The Empire and its propagandists never miss a chance to try to get a new war started, usually on the wrong side. The Syrian government almost certainly did not commit the latest gas attack, as it didn’t commit the last one in 2013, but that won’t stop the hysterical rush to war:
From Robert Parry:
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/05/another-dangerous-rush-to-judgment-in-syria/
From John Pilger:
The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.
In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”.
He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.
James Carden mentions William Appleman Williams’ “inside-outside” dynamic. The official, self-serving narrative for US government action is set by those within the government, and reinforced by the major US media outlets, who serve as official propagandists.
More on Williams here, with the US worldview described as such:
• A tendency to equate anti-colonialism with opposition to empire as such, thereby crediting the United States, a frequent opponent of formal empire, with a steadfastly anti-imperial outlook;
• An insistence that American values are universal values, leading to this corollary: “other peoples cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States”;
• A self-serving commitment to the principle of self-determination, informed by the conviction that “all peoples must ultimately self-determine themselves in the American Way if America itself is to be secure and prosperous”; or to put it another way, only when “historic American principles were honored by all” would world peace become possible;
• A penchant for externalizing evil, fostering an inclination to believe that trials and tribulations at home have their roots abroad; “domestic problems [therefore] became international problems” and U.S. foreign policy became the continuation of domestic politics by other means;
• A reflexive predilection for demonizing adversaries; opponents of the United States are not merely wrong or misguided; they are by definition “beyond the pale and almost, if not wholly, beyond redemption”;
• A belief that the American economy cannot function absent opportunities for external expansion and that the American political system cannot function absent prosperity: stagnation fostered internal unrest which threatened stability and raised “the specter of chaos”; economic expansion, therefore, “provided the sine qua non of domestic prosperity and social peace”;
• A steady, if unacknowledged, drift toward militarization, as policymakers “increasingly defined safety in terms of conquest—or at any rate domination”; yet as Williams emphasizes, “it was the civilians who defined the world in military terms, not the military who usurped civilian power”;
• An unshakable confidence in American Exceptionalism and American beneficence; in the end “a unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” will enable the United States “to check the enemies of peace and progress—and build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.”
James Carden, in The Nation, writes a nice overview of the Obama’s policy failures, at least as judged against his early promises. This is from a segment of the Left that is thankfully not controlled by Hillary’s neocon and R2P crowd:
As we approach the final months of the Obama presidency, it’s clear that the “change” in foreign policy that candidate Obama promised voters has not materialized. His pledges to end the Iraq War, to pursue a nuclear-free world, to improve relations with Russia, to act as an honest broker between Israel and Palestine, and to improve relations with the Arab world have all been left unfulfilled. That his likely successor, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is to the right of the president on matters of national security is, in a way, an all-too-fitting monument to an era of dashed expectations.
A lot of money flowing to special interests:
These US interventions are supported by nearly 2.1 million reserve and active-duty troops, 200,000 of whom are stationed overseas at a yearly cost of $600 billion. By some estimates, the US military is currently operating in more than 160 countries.
Neocons change teams:
It was widely assumed that Obama would pick up the pieces of the Bush years and exorcise hegemonic fantasies from the body politic. Instead, over his two terms in office, the convergence of the neoconservative and Wilsonian interventionist creeds has solidified into orthodoxy. No better evidence of this exists than the fact that the neocons who served as the instigators and defenders of George W. Bush’s foreign policy have become devoted supporters of Hillary Clinton. Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen, among others, have all voiced their preference for Clinton over the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
When did they converge?
As it became more and more difficult to deny that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a debacle, George W. Bush tried to justify his administration’s policies by appropriating the language of the Wilsonians in an attempt to make his actions palatable to the guardians of respectable opinion. In his second inaugural address, Bush proclaimed: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” By employing such language, Bush cleared the way for the convergence of the neoconservative and Wilsonian ideologies, which have now congealed into the orthodoxy holding US foreign policy hostage.
From an article in The National:
The Ottomans and Iran’s Safavid Empire fought a century of wars for control of modern-day Iraq, with the Ottomans finally triumphing in 1639. The Treaty of Zuhab was a major defeat for the Safavids, taking Iraq out of the Persian sphere and establishing it as a “citadel of Arabism”.
For Iran the defeat turned out to be a long-term blessing: it established Iran within borders which have lasted to this day and enabled the empire to transition smoothly into a nation state.
There is a nice overview of recent Western propaganda and distortion in Cook’s article.
From the end of Jonathon Cook’s article:
Conversely, Curtis concludes with an assertion of such stunning political puerility that it undermines almost everything that has gone before. He argues of Putin’s involvement in Syria: “The Russians are still there – and no one really knows what they want.” Curtis does not know what “the Russians want” only because his perceptions have been carefully managed by the western media. Russia has very obvious strategic interests in being there. Among other things, it is trying to prevent the takeover of another country on its doorstep by Islamic jihadists, to halt the further destabilization of the Middle East, and to prop up a key ally in Russia’s front against US expansionism.
“Great Games” of this kind between global superpowers have been going on for all of modern history. There is precisely nothing new about them, or mysterious.
The complexity Curtis luxuriates in is really not so complex. The world is divided between those who have power and wealth, and those who do not. The battle for the powerful is to keep their power, as it always has been. And that requires keeping the rest of us docile, misinformed and filled with a sense of hopelessness. Curtis is simply playing his part in managing our perceptions – and doing so in great style.
This campaign was hardly subtle, with the enemy depicted as bugs. Magazines carried cartoons showing Italians, Germans and Japanese as part cockroach, and prior to the mass incendiary bombing of Japanese cities, the US Marines’ magazine Leatherneck displayed a cartoon of a half-human, half-insect creature entitled Louseous Japanicas to accompany an article that called for “enemy breeding grounds to be completely annihilated.”
The US government knew at least since 2014, when ISIS was sweeping through Iraq and Syria, that their dear friends in Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding ISIS and al Qaeda. The US did nothing about it because that might undermine their power over the Middle East. But what kind of power is it when they are beholden to the same forces they claim to be fighting against? The US is the sucker in the region and is being played for a fool.
From Patrick Cockburn at Unz.com, quoting from a US government memo released by Wikileaks:
The memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis and other radical groups in the region.” This was evidently received wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and South Asia.
For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the “War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.
It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in December 2009 states that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan].” But Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue in the US. Why not?
Much more at the link above.
Gary North says that “Empires take time to develop, and at some point, they drain the financial resources of the nation that launched the empire. There are no exceptions to this process. Empire always produces bankruptcy.”
This is because empires are not undertaken in response to a need. They serve as a wealth transfer from the taxpaying masses to the special interests that are needed to expand and run an empire. The winners are the financiers of the empire, weapons makers, bureaucrats that run the empire, military people who enforce the rule of the empire and get neat looking ribbons and medals, think tanks, and so on.
The masses pay for the empire and the salaries of those who run it, and pay for the weapons and soldiers to control it, and supply the soldiers to die for it.
But there is no market being satisfied. The wealth transfer and capital misallocation and destruction needed to acquire it and maintain it eventually destroy the empire from within because it makes the majority poorer and corrupts the government.
The PR firm Purpose is working on overthrowing the Assad government of Syria.
From Alternet:
Best known for its work on liberal social issues with well-funded progressive clients like the ACLU and the police reform group, Campaign Zero, the New York- and London-based public relations firm Purpose promises to deliver creatively executed campaigns that produce either a “behavior change,” “perception change,” “policy change” or “infrastructure change.” As the Syrian conflict entered its third year, this company was ready to effect a regime change.
Who funds the campaign?
Though The Syria Campaign claims to “refuse funding from any party to the conflict in Syria,” it was founded and is sustained with generous financial assistance from one of the most influential exile figures of the opposition, Ayman Asfari, the U.K.-based CEO of the British oil and gas supply company Petrofac Limited. Asfari is worth $1.2 billion and owns about one-fifth of the shares of his company, which boasts 18,000 employees and close to $7 billion in annual revenues.