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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56209.htm

The Unwelcome Return of the Real Purveyors of Violence

With the mainstream media still obsessing about the January 6th “violent coup attempt” at the US Capitol Building, the incoming Biden Administration looks to be chock full of actual purveyors of violent coups. Don’t look to the mainstream media to report on this, however. Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died.

Take returning Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, for example. More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared.

Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded - after thousands of civilians were killed.

As we were unfortunately reminded during the last four years of the Trump Administration, the personnel is the policy. So while President Trump railed against the “stupid wars” and promised to bring the troops home, he hired people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to get the job done. They spent their time “clarifying” Trump’s call for ending wars to mean he wanted to actually continue the wars. It was a colossal failure.

So it’s hard to be optimistic about a Biden Administration with so many hyper-interventionist Obama retreads.

While the US Agency for International Development (USAID) likes to sell itself as the compassionate arm of the US foreign policy, in fact USAID is one of the main US “regime change” agencies. Biden has announced that a top “humanitarian interventionist” – Samantha Power – would head that Agency in his Administration.

Power, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council staff and as US Ambassador to the UN, argued passionately and successfully that a US attack on the Gaddafi government in Libya would result in a liberation of the people and the outbreak of democracy in the country. In reality, her justification was all based on lies and the US assault has left nothing but murder and mayhem. Gaddafi’s relatively peaceful, if authoritarian, government has been replaced by radical terrorists and even slave markets.

At the end of the day, the Bush Republicans – like Rep. Liz Cheney – will join hands with the Biden Democrats to reinstate “American leadership.” This of course means more US overt and covert wars overseas. The unholy alliance between Big Tech and the US government will happily assist the US State Department under Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with the technology to foment more “regime change” operations wherever the Biden Administration sees fit. Finish destroying Syria and the secular Assad? Sure! Go back into Iraq? Why not? Afghanistan? That’s the good war! And Russia and China must be punished as well.

These are grave moments for we non-interventionists. But also we have a unique opportunity, informed by history, to denounce the warmongers and push for a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56208.htm

Does 'by force and fraud' signal the end of the US democracy doctrine?  

In an interview with British newspaper The Times in 2015, former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied that exporting democracy was the main motive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic," he claimed.

However, the senior official was being dishonest. Writing in Mother Jones, Miles E Johnson responded to Rumsfeld's claim by quoting some of his previous statements where he repeatedly cited democracy as the main reason for the US invasion. The war became one of the most destructive since Vietnam.

It was not just Rumsfeld who promoted the democracy pretence quite brazenly. Indeed, "democracy" was parroted by thousands of Americans in government, the military, mainstream media and the numerous think-tanks across the intellectual and political landscape of Washington DC.

I could not help but reflect on this when, on 6 January, thousands of Americans stormed the Washington Plaza, climbed the walls of Capitol Hill and took over the US Congress. A country that has assigned to itself the role of "defender of democracy" worldwide, was unable to defend its own democracy at home.

In Iraq, as soon as US soldiers stormed into Baghdad in 2003 they hurried to occupy all government buildings and every symbol of Iraqi sovereignty. Triumphant soldiers were filmed rampaging through the offices of former Iraqi ministers and smoking their cigars while placing their dirty boots on top of their desks. Bizarrely, similar scenes were repeated in Washington two weeks ago, this time in the offices of US legislators, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.

Iraqi ministers were hunted down, with their photos and names circulated on what the US military referred to as "most wanted Iraqi playing cards". In the American version of the chaos, US Congressmen and women were forced to cower in the chamber or run for their lives.

The violent events in Washington have been depicted by US mainstream media as if they were but a temporary crisis, an aberration incited by a president who refuses to concede power peacefully and democratically. The reality, however, is far more complex. There is nothing transitory about any of this and, while Donald Trump is largely to blame for the bloody events of 6 January, the man is a symptom of America's rooted democracy crisis, which is likely to get worse.

Famed American linguist and historian Noam Chomsky has long argued that the US is not a democracy, but a plutocracy, a country that is governed by the interests of the powerful few. He has also argued that, while the US does operate according to formal democratic structures, these are largely dysfunctional. In an interview with Global Policy Journal in 2019, Chomsky asserted that, "[the] US Constitution was framed to thwart the democratic aspirations of most of the public."

This has been evident for many years. Long before Trump became President, the dichotomy of American democracy has expressed itself in the way that the American people interact with their supposedly democratic institutions. For example, according to a Pew Research Centre poll published last September, just 20 per cent of US adults trust their government. This number has remained relatively unchanged throughout previous administrations.

With the US economy sinking rapidly due to various factors, including the government's mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the people's distrust in government is now manifesting itself in new ways, including mass violence. The fact that 77 per cent of those who voted for Trump in the November election believe that Joe Biden's win was due to fraud, suggests that a sizable percentage of Americans have little faith in their country's democratic processes. The consequences of this realisation will surely be dire.

America's constitutional crisis, which is unlikely to be resolved in the current polarised atmosphere, is compounded by an external political crisis. Historically, the US has defined and redefined its mission in the world based on lofty spiritual, moral and political maxims, starting with "Manifest Destiny" to fighting communism and eventually serving as the defender of human rights and democracy around the world. The latter was merely a pretence used to provide a moral cover that would allow the US to reorder the world so that it can expand its market and ensure its global economic dominance.

Thomas Paine, whose influence on US ideals of liberty and democracy is arguably unmatched, warned in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense against the potential tyranny of those who "attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools."

Alas, Paine's warning went unheeded. Indeed, the democracy fraud that Rumsfeld, George W Bush and his clique carried out in Iraq in 2003 was simply a repeat of numerous other fraudulent military campaigns carried out around the world. The "protectors of democracy" became and remain the very people responsible for its undoing.

Unquestionably, the storming of US Congress will have global repercussions, not least the weakening of US hegemony and its self-serving definition of what constitutes a democracy. It is possible that the US democracy doctrine could soon cease to be relevant in the lexicon of US foreign policy conduct as it is indeed predicated on "force and fraud".