Peter R. Quiñones wrote the following brief reflection recently, and it mirrors my own sentiments as well. As an idealistic youth I voluntarily joined the peacetime US Navy just after Vietnam in 1976, in the hopes that America had learned her lesson about fighting wars abroad that had nothing to do with keeping America “safe”.
The greatest message you can communicate to anyone you encounter on Memorial Day is that it is a holiday that should not exist. The excuses for the men and women who have died in “service to this country” are numerous, but only in the rarest of circumstances does it have to do with protecting American lives or liberty on this piece of soil.
I’m only going to address the 20th Century here so we should start with World War 1. Was the United States homeland in danger of being invaded by anyone? Of course not. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s great book, “Democracy: The God That Failed,” conveys to me that WW1 was fought to destroy any remaining trace of historic monarchies in Europe, and to institute democracy instead. Even the countries that kept their royalty saw them become only symbols in a parliamentary system rather than a one family rule.
What about World War 2? PEARL HARBOR!!! HITLER DECLARED WAR ON US!!! WW2 is the war that is consistently sold as the “good war.” Fortunately, many good historians have shot multiple holes in the assumed fact that the US had to enter WW2 on either front. I interviewed one here.
What about Korea? Vietnam? Iraq War 1, 2, 3 and 3.5? Afghanistan? Somalia? Libya? Syria? I could go on and on (unfortunately). The bottom line for all these is this; the “honorable” and “patriotic” reasons given for American men and women dying on battlefields across the world are strained when you begin to look at them more closely. The hundreds of thousands who sacrificed their lives believing they were fighting for American freedom were mistaken. Overwhelmingly they were duped. But it’s not their fault. With the draft in effect for most of the 20th century (ended in 1973 when the US pulled out of the Vietnam War), many had no choice but to fight. Many others were convinced to enlist by war propaganda.
On Memorial Day I weep for the fallen. Not because of their sacrifice, but because they were sacrificed.
Routinely, the American government has squandered the innocence of our youth to do exactly what Robert E. Lee warned about:
In my previous post I covered a lot of ground towards truths that could (I rarely say “should” as I believe you don’t typically “should” on you real friends 🙂 ) open their eyes to the true character of their evil government. The so-called American Exceptionalism is pure myth. Just ask other people around the world who have experience our “help”.
There is, however, even in these days much to be hopeful for. We can continue to plant the seeds of truth with those who will listen about the lies that seem to bombard us each and every day in our world. This unwrapping of truth could very well lead this nation, or preferably, parts of this nation, to reflect on core truths that might bring about a new season of liberty and freedom in the regions that hold these truths to their hearts.
Maybe this American Government holiday can be used to help people question the very nature of their government, their politicians and the evil cabal that backs an evil agenda in this land all for power and money.
A bully has to deflect any blame for anything and everything. One has to wonder it this is the proverbial blaming someone else before one gets blamed themselves, for something they actually did. First impressions are like that.
Lincoln knew if the South fired the first shot they would historically receive the blame for their peaceful secession that was spun to be an “insurrection”.
FDR knew if Japan struck first, he would get his ticket to join WWII which would hid his disastrous attempts at pulling the US out of the Great Depression with his New Deal programs ad nauseum.
Bush I knew Iraq would get the blame even though the US signaled to Saddam Hussein that it was his purview whether to invade Kuwait or not for infringing on Iraqi oil fields with horizontal drilling.
Bush II knew Iraq would get the blame after accusing them of WMDs.
Obama knew Libya would get the blame after accusing them of .. sorry, can’t even remember the excuse for turning Libya over to ISIS and other radical groups. Obama also tried this with Assad in Syria and that he used chemical weapons against his own people.
Now Trump, the GOP and the Democrats are all turning to blame China for ‘Rona. Seriously?
Yes, I call it ‘Rona since I ain’t following any government guidelines or laws that infringe on my NATURAL right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Just livin’ the life!
So Moon of Alabama has a pretty good article about the timeline that China had in sharing their own Covid-19 journey:
The U.S. claims that China did not inform it sufficiently. The timeline as published by China and confirmed by media reports does not support that claim.
On January 3 the head of the U.S. Center of Disease Control was personally informed by his Chinese counterpart that there was an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. On January 8 the “unknown cause” was identified as a novel coronavirus. A full genome sequence of the virus was published on January 12 and preliminary testing kits were developed and made available in Wuhan. By January 13 another test and test protocol had been developed in Germany and on January 17 the WHO adopted its refined version.
In the U.S. the CDC insisted on developing its own test and failed by contaminating its test components. It then failed for more than a month to correct the issue.
When you point a finger at someone else, you have to realize that you have three other fingers pointing at yourself! However, American Exceptionalism keeps the blinders on as to the US’s stupid decisions at every turn of this pandemic turned plan-demic.
The whole blame game smells fishy as it becomes apparent that the wet market in Wuhan was not the source of the epidemic. For one, it did not and does not sell bats. Another point is that the epidemic started in December at a time when bats hibernate. The first know case was not related to the market at all.
As far as a lab source to this bat-sourced theory:
Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney and a fellow of the respected Royal Society in London, said the Wuhan laboratory blamed by some for the pandemic does have specimens of the bat virus RaTG13, the closest relative of Covid-19 source SARS-CoV-2, but the two are not genetically linked.
RaTG13 strains, he says, are from the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, not the central city of Wuhan, the pandemic’s initial epicenter.
Genome tracing has revealed that the bat virus RaTG13 has at least 20 years of genetic divergence, or evolutionary change, from SARS-CoV-2, and possibly as much as 50 years, ruling it out as the source of the pandemic.
OK then. What is it that the US wants. You know whenever there is COOPERATION across the political aisle from Democrats and GOP, there is some stupid agenda going on as Democrats are evil, GOP are stupid and together they are STUPID to the 2nd power.
1. Financial: I am pretty sure since the US has chosen the path of financial self destruction to cover their own super sick financial fundamentals and a QE hell that they could never exit without saving face, this Covid-19 became a convenient camouflage. The US wants to keep China on its heals as the US fire-sale domestically heats up and Chinese investors come looking for good deals.
2. Military: I am pretty sure with all the Covid-19 infected aircraft carriers and nuclear bomber fleets are heading back to the US mainland which leaves China to do what they want in the South China Sea, and the Pentagon is not happy about that but its hands are tied between that and exiting bases in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
We can call this a lame pre-emptive strike in order for the US Empire to stay in the world stage without looking like it is no longer empire material.
The obvious solution is to do this financial reset is not to bailout corporate America, but to do the hard work of moving through bankruptcies WHILE drastically paring down federal government giving responsibilities back to the states and recall the military from their global outposts to the United States mainland. The core piece of this is the removal of the central bank, the FED, as this has allowed the United States to live well beyond its means ($25T debt and $250T unfunded liabilities) and enslave the generations to come.
Will our existing political class figure this out? Not a chance.
Will voting help? Not a chance.
The US still has the USPS and Amtrak, if they can be trusted with little things, you can safely say they can’t be trusted with MAJOR things.
This nation will have to split into many smaller republics before any of this can be addressed.
Whoever can be trusted with smallthings can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. – Luke 16:10 (Bible)
Critical thinkers, after a spat or confrontation, will reflect on the encounter and attempt to understand the motives of those involved. This requires getting out of your own shoes and into the shoes of others.
We usually assume the best in others by default. People we meet for the first time we try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Over time we can then compare words with actions and be a pretty good judge of character.
We are also influenced by our upbringing, and our schooling, and if that involves government schools or even most private schools, the bias is there. We have learned of George Washington and the cherry tree (myth), we have learned about Honest Abe (myth) and we have learned about good government.
There is no doubt that this base operating system allows most people to see government as a natural safety net, and a natural “go-to” for any life problem that comes along, the Nanny State can take care of it best. But I digress.
When it comes to thinking about the United States of America, or more accurately, the US Empire, there is a natural inclination to think of American Exceptionalism. Being proud of America to the point of thinking it knows best for every people group around the world is as American as “apple pie”.
So when President Donald Trump says:
Over the last three years, under my leadership, our economy is stronger than ever before and America has achieved energy independence. These historic accomplishments changed our strategic priorities. These are accomplishments that nobody thought were possible. And options in the Middle East became available. We are now the number-one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. We are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil. (emphasis added)
.. you have to really wonder, what about all the times he references oil in Syria as being critical for the US to protect or wanting 50% of Iraq’s oil revenue to pay for all that the US has done in Iraq since the invasion, is it really about the oil, or things links to and through the oil?
Whitney Webb from a Mint Press article does a great job at looking at all the angles to determine motives. She even references another great thinker, Tom Loungo and his Gold, Goats N’Guns web page in her attempt to get her mind around what Trump, the Neo-Cons and the War Party are angling for:
Yet, given the centrality of the recent Iraq-China oil deal in guiding some of the Trump administration’s recent Middle East policy moves, this appears not to be the case. The distinction may lie in the fact that, while the U.S. may now be less dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, it still very much needs to continue to dominate how oil is traded and sold on international markets in order to maintain its status as both a global military and financial superpower.
Bingo Whitney.
This is the core that fuels the MIC, the Deep State, the War Party as well as the US Empire itself. Without the petrodollar, the US military can no longer have its $1T annual budget, and the whole US economic charade would be revealed.
The takeaway from the petrodollar phenomenon is that as long as countries need oil, they will need the dollar. As long as countries demand dollars, the U.S. can continue to go into massive amounts of debt to fund its network of global military bases, Wall Street bailouts, nuclear missiles, and tax cuts for the rich.”
Yes, at its core, this is probably the only long-range thinking the US Empire cares about with the only exception of possibly Israel’s survival.
Historically, Iraq remembers:
It appears that the ever-present role of the petrodollar in guiding U.S. policy in the Middle East remains unchanged. The petrodollar has long been a driving factor behind the U.S.’ policy towards Iraq specifically, as one of the key triggers for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s decision to sell Iraqi oil in Euros opposed to dollars beginning in the year 2000. Just weeks before the invasion began, Hussein boasted that Iraq’s Euro-based oil revenue account was earning a higher interest rate than it would have been if it had continued to sell its oil in dollars, an apparent signal to other oil exporters that the petrodollar system was only really benefiting the United States at their own expense.
Libya also found out the hard way what happens to countries outside of the US Empire’s orbit.
The tilt away from the US Empire started earlier last year in AUG2019 when Iraq asserted its sovereignty on its border with Syria:
Luongo also argued that the current tensions between U.S. and Iraqi leadership preceded the oil deal between Iraq and China by several weeks, “All of this starts with Prime Minister Mahdi starting the process of opening up the Iraq-Syria border crossing and that was announced in August. Then, the Israeli air attacks happened in September to try and stop that from happening, attacks on PMU forces on the border crossing along with the ammo dump attacks near Baghdad ..
Then, it was Iraq looking at options for its own rebuilding (the US Empire has squandered billions of dollars on projects that help the US Empire more than it does the Iraqi infrastructure, even though the US invasion was a mistake and rightly should have the US bear the expense of rebuilding).
Iraq looked to the east, with China, and found a better deal than the one that Trump offered Iraq:
While Trump demanded half of Iraq’s oil revenue in exchange for completing reconstruction projects (according to Abdul-Mahdi), the deal that was signed between Iraq and China would see around 20 percent of Iraq’s oil revenue go to China in exchange for reconstruction.
It was right after that Chinese conference that Iraq started seeing unrest, “coincidentally”:
Abdul-Mahdi’s delegation to China ended on September 24, with the protests against his government that Trump reportedly threatened to start on October 1. Reports of a “third side” firing on Iraqi protesters were picked up by major media outlets at the time, such as in this BBC report which stated:
Reports say the security forces opened fire, but another account says unknown gunmen were responsible….a source in Karbala told the BBC that one of the dead was a guard at a nearby Shia shrine who happened to be passing by. The source also said the origin of the gunfire was unknown and it had targeted both the protesters and security forces. (emphasis added)”
This is exactly what the US did in Ukraine back in 2014 .. it has the US Empire’s fingerprints all over it.
Then ..
.. after my [Abdul-Mahdi] return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened [that there would be] massive demonstrations to topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, whereby a third party [presumed to be mercenaries or U.S. soldiers] would target both the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from atop the highest buildings and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement.”
“I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement. When the defense minister said that those killing the demonstrators was a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened myself and the defense minister in the event that there was more talk about this third party ..
Yes, this is the true character of the US empire, in actions, verses the words from George W. Bush in DEC2005:
Just over two-and-a-half years ago, Iraq was in the grip of a cruel dictator who had invaded his neighbors, sponsored terrorists, pursued and used weapons of mass destruction, murdered his own people, and for more than a decade, defied the demands of the United Nations and the civilized world. Since then, the Iraqi people have assumed sovereignty over their country, held free elections, drafted a democratic constitution, and approved that constitution in a nationwide referendum. Three days from now, they go to polls for the third time this year, and choose a new government under the new constitution.
Democracy arrived in Iraq in 2005, but now 15 years later, with the US still occupying this country that it wrongfully invaded, the US wants a monopoly on “re-building Iraq” and “keeping ISIS out of Iraq”.
From my last post lamenting the benefits of small nations or federations of small republics and city-states, it became rather obvious that the formation of the Articles of Confederation which linked thirteen colonies together to fight against the British Empire was a noble effort, and that Switzerland decided early on to retain this focus unlike the United States:
After the revolutionary war, many founders abandoned the Swiss model as being too week and opted again towards the large-state model..
In today’s post, I use primarily an article from Darius Shahtahmasebi that explains the impact that many of the US Empire’s wars have had on Muslims over time. Darius does a great job of balancing the fact that it is not that the Muslims were targeted, but like the American Indians, it has more to do with the content their lands have for potential empire resources or disruptions in trade routes.
There are then several phases of the US Empire’s history that I hope to unpack today as a lesson we can all learn from so we can better understand the true character of the empire’s endeavors.
The first phase happened when the united States, having been victorious in its quest for independence from the British Empire, was potentially left unprotected in world trade. The source I chose for this was an article that helps to identify what really might have gone town in the tension between the US (which many consider to be a Christian nation) and the Barbary Powers (that happened to be primarily Muslim in religious terms). The truth is that these Barbary ‘corsairs’ were not only Muslim but also included English privateers and Dutch captains who exploited the changing loyalties of an era in which friends could become enemies and enemies friends with the stroke of a pen.
In the Barbary ‘pirate’ era, these entrepreneurs were not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, and even as far away as the Netherlands and Iceland. They landed on unguarded beaches, and crept up on villages in the dark to capture their victims. This did not begin with these powers that ended up enslaving over one million Europeans, but was preceded by Christian pirates, primarily from Catalonia and Sicily, that dominated the seas, posing a constant threat to merchants in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Back to the Barbary powers of the Ottoman Empire of the 15th century:
During the era of the American colonies, American merchant vessels received protection by virtue of being of being British; the British were among the countries that paid tribute. Then, during the American Revolution, an alliance with France protected American ships. But full independence brought an end to that.
Initially, the United States decided to pay tribute. But American leaders, including Jefferson, seethed at having to do it, saying it would only inspire more and more outrageous financial demands. On July 11, 1786, Jefferson wrote to John Adams, “I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” The following month, he wrote to James Monroe that the Barbary powers “must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them.”
Jefferson truly believed that the sea trade routes should be free. However, during the George Washington and John Adams administrations, the tribute was paid as was done by all the European powers, in fact, the rift was identified as economic in nature and not seen as religious:
As early as 1797, the United States made clear in a treaty with Tripoli that “as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan (Mohammedan or Muslim) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
Once Jefferson became the US President, he decided that enough was enough:
After Jefferson became president in 1801, he rejected Tripoli’s demand for payment. The pasha of Tripoli countered by declaring war on the United States. Jefferson sent forces to the Mediterranean, and after sporadic combat, hostilities ended four years later with a negotiated settlement in which the United States paid a smaller tribute than had initially been demanded.
The era of Barbary corsairs effectively ended a decade later, when, after the U.S. Navy, battle-hardened from the War of 1812, won a quick victory against Algiers, effectively ending all tribute payments.
By 1815, after the US’s war against the British Empire, the US flexed its muscles and used force to protect US shipping going forward. Shortly after this, the US found itself in a war with Mexico in the late 1840s and by 1860, fought an attempt to split the United States into two confederations. By this time there were powerful elites who saw that the economies of scale incentivized a violent end to the effort to have an adjacent federation have in effect a free trade zone.
The trend in hindsight becomes clear as the United States, in its second phase, turns its eyes to the Plains Indians after successfully placing the South in military districts, as this article explains:
In an attempt at peace in 1851, the first Fort Laramie Treaty was signed, which granted the Plain Indians about 150 million acres of land for their own use as the Great Sioux Reservation. Then, 13 years later, the size was greatly reduced to about 60 million acres in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which recreated the Great Sioux Reservation boundaries and proclaimed all of South Dakota west of the Missouri river, including the Black Hills, solely for the Sioux Nation.
As part of the treaty, no unauthorized non-Indian was to come into the reservation and the Sioux were allowed to hunt in unceded Indian territory beyond the reservation that stretched into North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado. If any non-Indian wanted to settle on this unceded land, they could only do it with the permission of the Sioux.
That was until 1874, when gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The treaties that were signed between the Native Americans and the U.S. government were ignored as gold rushers invaded Indian Territory and issues arose, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
As time went on, the American Indians continued to be pushed into smaller territories and their lives began to diminish. In 1889, the U.S. government issued the Dawes Act, which took the Black Hills from the Indians, broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate reservations, and took nine million acres and opened it up for public purchase by non-Indians for homesteading and settlements.
The Native Americans were squeezed into these smaller territories and didn’t have enough game to support them. The bison that had been a staple to their way of life were gone. Their ancestral lands that sustained them were no longer theirs. The resistance was over. They were no longer free people, living amongst themselves, but “Redskins” confined by the “white man” in reservations they had been forced to, many against their will.
At this point, one might logically think that the US is done with its expansion as it now is in total control of all the lands from the east to the west coast of North America. However, there were plenty of elites that were very willing in their agenda for:
… capitalizing on a national tragedy to push through an unrelated agenda. The explosion of the Maine in Havana’s harbor — killing some 260 sailors — was the immediate catalyst for the invasion of Cuba and then the Philippines.
Y’all do know that the USS Maine was NOT sabotaged by the Spanish in Cuba, right?
The result was a third phase in this trend toward empire.
Again, you have a list of critical thinkers that understand the down-side of empire, called the Anti-Imperialist effort in 1898, outlined in this article:
“We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government.
“We earnestly condemn the policy of the present National Administration in the Philippines. It seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods…”
.. to your typical statist media b*llshit we still see today:
Today, the medium from which most Americans get their news, television, plays much the same role as the “yellow press” of William Randolph Hearst — cheerleading for war. Then, as now, the argument justifying war started as a matter of self-defense, then morphed into a war for “freedom,” and finally stood naked as a political and economic power grab
So on and on it goes, the US Empire emerges well in advance of WWII, already using shady ways to promote its power on the world’s stage.
The latest chapter is probably not that last, but the character of this empire will be remembered for generations:
U.S.-led wars in the Middle East have killed some four million Muslims since 1990. The recently published Afghanistan papers, provided an insight into the longest war in U.S. history and revealed how U.S. officials continuously lied about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic understanding of the country, were hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, and had wasted as much as $1 trillion in the process.
This parallels a little known previous ‘longest war’ that was initiated a century before:
.. the U.S. waged a war from 1899 to 1913 in the southernmost island of the Philippines. Known as the Moro War, it was the longest sustained military campaign in American history until the war in Afghanistan surpassed it a few years ago. As a result, the U.S. and the Philippine governments are still embroiled in a battle with Islamist insurgents in the southern Philippines, which takes the meaning of “forever war” to a whole new level
.. the U.S. military was not welcome in the Philippines, much as it is not welcomed by Afghanistan or any other Muslim-majority nation which has to duel with the U.S. Empire. After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.
“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
The tactics remain the same, total war from Sherman and Sheridan used in the so-called Civil War, to the war on the American Indians, to the war in the Philippines, to Afghanistan and beyond is somehow construed to be “American Exceptionalism”.
Usually, when the bombs start to drop, it is really the middle of the story. The start of the story is usually hidden to the public at large, both intentionally and by sheer ignorance.
The “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq by US forces in 2003 was not the reaction to something Saddam did wrong, like having WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), but was part of an agenda that was set in motion years if not decades before:
It’s surely clear to almost everyone now that we were lied into an illegal war which not only destroyed an entire country, but which also led directly to the rise of ISIS and helped bring terrorism to Europe too. – Ron Paul (2016)
While statism kills, empires kill on a whole different level. While nations like Germany (Jews) and China (farmers) and USSR (Ukrainians, etc) and USA (Southerners and American Indians) do their share of genocide, there is nothing like an empire that can take that to a whole different level.
But it was not always so. Take for instance a majority of the time the British Empire was a world power, as Eric S. Margolis in this article explains:
The British were always masters of efficient imperialism. In the 19th century, they managed to rule a quarter of the Earth’s surface with only a relatively small army supported by a great fleet. Many of their imperial subjects were so overawed by the pomp and circumstance of British rule that they often willingly cooperated, or at least bent the knee.
Call it colonialism 101. Ardent students of Roman history, the British early on adopted the Roman strategy of ‘divide et impera’, divide and conquer. The application of this strategy allowed the British Empire to rule over vast numbers of people with minimal force.
For over one hundred years, life in the American colonies were not bad at all actually. This is why there was 1/3rd of Americans that did NOT want to go to war with the British Empire, as up until the 1760s, the British ruled in a minimalist way!
When we reflect on the poor country of Iraq, and how it was somewhat abused by English power in the early 20th century especially after the discovery of oil, never really knew what was in store for them by 1990. From a post WWII transition that saw American influences in the Middle East region on the increase, and with Saddam Hussein in the employ and control of the CIA, even supplying Iraq with chemical weapons in its war against Iran in the 1980s, it is clear that the American Empire was in the driver’s seat.
In 1990, when the world was shocked that Hussein invaded Kuwait, there were those in the US Government that were not surprised as they gave him the green light. This even allowed the US Empire a “reason” to respond to this attack on an adjacent sovereign nation and allowed a “coalition” of UN nations to mount an attack on Iraq (Gulf War I) to place it under tighter control until the US again invaded 12 years later.
Eric S. Margolis goes on to explain:
I was in Iraq in 2001 and 2003 and saw how much it had developed in spite of the draconian rule of Saddam Hussein. I was one of only a few journalists trying to dispute the western lies about Iraq. The dim-witted Iraqi secret police threatened to hang me as a spy – after I revealed their germ warfare plant at Salman Pak had been set up and was secretly run by British technicians.
There was enough fake news in the early 2000s to convince the American public and the world that Saddam was bad and that the US and its allies were good.
Iraq, let’s recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia.
Truth be told, these “leaders” are in fact war criminals still walking free.
Most people don’t understand that Iraq remains a US-occupied nation. We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil extracted by big US oil firms since 2003. For the US, Iraq was a treasure house of oil with 12% of world reserves. It was OPEC’s 2nd largest producer.
Recall one of the leading neocons who engineered the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, claimed the US could finance its entire invasion of Iraq (he estimated the cost at about $70 billion) by plundering Iraq’s oil. Today, the cost of the occupation has reached over $1 trillion. Wolfie is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, President Trump says the US will grab Syria’s oil fields.
It is all very sick, but the problems in Iraq do not make it into MSM these days:
Ever since the 2003 invasion, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of US-appointed figureheads who have proven as corrupt as they are inept. During the war, the US destroyed most of Iraq’s water and sewage systems, causing some 500,000 children to die from water-borne diseases, wrecking much of its industry and commerce, leaving millions of men unemployed. Public services have broken down.
Before the US invasion, Iraq led the Arab world in industry, farming, medicine, education and women’s rights. All that was destroyed by the ‘liberation.’
The fallout from this conflict and that in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have produced economic refugees that have invaded Europe and dispersed Christians out of the Middle East. Will we ever know the true statistics for all the chaos that was put into action in 2001 (Afghanistan) and 2003 (Iraq)?
How is that for the legacy of American Exceptionalism?
Blow-back (CIA term) is a thing, and we thought the 2000/2010s had seen enough terrorism as a result, just wait ..
