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https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/22/patrick-lawrence-biden-and-the-icc-a-new-level-of-farce/

Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’

There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of  children from eastern Ukraine in the early months of the intervention that began a year ago. Let us settle on three of these things. 

Straight off the top, the ICC’s action announced on March 17 is ridiculous in any number of ways. Its  legality is questionable at the very least. Its premise appears to bear no relationship with reality; it will have no appreciable effect. It is a political gesture dressed up as law and, as a political gesture dressed up as law, it is sheer propaganda, nothing more. 

If an institution such as the ICC behaves ridiculously in these ways, it is not doing its credibility a great deal of good. To ask what use the ICC serves, despite its elevated purpose when it was founded 25 years ago, seems to be a good question.  

There is a history behind this kind of conduct. This is the second thing to say about what the ICC has just done. If we study this history even briefly, we are likely to be upset, because this history indicates that the many international institutions to which humanity has looked as a source of impartial order for the past 70–odd years do not work as intended. And they were fated not to work as intended so long as the United States insists, as it has since the 1945 victories, on global dominance. This is a case of either/or: We can have a stable world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter or other such instruments of international law, or we can have the American imperium, but we cannot have both. 

This leads us to the third thing to say about the ICC’s decision to issue a warrant for a head of state’s arrest. And the third thing to say is the one that seems to me to require our attention most urgently if we are to understand the world in which we live. 

We must think hard now about what the political philosophers call the state of exception. This notion has a history, too, and it is a very grim one. The state of exception describes powers that make law and at the same time proclaim themselves above the law. The history of this concept runs from the Romans through the European monarchies on up to the Nazi regime. 

In this last case, the Third Reich operated under a continual state of exception as  against a temporary state of exception deriving from an unforeseen emergency. And to proceed to our point, the U.S. has claimed for itself a similarly continual state of exception since the early Cold War years. Its relations with the ICC are a clear manifestation of this reality. 

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There was talk among the Western powers for most of last year, readers may recall, of the U.N. forming a special court to try Putin and other Russian officials on charges of war crimes allegedly committed in the course of the Ukraine conflict. But Washington and its allies overestimated international sentiment: They could get no appreciable support among member states for any such project. They similarly failed when, as an alternative, they tried to get the U.N. General Assembly to authorize the ICC, a U.N. body, to investigate the numerous allegations of war crimes leveled since the start of hostilities in February 2022. 

It was at this point that the West—reportedly led by Britain—began an intense lobbying campaign at The Hague to get the ICC to act even without a U.N. referral behind it. The arrest warrant announced last Friday appears to be the result of this pressure.  

The legalities here are important. While Russia is not a signatory to the ICC’s founding treaty, a U.N. referral such as the U.S. and its allies sought would extend the court’s jurisdiction even to nations that do not recognize it. This is why the Western powers spent all those months trying to bring the General Assembly around.  

Is our conclusion other than obvious? The ICC’s action last week has no sound legal basis, and the court has no jurisdiction over a nation that does not recognize it. “But as we have seen on so many occasions, over so many matters in the past few years,” Alexander Mercouris observed in an informed webcast over the weekend, “simple issues of legal procedure, of due process, are no longer allowed to stand in the way when a demand to do something of this nature appears.”

The charges of criminal abduction and forced deportation of children appear to be equally flimsy. The Russian Federation has made no secret of its effort to remove thousands of children from harm’s way over the past year. Some of these children were parentless and living in orphanages, by the Russian account; when parental consent was involved, the Russians running the program say they had it. These children, not to be missed, were removed from areas under constant artillery bombardment from Ukrainian forces in the eight years following the U.S.–cultivated coup in 2014.

CBS News, The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, CNBC, The Associated Press: News of these alleged abductions was ubiquitous just prior to the ICC’s action last Friday. They all rested on a single source, a report Yale University produced as part of an organization called Conflict Observatory, which describes itself as “a central hub to capture, analyze, and make widely available evidence of Russian-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.” 

Right out of the box, problems. Conflict Observatory is not interested in war crimes in Ukraine; it is interested in Russian war crimes—another matter altogether. And since we have had no impartial, on-the-ground investigations of any of the countless allegations of Russian war crimes, this seems a presumptuous, not to say prejudicial, statement of purpose. 

Michael Tracey, the enterprising independent journalist, has done some excellent spade work since all the press reports appeared last week. And sure enough, it is the usual story. Conflict Observatory claims to operate as a nongovernmental organization, but it is a non–NGO “NGO” funded by the State Department. So much for Conflict Observatory’s claim to conduct disinterested inquiries. It did no on-the-ground research for its report on Russian “abductions,” no interviews with parents, children, officials, or anyone else, and never went anywhere near the 40 or so “re-education camps”—that freighted Cold War term—it says Russia runs. Instead, it skates around social media and relies otherwise on “open source” research and press reports, including Ukrainian press reports.  

Let me get to the point: Conflict Observatory bears all the marks—its focus, its funding, its method—of a reprise of the Bellingcat ruse, which is nothing more than a generator of propagandistic nonsense whose funding traces to NATO and various intelligence agencies.

Tracey’s long Twitter thread on the Conflict Observatory case can be read here. Among his more remarkable findings is the testimony of one of the report’s co-authors, a Ms. Howarth, during a presentation at the State Department. Ms. Howarth cites the numerous reasons parents voluntarily sent their children to Russia that she found as she reviewed the open source data: constant shelling, blackouts, disrupted sanitation, malnutrition, and on through the list of wartime calamities. Go figure.  

So, we must await evidence, forlorn as this prospect may be, that what a bogus NGO, the State Department, American academia, American media, and the ICC call abductions were other than humanitarian evacuations. In the meantime, two questions. One, where are all the distressed parents whose children have been taken forcefully from them? We have heard no chorus of voices among them raised. There have been a few interviews with distressed parents—The AP did a couple—but the identity of these distressed parents and the circumstances of these interviews must fairly remain open to question. Two, we have to ask what Russia wants with thousands of parentless children. If we are invited to entertain the thought that Russia is a large-scale state kidnapper, we deserve an explanation of this kind. What is the motivation? This seems to me a gaping hole in the story. 

Again, let us see. But given the sleazy appearance of Conflict Observatory as the main disseminator of the abduction story, and the sleazy, behind-the-curtain conduct of the Western powers prior to the ICC’s action last week, it looks to me as if evacuations became kidnappings when Western propagandists got to work in The Hague over the past few months. 

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The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was signed in 1998, and the court formally came into being in mid–2002. In the two decades and a year of its existence, its reputation has been downhill more or less all the way. A year after the court began operating came the American invasion of Iraq, the casualties of up to a million, the Abu Ghraib atrocities, and so on. No charges have ever been brought. Ditto, as John Whitbeck notes in his excellent blog, in the matter of Israeli conduct toward Palestinians, the illegal settlements, etc.: No charges, no warrants, no trials.

Numerous African nations have resigned from the ICC in recent years, and the whole of the African Union has accused the court of acting as an instrument of Western hegemony. This is the front edge of a very long story.

The late Shirley Hazzard, a wonderful novelist and a longtime observer of the U.N. from within its walls and without, published a book in 1973 called Defeat of an Ideal. I recall reading it in my younger years. In it, Hazzard recounted how the U.S. imported its Cold War anti–Communist freak show into the U.N. onward from the organization’s very first years. So began Washington’s effort to neuter the whole of the organization in the cause of American preeminence—“global leadership” as we have persuaded ourselves imperial ambition is rightfully called. 

What Hazzard witnessed was a prelude to what has taken place since. I can think of few nominally multilateral organizations whose declared internationalism has not been compromised by the U.S. and the other Western powers. The infamous case of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, is but one example readily to hand. The International Court of Arbitration is another. And the ICC another. 

As Hazzard succinctly had it in her book’s title, the ideals born of the high aspirations shared the world over after 1945 have been subverted. In effect, global public space, as we might call it, has been perverted into American public space. If this is nothing new, the ICC’s action last week reminds us of the damage that has been done and the international justice we must live without.

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I loved Joey Biden’s statement after the ICC announced its arrest warrant. “It’s justified,” the president said. Referring to the court he added, “But the question is, it’s not recognized internationally by us, either. But I think it makes a very strong point.”

This is the state of exception when it rolls casually off the famously loose tongue of a senile old man: We don’t abide by it, but let it assert its authority over others. Washington has been viciously adamant over the years in defense of Americans’ immunity from ICC prosecutions, threatening sanctions and military retribution in extreme cases. But as Michael Tracey reports, this has not stopped the State Department from collaborating with the ICC to get proceedings against Russian officials going—this with the authorization of Congress, the Congress that rejects the ICC’s jurisdiction.  

There is, indeed, none of Joey Biden’s apple pie in the story of America’s claim to a state of exception as its post–1945 modus operandi.

The modern theorist of the state of exception was Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and a lifelong opponent of liberal democracy in any version of it. He defined the concept in “On Dictatorship,” a 1921 essay, and refined it a year later in “Political Theology.” Schmitt wrote in response to the chaos of the Weimar Republic. Modern societies needed strong leaders willing to promulgate law but stand above it, he argued. The power to proclaim a state of exception is inseparable from the concept of sovereignty. The Reich, needless to say, had a lot of time for Schmitt.Giorgio Agamben, the noted Italian philosopher, published State of Exception in 2005 to trace the roots of Schmitt’s thinking back to Augustus and bring it forward to our time. Here he is on the Nazi regime:

The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted 12 years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.

As I have written elsewhere, the British courts’ treatment of Julian Assange is an excellent if disgraceful example of the state of exception as Agamben describes it here. Assange was tried under British law, but the judges adjudicating his case did not abide by the law during his trials. Agamben goes a little further back, to George W. Bush’s authorization of the abductions, torture, and detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay in November 2001:

What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws.

When did all this begin? How did we get from Carl Schmitt and the Nazis to “black sites” and waterboarding to what amounts to a covert op to subvert the ICC? And by whose hand? These were my questions when I called Aaron Good, who last year published American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, to talk about what happened in The Hague last week. The book is an exception in its own right: It plumbs the depths of America’s quiet, not-much-noticed and never declared claim to the state of exception as no book, to my knowledge, has heretofore done. 

Good referred me to a document called NSC–68, a paper Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson, two early Cold Warriors, wrote for the National Security Council in 1950. The document cast the Soviets as so overwhelming a threat that it presented the U.S. with an emergency  and required, in so many words, a state of exception. 

“Along with NSC–10/2, an earlier document, NSC–68 provided what was essentially an open-ended assertion of the state of exception—ostensibly to defend against the allegedly existential threat posed by the global communist conspiracy,” Good said. “A passage in NSC–68 captures it best: ‘The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures.’ 

“Think about this in conjunction with the elastic clause of the 1947 National Security Act—the provision that authorized the CIA to ‘perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the President or the [DCI] may direct,’” Good continued. “With this early Cold War legislation and these secret NSC planning documents, the U.S. had created a clandestine intelligence service secretly authorized to operate without legal restraint. These formed the basis for all the covert ops, the ‘plausible deniability,’ and all else that followed.”

Good had no difficulty fast-forwarding to the ICC’s conduct last week at the very legible behest of the U.S. and its allies. “I read this as the abuse of an instrument of international law and so a violation of the spirit of international law,” he said. “It’s a desperate gambit, a new level of farce for the American empire—and in this a sign of weakness.”

Desperate, fatally damaging to our global public space, dangerous: It is all of these. If there is a virtue in the ICC’s perfectly frivolous conduct last week and what led to it, this lies in exposure: The court and those who manipulate it have at last been exposed. It is not a good place we find ourselves to be in, but it is best we recognize it for what it is.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57423.htm

Send in the Clowns

Sometimes I think that the script being used by the Biden Administration to manage its foreign and national security policies has been written by George Orwell, though I am not sure if it based on 1984 or Animal Farm. Maybe it is a combination of the two. Either way, it would help explain why there is something seriously wrong here. For example, at the end of February Congress, confronted by a debt ceiling, began discussing cutting Medicare and Social Security while more recently a banking sector crisis seems to be developing so Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen decided to go off doing photo-ops in Kiev embracing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly after handing him the keys to the US economy. She explained to Zelensky how the White House had approved an additional $12 billion in aid to Ukraine during the previous week, including $2 billion for the military and $10 billion to support Zelensky’s government and other infrastructure needs. The US Treasury is now de facto the source of the Ukraine government’s entire annual budget. In addition, Yellen described glowingly how the Treasury and State Departments will implement a new round of sanctions against more than 200 entities and individuals with ties to Russia’s military, high-technology industries, and its metals and mining sectors. The US Department of Commerce is also enforcing export restrictions on materials and technology, including semiconductors, sold by American companies to customers in Russia and China.

In defense of her grand mission, Yellen penned an op-ed for the always compliant New York Times explaining the importance of Ukraine to the United States. She wrote how in Ukraine “…Russia’s barbaric attacks continue — but Kyiv stands strong and free. Ukraine’s heroic resistance is the direct product of the courage and resilience of Ukraine’s military, leadership and people. But President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians would be the first to admit that they can’t do this alone — and that international support is crucial to sustaining their resistance. I’m in Kyiv to reaffirm our unwavering support of the Ukrainian people. Mr. Putin is counting on our global coalition’s resolve to wane, which he thinks will give him the upper hand in the war. But he is wrong. As President Biden said here last week, America will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes… Ukrainians are fighting for their lives on the front lines of the free world. Today, and every day, they deserve America’s unyielding support.”

The Yellen op-ed drones on with a lie so large that it is astonishing that the New York Times would even print it: “When confronted with scenes of brutality and oppression, Americans have always been quick to stand up and do the right thing. Our strength as a nation comes from our commitment to our ideals — and our capacity to see in others the same desires that animated our own struggles for freedom and justice.” But then she tops that with assurances from “President Zelensky, [who] has pledged to use these funds in the ‘most responsible way.’ We welcome this commitment, as well as his longstanding agenda to strengthen good governance in Ukraine.” Huh?

And here is Yellen’s version of “Why We Fight!”: “Our support is motivated, first and foremost, by a moral duty to come to the aid of a people under attack. We also know that, as President Zelensky has said, our assistance is not charity. It’s an investment in ‘global security and democracy.’ Let’s look at the strategic impact of our support for Ukraine so far. Mr. Putin’s war poses a direct threat to European security, as well as to the laws and values that underpin the rules-based international system.”

So, Americans have a “moral duty” apparently up to and including sending their sons and daughters to die supporting Ukraine. And ah yes, it’s all about the “free” world, democracy and the notorious rules based international system! Has anyone yet cited Hegel’s observation that the President Joe Biden Administration’s foreign policy has already “repeated itself, first as a tragedy in Afghanistan, second as a farce”? Meanwhile one suspects Zelensky was laughing all the way to the bank as Yellen disappeared over the horizon to come up with the cash, as that old expression goes, and he probably already has one of his buddies shopping for a new villa on the French Riviera to supplement his other real estate! But wait! The story became even more exciting the following week, involving another visit to Mr. Z by America’s nearly invisible Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man who can literally look Z in the eye as they are both very short. Garland is generally engaged in chasing white supremacists and requiring all new FBI hires to learn all about how to identify and pursue antisemites, but he has made two trips to Kiev to meet mano-a-mano with the brave olive drab t-shirt clad warrior who is already being beatified as the twenty-first century’s Winston Churchill.

Garland was in town to do the other thing that engages his sense of law and order, which is to set up a tribunal to arrest, prosecute and punish Russian war criminals after Ukraine emerges triumphant from its conflict with the unimaginably evil President Vladimir Putin. It would be modeled on the Nuremberg Tribunals that tried leading Nazis after the Second World War, and Garland has cited his family’s escape from the so-called holocaust to explain why he is intent on personally being involved in delivering what he describes as “justice.” A Justice Department spokeswoman described Garland’s mission as being in Kiev to personally “reaffirm America’s commitment to help hold Russia responsible for war crimes committed in its unjust and unprovoked invasion against its sovereign neighbor.”

Garland had several meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky and foreign law enforcement officials including Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin while attending what was billed as the “United for Justice Conference.” Zelensky elaborated that the purpose of the conference was to hold Russia’s leadership accountable for the alleged atrocities carried out by its army. “The main issue of all these meetings is accountability,” he said. The US Justice Department is reportedly actively engaged in the gathering of evidence to indict the Russians. During Garland’s first visit to Ukraine in June 2022 he announced the appointment of Eli Rosenbaum, an Office of Special Investigations prosecutor best known for going after former Nazis, to direct American efforts to identify and track Russian war criminals.

Garland laid it on thick, as was expected from someone responsible for prosecuting the rest of the world when it steps out of line. He told his hosts that “Just over twelve months ago, invading Russian forces began committing atrocities at the largest scale in any armed conflict since the Second World War. We are here today in Ukraine to speak clearly, and with one voice: the perpetrators of those crimes will not get away with them. In addition to our work in partnership with Ukraine and the international community, the United States has also opened criminal investigations into war crimes in Ukraine that may violate US law.” He concluded by throwing out the complete bullshit party line much beloved by Joe Biden and Tony Blinken, that “The United States recognizes that what happens here in Ukraine will have a direct impact on the strength of our own democracy.”

Of course, there is more than a little bit of irony in all this, not to mention top level hypocrisy, as the United States has killed more people directly or indirectly while committing more crimes against humanity dished out in various ways over the past twenty years than any other country, except, predictably, Israel, which currently is committing crimes against humanity on a nearly daily basis. Curiously, however, the normally tone-deaf White House and Pentagon seem to understand, on a certain level, that opening up Pandora’s box might not be a good idea when it comes to war crimes. Last week Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin refused to share US information on alleged Russian crimes with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the ICC collected by American intelligence agencies regarding Russian activities in Ukraine because helping the court investigate Russians might set a precedent that could help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. Washington does not recognize the ICC, fearing that it might well seek to examine the sorry record of US military crimes in Asia and Africa. Israel similarly does to recognize the court for roughly the same reason.

So here we are, two top level officials from the Biden regime sneak into Kiev to give an arch crook money and unlimited moral support, together with a pledge that more cash is on the way as are arms and war crimes tribunals await those nasty Russians. And guess what? It is all packaged as being good for America! This sounds like a song that was sung previously in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and it was a tissue of lies then just as it is now. Yellen ought to have stayed home to tend to the banking system and should be giving the billions of dollars earmarked for Zelensky back to the American people. If Garland wants to investigate anyone it should be the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and Congress. And yes, his own FBI! And don’t forget how the Bidens and Clintons became multi-millionaires! And then there is the destruction of Nord Stream. Funny how every time one turns over a rock in and around the US government something really smelly surfaces.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/21/john-boltons-prominence-in-the-media-proves-our-entire-society-is-diseased/

John Bolton’s Prominence In The Media Proves Our Entire Society Is Diseased

In order to narrative-manage the public conversation about the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, those who helped unleash that horror upon our world have briefly paused their relentless torrent of “Ukraine proves the hawks were always right” takes to churn out a deluge of “Actually the Iraq War wasn’t based on lies and turned out pretty great after all” takes.

Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haas — who worked in the US State Department under Colin Powell when Bush launched his criminal invasion — got a piece published in Project Syndicate falsely claiming that the US government and his former boss did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, and that “governments can and do get things wrong without lying.”

Former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum cooked up a lie-filled spin piece with The Atlantic claiming that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression” and suggesting that perhaps Iraqis are better off as a result of the invasion, or at least no worse off than they would otherwise have been.

Neoconservative war propagandist Eli Lake, who has been described by journalist Ken Silverstein as “an open and ardent promoter of the Iraq War and the various myths trotted out to justify it,” has an essay published in Commentary with the extraordinary claim that the war “wasn’t the disaster everyone now says it was” and that “Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.”

But by far the most appalling piece of revisionist war crime apologia that’s come out during the 20th anniversary of the invasion has been an article published in National Review by the genocide walrus himself, John Bolton.

Bolton sets himself apart from his fellow Iraq war architects by arguing that the actual invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein “was close to flawless,” and that the only thing the US did wrong was fail to kill more people and topple the government of Iran.

Bolton criticizes “the Bush administration’s failure to take advantage of its substantial presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek regime change in between, in Iran,” writing that “we had a clear opportunity to empower Iran’s opposition to depose the ayatollahs.”

“Unfortunately, however, as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon,” Bolton writes.

Bolton claims that the notoriously cruel sanctions that were inflicted upon Iraq between 1991 and 2003 were too lenient, saying there should have been “crushing sanctions” that were “enforced cold-bloodedly”.

As Reason’s Eric Boehm notes in his own critique of Bolton’s essay, perhaps the most galling part is where Bolton dismisses any responsibility the US might have for the consequences and fallout from the Iraq invasion, attempting to compartmentalize the “flawless” initial invasion away from all the destabilization and human suffering which followed by saying “they did not inevitably, inexorably, deterministically, and unalterably flow from the decision to invade and overthrow.”

“Whatever Bush’s batting average in post-Saddam decisions (not perfect, but respectable, in my view), it is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam,” Bolton writes.

This is self-evidently absurd. A Bush administration warmonger arguing that you can’t logically connect the invasion to its aftereffects is like an arsonist saying you can’t logically connect his lighting a fire in the living room to the incineration of the entire house. He’s just trying to wave off any accountability for that war and his role in it.

“One might suspect that Bolton imagines a world where actions should not have consequences because he’s been living in exactly that type of world for the past two decades,” Boehm writes. “Somehow, he’s retained his Washington status as a foreign policy expert, media commentator, and presidential advisor despite having been so horrifically wrong about Iraq.”

And that to me is what’s the most jaw-dropping about all this. Not that John Bolton still in the year 2023 thinks the invasion of Iraq was a great idea and should have gone much further, but that the kind of psychopath who would say such a thing is still a prominent news media pundit who is platformed by the most influential outlets in the world for his “expertise”.

It’s actually a completely damning indictment of all western media if you think about it, and really of our entire civilization. The fact that an actual, literal psychopath whose entire goal in life is to try to get as many people killed by violence as he possibly can at every opportunity is routinely given columns and interviews in The Washington Post, and is regularly brought on CNN as an expert analyst, proves our entire society is diseased.

To be clear, when I say that John Bolton is a psychopath, I am not using hyperbole to make a point. I am simply voicing the only logical conclusion that one can come to when reading reports about things like how he threatened the children of the OPCW chief whose successful diplomatic efforts in early 2002 were making the case for invasion hard to build, or how he spent weeks verbally abusing a terrified woman in her hotel room, pounding on her door and screaming obscenities at her.

And that’s just Bolton’s personality. The actual policies he has worked to push through, sometimes successfully, are far more horrifying. This is the freak who has argued rabidly for the bombing of Iran, for bombing North Korea, for attacking Cuba over nonexistent WMD, for assassinating Gaddafi, and many other acts of war. Who helped cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, who openly admitted to participating in coups against foreign governments, and who tried to push Trump into starting a war with Iran during his terrifying stint as his National Security Advisor.

This man is a monster who belongs in a cage, but instead he’s one of the most influential voices in the most powerful country on earth. This is because we are ruled by a giant globe-spanning empire that is held together by the exact sort of murderous ideology that John Bolton promotes.

Bolton is not elevated at maximum amplification in spite of his psychopathic bloodlust, but exactly because of it. That’s the sort of civilization we live in, and that’s the sort of media environment that westerners are forming their worldviews inside of. We are ruled by murderous tyrants, and we are propagandized into accepting their murderousness by mass media which elevate bloodthirsty psychos like John Bolton as part of that propaganda.

That’s the world we live in. That’s what we’re up against here.

And that’s why they’ve been working so hard to rewrite the history on Iraq. They need us to accept Iraq as either a greater good that came at a heavy price or a terrible mistake that will never be repeated, so that they can lead us into more horrific wars in the future.

We are being paced. Until now, “Iraq” has been a devastating one-word rebuttal to both the horror and failure of US interventionism. The essays these imperial spinmeisters have been churning out are the early parlay in a long-game effort to take away that word’s historical meaning and power. Don’t let them shift it even an inch.