Bring the Troops Home, But Also Stop the Bombing

by MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

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As our nation debates the merits of President Trump’s call for withdrawing US troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of US military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about US involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years.

By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries—and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.

As we contemplate that overwhelming number, let’s keep in mind that these strikes represent lives snuffed out, people maimed for life, families torn apart, homes and infrastructure demolished, taxpayer money squandered and resentment that only engenders more violence.

After the horrific crimes of September 11th, 2001, Congress was quick to pass a sweeping Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). While three presidents have claimed that the 2001 AUMF legally justifies these endless wars as a response to the crimes of 9/11, no serious reading of the Authorization could interpret it that way.  What it actually says is:

“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

As former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done… We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.”

And yet here we are, 17 years later, mired in wars in which we are bombing ever more “nations, organizations (and) persons” who had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes committed on September 11th.  We don’t have a single real or lasting success we can point to in 17 years of war in 7 countries and “counter-insurgency” operations in a dozen more.  Every country the U.S. has attacked or invaded remains trapped in intractable violence and chaos.

Please look at this chart, and take a few moments to reflect on the mass destruction it represents:

These figures are an absolute minimum of confirmed strikes, based on U.S. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of confirmed drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project‘s count of Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen; and other published statistics.  Figures for 2018 are through October for Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan; through November for Yemen; and incomplete for other countries.

There are several categories of airstrikes that are not included on this chart, so the real total is certainly much higher. These are:

–   Helicopter strikes: Military Timespublished an article in February 2017titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.”  The largest pool of airstrikes not included in U.S. Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters.  The U.S. Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported airstrikes in Afghanistan in 2016.  The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes runs throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many actual missiles were used in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in 2016.

–    AC-130 gunships: The airstrike that destroyed the Doctors Without Bordershospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015 was not conducted with bombs or missiles, but by a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship.  These machines of mass destruction, usually flown by US Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it, often until it is completely destroyed.  The U.S. has used AC-130sin Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Syria.

–    Strafing runs:  U.S. airpower summaries for 2004-2007 include a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped… does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks.  They fire up to 65 shells per second and can blanket a large area with deadly and indiscriminate fire, but that does not count as a “weapons release” in U.S. airpower summaries.

–    Yemen: Journalist Iona Craig, who has reported from Yemen for many years and manages the Yemen Data Project (YDP), told us she doesn’t know what proportion of actual airstrikes its data represents, and that the number of bombs or missiles recorded in each “air raid” in the YDP’s data is only a minimum confirmed number. Whatever fraction of total air raids YDP’s data represents, the actual number of bombs dropped on Yemen is certainly higher than these figures. YDP just doesn’t know how much higher.

–    The U.S. and allies conducting “counter-insurgency” operations in West Africa and other regions.

The U.S. public soon lost its appetite for sending our own sons and daughters to fight and die in all these wars.  So, like Nixon with Vietnam, our leaders reverted to bombing, bombing and more bombing, while small deployments of U.S. special operations forces and larger numbers of foreign proxies do most of the real fighting on the ground.

Our enemies call us cowards, especially when we use drones to kill by remote control, but more importantly, we are behaving like arrogant fools.  Our country is acting as an aggressor and a bull in a china shop at a critical moment in history when neither we, nor the rest of the world, can afford such dangerous and destabilizing behavior from a hyper-militarized, aggressive imperial power.

After U.S.-led bombing, artillery and rocket fire destroyed two major cities in 2017, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the U.S. and its allies conducted fewer airstrikes in 2018, but actually increased the number of strikes in Afghanistan.

We are heading into 2019 with new initiatives to reduce U.S. military involvement overseas. In Yemen, that initiative is the result of massive grassroots pressure on Congress, and is being done in opposition to Trump’s continued support for Saudi aggression in Yemen. In the case of Syria and Afghanistan, it is coming from Trump himself, with broad popular support but bipartisan opposition from Congress and DC elites.

Those who are part of the bipartisan war consensus should reflect on the growing public awareness of the murderous futility of U.S. overseas wars. A survey by the Committee for a Responsible Foreign Policy revealed “a national voter population that is largely skeptical of the practicality or benefits of military intervention overseas.” Donald Trump seems to realize this public disdain for endless war, but we shouldn’t let him get away with reducing U.S. troop presence but continuing—and in some cases escalating—the devastating air wars.

A good New Year’s resolution for the United States would be to put an end to the wars we have been engaged in for the past 17 years, and to make sure we do not allow the same military madness that got us into this mess to sucker us into new wars on North Korea, Iran, Venezuela or other countries.  Yes, let’s bring the troops home, but let’s also stop the bombing. Sustained advocacy toward the Trump administration and the new Congress by peace-loving Americans will be critical if we are to fulfill this resolution.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

Imagine If Saudi Arabia Was Not a US Ally

Caitlin JOHNSTONE

The US Senate has voted 56 to 41 to sorta-kinda eventually end America’s part in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, one step out of a great many that will need to happen in order to end the worst humanitarian crisis on the face of the earth.

The joint resolution still allows US drones to patrol Yemeni airspace and rain death from above in its “war on terror” against Al Qaeda, and it is unable to pass in the House this year due to an unbelievably sleazy rider that House Republicans attached to the unrelated Farm Bill. The resolution isn’t expected to change much in terms of actual US participation in the war besides some intelligence and reconnaissance assistance to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Houthi rebels, since the US has already ended its assistance in refueling Saudi jets on their bombing campaigns as of last month. Trump is expected to veto any Yemen resolutions, and the Senate resolution was not passed with a veto-proof supermajority.

Still, it’s a step. A step in the right direction, both toward congress imposing some checks and balances on the Executive Branch’s heretofore obscenely unchallenged war powers, and toward the US government moving into opposition to the brazen war crimes being inflicted upon the Yemeni people by America’s close ally Saudi Arabia. And I think that last bit is worth taking a moment to think about.

Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project indicates that up to 80,000 people have been killed in this war, which would be eight times more than the 10,000 figure we’ve been hearing from the mainstream media for years on those rare occasions they’ve felt like mentioning Yemen. And it is important to note that this number applies to deaths by military violence only, not to the other untold tens of thousands who have died of starvation and cholera as a result of Saudi Arabia’s inhuman blockades on imports and its deliberate targeting of farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and cholera treatment centers with airstrikes. Just for children under the age of five, the death toll due to starvation alone is believed to be around 85,000.

So that’s what’s going on while the bureaucrats on Capitol Hill are slowly pushing their pencils and the diplomats are making nicey nicey with theocratic Gulf state tyrants. If Saudi Arabia were not an ally of the United States, this matter would be treated very, very differently.

In May of last year, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was given a memo by his assistant, virulent Iran hawk Brian Hook. The memo, intended to educate the struggling political neophyte Tillerson on the finer points of State Department manipulation, laid out the beltway’s standard protocol for dealing with Washington’s allies and its enemies. Hook said human rights issues are something the US government presses its enemies on but not its allies, naming China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as examples of US enemies who violate human rights, and naming Egypt, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia as examples of US allies who violate human rights.

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook wrote. “One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

And indeed this is exactly the sort of behavior we see from the US government, not just from its official branches like the State Department but from its unofficial ones as well, including the mainstream media. Just look at the France protests, which have seen mass arrests and protesters getting eyes shot out and hands blown off by brutal police responses while receiving nary a whisper of commentary from the plutocrat-owned talking heads, yet if this were happening in Russia we all know it would be forced into viral trends and pushed into public consciousness at every opportunity.

If Saudi Arabia existed in the “enemies” column instead of the “allies”, we’d have been seeing constant mass media coverage of its butchery in Yemen for almost four years now. MSNBC, which recently went more than a yearwithout mentioning Yemen even a single time, would be tearfully depicting the dying children with the same urgency it covered the “uniquely horrific” sarin gas attack alleged to have taken place in Syria last year, and doing so regularly. The starving children of Yemen would be on the forefront of western consciousness instead of the back burner, and demands to make it stop would be screaming from coast to coast.

That’s seriously it. That one stupid, silly shift from the “allies” column to the “enemies” column would make the difference between night and day in the western world’s response to the slaughter in Yemen. The Saudi royals would be vilified, and that vilification would be used to manufacture support for sanctions and strategies to shove the KSA off the world stage. CIA covert ops would be implemented to sow discord, and starvation sanctions would target Saudi civilians to help stoke the flames of discontent. Regime change would take place via invasion or staged coup, and then a puppet regime would be installed which would quietly make the shift to selling all Saudi oil in US dollars.

And in the meantime, God help Trump if he was stupid enough to stay cozied up with the Saudis, because guess what? There’s a lot more evidence for Saudi collusion than there is for Russia collusion. The all-you-can-eat nothingburger of Russiagate would have been replaced by far more concrete and straightforward stories about direct financial ties to the Saudi government, an emissary for a Saudi prince who wanted to help Trump win the 2016 election, and remarks by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is “in his pocket”. Trump’s creepy glowing orb picture alone would have mainstream Saudi-gate conspiracy theorists in intractable hysterics.

Of course none of this would ever have had a chance to happen, because if Saudi Arabia were not a US ally, it would have been invaded and forcibly regime changed immediately after 9/11.

But Saudi Arabia is a US ally, and a very close one indeed. Its petrodollar deal, its prime strategic location and its ability to move vast amounts of wealth around behind a veil of total government opacity in the facilitation of sociopathic agendas has made it a priceless asset in the US-centralized empire’s relentless quest for global domination. This remains true in spite of whatever particular quibbles that empire might happen to have with MBS, and in spite of any journalists’ unfortunate encounters with any bone saws.

The struggle to dominate the Middle East remains one of the foremost priorities of elite power in this world, and they’re going to do everything they can not to let a few piles of dead children interfere with an important alliance. The butchery in Yemen is the single worst thing that is happening in the world today, and because of the power dynamics that are at play, we’re going to need a whole lot more than a feel-good Senate vote to heal it. It’s a step. We must keep stepping.

From Reason to Racism

Decline and fall of France’s secular republic

Kevin Barrett

Republic of Islamophobia by James Wolfreys; Pub: Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2018, 208 pages. Price: $12.72 Pbk.

“Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.” That idealistic slogan hyping freedom and inclusiveness is the official motto of two modern nations, France and Haiti (the latter, ironically, was born in a slave revolt against the former).

Despite the persistence of their national motto, French people today are growing increasingly unfree, unequal, and ungiven to brotherly love. According to Jim Wolfreys, a Senior Lecturer on European Politics at Kings College London, the French drift away from freedom and equality has produced a sick society infected by an ever more widespread, ever more normalized, ever more delusional racist scapegoating of Muslims.

In Republic of Islamophobia, Wolfreys traces the French anti-Islam insanity epidemic from its colonial past to the endless “war on terror” that has reshaped history since September 11, 2001. Wolfreys correctly points out that the French war on terror “predates 9/11. Its origins go back to the Republic’s colonial mission, whose tropes and reflexes were revived in the early-1990s as the Algerian civil war spilled over into France, leading to an intensification of state security provisions and, as Paul Silverstein notes, ‘the interpellation… of Franco-Maghrebis as ‘Muslims,’ a hailing that has been abetted by the larger public drama around the hijab’” (p. 2).

One of the limitations of Wolfreys’ book, like so many others from professors and “respectable” publishers, is its willingness to heap scorn on some lies while seemingly protecting others from scrutiny. First let’s consider the Islamophobic myths that Wolfreys is willing to expose:

• The pretext that France’s 2004 law prohibiting religious attire in public is religiously neutral, when in fact it is nothing more than a symptom and weapon of Islamophobia.

• The claim, repeated in high school textbooks, that France’s vaunted tradition of laicité (secularism) has always been about preventing religious expression in public, when in fact the opposite is true, “the 1905 law, so frequently cited today in support of the new secularism, meant more, not less, freedom of expression” (p. 92). As Wolfreys explains, the whole purpose of the 1905 secularism law was to nullify the French government’s residual de facto recognition of Catholicism as France’s official religion, thereby allowing Protestants, Muslims, Jews, non-religious people, and other minorities the right of full and complete expression of their religious views, affiliations, and identities in the public square. That right, granted in 1905 and respected until the anti-hijab law of 2004, is now a dead letter.

• The claim by Islamophobes that Muslims spilling over into the street during Friday prayers is equivalent to the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, even though such spillovers happen in only a very few of the 2,300 masjids in France due to French government’s hindrance of much-needed construction of new masjids (by comparison, France has 36,000 Catholic churches, maintained at government expense despite being largely devoid of worshippers).

• The pretense that French Islamophobia is not racist because it provides a legitimate critique of religion, when in reality it is used indiscriminately against people from North and Sub-Saharan Africa regardless of their degree of religiosity (in racist newspeak “Muslim” often translates as “brown-skinned immigrant”).

• The myth that the new wave of “populist” racism is a spontaneous phenomenon emerging naturally from white working communities, when in fact it is the strange fruit of an orchestrated public relations campaign led by elites, who inflict racist brainwashing on workers to conceal neoliberalism’s destruction of the working class and to legitimize Zionism’s crimes.

• The false assertion that white workers become racists because they are in close contact with immigrants, when in fact studies show that this is not the case. The truth is that voters for the Islamophobic National Front tend to be not white workers who live and work with immigrants, but rather those who are unemployed, homeless, or otherwise economically stressed.

Wolfreys is to be commended for exposing the fact that the tidal wave of Islamophobic racism washing over France is the product of a toxic neoliberal-Zionist publicity campaign. But he fails to confront the most sordid details of that campaign — details that would, if exposed, cause the whole campaign to implode.

I am referring, of course, to Islamophobia-inciting false flag operations, notably those of September 11, 2001, and the French follow-up operations of January 7 and November 13, 2015. No student of Islamophobia can fail to be aware of the magisterial work of 9/11 scholar David Ray Griffin, whose series of 13 books on the subject definitively exposes the neoconservative coup d’état that unleashed the Islamophobic demon. Likewise, no serious student of Islamophobia in France should be ignorant of the facts discussed in my two edited books We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo and ANOTHER French False Flag — facts which taken together show that the French government and mainstream media are lying outrageously about the terror events of 2015, which appear to have been 9/11-style false flags à la française.

Wolfreys, a gainfully-employed university lecturer, apparently knows that looking at such facts with honesty and accuracy would likely destroy his career; so he begins his book with the following sentences, “Something was out of kilter. Fifty world leaders had gathered on 11 January 2015 to commemorate the journalists killed in the Charlie Hebdo offices on 7 January and the police officer and shoppers murdered at a kosher supermarket over the following two days.”

Something was, of course, out of kilter; but so is Wolfreys’ opening. First, he mistakenly tells us that the police officer killed during this period died at the kosher supermarket, where he and shoppers were murdered “over the following two days.” In fact the kosher supermarket hostage-taking and shooting incident did not transpire “over two days.” It happened on a single day, January 9. And no police officer was killed there. Yes, one police officer was allegedly killed by kosher supermarket shooter Coulibalay on the previous day, January 8. But this is not the “policeman shooting” that everyone remembers.

Wolfreys completely erases from history the celebrated “policeman shooting” that proves the official story of the Charlie Hebdo event is fraudulent: the alleged shooting of Ahmed Merabet, captured on video — apparently by a pre-positioned Israeli surveillance team — as alleged Charlie Hebdo shooters Saïd and Chérif Kouachi fled the magazine offices after the massacre.

Wikipedia, whose accounts of sensitive topics are controlled by professional propagandists, describe this “shooting” as follows, “An authenticated video surfaced on the internet that shows two gunmen and a police officer, Ahmed Merabet, who is wounded and lying on a sidewalk after an exchange of gunfire. This took place near the corner of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and Rue Moufle, 180 metres (590 ft) east of the main crime scene. One of the gunmen ran towards the policeman and shouted, ‘Did you want to kill us?’ The policeman answered, ‘No, it’s fine, boss’, and raised his hand toward the gunman, who then gave the policeman a fatal shot to the head at close range.”

The actual video may be viewed here. It clearly shows that no such “fatal shot to the head at close range” was fired. Instead, the “gunman” fires a blank round, consisting of paper or cotton, that impacts on the sidewalk approximately one meter from the head of the “victim.” Had the victim actually been shot with an AK47 from close range, his head would have exploded into pink mist. Yet the “fatal shot” has no impact whatsoever on the victim’s head! Instead, it can be seen raising a small cloud of dust on the sidewalk a meter away from the head — not the massive and hazardous cratering of concrete shrapnel a real bullet would have triggered — showing that it was merely a blank round.

Clearly this “escape scene” was play-acted and filmed for propaganda purposes. French investigative journalist Hicham Hamza has traced the provenance of the leaked video — like the leaked “blood heart” photo of the victims of the 13/11/15 Bataclan nightclub shooting, and the 14/7/16 “truck attack” footage from Nice — to Israel, whose bloody fingerprints are all over these and dozens of other “Islamic terror” public relations stunts.

Why won’t Wolfreys and other mainstream academicians and journalists report these and so many other similarly damning facts? The sad answer was given a century ago by Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

By succumbing to Sinclair’s dilemma, Wolfreys limits the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and relevance of his otherwise solid analysis of French Islamophobia.

 

Kevin Barrett

17 Years After 911, US Backs Al Qaeda in Syria

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM 

The September 11 terror incidents in 2001 are said to be the biggest-ever deadly attack on US soil. Shamefully, exactly 17 years later, the US president and Pentagon military chiefs are threatening to go to war in Syria – to defend the same ilk of terrorists.

“Shamefully” is perhaps not the most fitting word here. “Consistently” would be more appropriate.

Officially, the spectacular plane-crashing mayhem 17 years ago in New York City was due to 19 Arab hijackers affiliated with the Al Qaeda terror network.

That account of the world-changing event has been hotly disputed, with many respected authors and organizations claiming that evidence shows the US intelligence agencies are implicated in an inside job. The death of some 3,000 American citizens was hence exploited as a pretext for launching a series of US overseas wars, whose hidden agenda was for promoting imperialist objectives.

In any case, the official story is that Al Qaeda operatives hijacked four airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, as well as into the Pentagon building near Washington. The fourth plane crashed in a rural area in Pennsylvania, allegedly after passengers challenged
the terrorist pilots.

The Al Qaeda terror network, with its ideological links to Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism, was declared “enemy number one” by then President George W Bush, who proceeded to launch wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, supposedly to avenge the 911 atrocity perpetrated against
American civilians.

The so-called “war on terror” has since become a much-overused blank check for successive US governments and their NATO allies to launch wars anywhere in the world to “defeat terrorists”. It has been used to justify increasing Western state surveillance powers against its own citizens in the name of counter-terrorism.

To be sure, the official story on 911 and subsequent US and NATO military rampaging around the globe has been challenged by skeptics and critics.

One of the key lines of contesting the official narrative is the documented evolution of the Al Qaeda terror franchise, which grew out of US sponsorship of motley radical Islamist groups in Afghanistan during the 1980s. That covert ploy was to give then occupying Soviet troops “their Vietnam”. American and British military intelligence along with lavish Saudi funding created the Frankenstein Monster of Islamic terrorism that mutated and spread across the Middle East and beyond.

So, the very notion that, post-911, the American creators of the terrorist monster would serve to protect the civilized world from their own creation was always a deeply suspect proposition.

The truth is that the US never stopped colluding with these terror groups since the days of the putative Afghan Vietnam for the Soviet Union.
The 911 incidents may have been some form of “blowback” or, plausibly, it was American intelligence handlers contriving a plot which would give imperialist planners their much-desired “new Pearl Harbor” – a blank check to declare war on the planet for the benefit of advancing US strategic interests.

Granted, the success of that nefarious covert scheme is questionable given the unforeseen huge financial and social costs to American society, as well as from general bedlam undermining global security.

For observers willing to see, it seems indisputable that there is something of a symbiotic relationship between Islamist terror proxies and the US imperialist state. The official “enemy” is a boon for justifying oppressive state powers against citizens; it serves as a pump for bloated budgets to the military-industrial complex at the heart of the American capitalist economy; and this enemy can also serve as target practice for illegal military intervention in foreign countries – US interventions that would otherwise be seen for what they are, as “criminal aggression”.

Further, the terror proxies continue to serve as a cat’s paws for US imperialism, as in the earlier formation in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Rather than direct large-scale American military involvement, the Al Qaeda brigades are deployed to do Washington’s dirty work. Syria is emerging as the new Afghanistan.

Officially, the Pentagon and US corporate news media scoff at these claims of collusion with terrorists. “We are bombing Syria to defeat terrorists,” so goes the mantra. Substitute any number of countries for “Syria”, as required.

Well, if that’s the case why have senior US military people like Michael Flynn admitted that the former Obama administration deliberately cultivated the terror brigades in Syria? Why have hundreds of millions of dollars gone into forming a non-existent “moderate rebel army” in Syria only for the American weaponry to end up in the hands of terror groups like Nusra Front?

What about credible reports of US military helicopters airlifting Nusra commanders out of harm’s way to other, safer parts of Syria? Similar reports of airlifting, or airdropping weapons, have come out of Afghanistan, where the Pentagon is still “fighting terrorists” – 17 years after 911.

It has taken a painfully long time over the eight years of war in Syria to uncover the full and real extent of criminality by the US and its British and French allies, along with the Saudis, Turks and Israelis.

But now we are coming full circle. President Donald Trump and his officials are warning that they will launch military strikes on Syria if the Syrian army and its Russian and Iranian allies proceed with the offensive to retake Idlib province. The northwest province is the last-remaining stronghold of anti-government militants. These militants are not the illusory “moderate rebels” the Western media have long bamboozled the public with. The militants comprise Nusra Front, Ahrar al Sham, Islamic State, and other self-professed Wahhabi jihadists of the Al Qaeda franchise. The myriad, mercurial names are merely part of the US cynical cover.

Trump – the supposed non-interventionist president – has even discarded the earlier ruse of invoking “chemical weapons” as a pretext for a US military attack on Syria. He and his officials are simply saying that any offensive by the Syrian army to retake all of its territory is an “unacceptable escalation” that will be met with a US military response.

There is no other credible rationale for such military deployment by Washington in Syria. The Western media are as usual riding shotgun with the mendacity, claiming that the Syrian army offensive will trigger a “humanitarian crisis”, rather than reporting the salient fact that the offensive is aimed at eradicating the most vile terror groups from that country.

In Syria, today, 17 years after 911, the real relationship between US authorities and terrorism is on display. The United States of Anarchy.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

Seventeen years after 9/11: From “war on terror” to “great power conflict”

Seventeen years after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks—which became the official pretense for the so-called “war on terror” and a series of bloody conflicts that cost the lives of at least one million people—Washington is on the verge of launching a massive new military offensive in Syria in defense of Al Qaeda-linked forces.

US National Security Advisor John Bolton, one of the architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the US has been actively preparing to launch a military strike against the Syrian government, using the pretext of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government that the Pentagon claims will take place sometime in the imminent future.

Bolton warned, “We’ve been in consultation with the British and the French, who joined us in the second strike against the Syrian government in April, and they also agree that another use of chemical weapons will result in a much stronger response”.

Washington is making clear that it is responding not to what it claims the Syrian government has done, but what it claims it will do in the future. A chemical weapon “attack” will, in other words, be made to order.

The accusations being cooked up against the Syrian government are more brazen and shameless versions of the US claims of chemical weapons attacks in Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and in Douma earlier this year, which leading investigative journalists have asserted were staged by the CIA’s proxy forces.

The trumped-up pretexts under which Washington has sought to escalate the US involvement go unquestioned and unchallenged in the US print and broadcast media, as though the Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq never happened.

The real motivation for the fabricated justifications is clear. The Syrian government, aided by its allies Russia and Iran, is on the verge of a major new offensive to recapture the Syrian province of Idlib, which is expected to succeed, barring US intervention. It would effectively place the whole country under the control of the Syrian government and mark the decisive failure of the seven-year regime-change effort by the United States in alliance with terrorist militias.

This would be a major debacle for US imperialism, and Washington is not prepared to accept such an outcome, even if it means a shooting war with Syria’s allies.

Days ago, a force of 100 Marines was sent to reinforce a US base in Syria after Russian military forces requested permission to attack Daesh positions nearby.

The Pentagon made clear that the US forces are fully prepared to engage Russian troops. A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States does not seek to fight the Russians”. “However, the United States will not hesitate to use necessary and proportionate force to defend the US, coalition or partner forces.” Since the beginning of the US regime-change operation in 2011, the CIA and Pentagon have armed and trained terrorist militias linked with Al Qaeda and the Daesh, which it used as its shock troops in an effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

Now, 17 years after September 11, 2001, Washington is preparing a major new war to protect terrorists aligned with the very organization charged with carrying out the attack on the World Trade Center.

This seemingly bewildering about-face expresses the real nature of the so-called "war on terror." Leaving aside the unexplained circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks themselves, from its outset it was meant to dragoon public opinion behind wars of aggression long planned by Washington.

The day after the 9/11 attacks, some experts explained that “From the standpoint of the American government, the crusade against terrorism has been far more a campaign of propaganda to justify US military violence around the world than a conscientious effort to protect the American people.”

Subsequent events have thoroughly vindicated this analysis. This alleged “war on terror” was the pretext for a renewal of imperialist neocolonialism on a massive scale, including the launching of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the wars for regime-change in Libya and Syria, and the US clandestine murder and torture operations in dozens of countries throughout the world.
The aim of this offensive was summed up in a secret neoconservative strategy document quoted by journalist Seymour Hersh in his latest book. It stated that the Iraq war “will start making the US the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination.” All those who would oppose American aims in the Middle East would be “fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation.”

The ultimate target of the wars in the Middle East launched in the name of the “war on terror” were the “great powers” of Russia and China, as well as America’s one-time “allies” in the European Union. By controlling the heart of Eurasia, with its vital energy and transit links, the United States could regain its geopolitical hegemony by military means, even as its dominance over the global economy waned.

But as the United States came increasingly to rely on Al Qaeda-linked terrorist militias, first in Libya, then in Syria, the veneer of the “war on terror” wore increasingly thin. The pretense was effectively discarded in this year’s Pentagon National Defense Strategy document, which stated that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.”

Echoing this theme, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell commemorated anniversary of 9/11 with a Washington Post column titled, “We responded with urgency to 9/11. Now we need to respond as urgently to China.”
Morell argues that the US must prevent China from “seeking to become the most powerful and influential country in the world.” Throughout the article, Morell never explains what, if anything, the September 11, 2001 terror attacks have to do with China.

The column makes sense only if one sees the entire “war on terror” as a pretext for a series of neocolonial wars of aggression in the Middle East that have placed the US on a collision course with China and Russia.

Beijing and Moscow, for their part, see the American threats as deadly serious. Russia, which has worked to rapidly expand its nuclear arsenal, is in the midst of staging its largest military exercises in 37 years, involving some 300,000 troops, for the first time with substantial Chinese participation.

By the way, the efforts of the US to shore up its global position by military means through a series of ever-expanding wars have led to one bloody catastrophe after another. But Washington, the cockpit of global imperialism, has responded to every disaster by upping the ante. If this course brings it to the brink of war with a nuclear-armed power, Washington has made clear it is prepared to accept the consequences.

This eruption of American militarism is driven in large measure by domestic considerations. The US ruling elite sees in war a means of enforcing a kind of “national unity” through internet censorship, attacks on the press and other dictatorial methods. As former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell notes, “National unity is essential as the United States responds to myriad threats, including Russia’s attempts to weaken us at home and abroad.”

The crisis-ridden Trump administration, for its part, sees war as a means of placating its domestic critics in the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies, whose bitter faction fight with the administration revolves around demands that Trump take a more aggressive stance against Russia in Syria.

As the United States stands on the precipice of an offensive that could lead to a shooting war with a nuclear-armed power, the entire US political establishment has lined up in favor of military escalation. This includes the middle-class “left” periphery of the Democratic Party, such as the International Socialist Organization, which has consistently demanded a more aggressive US pursuit of regime-change in Syria. No movement against war will come from any faction of this decrepit and reactionary political establishment. Rather, it must and will come from the mass roots of the American society.

That was a diagnostic analysis by Andre Damon, who is the National Secretary of the US-based International Youth and Students for Social Equality.

FALSE FLAG WAR ON TERROR

-Daniel Mabsout

The question being asked is : How did US that created Terror  end up fighting Terror ? By what magic trick the author and creator of Terror is fighting Terror ?   How did this  happen that the creator of Terror markets himself as the one qualified to fight  Terror and ready to fight it  ? Who is the one nurturing  any doubt  about US breeding Terror ? We all know that it is USA that has created Terror without the least doubt and that US is the mother and father of Terror.

How did it come then to fight Terror and call for the support of others in this ? In order to be able to do this , the USA started by  giving  the impression that Terror is affiliated to a  certain thought and fanaticism that pertains to Islam be it Wahabi or other . This was the first self distancing  from Terror, to associate Terror with Gulf ideology and have gulf countries fund it and sustain it.  The first step has been made and Terror was to be  associated with Islam and had made the  first step away from its mother and sponsor and sustainer to become linked to Islam far from its colonial origins where it was conceived.

Of course, Islam is only the victim of Terror . The tool of Terror is made of  groups of terrorists who seem to be on their own and act on their own .  But the truth is that they are just tools or extensions . They could have been  from any Religion or culture , it would have made no difference because they are not part of an ideology  except for that of the colonialist . They are just tools or extensions and they are all disposable and replaceable and do not count , they have no say or independence,  they are just slaves and do not serve a purpose of their own but the purpose of another that requires that they sacrifice themselves for it . They do not serve the purpose of their financiers either who are the gulf countries . They do not serve the purpose of KSA , they serve the purpose of the predator west to whom they are totally affiliated.

Now,  all this is being hidden and occulted and the thugs are being given an identity of their own and a purpose . They are moderate opposition or fanatics or terrorists and they should look as representing the interests of their sponsors of Turkey , KSA and other. The truth is that they are nothing of all this,  but they are being conferred such existence and identity so that they seem on their own  and with a separate existence . This accepted narrative of independence allows their creators-  the predators- to fight them and declare war on them in order to inflict more destruction and chaos and not in order to get rid of them.

Terror is more like a new lethal weapon developed by the west . It is the latest weapon that has proved itself on the battle ground  and a weapon that comes in handy because it spares so many colonialist lives . The west is investing greatly in this new discovered weapon made of disposable human beings that happen to be Muslims . Terror-  thus- is an investment for the predator and is not something that the predator is ready to give up or annihilate,  but it is something that the predator will keep using and replacing until he fulfills his aim.

US  cannot really fight Terror because US values and cherishes Terror and uses Terror and will continue to use it . US is terror itself , but for some reason and somehow we are made to think that it is not ,  and that it is seeking to overcome Terror  and defeat it . Nothing could be more fake. US is Terror  and Terror is US.

-Daniel Mabsout