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America’s Recent Achievements in the Middle East

by Eric Zuesse

Here are before-and-after pictures of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East:
before and after photos of Iraq Yemen Syria
What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush.
As President Obama instructed his military, on 28 May 2014:

When issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States, when such issues are at stake — when crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us — then the threshold for military action must be higher. In such circumstances, we should not go it alone. Instead, we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action. We have to broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law; and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action. In such circumstances, we have to work with others because collective action in these circumstances is more likely to succeed.”

So: ’we’ didn’t achieve these things only on our own, but instead in alliance with the royals of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and other friendly countries, which finance jihadists everywhere but in their own country. And, of course, all of ‘us’ are allied against Russia, so we’re now surrounding that country with ‘our’ NATO partners before we do to it what we’ve previously done to Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. America is becoming even more ambitious, because of ‘successes’ like these in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.
The United States has been the great champion of ‘democracy’ throughout the world. And these are are some of the results of that ‘democracy’. ‘We’ are spreading it abroad.
‘Our’ latest victory has been ‘our’ spreading it to Ukraine. No country is closer to Russia than that.
Inside America, the term that’s used for referring to anyone who opposes this spreading of ‘democracy’, is ‘isolationist’, and this term is imported from the meaning that it had just prior to America’s joining World War II against Hitler and other fascists. Back in that time, an “isolationist” meant someone who didn’t want to defeat the fascists. The implication in the usage of this term now, is that the person who is an ‘isolationist’ is a ‘fascist’, just as was the case then. It’s someone who doesn’t want to spread ‘democracy’. To oppose American foreign policy is thus said to be not only ‘right wing’, but the extremist version of that: far right-wing — fascist, perhaps even Nazi, or racist-fascist. (Donald Trump is rejected by many Republicans who say that he’s ‘not conservative enough’. Democrats consider him to be far too ‘conservative’. The neoconservative Democrat Isaac Chotiner, whom the Democratic neoconservative Slate hired away from the Democratic neoconservative The New Republic, has headlined at Slate, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” and he answered that question in the affirmative.)  George Orwell dubbed this type of terminological usage “Newspeak”.
It’s very effective.
Studies in America show that the people who are the most supportive of spreading ‘democracy’ are individuals with masters and doctoral degrees (“postgraduate degrees”). Those are the Americans who vote for these policies, to spread American ‘democracy’, to foreign lands. They want more of this — more of these achievements. (Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders nationwide among the “postgraduate” group.) Some of these people pride themselves on being “technocrats.” They claim that the world needs more of their ‘expertise’. Lots of them come forth on the ‘news’ media to validate such invasions as Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria after 2011, etc. Almost all of them possess doctoral degrees. This shows what they have learned. They are the most employable, the highest paid, the most successful, in their respective fields.
After all: ‘democracy’ is not for amateurs. It’s only for people who take instruction, and who do what they are told. But, told by whom? Whom are they obeying? Do they even know? In any organization, when an instruction is issued, is it always easy to know who issued it? And what happens to a person who doesn’t carry it out? There is a winnowing process. The constant survivors are the ones who rise from that process, and who ultimately win the opportunity to issue some of the instructions themselves. These people are the wheat; everybody else is chaff, which gets discarded, in a ‘democracy’.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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falcemartello
falcemartello
Aug 4, 2016 8:22 AM

” You are either with us or against us” ( The Washington Consensus). Deflecting their own fascism . The pot calling the kettle black. Much to many persons bewilderment ,the west has fallen from any semblance of principles that are related to humanistic values , instead. Self nihilistic perfidy. Great jibe Mr Zuesse

susannapanevin
susannapanevin
Aug 4, 2016 12:09 AM

Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Aug 3, 2016 10:15 PM

“The implication in the usage of this term now, is that the person who is an ‘isolationist’ is a ‘fascist’, just as was the case then.”
I’ve consistently had this problem with Zuesse, and we even had it out through email once. Isolationists are not fascists, and never have been–then or now.
In the 1930s, once it became apparent that Roosevelt was intent on dragging the country to war again, millions of men and women–Democrat, Republican, Socialist, and Independent–banded together, formed the America First Committees (AFCs) in order to stop the drive for war. The neocons and their allies in the press have conspired to portray all these fine people as ‘fascists’, even though only a vanishingly small percentage of members ever expressed such sentiments. In their twisted world, to be against war is ‘fascism’, while to honor and glorify imperial wars is ‘democracy’.
I can’t stop Zuesse from buying into this atrocious fiction; but I hope that I might be able to save some of you here from believing it, at least.

elenitsEleni Tsigante
elenitsEleni Tsigante
Aug 4, 2016 6:22 AM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig

Are you sure he didn’t mean it sarcastically? This is how I read it. Maybe I’m wrong!
In the EU the pro-EU clowns (sorry, politicians) always cite incipient fascism as the number one reason to maintain the EU “despite its flaws”. According to this “logic” and without providing reasons only the EU can fight fascism, not individual countries or, hmm, individuals. As examples of the incipient danger they cite Orban, Farage, Le Pen – the three main politicians who have opposed and exposed the EU. They also cite the Nuland & oligarch-funded Pegida, Jobbik and Golden Dawn. Apart from the EU Commission and US gov, the anti-fascism is made by most heads of state and such fellow travelers as Varoufakis (DiEM25).
This is Orwellian ‘newspeak’ of course – because the fascists are in fact “Democracy”-promoters along with their think tanks and stooges: USgov, EU, NATO, Soros & co. The fascist threats i.e. euro-skeptics are the sovereigntists who understand full well that without sovereignty there can be no chance of democracy.

elenits
elenits
Aug 4, 2016 6:26 AM

Sorry!…I meant:
[near end of paragraph 2] “the anti-fascism claim is made by most heads of state”
and
[last sentence, paragraph 3] “the so-called fascist threats i.e. euroskeptics, are the sovereigntists…”

Kenneth Lindemere
Kenneth Lindemere
Aug 3, 2016 7:50 PM

It’s always presupposed that these wars are failures, where I think that they’ve played out pretty much as the oligarchs wanted – destroying viable communities, but leaving enough so that the people keep fighting, thus providing the continuous wars that are necessary to maintain the American economy and that ensure that the societies cannot rebuilt.

ThomasT
ThomasT
Aug 3, 2016 11:35 PM

yes

rtj1211
rtj1211
Aug 3, 2016 6:32 PM

People who take orders are not participants in a ‘democracy’, since the whole point of democracy is a participation in decision-making followed by respecting the decision taken.
Demos Kratos is I believe the Greek from which the word democracy is derived. ‘People Power’ is its translation…..
Having been ‘highly educated’ and lived and worked with both ‘highly educated’ people and those who were successful in real life despite not having PhDs, I have drawn several conclusions over the past 30 years:
There is no correlation whatsoever between higher HEI qualifications and the most important human quality, empathy. I have been happily half starved to death by PhD Professors and their kind and I have been nurtured back to health by businesswomen lacking degrees. A cold-hearted, analytical degree in ‘medicine’ is rather less use to a struggling human being than respectful, empathic understanding; appropriate friendliness; and social integration.
In many fields of ‘higher education’ there has been a naive belief that the ‘reductionist’ approach yields true insight. This is only half true. Understanding that the expression of certain proteins alters in various disease states is not much use if you don’t know how to reset the protein expression level back to a healthy state, is it? But knowing that may lead in time to understand how to reset the system. So it contributes, but is not enough. Carrying out brilliant analyses of how various tribes/groupings in the Middle East will react to certain behaviour patterns isn’t much use if you are so callous that you are prepared to murder millions, knowing how people will react. Will it? That lack of empathy might come in handy when calling it ‘acceptable collateral damage’, mightn’t it?
Most fields of higher study have ‘mantras’ inbuilt into their ‘relevant literature’. Relevant literature is all that is used in the logical semantics used to determine hierarchies in that field. It’s amazing how many fallacious assumptions are ‘taken as read’ in the supposedly skeptical fields of science. I only became aware of it after taking time out of science: you gain perspective being away from them that you never get remaining in the hothousing cauldron. There are rules to get promoted and, if you break them, your career is over. So surprisingly enough, you can find very conservative, very hierarchical values in Universities. Odd that, isn’t it??
Most university degrees involve over-loading students with enormous amounts of information and insufficient time to process them critically. Crucially, there is insufficient discussions about where certain ‘academic theories’ break down. In my MBA, Black-Scholes theory was presented as an academic approach to financial asset evaluation, but no discussions occurred as to whether it had limitations of applicability. The collapse of LTCM in the USA is the relevant case study. Perhaps if academics hadn’t filled MBA students with theories and instead impressed on them the necessity to understand their limitations, fewer ‘crashes’ might take place?? There are overtly stated truths that evaluation of 16PF personality types is ‘fixed throughout life’, when I know from personal experience that my type has changed three times in life, primarily due to fundamental changes in life due to seminal life experiences. It was not up for discussion because all the research was done at a point in history when evolution was somewhat slower than the past 25 years. Revisiting such assumptions would be a very good thing…..
One of the things about academia is that it is very, very rare for anyone to be allowed true freedom of thought before the age of about 30, as they work as ‘students’ or ‘postdocs’ according to pre-set mantras from above. So you generate a lot of people carrying assumptions that have not been questioned in HEIs. If they shift into Government, that’s not exactly a place to be challenging the Overlords, is it? So they buy into the propaganda again….
Living at the sharp end, you tend to see the consequences of the actions of those ‘more highly qualified’. People who have been downsized have, in effect, ‘been conquered’ by their management, their shareholders etc. They know what a ghost town looks like, they’ve lived in one. No-one inside the Beltway has. No-one on Wall Street has. People in Government and on Wall Street don’t go and fight in Iraq, in Afghanistan, they don’t come back in body bags. Folks from Main Street do that……
The problem America has is that it pre-selects very early people it has deemed ‘leadership material’ and promotes them very young into positions of incredible responsibility. In my opinion, very few of them have a broad enough experience of real life to be worthy of such responsibility so young. College, Oxford, McKinsey/Wall Street isn’t exactly a preparation to serve anyone but McKinsey and Wall Street, is it? How do you serve struggling farmers in Kansas? How do you understand the challenges of blue collar workers whose jobs ended up in China? I remember asking one of the better members of such august company when they were in Oxford ‘if they understood why anyone supported a football team’? They freely confessed that they did not. I did not enlighten them, decided to let them think about it. They were good enough to work it out for themselves…..the fact is that UK football clubs no longer represent at the top level what they originally did represent and still do to a lesser extent lower down the pyramid: a sense of local pride, a sense of local solidarity, a sense of ‘our town, our region, produced this team’.
I am of the strong opinion that America needs to select people from ‘outside the system’ if it wants to re-integrate itself into humanity. It needs to reflect on whether its leaders actually ARE superior to someone like Sergey Lavrov, who worked in Asia, including in a small developing nation, Sri Lanka, as a young man; for a decade at the UN in middle age; before becoming Foreign Minister for Russia in the past decade. Too many American leaders have never worked outside of their gilded communities back home. They would do well to have worked in countries which really hate America so they can see what their own country’s faults are from afar……..then they would know how to bring America into the 21st century……..which is the World’s Century, not America’s Century……

Vaska
Vaska
Aug 3, 2016 8:56 PM
Reply to  rtj1211

History, foreign relations, political science, economics, and sociology all need a thorough shake-up and an opening up of the outer boundaries of the thinking and the facts permitted into the discipline. Otherwise, we’ll just continue producing thoroughly indoctrinated generations of future political cadres and policy makers, incapable of recognizing, let alone stepping out of the matrix in which they were formed by those whose interests the matrix serves. To break outside those bounds will first take liberating the educational system from the “market” and returning it to the service of education and the pursuit of knowledge. And to do that, you need both the political will for it and leadership.

Bryan Hemming
Bryan Hemming
Aug 4, 2016 1:50 PM
Reply to  Vaska

Right on the nail, Vaska, it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. It starts the first day children get through the school gates, and maybe even before. Embedded in schools, universities and colleges are the messages that ‘educate’ us to serve the elite. They infect our books, sports, arts, and entertainment. They poison business, news, the judiciary, military and politics. For every ‘winner’ there must be an army of ‘losers’ to be sacrificed for the cause.
The vast majority of us are here on earth solely to serve ever-expanding needs and greed of society’s ‘winners’. Those who stray from the path must be punished severely as an example to the others. We must all know our place in the order of things.
A massive shake-up in the way we think about education is exactly what’s needed, yet things seem to be heading in the opposite direction.

elenits
elenits
Aug 4, 2016 6:33 AM
Reply to  rtj1211

Good comment.
In a way it is much simpler: the purposeful infiltration and degradation of academia over 30+ years. This started in the US as the hegemon. Now all over Europe starting with the UK the traditional academia has been Americanised and one could even say weaponised in its higher reaches.
Even architecture, my field, has been proselytized and infiltrated with NWO concepts and “professors”.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Aug 3, 2016 6:26 PM

Reblogged this on Worldtruth and commented:
We are all complicit in this because we do not oppose it. Until we do, we are the murderous aggressors.