The western media is key to Syria deceptions

by Jonathan Cook

The media are not a watchdog on power but the public relations arm of giant corporations pursuing their narrow interests in the Middle East

By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province — their final holdout in Syria — should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism.

That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.

Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given that the Syrian government was already poised to defeat these al-Qaeda groups without resort to chemical weapons — and without provoking the predictable ire (yet again) of the west.

But most of all scepticism was required because these latest claims arrive just as we have learnt that the last supposed major chemical attack — which took place in April 2018 and was, as ever, blamed by all western sources on Syria’s president, Bashar Assad — was very possibly staged, a false-flag operation by those very al-Qaeda groups now claiming the Syrian government has attacked them once again.

Addicted to incompetence

Most astounding in this week’s coverage of the claims made by al-Qaeda groups is the fact that the western media continues to refuse to learn any lessons, develop any critical distance from the sources it relies on, even as those sources are shown to have repeatedly deceived it.

This was true after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, and it has been confirmed after the the international community’s monitoring body on chemical weapons, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was exposed this month as deeply dishonest.

It is bad enough that our governments and our expert institutions deceive and lie to us. But it is even worse that we have a corporate media addicted — at the most charitable interpretation — to its own incompetence. The evidence demonstrating that grows stronger by the day.

Unprovoked attack

In March the OPCW produced a report into a chemical weapons attack the Syrian government allegedly carried out in Douma in April last year. Several dozen civilians, many of them children, died apparently as a result of that attack.

The OPCW report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” for believing a toxic form of chlorine had been used as a chemical weapon in Douma, and that the most likely method of delivery were two cylinders dropped from the air.

This as good as confirmed claims made by al-Qaeda groups, backed by western states, that the cylinders had been dropped by the Syrian military. Using dry technical language, the OPCW joined the US and Europe in pointing the finger squarely at Assad.

It was vitally important that the OPCW reached that conclusion — and not only because the west has an overarching ambition for regime change in Syria.

In response to the alleged Douma attack a year ago, the US fired a volley of Cruise missiles at Syrian army and government positions before there had been any investigation into who was responsible.

Those missiles were already a war crime — an unprovoked attack on another sovereign country. But without the OPCW’s implicit blessing, the US would have been deprived of even its flimsy, humanitarian pretext for launching the missiles.

Leaked document

Undoubtedly the OPCW was under huge political pressure to arrive at the “right” conclusion. But as a scientific body carrying out a forensic investigation surely it would not have dared to doctor the data.

Nonetheless, it seems that may well be precisely what it did. This month the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media — a group of academics who have grown increasingly sceptical of the western narratives told about Syria — published an internal, leaked OPCW document.

A few fays later the OPCW reluctantly confirmed that the document was genuine, and that it would identify and deal with those responsible for the leak.

The document was an assessment overseen by Ian Henderson, a senior OPCW expert, of the engineering data gathered by the OPCW’s fact-finding mission that attended the scene of the Douma attack. Its findings fly in the face of the OPCW’s published report.

Erased from the record

The leaked document is deeply troubling for two reasons.

First, the assessment, based on the available technical data, contradicts the conclusion of the final OPCW report that the two chemical cylinders were dropped from the air and crashed through building roofs. It argues instead that the cylinders were more likely placed at the locations they were found.

If that is right, the most probable explanation is that the cylinders were put there by al-Qaeda groups — presumably in a last desperate effort to persuade the west to intervene and to prevent the jihadists being driven out of Douma.

But even more shocking is the fact that the expert assessment based on the data collected by the OPCW team is entirely unaddressed in the OPCW’s final report.

It is not that the final report discounts or rebuts the findings of its own experts. It simply ignores those findings; it pretends they don’t exist. The report blacks them out, erases them from the official record. In short, it perpetrates a massive deception.

Experts ignored

All of this would be headline news if we had a responsible media that cared about the truth and about keeping its readers informed.

We now know both that the US attacked Syria on entirely bogus grounds, and that the OPCW — one of the international community’s most respected and authoritative bodies — has been caught redhanded in an outrageous deception with grave geopolitical implications. (In fact, it is not the first time the OPCW has been caught doing this, as I have previously explained here.)

The fact that the OPCW ignored its own expert and its own team’s technical findings when they proved politically indigestible casts a dark shadow over allthe OPCW’s work in Syria, and beyond. If it was prepared to perpetrate a deception on this occasion, why should we assume it did not do so on other occasions when it proved politically expedient?

Active combatants

The OPCW’s reports into other possible chemical attacks — assisting western efforts to implicate Assad — are now equally tainted. That is especially so given that in those other cases the OPCW violated its own procedures by drawing prejudicial conclusions without its experts being on the ground, at the site of the alleged attacks. Instead it received samples and photos via al-Qaeda groups, who could easily have tampered with the evidence.

And yet there has been not a peep from the corporate media about this exposure of the OPCW’s dishonesty, apart from commentary pieces from the only two maverick mainstream journalists in the UK — Peter Hitchens, a conservative but independent-minded columnist for the Mail on Sunday, and veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk, of the little-read Independent newspaper (more on his special involvement in Douma in a moment).

Just as the OPCW blanked the findings of its technical experts to avoid political discomfort, the media have chosen to stay silent on this new, politically sensitive information.

They have preferred to prop up the discredited narrative that our governments have been acting to protect the human rights of ordinary Syrians rather than the reality that they have been active combatants in the war, helping to destabilise a country in ways that have caused huge suffering and death in Syria.

Systematic failure

This isn’t a one-off failure. It’s part of a series of failures by the corporate media in its coverage of Douma.

They ignored very obvious grounds for caution at the time of the alleged attack. Award-winning reporter Robert Fisk was among the first journalists to enter Douma shortly after those events. He and a few independent reporters communicated eye-witness testimony that flatly contradicted the joint narrative promoted by al-Qaeda groups and western governments that Assad had bombed Douma with chemical weapons.

The corporate media also mocked a subsequent press conference at which many of the supposed victims of that alleged chemical attack made appearances to show that they were unharmed and spoke of how they had been coerced into play-acting their roles.

And now the western media has compounded that failure — revealing its systematic nature — by ignoring the leaked OPCW document too.

But it gets worse, far worse.

Al-Qaeda propaganda

This week the same al-Qaeda groups that were present in Douma — and may have staged that lethal attack — claimed that the Syrian government had again launched chemical weapons against them, this time on their final holdout in Idlib.

A responsible media, a media interested in the facts, in evidence, in truth-telling, in holding the powerful to account, would be dutybound to frame this latest, unsubstantiated claim in the context of the new doubts raised about the OPCW report into last year’s chemical attack blamed on Assad.

Given that the technical data suggest that al-Qaeda groups, and the White Helmets who work closely with them, were responsible for staging the attack — even possibly of murdering civilians to make the attack look more persuasive — the corporate media had a professional and moral obligation to raise the matter of the leaked document.

It is vital context as anyone tries to weigh up whether the latest al-Qaeda claims are likely to be true. To deprive readers of this information, this essential context would be to take a side, to propagandise on behalf not only of western governments but of al-Qaeda too.

And that is exactly what the corporate media have just done. All of them.

Media worthy of Stalin

It is clear how grave their dereliction of the most basic journalistic duty is if we consider the Guardian’s uncritical coverage of jihadist claims about the latest alleged chemical attack.

Like most other media, the Guardian article included two strange allusions — one by France, the other by the US — to the deception perpetrated by the OPCW in its recent Douma report. The Guardian reported these allusions even though it has never before uttered a word anywhere in its pages about that deception.

In other words, the corporate media are so committed to propagandising on behalf of the western powers that they have reported the denials of official wrongdoing even though they have never reported the actual wrongdoing. It is hard to imagine the Soviet media under Stalin behaving in such a craven and dishonest fashion.

The corporate media have given France and the US a platform to reject accusations against the OPCW that the media themselves have never publicly raised.

Doubts about OPCW

The following is a brief statement (unintelligible without the forgoing context) from France, reportedby the Guardian in relation to the latest claim that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons this week: “We have full confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”

But no one, except bloggers and academics ignored by the media and state authorities, has ever raised doubts about the OPCW. Why would the Guardian think these French comments worthy of reporting unless there were reasons to doubt the OPCW? And if there are such reasons for doubt, why has the Guardian not thought to make them public, to report them to its readers?

The US state department similarly came to the aid of the OPCW. In the same Guardian report, a US official was quoted saying that the OPCW was facing “a continuing disinformation campaign” from Syria and Russia, and that the campaign was designed “to create the false narrative that others [rather than Assad] are to blame for chemical weapons attacks”.

So Washington too was rejecting accusations against the OPCW that have never been reported by the state-corporate media.

Interestingly, in the case of US officials, they claim that Syria and Russia are behind the “disinformation campaign” against the OPCW, even though the OPCW has admitted that the leaked document discrediting its work is genuine and written by one of its experts.

The OPCW is discredited, of course, only because it sought to conceal evidence contained in the leaked document that might have exonerated Assad of last year’s chemical attack. It is hard to see how Syria or Russia can be blamed for this.

Colluding in deception

But more astounding still, while US and French officials have at least acknowledged that there are doubts about the OPCW’s role in Syria, even if they unjustifiably reject such doubts, the corporate media have simply ignored those doubts as though they don’t exist.

The continuing media blackout on the leaked OPCW document cannot be viewed as accidental. It has been systematic across the media.

That blackout has remained resolutely in place even after the OPCW admitted the leaked document discrediting it was genuine and even after western countries began alluding to the leaked document themselves.

The corporate media is actively colluding both in the original deception perpetrated by al-Qaeda groups and the western powers, and in the subsequent dishonesty of the OPCW. They have worked together to deceive western publics.

The question is, why are the media so obviously incompetent? Why are they so eager to keep themselves and their readers in the dark? Why are they so willing to advance credulous narratives on behalf of western governments that have been repeatedly shown to have lied to them?

Iran the real target

The reason is that the corporate media are not what they claim. They are not a watchdog on power, or a fourth estate.

The media are actually the public relations wing of a handful of giant corporations — and states — that are pursuing two key goals in the Middle East.

First, they want to control its oil. Helping al-Qaeda in Syria — including in its propaganda war — against the Assad government serves a broader western agenda. The US and NATO bloc are ultimately gunning for the leadership of Iran, the one major oil producer in the region not under the US imperial thumb.

Powerful Shia groups in the region — Assad in Syria, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Iraqi leaders elevated by our invasion of that country in 2003 — are allies or potential allies of Iran. If they are in play, the US empire’s room for manoeuvre in taking on Iran is limited. Remove these smaller players and Iran stands isolated and vulnerable.

That is why Russia stepped in several years ago to save Assad, in a bid to stop the dominoes falling and the US engineering a third world war centred on the Middle East.

Second, with the Middle East awash with oil money, western corporations have a chance to sell more of the lucrative weapons that get used in overt and covert wars like the one raging in Syria for the past eight years.

What better profit-generator for these corporations than wasteful and pointless wars against manufactured bogeymen like Assad?

Like a death cult

From the outside, this looks and sounds like a conspiracy. But actually it is something worse — and far more difficult to overcome.

The corporations that run our media and our governments have simply conflated in their own minds — and ours — the idea that their narrow corporate interests are synonymous with “western interests”.

The false narratives they generate are there to serve a system of power, as I have explained in previous blogs. That system’s worldview and values are enforced by a charmed circle that includes politicians, military generals, scientists, journalists and others operating as if brainwashed by some kind of death cult. They see the world through a single prism: the system’s need to hold on to power. Everything else — truth, evidence, justice, human rights, love, compassion — must take a back seat.

It is this same system that paradoxically is determined to preserve itself even if it means destroying the planet, ravaging our economies, and starting and maintaining endlessly destructive wars. It is system that will drag us all into the abyss, unless we stop it.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).

Terrorism at the Service of ‘Regime Change’. How the West Gets Hit by Its Own Former ‘Useful Freedom Fighters’

DMITRY BABICH 

The Times of London recently published an apologetic story about some “Chechen battalion” that it likes. This special military unit is fighting on the side of Ukrainian troops near the port of Mariupol on the Azov Sea and is headed by a bearded Chechen with a huge dagger inscribed with the words “Death to Separatists.” The Times describes this seemingly bloodthirsty gentleman in a positive light.

An enemy of my enemy

There is one good reason for that. The author of the story, British journalist Marc Bennets, and the commander of the “anti-separatist” battalion, named Muslim Cheberloevsky, have one common enemy. This enemy is the Russian president Putin. In the story, Cheberloyevsky explains to Bennets that he kills the Ukrainian “separatists” (i.e. mostly the Russian-speaking people of Donbass, who refused to live under the crudely nationalist regime of Petro Poroshenko), because he sees them as allies of president Putin. And “Putin is our enemy too,” explains Cheberloyevsky his affinity to Ukrainian nationalists, who normally look down on anyone who was born in Russia. Good enough for The Times. On its pages, Mr. Cheberloyevsky becomes a “freedom fighter.”

The fact that Mr. Cheberloyevsky holds Islamist views and that in an interview to Ukrainian TV he had admitted having trained with the so called Islamic State (formerly ISIS) in Iraq and Syria – this information does not deter The Times in the least. So what, if this useful Islamist “waged jihad” in Syria? Obviously, the UK’s mainstream media shares the establishment’s opinion that the West has a bigger fish to fry with the likes of Mr. Cheberloyevsky – fighting Putin. The perspective of spoiling the day for “Vlad the Bad” is enough for The Times to forget how the anti-Putin and anti-Assad jihadists, having received Western aid, committed terrorist acts in Western Europe and the US. For example, the Boston marathon bombing in 2013 or the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015 were both masterminded by Islamist recipients of Western aid for “freedom fighters,” who had radicalized themselves in the same places as Mr. Cheberloyevsky.

Weaponizing Islamism – at your own peril

George Galloway, a former British MP and a prominent critic of British establishment, cites The Times’ story in order to prove his point: “It was always thus.” For several decades, the United States and its allies inside the EU continuously tried to weaponize the Islamist radicals against what the Western establishment saw as much more important adversaries – against Russia, China, Libya, Syria, Iran, etc. It is enough to mention the admitted facts of American and British financing for Osama bin Laden and his proxies during their anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. Among more recent cases, one could cite the political asylum provided in the US and in the EU to the anti-Russian terrorists, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, who on their own killed and maimed several dozen people by exploding a bomb in Boston, Massachusets, during the traditional annual marathon in 2013. The Russian security services warned their American colleagues BEFORE the attack, that the future main perpetrator of the “marathon massacre,” Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had taken part in the anti-Russian terrorist activities in two of the Moslem regions of Russia – the autonomous republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. But this warning went unheeded, with 3 Bostonians killed and 16 losing their limbs as a result.

This time again, the British media is undisturbed by the dangers of the alliance with the likes of Mr. Cheberloyevsky.

“There was more interest in Strictly Come Dancing than the long-bearded Islamist extremists, who were now, once again, our partners in crime,” former MP George Galloway writes, and one could not agree more.

We have seen it all – in Syria

Somehow, a lot of the arms and so called “non-lethal equipment” provided by the US and its allies to the “moderate armed opposition” (what an oxymoron!) fighting the Syrian president Bashar Assad ended in the wrong hands. Even Western journalists admitted on many occasions, that a lot of this deadly stuff was ultimately used by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in the region, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Jaish al-Islam. Even The Guardian, normally subservient to the globalists, had to report that the “wrong” terrorists quite logically got hold of American gifts to the “right” terrorists, with gifts ranging from Humvee armored vehicles to the should-launched anti-aircraft missiles. Later these arms were used against citizens of Western countries, among many other victims. But the mainstream Western press never criticized its governments’ decisions to supply such weapons to “moderate Syrian opposition,” concentrating instead on the crusade against Putin and Assad. In 2011-2015 the supposedly “pluralist” American, British or French media machines were not different from the supposedly “unfree” Saudi or Turkish ones in that they all viewed the Islamists as a “lesser evil” than the secular Syrian government or, heaven forbid, Russian military contingent legally invited by this government to Syria.

Bigger evil – lesser evil

“The logic of Western political leaders is simple and cynical,” explains Mikhail Delyagin, the head of the Moscow-based Institute for Globalization Problems. “How many Western citizens can terrorists kill? Not more than a few hundreds, at worst a thousand or two, as it was the case during the 9/11 terrorist act in the United States, in 2001. Such a situation is most unfortunate, but it cannot be a threat to the power of globalist clans which now control the US and the EU. Meanwhile, Russia’s or China’s counteraction can be a limitation on their power, it can thwart their plans of spreading the globalist, so called “liberal” ideology to the largest possible number of countries. So, the main enemies of the modern West crack up to be Russia and other sovereign countries, not the terrorists.”

The proof that this kind of attitude dominates on the side of Western elites can easily be obtained from their own loyal “free” press, if only one takes the trouble to memorize how the headlines (and the affiliations!) of, say, the New York Times change over the course of the wars which the US assisted in unleashing.

From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011 to the year 2013, the New York Times has been describing the insurgents operating against president Assad as “moderate,” denying the reports about their ties to the international jihadist movement or their attempts to impose medieval Islamist laws on Assad’s Syria. And then, suddenly, in 2013, we read the following in an article by the NYT’s Anne Barnard and Eric Schmitt:

“Known as fierce fighters willing to employ suicide car bombs, the jihadist groups now include more than 6,000 foreigners, counterterrorism officials say, adding that such fighters are streaming into Syria in greater numbers than went into Iraq at the height of the insurgency there against the American occupation.”

“Too little” crime, “too late” deaths

Later in the article, the NYT’s authors voice some very controversial criticism of the policy directed at arming those very sinister international terrorists in Syria: “Even Congressional supporters of the C.I.A.'s covert program to arm moderate elements of the Syrian opposition fear the delivery of weapons, set to begin this month, will be too little, too late.”

Isn’t that great? The NYT is not criticizing something clearly illegal: a covert (like almost any intentional crime) CIA program to supply deadly weapons to terrorists fighting a sovereign country’s government. They criticize this criminal act for coming too late and lacking in scope!

“Spooky parallels” of terror

The Washington Post’s shameless veteran-columnist David Ignatius, who recently got famous for reporting to the authorities, Stalin style, on Michael Flynn’s unauthorized contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States, had a rare moment of writing something critical of globalists in 2012. At the moment, president Obama’s line on using the Islamists as “work horses” for the regime change in Syria became apparent. And Ignatius produced a parallel that just asked to be made – the parallel between modern Syria and the American involvement in Afghanistan of the 1980s.

“The parallels are spooky. In Syria, as in Afghanistan, CIA officers are operating at the borders (in this case, mostly in Jordan and Turkey), helping Sunni insurgents improve their command and control and engaging in other activities… There’s even a colorful figure who links the two campaigns: Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who as Saudi ambassador to the US in the 1980s worked to finance and support the CIA in Afghanistan and who now, as chief of Saudi intelligence, is encouraging operations in Syria... There is a negative element to this parallel too, however: this CIA-backed victory opened the way for decades of chaos and jihadist extremism that are still menacing Afghanistan, its neighbors and even the United States.”

This “even” in the article by Ignatius can be a target for sarcasm: after all, even according to the official American version, the 9/11 mass murder was planned in Afghanistan “liberated” with the help from the CIA. So, George Galloway probably has a point, when he advises the Western governments in his article: “Read Mary Shelley, read Frankenstein, and read it to the end.” Alas, the end may be too awful, too near – and not only for the Western sponsors of Islamist terrorism.

Battle of Idlib: No Mass Flight, Expulsion or Humanitarian Crisis

TEHRAN (FNA)- Syrian President Bashar Assad says “Idlib province is home to tens of thousands of terrorists and the region is among the priority areas for the Syrian military's operations.”

So it makes perfect sense to liberate the terror-held area. After all, the Syrian Army is sending military equipment and ammunition to the borders of Idlib, preparing for a large-scale operation to clear the area of terrorists.

Sadly, most of Idlib province is occupied by a disparate collection of foreign-backed terrorist groups. The region has been home to infighting between Nusra Front (also known as Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at or the Levant Liberation Board)and Ahrar al-Sham as well, a coalition of Salafist, Takfiri and Wahhabi jihadists. And with the liberation of broad areas of Southern Syria this month, Idlib has become one of the last terrorist strongholds in Syria – all armed with US-made weapons, including anti-tank missiles.

The good news is that Turkey has officially designated the Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at jihadist group as a "terrorist" organization, ahead of the operation by the Syrian Army. Turkey, which has already listed Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda as terror groups, has updated its list of terror groups. It has been keeping a wary eye on the Idlib offensive, as the long-awaited operation is seen as a prelude to efforts to bring peace to Syria. To that end, the presidents of these three countries are scheduled to meet in Iran this week. The talks will include prospects of peace with the opposition groups.

The military operations in Idlib are not designed to cause catastrophe or trigger an influx of refugees across its borders. That’s not the intention. Reconstruction in Syria cannot begin as long as there are still remnants of ISIL and Al-Qaeda in the war-torn country. No international company or bank is willing to build or finance any infrastructure project if parts of Syria are still under the control of militant groups.

For that reason, recapturing the province of Idlib makes sense. It will pave the way for full resumption of reconstruction efforts nationwide. Private companies from Iran have already agreed to build 30,000 homes for the Syrian people. They also say they could only begin work when they feel safe. That safety could be guaranteed with liberation of Idlib.

In between, Western media outlets are free to claim sectarian and ethnic cleansing will be inevitable once Idlib is fully liberated. And even if the war ends, many refugees will find it too dangerous to return to their homes. They can even claim communities which once lived together in peace will be too frightened of each other to return to Idlib.

But guess what? They made the same claims when other regions were liberated by the allied forces and nothing terrible happened afterwards. This means there are no reasons for the civilians to be afraid; there is no sectarian or ethnic and political agenda; and certainly no “displacement, elimination, mass flight and expulsion” plans. Much to the chagrin of “fakestream” media in the West, civilians will be able to return home in safety and with full protection from the central government.

There is no denying that the decision to liberate Idlib has enraged the United States and its rogue partners. They are using their “humanitarian crisis” concerns to prolong the unnecessary conflict, to justify their presence and occupation, and to keep their terror proxies at an arm’s length. Backed by corporate media propaganda, they allege liberation will look like occupation and ethnic cleansing. Other allegations include government forces will be carrying out summary execution of Qaeda sympathizers, looting, and burning homes for the run of it.

The frantic propagandists are in the know that these barbaric acts are what their terror proxies have done in Syria for so many years - and continue to do in Idlib under the horrible campaign of regime-change bloodletting. To be sure, the government-led campaign to liberate Idlib will have the minimum number of civilian casualties. It has nothing to do with sectarian tensions or people and everything to do with the plan to kick start nationwide reconstruction efforts.

In brief, it is the terrorist groups and their enablers that have committed and continue to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Syria. The War Party in Washington and its rogue partners in crime are not fit to judge the sensible conducts of the Syrian government forces and allies in Idlib. One instance is the tens of thousands of former rebels who have all been pardoned by the government in the last several years and are living in peace in their cities. Still better, some of the same are fighting alongside the Syrian army against their former comrades to end the war. The peace agreements signed with numerous militant groups constituted one of the main reasons why the operation in Sweida was wrapped up in a matter of weeks than months.

Predictably, the United States and its allies will still issue statements blaming Syria and its allies for the carnage wrought by ISIL and Al-Qaeda in Idlib, and that includes their sectarian massacres, summary executions, and destruction of public property among others. The reason is obvious. They are unhappy at the reversal of fortunes because the Syrian Army in collaboration with allied forces has liberated the rest of the country from the bloodthirsty demons Washington and partners created. They are now heading towards Idlib where the fate of foreign-backed terrorists is sealed.

Ten Theses of American Empire-Building

By James Petras

Few, if any, believe what they hear and read from leaders and media publicists. Most people choose to ignore the cacophony of voices, vices and virtues.

This paper provides a set of theses which purports to lay-out the basis for a dialogue between and among those who choose to abstain from elections with the intent to engage them in political struggle.

Thesis 1

US empire builders of all colors and persuasion practice donkey tactics; waving the carrot and wielding the whip to move the target government on the chosen path.

In the same way, Washington offers dubious concessions and threatens reprisals, in order to move them into the imperial orbit.

Washington applied the tactic successfully in several recent encounters. In 2003 the US offered Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi an accommodation in exchange for disarmament, abandonment of allies in Africa and Asia. In 2011, the US with its European allies applied the whip – bombed Libya, financed and armed retrograde tribal and terrorist forces, destroyed the infrastructure, murdered Gaddafi and uprooted millions of Africans and Libyans who fled to Europe. Washington recruited mercenaries for their subsequent war against Syria in order to destroy Bashar Assad. Washington did not succeed in establishing a puppet regime in the midst of perpetual war it launched and supported.

The empire’s carrot weakened its adversary, but the stick failed to recolonize Libya. Moreover, its European allies are obligated to pay the multi-billion Euro cost of absorbing millions of uprooted immigrants and the ensuing domestic political turmoil.

Thesis 2

Empire builders’ proposal to reconfigure the economy in order to regain imperial supremacy provokes domestic and overseas enemies. President Trump launched a global trade war, replaced political accommodation with economic sanctions against Russia and a domestic protectionist agenda and sharply reduced corporate taxes. He provoked a two-front conflict. Overseas, he provoked opposition from European allies and China, while facing perpetual harassment from domestic free market globalists and Russo-phobic political elites and ideologues.

Thesis 3

Leftists frequently reverse course: they are radicals out of office and reactionaries in government, eventually falling between both chairs. Shrewd but discredited elites frequently recognize the opportunism of the Left, and in time of distress, have no problem in temporarily putting up with Left rhetoric and reforms as long as their economic interests are not jeopardized. The elite know that the Left signal left and turn right.

Thesis 4

Elections, even ones won by progressives or leftists, frequently become springboards for imperial backed coups. Over the past decade newly elected presidents, who are not aligned with Washington, face congressional and/or judicial impeachment on spurious charges. The elections provide a veneer of legitimacy which a straight-out military-coup lacks.

In Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela, ‘legislatures’ under US tutelage attempted to ouster popular President. They succeeded in the former and failed in the latter.

When electoral machinery fails, the judicial system intervenes to impose restraints on progressives, based on tortuous and convoluted interpretation of the law.

Thesis 5

Even crazy leaders speak truth to power. There is no question that President Trump suffers a serious mental disorder, with midnight outbursts. Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times, Washington Post, the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust.

Thesis 6

When a bark turns into a bite, Trump proves the homely truth that fear invites aggression. Trump has implemented or threatened severe sanctions against the EU, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea and any country that does not submit to his dictates. At first, it was bombast and bluster which secured concessions.

Concessions were interpreted as weakness and invited greater threats. Disunity of opponents encouraged imperial tacticians to divide and conquer. But by attacking all adversaries simultaneously he undermines that tactic. Threats everywhere limits choices to dangerous options at home and abroad.

Thesis 7

The master meddlers, of all times, into the politics of sovereign states are the Anglo-American empire builders. But what is most revealing is the current ploy of accusing the victims of the crimes that are committed against them. After the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the US and its European acolytes ‘meddled’ on a world-historic scale, pillaging over two trillion dollars of Soviet wealth.

With Russia’s revival under President Putin, Washington financed a large army of self-styled ‘non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) to organize electoral campaigns, recruited moguls in the mass media and instigated ethnic rebellions.

Moreover, the Israelis have perfected meddling on a grand scale – they intervene successfully in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon. They set the West Asia agenda, budget and priorities, and secure the biggest military handouts on a per-capita basis in US history! Apparently, some meddlers meddle by invitation and are paid to do it.

Thesis 8

Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.

In the US the buyers and brokers are called ‘lobbyists’ – everywhere else they are called fraudsters. Corruption greases the wheels of billion dollars military spending, technological subsidies, tax evading corporations and every facet of government – out in the open, all the time and place of the US regime.

Corruption as lobbying never evokes the least criticism from the mass media.

When corruption is punished in China, the US media claim it is merely a ‘political purge’ even if it directly reduces elite conspicuous consumption.

Thesis 9

Bread and circuses are integral parts of empire building – especially in promoting urban street mobs to overthrow independent and elected governments.

Imperial financed mobs – provided the cover for CIA backed coups in Iran (1954), Ukraine (2014), Brazil (1964), Venezuela (2003, 2014 and 2017), Argentina (1956), Nicaragua (2018), Syria (2011) and Libya (2011) among other places and other times.

Masses for empire draw paid and voluntary street fighters who serve the elite. The “mass cover” is especially effective in recruiting leftists who look to the street for opinion and ignore the suites which call the shots.

Thesis 10

The empire is like a three-legged stool it promotes genocide, to secure magnicide and to rule by homicide. Invasion kills millions, capture and kill rulers and then rule by homicide – police assassinating dissenting citizens.

The cases are readily available: Iraq and Libya come to mind. The US and its accomplices invaded, bombed and killed over a million Iraqis, captured and assassinated its leaders. A similar pattern occurred in Libya: the US and EU bombed, killed and uprooted several million people, assassinated Gadhafi and fomented a lawless terrorist war of clans, tribes and western puppets.

“Western values” reveal the inhumanity of empires built to murder “a la carte” – stripping the victim nations of their defenders, leaders and citizens.

The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism – its continuities and novelties. The mass media systematically write and speak lies to power: their message is to disarm their adversaries and to arouse their patrons to continue to plunder the world.

You have just read excerpts of a feature authored by James Petras, a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.