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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/01/13/with-attack-on-yemen-the-u-s-is-shameless-we-make-the-rules-we-break-the-rules/16/

With Attack on Yemen, the U.S. is Shameless: “We Make the Rules, We Break the Rules”

Critics denounce the US government’s rhetoric as Orwellian and hypocritical.

Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?

It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.

The framing was typical when the New York Times printed this sentence at the top of the Friday front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”

So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action — taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed — rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.

On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.” He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”

In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.

But that would require genuine diplomacy — not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)

Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”

But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.”

The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that — several weeks into the slaughter — he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”

There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”

After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”

Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.

The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world. 

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/01/13/us-uses-conflict-with-iran-as-scapegoat-for-its-genocidal-crimes/14/

US Uses Conflict With Iran as Scapegoat for Its Genocidal Crimes

The situation highlights U.S. complicity in Israel’s actions and potential escalation with Iran.

How absurd! U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is “frenetically” crisscrossing the Middle East “warning” that the conflict is escalating to engulf the region.

Arsonist Washington is shouting ‘Fire’ in a region it is blowing up.

This is while Washington is fueling Israel’s non-stop genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. And while the United States and Israel assassinate top Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian commanders in Lebanon and Iraq.

This is while the United States blatantly blocks calls at the United Nations for a ceasefire, and while it dispatches warships and warplanes to the region.

Blinken is touring nine countries this week including Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Israel. It’s his fifth trip to the region since October 7.

A headline on NBC declared: ‘Violence spikes in West Bank as Blinken aims to limit spread of conflict’.

As with much of the Western media coverage, Washington is portrayed as some kind of hapless peace advocate. The delusional posturing is stomach-churning when the reality is that the United States is fully complicit in the genocide against Palestinians. And it is fully complicit in dangerously escalating the region-wide conflict.

It is a sick joke to present Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden as trying to tamp down regional tensions that have reached boiling point precisely because of U.S. policy supporting and arming Israel’s relentless massacres.

Washington has pointedly refused to demand that Israel call a ceasefire to the slaughter that began on October 7 following Hamas attacks on Israel. The genocidal offensive by Israel is now going into its fourth month with a death toll estimated at nearly 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, according to Euro-Med Monitor.

The U.S. is insanely militarizing the region adding more fuel to the inferno. The deployment of naval forces in the Red Sea to counter Yemen’s blockade of Israeli shipping is just part of the broader militarization in support of Israel. There’s no need for a naval flotilla if a ceasefire were implemented.

The Biden administration has again this week rebuffed Arab and Islamic leaders calling for a ceasefire and urgent access for humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank, where conditions have deteriorated to a wretched famine for nearly two million people. Still, Washington does nothing even as Israeli politicians openly talk about ethnically cleansing the occupied Palestinian territories.

If the Middle East slides into a conflagration, make no mistake, the disaster will be owned by Washington. The appeasement of the Israeli regime by the United States has been going on for decades and has fully stoked the tinderbox situation of injustice and oppression. But the last four months of total indulgence of a lawless genocidal regime is the final trigger.

One possible get-out for the U.S. is to blame Iran and its regional allies and in that way try to divide and rule the Arab nations.

Under the headline, ‘The threat of a broader conflict with Iran’, the New York Times editorialized: “Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip have emboldened a newly aggressive Iran. After launching scores of attacks across the region, Iranian proxy groups have come into direct conflict with U.S. forces twice in the past week, and Washington is openly threatening airstrikes if the violence does not abate.”

That’s an astounding feat of reality-inversion by the Times. The slaughter by Israel fully enabled by the United States is somehow projected onto Iran as being “emboldened and newly aggressive”.

But you can easily discern what Washington is getting at here. It’s trying to divert the growing region-wide hostility and disgust towards America and its hypocritical European accomplices by playing the Iranian card.

CNN reported: “Many of Blinken’s conversations with Arab leaders will focus on the specter of Iran, which is believed, experts and officials say [sic], to be trying to stir the pot while stopping short of provoking an outright war.” (That’s CNN quoting U.S. intelligence propaganda sources, by the way.)

The Americans urgently need to puncture the accumulating anger against Washington and Israel across the region by scapegoating Iran as the villain. This is an attempt to rile up past sectarian rivalries between the Sunni Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran.

Washington is trying to make out that Iran and its regional allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as the Houthis in Yemen and the Syrian state led by Assad, are the enemy of peace in the region. It is an audacious move.

This week the New York Times resurrected fears of Iran being close to building a nuclear bomb. It claimed that Tehran was only “weeks” from converting enriched uranium into three weapons. The CIA’s favorite newspaper platform also in the same article sought to portray Iran in a new alliance with Russia and China implying that the latter was now helping Iran build a bomb.

This could be the ultimate reckless gamble by Washington and its Israeli proxy.

The Israelis are unhinged enough to launch airstrikes on Iran to purportedly take out alleged nuclear facilities. Israel has threatened to do so in the past. Even though Iran has repeatedly denied having any intention of building a nuclear weapon. And, in any case, so what if Iran did? Israel has an estimated 150 nuclear bombs, all obtained illegally.

The abominable genocide that is going on in Gaza and the West Bank is demonstrating the rank exposure of American imperialist crimes. The world can see more than ever the complicity of Washington in Israel’s war crimes. Not just complicity but full-on culpability.

In its desperation to divert global attention from its blood-soaked hands, Washington and its Israeli attack dog see one way out: to escalate the conflict with Iran.

Comments to article:

" Anthony Blinken——-what a disgusting man. The man of NO TRUTH. The man of NO HUMANITY—-and worst of all he is the man that is overpaid for PRETENDING to guide the world. A dangerous man—not only for his greed , but for his attempt to play all the parties at same time. "

" Increasingly desperate and dangerous mRNA bioweapons mass murderers of an estimated 17-20 millions worldwide fully understand there are attorneys across the Earth determined to bust them for committing the greatest crimes against humanity in world history. They are desperate enough to trigger World War III as their sole means of escaping prosecution – as at this historical turning point, the mass murderers are indeed playing for “All the marbles’” "