JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP ACTUALLY BRAGS IN A CAMPAIGN SPEECH ABOUT THE REAL REASON AMERICA IS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND IT IS NOT FOR THE OIL – HIS IMPORTANT ADMISSION GOES LARGELY UNNOTED IN THE CORPORATE PRESS BECAUSE IT RAISES THE SENSITIVE MATTER OF THE IMMENSE AMOUNT IN LIVES AND TREASURE AMERICA HAS SPENT FOR ISRAEL’S BENEFIT – THE SITUATION IN SYRIA – THE NEOCON WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AS A YEARS-LONG 1960s-STYLE SLUM CLEARANCE PROJECT – THE WARS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT 9/11 THAT WILL NEVER BE ANSWERED

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP WEISS IN MONDOWEISS


U.S. is in Middle East ‘to protect Israel’ not for oil, Trump says

Donald Trump said the U.S. isn’t involved in the Middle East for oil, but because we “want to protect Israel.” He made the comment during a rally in Winston-Salem, N.C. on Sept. 8. The comment has gone all but unreported in the mainstream press.


Thanks for highlighting this important truth.

You are right, Trump’s words received no attention in the corporate press.

I’ve long accepted Israel as America’s true motive for being in the region, but when you see virtually no confirmation of a matter that large, year after year, it is disheartening.

Control of the press is certainly a powerful tool even in the Age of the Internet.

We saw how the corporate press readily embraced and joked about Trump’s stated reason for remaining illegally in part of eastern Syria, the contrived nonsense about enjoying oil theft. I’m sure some security people worked overtime to come up with that line, one Trump could be comfortable with delivering because he thinks being a thug is amusing.

Never once did I see the truth about remaining in Syria, which is simply to act as a continuing irritant to the country’s government and to deprive it of some of its own resources so they can’t be applied to reconstruction, a set of American activities reflecting direct pressure from Israel.

Relatively few Americans understand the war in Syria. The press often falsely calls it a civil war. It represents a complex, covert effort to topple Syria, maybe even dismembering it, using hybrid techniques like hired mercenaries disguised as jihadis. They are recruited from many places and supported by the US and its allies, including Israel. Separatist-minded groups, too, such as the Syrian Kurds, have been supplied and encouraged to fight the national government.

A beautiful, historic land has been savaged, and about 600,000 people have been killed.

It has been largely for Israel’s benefit, so that an independent-minded government on its border could be eliminated. Israel also hoped in destabilizing Syria to secure its illegal hold on the Golan Heights, Syrian territory it seized in 1967. It hoped further, in the midst of induced chaos, to take still more Syrian territory as a “buffer” for the occupied Golan Heights, now claimed to be annexed as part of Israel, something international law does not permit doing with occupied territory.

That effort has mainly failed, thanks in large part to Russian and Iranian legally-provided assistance to Syria, but we have continued efforts here and there, including America’s seizure of oilfields, Turkey’s intrusion into the Northeast, and Israel’s regular low-level bombing of certain parts of a country that has not attacked Israel and that Israel is not at war with.

We really do live in a world of illusion in international affairs.

But it is not new. How many Americans ever had any idea of what the long slaughter in Vietnam was about? Vietnam was left littered with countless bomb craters, mine fields, and tons of poison like Agent Orange. Three million people were killed in Vietnam and another million in Cambodia, and for what? Just to secure an imperial foothold in Asia. Of course, you couldn’t sell it to the folks back home that way, so the filthy war morphed into something vaguely about defending freedom.

Just so, the War on Terror in the Middle East, more appropriately called the Neocon Wars. A couple of million killed, many millions made refugees, and some advancing, comparatively well-run societies destroyed.

The Neocon Wars are a gigantic years-long redevelopment project – what we called “slum clearance” in the 1960s – to bulldoze and pave over parts of Israel’s neighborhood, the parts containing any government not faithfully following American direction.

All the truly bloody tyrants from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and Bahrain are just fine with America and Israel so long as they keep their people in line and never question America’s activities. That fact is a major reason why the Middle East progresses so slowly towards democratic government. And it enables Israel to keep making the empty brag about being the region’s only democracy.

Some democracy where only one kind of people can immigrate and become citizens and where literally millions of others are held with no rights and no votes and no hope.

The dreary and brutal Condoleezza Rice, when the first explosions and screams were heard in the region, spoke about “hearing the birth cries of a new Middle East.”

Empires are ugly affairs and utterly without principle or compassion. And that description sums up contemporary America far more accurately than patriotic boilerplate about men in frock coats pledging their sacred honor to oppose tyranny. It also has a lot to do with the genuine brutality of America’s own society.

Of course, the real reason for the Neocon Wars inevitably raises questions around 9/11, but I doubt we will ever receive truthful answers. What we were provided is not even logical.