Embracing the Dark Side for their Galactic
Ambitions
By Dan Sanchez
October 28, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - When
Bill Kristol watches Star Wars movies, he roots
for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused
a social media
disturbance in the Force when he tweeted this
predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the
final trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Kristol sees the Empire as basically a
galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US
to have over the Earth: what he has termed “benevolent
global hegemony.”
Kristol, founder and editor of neocon
flagship magazine The Weekly Standard,responded to
scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the
Standard’s blog that justifies even the worst of Darth
Vader’s atrocities. In “The
Case for the Empire,” Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian
argument that you can’t make a “benevolent hegemony” omelet
without breaking a few eggs.
And what if those broken eggs are
civilians, like Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt who were
gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the
Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on
location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued, Uncle
Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids
R2D2 and C3P0; so they were “traitors” who were aiding the
rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.
A year after Kristol published Last’s
essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American
Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid
homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct
influence of neocons like Kristol and Last.
That war was similarly justified in part
by the false
allegation that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring
and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of
Fallujah, one of the most brutal episodes of the war,
was also specifically justified by the false allegation that
the town was harboring Zarqawi.
In reality Hussein had put a death warrant
out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq’s security forces
under the protective aegis of the US Air Force in Iraq’s
autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire
precipitated the chaotic collapse of
Iraq that Zarqawi’s outfit was able to
thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after
the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI
further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered
much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria
and Iraq).
And what if the “benevolent hegemony”
omelet requires the breaking of “eggs” the size of whole
worlds, like how high Imperial officer Wilhuff Tarkin used
the Death Star to obliterate the planet Alderaan? Well, as
Last sincerely argued, even Alderaan likely deserved its
fate, since it may have been, “a front for Rebel activity or
at least home to many more spies and insurgents…” Last
contended that Princess Leia was probably lying when she
told the Death Star’s commander that the planet had “no
weapons.”
While Last was writing his apologia for
global genocide, his fellow neocons were baselessly arguing
that Saddam Hussein was similarly lying about Iraq not
having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program.
Primarily on that basis, the obliteration of an entire
country began the following year.
And a year after that, President Bush
performed a
slapstick comedy act about his failure to find Iraqi
WMDs for a black-tie dinner for radio and television
correspondents. The media hacks in his audience, who had
obsequiously helped the neocon-dominated Bush administration
lie the country into war, rocked with laughter as thousands
of corpses moldered in Iraq and Arlington. A more sickening
display of imperial decadence and degradation has not been
seen perhaps since the gladiatorial audiences of Imperial
Rome. This is the hegemonic “benevolence” and “national
greatness” that Kristol pines for.
“Benevolent global hegemony” was coined by
Kristol and fellow neocon
Robert Kaganand their 1996 Foreign Affairs article
“Toward
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” In that essay, Kristol
and Kagan sought to inoculate both the conservative movement
and US foreign policy against the isolationism of Pat
Buchanan.
The Soviet menace had recently
disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons
were terrified that the American public would therefore jump
at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol
and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and
to instead capitalize on America’s new peerless preeminence
by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop.
The newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and
whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer
competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new
“unipolar moment” would last forever.
What made this neocon dream seem within
reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year
after the Berlin Wall fell, the Persian Gulf War against
Iraq was the debut “police action” of unipolar “Team
America, World Police.” Paul
Wolfowitz, the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered
it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato
Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled:
“In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy — the number 3
position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when
I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training
Center. (…)
And I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must
be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in
Desert Storm.”
And he said: “Yeah, but not really,
because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam
Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is
that we can use our military in the region — in the
Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve
got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet
client regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next
great superpower comes on to challenge us.”
The 1996 “Neo-Reaganite” article was part
of a surge of neocon literary activity in the mid-90s. It
was in 1995 that Kristol and John Podhoretz founded The
Weekly Standard with funding from right-wing media
mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Also in 1996, David
Wurmser wrote a strategy document for Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, “A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it was co-signed by
Wurmser’s fellow neocons and future Iraq War architects
Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith. “A
Clean Break” called for regime change in Iraq as a
“means” of “weakening, containing, and even rolling back
Syria.” Syria itself was a target because it “challenges
Israel on Lebanese soil.” It primarily does this by, along
with Iran, supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah,
which arose in the 80s out of the local resistance to the
Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils
Israel’s ambitions in that country.
Later that same year, Wurmser wrote
another strategy document, this time for circulation in
American and European halls of power, titled “Coping with
Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power
Strategy for the Levant.”
In “A Clean Break,” Wurmser had framed
regime change in Iraq and Syria in terms of Israeli regional
ambitions. In
“Coping,” Wurmser adjusted his message for its broader
Western audience by recasting the very same policies in a
Cold War framework.
Wurmser characterized regime change in
Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as “expediting
the chaotic collapse” of secular-Arab nationalism in
general, and Baathism in particular. He concurred with King
Hussein of Jordan that, “the phenomenon of Baathism,” was,
from the very beginning, “an agent of foreign, namely Soviet
policy.” Of course King Hussein was a bit biased on the
matter, since his own Hashemite royal family once ruled both
Iraq and Syria. Wurmser argued that:
“…the battle over Iraq represents a
desperate attempt by residual Soviet bloc allies in the
Middle East to block the extension into the Middle East
of the impending collapse that the rest of the Soviet
bloc faced in 1989.”
Wurmser further derided Baathism in Iraq
and Syria as an ideology in a state of “crumbling descent
and missing its Soviet patron” and
“no more than a Cold War enemy relic on
probation.”
Wurmser advised the West to put this
anachronistic adversary out of its misery, and to thus, in
Kristolian fashion, press America’s Cold War victory on
toward its final culmination. Baathism should be supplanted
by what he called the “Hashemite option.” After their
chaotic collapse, Iraq and Syria would be Hashemite
possessions once again. Both would be dominated by the royal
house of Jordan, which in turn, happens to be dominated by
the US and Israel.
Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism
must be the foremost priority in the region. Secular-Arab
nationalism should be given no quarter, not even, he added,
for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
Thus we see one of the major reasons why
the neocons were such avid anti-Soviets during the Cold War.
It is not just that, as post-Trotskyites, the neocons
resented Joseph Stalin for having Leon Trotsky assassinated
in Mexico with an ice pick. The Israel-first neocons’ main
beef with the Soviets was that, in various disputes and
conflicts involving Israel, Russia sided with secular-Arab
nationalist regimes from 1953 onward.
The neocons used to be Democrats in the
big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman and Henry
“Scoop” Jackson. After the Vietnam War and the rise of the
anti-war New Left, the Democratic Party’s commitment to the
Cold War waned, so the neocons switched to the Republicans
in disgust.
According to
investigative reporter Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first
taste of power within the Reagan administration, in which
positions were held by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot
Abrams, and
Michael Ledeen. They were especially influential during
Reagan’s first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare,
and profligate defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan
remembered so fondly in their “Neo-Reaganite” manifesto.
It was then that the neocons helped
establish the “Reagan Doctrine.” According to neocon
columnist
Charles Krauthammer, who coined the term in 1985, the
Reagan Doctrine was characterized by support for
anti-communist (in reality often simply anti-leftist) forces
around the whole world.
Since the support was clandestine, the
Reagan administration was able to bypass the “Vietnam
Syndrome” and project power in spite of the public’s
continuing war weariness. (It was left to Reagan’s
successor, the first President Bush, to announce following
his “splendid little” Gulf War that, “by God, we’ve kicked
the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”)
Operating covertly, the Reaganites could
also use any anti-communist group they found useful, no
matter how ruthless and ugly: from Contra death squads in
Nicaragua to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen in
Afghanistan. Abrams and Ledeen were both involved in the
Iran-Contra affair, and Abrams was convicted (though later
pardoned) on related criminal charges.
Kristol’s “Neo-Reaganite” co-author Robert
Kagan gave the doctrine an even wider and more ambitious
interpretation in his book A Twilight Struggle :
“The Reagan Doctrine has been widely
understood to mean only support for anticommunist
guerrillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes, but from the
first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for
anticommunist guerrillas was the logical outgrowth, not
the origin, of a policy of supporting democratic reform
or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by
right-wing dictators as well as by communist parties.”
As this description makes plain, neocon
policy, from the 1980s to today, has been every bit as
fanatical, crusading, and world-revolutionary as Red
Communism was in the neocon propaganda of yesteryear, and
that Islam is in the neocon propaganda of today.
The neocons credit Reagan’s early
belligerence with the eventual dissolution of the Soviet
Union. But in reality, war is the health of the State, and
Cold War was the health of Soviet State. The Soviets
long used the American menace to frighten the Russian people
into rallying around the State for protection.
After the neocons lost clout within the
Reagan administration to “realists” like George Schultz, the
later Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev detente began. It was only
after that detente lifted the Russian siege atmosphere and
quieted existential nuclear nightmares that the Russian
people felt secure enough to demand a changing of the guard.
In 1983, the same year that the first
Star Wars trilogy ended, Reagan vilified Soviet Russia
in language that Star Wars fans could understand by
dubbing it “the Evil Empire.” Years later, having, in
Kristol’s words, “defeated the evil empire,” the neocons
that Reagan first lifted to power began clamoring for a
“neo-Reaganite” global hegemony. And a few years after that,
those same neocons began pointing to the sci-fi Galactic
Empire that Reagan implicitly compared to the Soviets as a
lovely model for America!
Fast-forward to return to the neocon
literary flowering of the mid-90s. In 1997, the year after
writing “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” together,
Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The 20th
century is often called “the American century,” largely due
to it being a century of war and American “victories” in
those wars: the two World Wars and the Cold War. The neocons
sought to ensure that through the never-ending exercise of
military might, the American global hegemony achieved
through those wars would last another hundred years, and
that the 21st century too would be “American.”
The organization’s founding
statement of principles called for “a Reaganite policy
of military strength and moral clarity” and reads like an
executive summary of the founding duo’s “Neo-Reaganite”
essay. It was signed by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Abrams, Norman
Podhoretz and
Frank Gaffney; by future Bush administration officials
such as
Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Lewis
“Scooter” Libby; and by other neocon allies, such as Jeb
Bush.
Although PNAC called for interventions
ranging from Serbia (to roll back Russian influence in
Europe) to Taiwan (to roll back Chinese influence in Asia),
its chief concern was to kick off the restructuring of the
Middle East envisioned in “A Clean Break” and “Coping” by
advocating its first step: regime change in Iraq.
The most high-profile parts of this effort
were two “open letters” published in 1998, one in January
addressed to
President Bill Clinton, and another in May addressed to
leaders of Congress. As with its statement of
principles, PNAC was able to garner signatures for these
letters from a wide range of political luminaries, including
neocons (like Perle), neocon allies (like
John Bolton), and other non-neocons (like James Woolsey
and Robert Zoellick).
The open letters characterized Iraq as “a
threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have
known since the end of the Cold War,” and buttressed this
ridiculous claim with the now familiar allegations of Saddam
building a WMD program.
Thanks in large part to PNAC’s pressure,
regime change in Iraq became official US policy in October
when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998. (Notice the Clinton-friendly
“humanitarian interventionist” name in spite of the policy’s
conservative fear-mongering origins.)
After the Supreme Court delivered George
W. Bush the presidency, the neocons were back in the
imperial saddle again in 2001: just in time to make their
projected “New American Century” of “Neo-Reaganite Global
Hegemony” a reality. The first order of business, of course,
was Iraq.
But some pesky national security officials
weren’t getting with the program and kept trying to distract
the administration with concerns about some Osama bin Laden
character and his Al Qaeda outfit. Apparently they were
laboring under some pedestrian notion that their job was to
protect the American people and not to conquer the world.
For example, when National Security
Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke was
frantically sounding the alarm over an imminent terrorist
attack on America,Wolfowitz was uncomprehending. As Clarke
recalled, the then Deputy Defense Secretary
objected:
“I just don’t understand why we are
beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
Clarke informed him that:
“We are talking about a network of
terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to
be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that
network because it and it alone poses an immediate and
serious threat to the United States.”
This simply did not fit in the
agenda-driven neocon worldview of Wolfowitz, who responded:
“Well, there are others that do as
well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example.”
And as Peter Beinhart recently
wrote:
“During that same time period [in
2001], the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt
Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter
given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the
intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring
and summer of 2001, the CIA
told the White House by May 1 that ‘a group
presently in the United States’ was planning a terrorist
attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief
warned that al-Qaeda strikes might be ‘imminent.’
But the same Defense Department
officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back
against the CIA’s. According to
Eichenwald’s sources, ‘the neoconservative leaders
who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were
warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled;
according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely
pretending to be planning an attack to distract the
administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the
neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.’
By the time Clarke and the CIA got the
Bush administration’s attention, it was already too late to
follow any of the clear leads that might have been followed
to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
The terrorist attacks by Sunni Islamic
fundamentalists mostly from the Saudi Kingdom hardly fit the
neocon agenda of targeting the secular-Arab nationalist
regimes of Iraq and Syria and the Shiite Republic of Iran:
especially since all three of the latter were mortal enemies
of bin Laden types.
But the attackers were, like Iraqis, some
kind of Muslims from the general area of the Middle East.
And that was good enough for government work in the American
idiocracy. After a youth consumed with state-compelled
drudgery, most Americans are so stupid and incurious that
such a meaningless relationship, enhanced with some
fabricated “intelligence,” was more than enough to
stampede the spooked American herd into supporting the
Iraq War.
As Benjamin Netanyahu once
said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.”
Whether steering the country into war
would be easy or not, it was all neocon hands on deck. At
the Pentagon there was Wolfowitz and Perle, with
Perle-admirer Rumsfeld as SecDef. Feith was also at Defense,
where he set up two new offices for the special purpose of
spinning “intelligence” yarn to tie Saddam with al-Qaeda and
to weave fanciful pictures of secret Iraqi WMD programs.
Wurmser himself labored in one of these
offices, followed by stints at State aiding neocon-ally
Bolton and in the Vice President’s office aiding neocon-ally
Cheney along with Scooter Libby.
Iran-Contra convict Abrams was at the
National Security Council aiding Condoleezza Rice. And
Kristol and Kagan continued to lead the charge in the media
and think tank worlds.
And they pulled it off. Wurmser finally
got his “chaotic collapse” in Iraq. And Kristol finally had
his invincible, irresistible, hyper-active hegemony looming
over the world like a Death Star.
The post-9/11 pretense-dropping American
Empire even had Dick Cheney with his Emperor Palpatine snarl
preparing Americans to accept torture by saying:
“We also have to work, though, sort of
the dark side, if you will.”
The Iraq War ended up backfiring on the
neocons. It installed a new regime in Baghdad that was no
more favorable toward Israel and far more favorable toward
Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria. But the important thing was
that Kristol’s Death Star was launched and in orbit. As long
as it was still in proactive mode, there was nothing the
neocons could not fix with its awful power.
This seemed true even during the Obama
presidency. On top of Iraq and Afghanistan, under Obama the
American Death Star has demolished Yemen and Somalia. It
also demolished both Syria and Libya, where it continues the
Wurmsurite project of precipitating the chaotic collapse of
secular-Arab nationalism. Islamic terror groups including
al-Qaeda and ISIS are thriving in that chaos, but the
American Death Star to this day has adhered to Wurmser’s
de-prioritization of the Islamist threat.
As Yoda said, “Fear is the path to the
Dark Side.” The neocons have been able to use the fear
generated by a massive Islamic fundamentalist terror attack
to pursue their blood-soaked vendetta against secular-Arab
nationalists, even to the benefit of the very Islamic
fundamentalists who attacked us, because even after 12 years
Americans are still too bigoted and oblivious to
distinguish between the two groups.
Furthermore, Obama has gone beyond
Wurmser’s regional ambitions and has fulfilled Kristol’s
busybody dreams of global hegemony to a much greater extent
than Bush ever did. To appease generals and arms merchants
worried about his prospective pull-outs from the Iraqi and
Afghan theaters, Obama launched both an imperial “pivot” to
Asia and a stealth invasion of Africa. The pull-outs were
aborted, but the continental “pivots” remain. Thus Obama’s
pretenses as a peace President helped to make his regime the
most ambitiously imperialistic and globe-spanning that
history has ever seen.
But the neocons may have overdone it with
their Death Star shooting spree, because another great power
now seems determined to put a stop to it. And who is foiling
the neocons’ Evil Empire? Why none other than the original
“Evil Empire”: the neocons’ old nemesis Russia.
In 2013, Russia’s Putin diplomatically
frustrated the neocons’ attempt to deliver the coup de
grâce to the Syrian regime with a US air war. Shortly
afterward, Robert Kagan’s wife Victoria Nuland yanked
Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence by engineering a
bloody coup in Kiev. Putin countered by bloodlessly annexing
the Ukrainian province of Crimea. A proxy war followed
between the US-armed and Western-financed junta in Kiev and
pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
The US continued to intervene in Syria,
heavily sponsoring an insurgency dominated by extremists
including al-Qaeda and ISIS. But recently, Russia decided to
intervene militarily. Suddenly, Wolfowitz’s lesson from the
Gulf War was up in smoke. The neocons cannot militarily do
whatever they want in the Middle East and trust that Russia
will stand idly by. Suddenly the arrogant Wolfowitz/Wurmser
dream of crumbling then cleaning up “old Soviet client
regimes” and “Cold War enemy relics” had gone poof. Putin
decided that Syria would be one “Cold War relic” turned
terrorist playground too many.
Russia’s entry into Syria has thrown all
of the neocons’ schemes into disarray.
By actually working to destroy Syrian
al-Qaeda and ISIS instead of just pretending to, as the US
and its allies have, Russia threatens to eliminate the
head-chopping bogeymen whose Live Leak-broadcasted brutal
antics continually renew in Americans the war-fueling terror
of 9/11. And after Putin had taken the US air strike option
off the table, al-Qaeda and ISIS were the neocons most
powerful tools for bringing down the Syrian regime. And now
Russia is threatening to take those toys away too.
If Hezbollah and Iran, with Russia’s air
cover, manage to help save what is left of Syria from the
Salafist psychos, they will be more prestigious in both
Syria and Lebanon than ever, and Israel may never be able to
dominate its northern neighbors.
The neocons are livid. After the conflicts
over Syria and Ukraine in 2013, they had already started
ramping up the vilification of Putin. Now the demonization
has gone into overdrive.
One offering in this milieu has been an
article by Matthew Continetti in the neocon web site he
edits, The Washington Free Beacon. Titled “A
Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century,” it
obviously aims to be a sequel to Kristol’s and Kagan’s
“Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” As it turns out,
the Russian “Evil Empire” was not defeated after all: only
temporarily dormant. And so Continetti’s updated Reaganite
manifesto is subtitled, “How to confront Vladimir Putin.”
The US military may be staggering around
the planet like a drunken, bloated colossus. Yet Continetti
still dutifully trots out all the Kristolian tropes about
the need for military assertiveness (more drunken
belligerence), massive defense spending (more bloating), and
“a new American century.” Reaganism is needed now just as
much as in 1996, he avers: in fact, doubly so, for Russia
has reemerged as:
“…the greatest military and
ideological threat to the United States and to the world
order it has built over decades as guarantor of
international security.”
Right, just look at all that security
sprouting out of all those bomb craters the US has planted
throughout much of the world. Oh wait no, those are
terrorists.
Baby-faced Continetti, a Weekly
Standard contributor, is quite the apprentice to Sith
Lord Kristol, judging from his ardent faith in the
“Benevolent Global Hegemony” dogma. In fact, he even shares
Lord Kristol’s enthusiasm for “Benevolent Galactic
Hegemony.” It was Continetti who kicked off the recent
Star Wars/foreign policy brouhaha when he tweeted:
“I’ve been rooting for the Empire
since 1983”
This elicited a concurring response from
Kristol, which is what set Twitter atwitter. Of course the
whole thing was likely staged and coordinated between the
two neocon operatives.
Unfortunately for the neocons, demonizing
Putin over Syria is not nearly as easy as demonizing Putin
over Ukraine. With Ukraine, there was a fairly
straight-forward (if false) narrative to build of big bully
Russia and plucky underdog Ukraine.
However, it’s pretty hard to keep a lid on
the fact that Russia is attacking al-Qaeda and ISIS, along
with any CIA-trained jihadist allies are nearby. And it’s
inescapably unseemly for the US foreign policy establishment
to be so bent out of shape about Russia bombing sworn
enemies of the American people, even if it does save some
dictator most Americans don’t care about one way or the
other.
And now that wildly popular wild card
Donald Trump is spouting unwelcome common sense to his
legions of followers about how standing back and letting
Russia bomb anti-American terrorists is better than starting
World War III over it. And this is on top of the fact that
Trump is deflating Jeb Bush’s campaign by throwing shade at
his brother’s neocon legacy, from the failures over 9/11 to
the disastrous decision to regime change Iraq. And the
neocon-owned Marco Rubio, who actually adopted “A New
American Century” as his campaign slogan, is similarly
making no headway against Trump.
And Russia’s involvement in Syria just
keeps getting worse for the neocons. Washington threatened
to withdraw support from the Iraqi government if it accepted
help from Russia against ISIS. Iraq accepted Russian help
anyway. Baghdad has also sent militias to fight under
Russian air cover alongside Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah
forces.
Even Jordan, that favorite proxy force in
Israel’s dreams of regional dominance, has begun
coordinating with Russia, in spite of its billion dollars a
year of annual aid from Washington. Et tu Jordan?!
Apparently there aren’t enough Federal
Reserve notes in Janet Yellen’s imagination to pay Iraq and
Jordan to tolerate living amid a bin Ladenite maelstrom any
longer.
And what is Washington going to do about
it if the whole region develops closer ties with Russia?
What are the American people going to let them get away with
doing about it? A palace coup in Jordan? Expend more blood
and treasure to overthrow the very same Iraqi government we
already lost much blood and treasure in installing? Start a
suicidal hot war with nuclear Russia?
And the neocon’s imperial dreams are
coming apart at the seams outside of the war zones too. The
new Prime Minister of Canada just announced he will pull out
of America’s war in the Levant. Europe wants to compromise
with Russia on both Ukraine and Syria, and this willingness
will grow as the refugee crisis it is facing worsens. Obama
made a nuclear deal with Iran and initiated detente with
Cuba. And worst of all for neocons, the Israeli occupation
of Palestine is being de-legitimized by the bourgeoning BDS
movement and by images of its own brutality propagating
through social media, along with translations of its hateful
rhetoric.
The neocons bit off more than they could
chew, and their Galactic Empire is falling apart before it
could even fully conquer its first planet.
Nearly all empires end due to
over-extension. If brave people from Ottawa to Baghdad
simply say “enough” within a brief space of time, hopefully
this empire can dissolve relatively peacefully like the
Soviet Empire did, leaving its host civilization intact,
instead of dragging that civilization into oblivion along
with it like the Roman Empire did.
But beware, the imperial war party will
not go quietly into the night, unless we in their domestic
tax base insist that there is no other way. If, in
desperation, they start calling for things like more boots
on the ground, reinstating the draft, or declaring World War
III on Russia and its Middle Eastern allies, we must stand
up and say with firm voices something along the lines of the
following:
No. You will not have my son for your
wars. And we will not surrender any more of our liberty. We
will no longer yield to a regime led by a neocon clique that
threatens to extinguish the human race. Your power fantasy
of universal empire is over. Just let it go. Or, as Anakin
finally did when the Emperor came for his son, we will hurl
your tyranny into the abyss.
