AMERICA STUMBLES THROUGH ANOTHER YEAR, SPREADING CHAOS AND
TRIVIA EVERYWHERE IN ITS PATH
John Chuckman
The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the United Nations’
Security Council on a resolution favoring their statehood, unquestionably a reasonable
proposal in the minds of most of the world’s people. Of course, the United
States, a permanent member of the Security Council, would automatically veto such
a resolution, as it vetoes all efforts to restore order to the chaos of the
Middle East. And of course, were such a resolution somehow miraculously to
pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as it has ignored a long list of binding
UN resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt are not enough for an upright,
God-fearing Southern gentleman like US Senator Lindsey Graham. He busied
himself recently with threatening America’s withholding funds from a United
Nations that gets involved in the “peace process.” Imagine, the United Nations
getting involved in peace? That is a chilling thought. Since the United States
has a history of withholding its UN dues against its solemn treaty obligations
to bully its way to certain changes, such threats do carry weight.
Senator Graham, regarded neither as an idealist nor a voice for peace, is only doing what so many
American politicians do under the unbelievably corrupt, money-drenched American
election system, and that is to make ridiculous public statements about the
Middle East in return for generous dollops of campaign funds from the world’s
most tireless political lobby, that for Israel. You might think that the lobby itself
would tire of funding backwater blowhards demanding the other ninety-five
percent of humanity play the game by America’s rules or America is picking up
its marbles or chips or whatever and going home, but clearly it does not.
“The peace process” is the longest running farce on the planet,
continuing for nearly fifty years. It might have been funny in the vein of The Mouse That Roared, but there is nothing
remotely funny in the killing of thousands of people and the extreme abuse and
hopelessness of millions. You just could not make a worse hash of a diplomatic and
human welfare situation than America has made in the Middle East. And the
situation has only intensified in its cruelty and injustice. Today, Israel
openly and regularly steals homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It
threatens ancient Muslim shrines and desecrates some of them. It has savaged
Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison camp, twice, killing close to four
thousand including nearly a thousand children. It has attempted to starve Gaza’s
people out with a years-long embargo, and is making ugly noises about still another
invasion. It is about to steal Syrian oil on the occupied Golan Heights,
drilling there illegally, and it is busy arranging the theft of offshore
natural gas that belongs to Gaza and Lebanon. It does all of this with complete
impunity and not even a cross word from the likes of Senator Graham. I do think
the Middle East provides the strongest possible evidence of the complete
unsuitability of the United States to play a dominant role in international
affairs. It is genuinely a case of the inmates running the asylum.
In another example of chaos mixed with farce, the United
States pretends to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and while that charade
continues, planes loaded with American weapons keep flying out of Turkey to
make the seeming lunatics even stronger. Indeed, the various ragtag factions trying
to overthrow the Syrian government, cutthroats assembled by the US and its
friends from all corners of the globe in a kind of hellish foreign legion, announced
a new alliance, so telling Washington’s approved terrorists in the conflict
from those who haven’t made the cut is more difficult than ever. Recently, one
or another of the lunatic mobs shot down two fighter jets, and how do you think
they managed that without American anti-aircraft missiles? Turkey’s certifiably
unbalanced president, Tayyip Erdoğan, one day makes fiery speeches threatening
Israel (to please the poor fools voting for him) and the next makes new secret
deals with Israel. Remember, this is a man who just built a one-thousand room
palace for himself – yes, that’s right, exactly one thousand rooms – and it is
the ugliest, most pointless large structure built since the early Soviet era, a
kind of gigantic sprawling warehouse incrusted with jewels and filled with
porcelain.
Well, dippiness is no barrier to membership in a secret club
in the region which includes the UAE, Saudia Arabia, and Israel, all lovingly
assisted by the US. They are all governments who regard change as desirable only
when it results in an even more rigid status quo, as in Egypt. Never mind the welfare of the region’s people
or democracy or human rights or national boundaries. These guys resemble twelfth
century lords seeing paupers cross their paths: they run them down and proceed
to a rollicking good dinner in the great hall. The club is all about security
for hereditary monarchs, security for America’s crusader fortress colony in the
Middle East, and security for helper states in the American agenda. We’ve had
many reports recently of secret air-freight flights between Tel Aviv and Abu
Dhabi. We also have reports of flights out of Turkey into Syria. The never
explained events at Benghazi were undoubtedly blowback from an operation
collecting unemployed thugs and arms for secret shipment to Turkey and then
into Syria. Saudi Arabia is voluntarily taking a bath by pushing oil prices
down, a favor to the US and Israel and Turkey and a way of hurting Russia,
Iran, Syria, and even Venezuela – all current members in good standing of
Captain America’s ever-changing galaxy of villains – aka, the Axis of Evil. The
US is willing to sacrifice for the time being its booming shale oil industry,
whose more costly production requires higher prices than Saudi conventional
crude, in return for the Saudi sacrifice.
Since both countries are desperate to hurt Russia, Iran, and
Syria, the deal is a marriage made in Realpolitik
heaven. Russia has helped Syria and does business with Iran, and Saudi Arabia
and Israel hate Iran and Syria. The US has made a large investment in toppling
Syria for Israel’s benefit, but the plan has been thwarted by Syrian endurance
and Russian help. The plan also overlooked the loyalty of important Syrian societal
groups to President Assad, but America often overlooks details as it attempts
to reshape the world to its liking with bombs. Of course, there was also the precedent
of Iraq, a bloody fiasco that achieved nothing but a million deaths and
splintering a country into pieces. That splintering, by the way, continues with
the ISIS fiasco: Iraq’s Kurds are being used against ISIS to strengthen their own
region’s quasi-independence from Iraq.
The chaos the secret club-member countries have created in
Syria – perhaps 200,000 killed and a couple of million refugees – appears not to
bother them in the least, just so many paupers in the roadway when galloping home
to dinner at the great hall. The victims do provide useful free material for
the propaganda war being waged, the understanding implicit in America’s and Canada’s
and Europe’s press being always that President Assad is responsible for the
catastrophe. The US, and cheerleaders on the sidelines like Canada’s current
dismal right-wing government, are doing virtually nothing for the refugees, or for
the many civilians crippled or wounded. Ironically, Israel actually accepts for
treatment in its northern medical facilities some of the very fanatics wounded in
the dirty work. After all, it is ultimately Israel’s dirty work they do,
regardless of their fanaticism. It’s a phenomenon we might call selective
terrorism: fanatical killers who do America’s work, or Israel’s, are not treated
as terrorists at all. No matter how many women and children you kill, no matter
how many places you bomb, you only become a terrorist if you oppose the
interests of America or Israel.
The toll in killed and wounded and homeless in Eastern
Ukraine continues to mount. New punitive measures come regularly from Kiev,
undoubtedly with American advice about possible vulnerabilities – after all, a
top cabinet minister in the coup-created government is American. Only the other
day we read reports of Ukrainian militia-types, the kind of right-wing thugs
who helped the US overthrow an elected government in Kiev, blocking food
traffic into the East. Attempting to starve people into submission is defined
in international law as a war crime, but we hear no word of concern from
America, just as we heard no word of concern for Israel’s original blockade of
Gaza which actually included a calculated level of calories intended to just keep
the population alive (since modified under intense secret international
pressure).
In all these induced chaotic situations, we hear little or
nothing from the UN, an institution which should be among the first condemning
aggressive behavior. But the UN, despite the many differing private views of
its members, is now in all official capacities under the thumb of the US. Its
current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, a candidate favored by America, is
ineffectual and behaves at times almost as though he headed an organization
having nothing to do with peace or human rights.
Well, there is some intimidating history. Boutros Boutros-Ghali
was the only UN secretary-general not to be elected to a second term in office,
and the reason was an American plan to be rid of him, one of Madeleine Albright’s
glorious career achievements. America vetoed his second term because it was
most unhappy when he did not embrace the bombing of Bosnia, and they disliked other
of his views which tended to be thoughtful and compassionate. Earlier, Secretary-General
Dag Hammarskjöld, a much admired man, was assassinated in an engineered plane
crash, said to have been the work of Belgian mining companies unhappy with the
UN’s policies in Congo, a place the mining companies had drained of wealth for
decades of brutal exploitation, but I think it unlikely anything of that nature
happened without at least a nod of approval from Washington, which after all
was a major customer for the products of Congo.
The evidence is piling up, despite delays and many
irregularities in the official investigation into the crash of airline Flight
MH-17 in Ukraine, that a Ukrainian pilot deliberately shot the plane down. His
fighter is said to have been armed with air-to-air missiles on take-off,
something completely out-of-the-ordinary in the conflict since Eastern
Ukrainians have no air force. It returned, according to an eye-witness, with no
missiles and the pilot’s muttering cryptic phrases. Of course, this would be
the kind of act you might expect from people who used sniper rifles earlier
this year to kill many hundreds of civilians in Maidan, the central square of
Kiev, in order to terrorize the population and start the coup. But where is
America’s voice in these grotesque doings? As Russia has patiently pointed out,
an American spy satellite was virtually overhead at the time of the crash, so
definitive evidence exists without a doubt but is not produced. But then
neither is it produced for the destruction of Flight MH-370 in the Indian
Ocean, an event it is virtually certain was the work of American forces at the
secret Diego Garcia base as the plane came their way for whatever unknown reason.
The irregularities around Flight MH-17’s investigation
include Malaysia, owners of the airline, being excluded from the group
conducting the investigation and include the fact that segments of the wreckage
were left behind at the crash site, and that after taking a very long time to
get there in the first place, making manipulation of forensic evidence possible
and even likely. We also have the absence of any American satellite or radar
records, and we have not a word about the autopsy on the pilot, something which
might solve the entire mystery, as from the discovery of Ukrainian missile
fragments in his body.
What kind of world do we want to live in? One where coups
and civil wars are engineered for the pleasure of others? One where airliners
full of people are shot down deliberately? This is the chaos, and just part of
it, America has bestowed upon us in the twenty-first century. I won’t even go
into the financial tsunami it created in 2008 with the same lack of caution for
others and concern about doing things correctly. The full impact of that has
yet to strike us all.
But America brings laughable trivia, too. The President of
the United States spending time and breath on the hacking of a private
company’s web site? A Japanese company, no less? And turning the relatively
trivial business of hacking, which happens every day now somewhere, into an
international incident by blaming, almost certainly incorrectly, North Korea?
The President said the FBI had investigated and assured him
that North Korea was responsible. What he didn’t tell us was that the FBI has a
decades-long record of being wrong, seriously wrong, a great deal of the time.
Given the FBI’s history, it certainly is in the running for the title of Most
Incompetent Security Organization in the Western World, although, like other
national security institutions in the United States, it is grossly over-funded
with money gushing out like water from broken plumbing. Americans pay more per
unit of misinformation than likely any other people on the planet.
Anyone familiar with the record of the FBI listens to
assurances like the President’s with a sarcastic smile at best (see FOOTNOTE
for a partial list of the FBI’s viciousness and incompetence over the years).
Shortly after the president’s silly words, we had several world-class tech
experts tell us why it could not have been North Korea, and I’ll take bets
against the FBI on this one from anyone.
It likely was someone at Sony doing a publicity stunt to
promote what by all reports is a dud of a film, but why should the man with the
biggest job in the world join in? Consider also the fact that if you make what
can be viewed as a threatening comment or presentation of any kind against the
President of the United States, you will be visited and interviewed by the
Secret Service, who will then keep you on file permanently. Why is it okay to
make a movie about the assassination of North Korea’s president then, the
subject of The Interview? Sony
certainly has right to do stupidly foolish things, but it is more than a little
muddled for the President eagerly to support it. Will he now address the rights
of porn actors in California to work without condoms?
As I write this, a British newspaper reports that some Sony
employees have been quietly dismissed. Reported also is the discovery of a web
site strongly suggesting disgruntled employees. See what I mean about America
overlooking the facts before it acts?
FOOTNOTE ON HOW WRONG AND DISHONEST THE FBI HAS BEEN: The
FBI was wrong in claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia, something J.
Edgar Hoover insisted for many years while he gambled at their racetracks and
stayed at their resorts for free, some biographers believing Hoover had been
compromised by the Mafia with photos of his secret gay, cross-dressing life. The
FBI was wrong in focusing huge resources for many years on the pathetic
American Communist Party, half of whose small membership is said to have
consisted of FBI agents. The FBI was wrong about the threat of Albert Einstein,
seeking his extradition for a time and checking the contents of his garbage to
his dying day. The FBI was wrong about the danger of Dr. Martin Luther King,
and it played judge and jury with his personal life. The FBI was wrong about
Dr. Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos being a spy, although it ruined his career. The
FBI was wrong about the crash of TWA Flight 800, taking an inordinate amount of
time trying to let public interest cool and avoid the obvious fact that the
crash was an accidental shoot-down by the American military, there being a
radar track showing something like a missile rising towards the plane. Despite
its vast resources, the FBI never saw 9/11 coming. One of its own senior agents,
Robert Hanssen, was one of the more damaging spies of modern times, a man whose
carelessness in many details, classic indicators of a paid spy, went unnoticed
for years. The FBI was wrong in the Atlanta Olympic bombing, ruining the life
of another innocent man. It couldn’t have been more wrong in its handling of
the sad kooks at Waco, effectively murdering them all. So, too, at the Ruby
Ridge standoff where an FBI sniper killed a woman and her child needlessly. The
FBI Crime Labs were cited in the 1990s by the Inspector General for misconduct
and manipulating evidence, something many had suspected for years. The FBI
specialized for years in hurting the reputations of those it didn’t like or
those it merely suspected, as by asking questions at their place of work and
neighborhood, not have any proof of wrong-doing. The FBI, at least under J.
Edgar Hoover, held career-threatening information obtained by spying over the
heads of many prominent congressmen and government leaders, effectively
blackmailing them to do its bidding. It did the same with non-government
officials where it felt so inclined. The FBI was wrong about the assassination
of President Kennedy, it being the only investigative agency for the
lamentable, embarrassing Warren Commission, thereby assuming at least equal responsibility
for its inaccurate, dishonest report. Indeed, the FBI did not reveal at the
time that Oswald secretly worked for them as a paid informant (since
documented). It also lied about evidence a senior FBI agent destroyed after the
assassination, a note Oswald had written.
