomination, the GOP establishment is furious with Trump because he dared call George W. Bush a liar and describe the invasion of Iraq as a “big fat mistake.” According to the British historian Kate Hudson, however, the 2003 invasion was just a continuation of the “pattern of aggression,” following the precedent set with Kosovo.

March 24, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment