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, 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.
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.
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.
In general, it is because an imperial power such as the US is desperate to maintain its client states. It must dole out more and more aid and weapons and support in order to keep states which otherwise have little in common with it in its orbit.
Internal forces, such as US weapons makers, influence the government also.
From an interview with Andrew Cockburn in the Dallas Morning News:
Andrew, when people speak cynically about the compromises we make to our own stated values in our relationship with Saudi Arabia, the American relationship, they typically refer to the Saudis’ ability to supply us with oil, and certainly that was the case dating back to the 1940s. But now that the resurgence of domestic fuel extraction has decreased our reliance on that foreign oil, what ties us to the Saudis economically?
A huge amount of money. Well, all sorts of things still. The one that really hits the eye is the enormous trade in weapons from us to them. As I say in the piece, since 2010 … we have sold or signed agreements to sell, it’s now actually topping $112 billion. It was $111 billion when I wrote the article, but they’ve thrown in just over another billion since then. … That leads to all sorts of things, like a huge American military presence … in Saudi Arabia who’s not just protecting the regime, training … all their internal security forces. We train another force that protects the oil installations, and we train the Saudi military. These trainers basically double as arms-sales merchants, because they make it explicitly their job to sell American defense products.
Rome (AsiaNews) – The news has not hit the front-pages, but it is a harbinger of important developments. Wahhabism, the doctrinal foundation of Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam funded in many parts of the world thanks to Riyadh, it is not part of Sunni Islam. It is a “distortion” of Islam that leads to extremism and terrorism. Hence, “a radical change is needed to re-establish the true meaning of Sunnism”. However, Saudi Arabia is already counterattacking, afraid that this might be the first step for the country and its imams to be burnt at the stake.
Over 100 Islamic clerics from around the world, including India, have attended this anti-Takfirism Sunni conference in Chechnya. They concluded that Salafism/Wahhabism, the state religion of the Saudi Kingdom flourishing in almost all Muslim-populated courtiers because of the massive Saudi funding, is not the part of mainstream Sunni Islam.
What is Syria about? Why do members of the US Establishment enable the destruction of Syria and its people, financed by the American taxpayer?
A widespread – and false – perception is that Obama has kept the US out of the Syrian war. Indeed, the US right wing routinely criticizes him for having drawn a line in the sand for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over chemical weapons, and then backing off when Assad allegedly crossed it (the issue remains murky and disputed, like so much else in Syria). A leading columnist for the Financial Times, repeating the erroneous idea that the US has remained on the sidelines, recently implied that Obama had rejected the advice of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to arm the Syrian rebels fighting Assad.
Yet the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times finally reported on a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama’s orders, provides organizational support and training.
……
Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America’s allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported.
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…….America’s two-sided war in Syria is a cynical and reckless gamble. The US-led efforts to topple Assad are not aimed at protecting the Syrian people, as Obama and Clinton have suggested from time to time, but are a US proxy war against Iran and Russia, in which Syria happens to be the battleground.