Foreign Policy Holiday Follies

The sheer incompetence of the Barack Obama administration and the corrupt duplicitous swine in the U.S. Congress are on full display for the world this weekend. Like some bizarre form of diorama in the front window of Macy’s set up to perform a weird holiday spectacle the wheels are coming off in a very ugly way so let the planet be placed on warning that 2014 could bring our national stupidity full-circle in a very serious apocalyptic manner.  First and foremost the once promising P5+1 talks with Iran on ending the nuclear problem are now on life support, stick a fork in any prospect for a peaceful and rational resolution. This was inevitable with many in congress working on behalf of foreign powers to sabotage negotiations with additional crushing sanctions. The two-pronged assault at pushing a collapsing empire into another war was being led in the Senate by right-wing Israeli lackey Senator Mark Kirk and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, he who recently was alleged to have been frolicking with underage prostitutes. In the House which is chock a block with fanatical Christian Zionists hellbent on triggering Armageddon to bring Jesus back and launching them skyward like so many ballistic missiles dirty, nasty naked to sit at the foot of God’s throne and watch all of us heathens suffer plagues and nuclear fallout  Eric ‘Iranium’ Cantor is the point man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and the Obama administration themselves beat the treacherous anti-Americans to the punch by imposing new sanctions on their own sending Iranian leaders into fits and for the time being they have left the table.

With the talks on life support it will be a joyous Christmas indeed for the war freaks and the military industrial complex who are both salivating over the billions of dollars in arms spending and singing joy to the world. This country is so screwed at this point thanks to the poisonous addiction to war and profiting obscenely off of human misery that there is no way to avert that which is inevitable: collapse. There will never be peace again in our time, the culture of corruption is just dug in too deeply and the average American psyche has been permanently altered to accept war as our national birthright. The jobs have gone overseas to low cost shitholes where workers toil like slaves in hideous conditions for a pittance, the markets cannot function without a never-ending infusion of government created money to gamble with and inflation is eating the average schmuck alive no matter how much the shills lie about the lack of such a thing.  I was pretty shocked when the war with Syria was averted despite the best efforts of Obama and Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry to lie the country into attacking Damascus. The entire reason for war, the Assad regime gassing civilians has been exposed as total horseshit most prominently last week in a London Review of Books piece by journalist Seymour Hersh that the was radioactive to the state-corporate media here in The Homeland. It was always a dubious claim that the radical Islamic fanatics that were being backed by the U.S. could be trusted and it was likely elements amongst them, backed by Bandar Bush and the Saudis who were responsible for the gassings. The other shoe has yet to drop on that one but we were spared a war in Syria for the time being.

The latest violation of the national interest that has torpedoed the Iran talks is consistent with the militarized state. We have never really scaled down after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese Empire only made it necessary to create new enemies to feed the war machine and the blood barters whose bottom line is tied to death and destruction that can never, ever end.  I was recently forwarded a long essay by liberal blogger Bob Alexander and would recommend it to everyone whatever their philosophical leanings may be. What Alexander does is connect the dots by boiling down the trajectory of the victorious post-war U.S. into today’s fascist surveillance state, where the Constitution is as George W. Bush so eloquently put it “nothing but a goddamned piece of paper” and the Obama Stasi spies on everyone and everything, the only thing that prevents them from spying on people’s thoughts is that the technology does not exist yet. I excerpt the following:

In 2008 Barack Obama said everything we wanted to hear, and after being swept into office dutifully did everything he was told. I can only assume his life-long ambition was to be a footnote president - the guy with an asterisk next to his name. And at the bottom of the page it’ll say, “The First African-American President.” In a few more years Hillary Clinton should be able to join the pantheon of footnote presidents.

The major differences between the current and previous governments should be alarming … but they don’t seem to concern the public very much if at all.

Presently, Americans have a Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t-Constitution. Remember when Keith Olbermann on MSNBC crossed off the Bill of Rights one by one after the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts were passed? It was more than just a civics lesson. He was telling us that what we took for granted didn’t exist anymore. Americans now live in a country where extra-ordinary rendition and extra-judicial decisions can leave them extra-crispy.

Americans recognize coups when they happen in other countries but remain oblivious to the ones that have occurred in their own. Why? The answer cannot be as simple as they weren’t told about it in the papers or on television. That is a part of it, I’m sure but it’s a topic scrupulously avoided everywhere, even among ourselves. Even though massive changes have occurred right before our eyes we treat this current iteration of the government as if it has always been The Government we read about in history books. This present government, among other things, spies on 5 billion cell phones every day. The President of The United States has boasted, “I’m really good at killing people.” How does that jibe with the notion that America is the land of the free and home of the brave? Is it just too goddamned scary to admit to ourselves that the government, supposedly of, by, and for the people, is completely out of our control?

Mr. Alexander’s essay is entitled "The Flag Remains the Same"  and can be read at either OpEd News or TV News Lies.  Often pieces such as this tend to get bogged down in too much detail and as a result too many people who would benefit from such reading would be discouraged.  Some may disagree with certain interpretations of history but for the most part the important thing to understand is that the entire country has changed into something very ugly with the exception of our blessed symbol of the flag. Children pledge allegiance to it, anyone who refuses to stand during the obligatory rendition of the national anthem at a sporting event risks harassment or worse yet there is never a question asked as to whether such enforced worship of a national symbol would be accepted in a truly free country.

With the Iran war back on again and Barry and the boys full of piss and vinegar after the repair of the Obamacare website, the establishment Republican Night of the Long Knives purge of the so-called tea party and Helicopter Ben’s successor, the bankster friendly Janet Yellen standing on the brink of confirmation and the continuation of the 85 billion dollar a month heroin injections into Wall Street banks it is breaking that there will be no reform of NSA Stasi surveillance practices. Not that it could have been expected with a pack of traitors in Congress providing cover for the unconstitutional programs nor the committee that Obama empaneled that included notorious schemer Cass Sunstein and shadow government figure Richard Clarke. It was as packed with fixers, liars and defenders of the national security state as either the Warren Commission or the Kean Commission. There was an expectation of at least cosmetic changes to warrantless surveillance but the establishment is now going to give Americans the big red, white and blue middle finger.

But what would foreign policy shenanigans be without American’s foremost warmonger the deranged old bastard John McCain? McCain just cannot keep himself away from travelling across the pond to whichever country that at the time happens to be on the brink of war to conduct media dog and pony shows and act as a whore to the arms industry. This time it is in Ukraine where he is holding court with the anti-government protesters who were only a few days ago set upon by government goons wielding truncheons and chainsaws. It was a brutal act of a desperate regime but really is none of our business here in the United States, any notions that we can't act as the global policeman have long been cast aside when there are defense industry dollars to be harvested, just like General Smedley Butler put it, "War is a Racket" and Senator McCain has been it's top sales rep for a long time now. I haven't seen the schedules for tomorrow's Sunday morning state propaganda shows but don't be surprised if the old man just happens to drop by either live or from satellite hookup to act as Santa Claus for Raytheon, General Electric and hundreds of others looking to gain market share in Kiev.

It all just continues to rot but Americans just couldn't be bothered, after all, the flag remains the same.

Obama Administration Lied About Syria Gas Attack

We almost went to war over this. In a very long piece published by the London Review of Books Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has dropped the bombshell that the Obama administration's much hyped reason for attacking the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad over the Ghouta sarin gas attacks was total bullshit. It was as phony as the lies about Saddam Hussein's yellow cake uranium, mobile chemical weapons labs, trans-Atlantic chemical weapon spewing gliders and links to 9/11. This is not surprising in the least, most wars are based on lies that can be sold to the schmucks and it was at the time one hell of a sales pitch, all of those looped videos of the poor, twitching, dying children that were aired for the maximum emotional impact. It was pure war pornography at both its finest and its worst. Let us not forget how close that we really were to the missiles flying into Damascus, a conflict that could have dragged in Russia and possibly escalated into WW III. Barry and the boys, especially Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry were ready to rumble but unfortunately were too inept to close the deal sending the petulant tantrum throwing 'allies' in Riyadh and Tel Aviv into a series of ugly snits that reverberate to this day. Regarding the Hersh story what is even less surprising than the blatant lies that were outed is the refusal of the U.S. state-corporate media to publish it, partially because of the egg on their faces for assisting in selling the Syria attack as they did the shock and awe bombardment of Baghdad but more so that they are not legitimate news outlets in the traditional sense but rather function as propaganda organs of the rogue government.

Hersh himself has been neutralized, smeared and affixed with the dreaded tin-foil hat that effectively ends one's ability to be published in establishment media. Even the New Yorker where Hersh wrote for years about the machinations of the Bush-Cheney regime including the lies to gin up more wars, torture and subversion of the Constitution has deemed him to be radioactive. Having myself followed Hersh's work for years the man is a seasoned journalist of integrity and talent who rocketed to stardom with his reporting on the My Lai atrocities during the Vietnam war and ripped away the star spangled facade of Bush-Cheney's war on terror by writing extensively on the heinous activities at Abu Ghraib prison that forever stripped the noble lie from the Iraq misadventure. With the Obama-Eric Holder war on journalism quashing any serious reportage with media personalities who can't be bought off or who in the instance of 60 Minute's now fallen star Lara Logan have agendas real reporters need to go to the foreign press to be published. Hersh likely raised more than a few hackles in Obama's gang when according to a Guardian Story he blasted the bastards with both barrels by inveighing:  “Do you think Obama’s been judged by rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention ot Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for?”.  He also dared to blaspheme the new national religion by questioning Obama's crowning achievement calling bullshit on the assassination of the bad assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden.

Already on Obama's shit list the latest from Hersh on the Ghouta gassing lies will likely not endear him to administration officials nor the bloodthirsty freaks the likes of John McCain, Mike Rogers, DiFi and Palmetto State Princess Lindsey Graham. The London Review of Books piece thoroughly disembowels the case for the Syrian attack and there should be very serious questions asked of why Obama went in front of the American people early in September and flat out lied:

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to talk to you about Syria, why it matters and where we go from here. Over the past two years, what began as a series of peaceful protests against the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad has turned into a brutal civil war. Over a hundred thousand people have been killed. Millions have fled the country. In that time, America has worked with allies to provide humanitarian support, to help the moderate opposition and to shape a political settlement.

But I have resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening, men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk. On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off limits, a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.

This was not always the case. In World War I, American GIs were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe. In World War II, the Nazis used gas to inflict the horror of the Holocaust. Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them. And in 1997, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved an international agreement prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, now joined by 189 government that represent 98 percent of humanity.

Perhaps the state-corporate media can be shamed into acknowledging Hersh's reporting but more likely they will soon mobilize for another vicious coordinated smear campaign. It will be up to the bloggers and alternative media to try to get the truth out in The Homeland. Both Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com and Marcy Wheeler at Empty Wheel have already written on the Hersh story so hopefully more will follow. It is of especial importance that the exposure of the Syrian lies get out as there is a full court press right now from fifth columnists, war freaks, propagandists, foreign governments and traitors in Congress to sabotage the deal that would prevent the third world war from erupting in Iran which would be a global cataclysm and bring about that looming collapse.