The US had a great deal going from 1953 to 1979 with the Shah of Iran. For 25 years Iran was a cornerstone of the US usurping the British Empire in the Middle East, following World War Two. Iran was a base for projecting US power in the region, and strategically it bordered the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
On December 10, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This analysis will try to look at how the prize fits in the bigger picture, but first, some general background is appropriate:
Norway is a member of NATO and has close ties to the United States and Great Britain. The political, economic and bureaucratic elites are firmly integrated in transatlantic networks, a nexus of economic connections, think tanks, international institutions, media and a thousand other ties that bind. They tend to identify with the liberal wing of the empire, (i.e. the Democrats, not the Republicans), but will work with any US administration. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are selected by the Norwegian parliament, and the Committee is nominally independent.
If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.
by David William Pear When the U.S.A. wanted a regime change it used to be done in secret by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), especially when that country had a democratically elected government such as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1980’s), Haiti (2006), Honduras (2009), Ukraine (2014) and Syria, where the bloody project is still raging, the body count mounting, and millions of refugees are homeless. In the last few decades the U.S. has grown bolder in its regime change projects. What used to be done secretly is now unabashedly done in plain sight. The 2017 Venezuela regime change project has gone public. Most of the U.S. public cannot see the forest for the trees of propaganda that has the public confused about what is behind the chaos in Venezuela today. Mostly what is behind it is U.S. funding millions of dollars to the political parties of the oligarchs. Without that money the opposition political parties would be more divided than they already are and weaker. The mainstream media spreads the propaganda that President …
by Simon Wood This piece was originally published September 8 2015, but is highly relevant to the ongoing drive for war i Syria We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms.” Former US President Jimmy Carter, presidential campaign, 1976 [Source] No clearer demonstration of the mass psychosis afflicting much of humanity can be seen than in the ongoing outrage and horror evoked by the photographs of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body. While it goes without saying that any empathic being would react with utter revulsion and helpless fury at the fate of this poor little boy, one cannot ignore the vast indifference evident toward the thousands of other needless child deaths that occur daily around the world. For this silent slaughter, we hear: ‘Shit happens’ or ‘What am I supposed to do about it?’ Aylan’s death even touched the stony hearts of corporate media editors: From Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: His name was Aylan. He was 3 years old, from …
by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org America’s aristocracy is determined to take over Russia. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union and of its communism, the Cold War has become replaced by an increasingly hot war in which the U.S. and its allies are expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and imposing against Russia what the U.S. refused to accept being imposed upon itself during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: nuclear checkmate! The direction of aggression since the end of communism has reversed, and the aggression itself has considerably intensified. Though the ideological excuse for the conflict is thus entirely gone, the aggression against Russia is far more than the Soviet Union ever dreamt of even trying against America. It’s so blatant. This is raw aggression, for nothing else than conquest — ideology has nothing to do with it. First, Russia’s allies are assassinated or otherwise overthrown; then, Russia is to be in the cross-hairs, isolated as much as possible: Russia’s ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq was killed in 2003; Russia’s ally Muammar Gaddafi …
Smoke rising after air strikes carried out by the Russian air force on an Islamic State base in Idlib province, Syria Photo: REUTERS/Ministry of Defence of Russia The Washington Free Beacon reports: Former President Jimmy Carter said recently that he provided maps of Islamic State positions in Syria to the Russian embassy in Washington, a move apparently at odds with the Obama administration’s official policy of not cooperating with Russia in the Syrian war. Carter said on Sunday in Georgia that he knows Russian President Vladimir Putin “fairly well” because they “have a common interest in fly fishing.” When he met with Putin in April along with other global leaders [photo above, with Putin and Kofi Annan] to discuss the crises in Syria and Ukraine, the Russian president gave him an email address so the two could discuss his “fly fishing experiences, particularly in Russia,” Carter said. The civil war in Syria, where U.S. officials say Russia has bombed rebels and CIA-backed groups rather than the Islamic State terrorist group, has also been a topic …
by David Swanson Jimmy Carter called a war waged in Vietnam by the United States — a war that killed 60,000 Americans and 4,000,000 Vietnamese, without burning down a single U.S. town or forest — “mutual” damage. Ronald Reagan called it a “noble” and “just cause.” Barack Obama promotes the myth of the widespread mistreatment of returning U.S. veterans, denounces the Vietnamese as “brutal,” and has launched a 13-year, $65 million propaganda program to glorify what the Vietnamese call the American War: As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away . . . They pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Which ideals might those have been? Remember, this was the bad war in contrast to which World War II acquired the ridiculous …
