Submitted by Dan Sanchez via DanSanchez.me,
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 Standardwith 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 Warsfans 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
www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm">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
www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm">President
Bill Clinton, and another in May addressed to
www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm">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.
