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https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/07/us-foreign-policy-is-a-scam-built-on-corruption/

US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population. 

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. 

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton. 

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. 

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones. 

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII. 

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world. 

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA. 

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex. 

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role. 

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI. 

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018). 

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex. 

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making. 

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining. 

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors. 

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition. 

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded. 

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement. 

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms. 

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024. 

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people. 

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/01/08/tony-blinken-is-a-cold-blooded-sociopath/

Tony Blinken Is A Cold-Blooded Sociopath

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just referred to the US-sponsored assassination of yet another journalist in Gaza as a “terrible tragedy”, as though the reporter was struck by lightning or died in a car crash or something.

Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Sunday, Blinken was asked to comment on the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on a car has was traveling in with two other journalists, one of whom also died. Hamza Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter and baby grandson were murdered in another Israeli airstrike in late October.

In response to an Al Jazeera reporter’s question about whether the United States condemns the murder of innocent journalists, Blinken replied as follows:

“I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he’s experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy, and that’s also been the case for, as I said, far too many innocent Palestinian men, women, and children — civilians, also journalists, Palestinian and other.”

Blinken went on to acknowledge the scores of journalists who have been killed in Gaza, saying that this shows the need to get humanitarian aid into the enclave and achieve a lasting peace. What Blinken did not do is issue anything resembling a condemnation of Israel and the clear and demonstrable fact that it has been highly focused on the task of murdering journalists in Gaza. He just offered his deepest condolences for Dahdouh’s death, framed it as a passive “tragedy” instead of an active assassination using highly sophisticated military technology under the sponsorship and support of the United States, and moved on.

It’s hard to say who’s worse, the far-right Israelis who openly revel in the butchery they are inflicting in Gaza, or the liberal Americans who directly sponsor that butchery and then look you dead in the eye and tell you how deeply, sincerely sorry they are to hear that another person in Gaza has died in a tragic accident.

Blinken is always doing sociopathic stuff like this. Late last month he tweeted, “This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around the world. Many killed, many more wounded, hundreds detained, attacked, threatened, injured — simply for doing their jobs. I am profoundly grateful to the press for getting accurate, timely information to people.”

I mean, can you believe the gall of this freak? As though his own administration wasn’t responsible for most of those killings. As though Israel has not spent the last three months directing wildly disproportionate firepower at the places it knows journalists are hiding. 

He’s standing there on top of a pile of corpses while mournfully shaking his head about their tragic unfortunate deaths.

There’s something about the job of US secretary of state that appears to require a significant level of sociopathy. From war criminal Henry Kissinger to Madeleine “We think the price was worth it” Albright to Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, the absolute worst person in any given presidential administration is very often the head of the State Department. A severe personality disorder is practically in the job description.

This is because while the secretary of state is officially the head of US diplomacy, “diplomacy” for the US empire looks a whole lot different from what it looks like for normal countries. US “diplomacy”, in practice, typically looks like going from country to country negotiating for international alignment behind wars, starvation sanctions, proxy conflicts and western-backed uprisings. In theory the State Department should be the department of peace, but in practice it’s just a subtler, sneakier military department.

Nothing epitomizes the depraved manipulations of the US empire better than Antony Blinken. There is no better representation of that empire than Tony standing there on his mountain of corpses, covered in blood, telling you how sorry he is to learn of the unfortunate accidental deaths of the people he just murdered, staring at you with his cold dead eyes, playing remarkably soulless blues guitar under the light of a bright red moon.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/01/09/westerners-have-an-absolutely-psychotic-view-of-airstrikes/

Westerners Have An Absolutely Psychotic View Of Airstrikes

Canadian online outlet The Breach has published a letter by CBC’s senior manager of journalistic standards Nancy Waugh which highlights perfectly the bizarre psychological relationship that westerners have with bombs and airstrikes in foreign countries.

In response to multiple complaints from a retired Humber College professor about the wildly biased language that Canada’s state broadcaster has been using to describe Israel’s war on Gaza, Waugh acknowledged that the CBC routinely uses words like “murderous,” “vicious,” “brutal,” “massacre,” and “slaughter” to refer to the October 7 Hamas attack while using far less emotionally charged words like “intensive,” “unrelenting,” and “punishing” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last three months. 

Waugh defended this extreme discrepancy by saying that Israel’s attacks in Gaza differ from the Hamas attack on Israelis in that Israel’s killings are done “remotely”.

“Different words are used because although both result in death and injury, the events they describe are very different,” Waugh wrote. “The raid saw Hamas gunmen stream through the border fence and attack Israelis directly with firearms, knives and explosives. Gunmen chased down festival goers, assaulted kibbutzniks then shot them, fought hand to hand, and threw grenades. The attack was brutal, often vicious, and certainly murderous.”

“Bombs dropped from thousands of feet and artillery shells lofted into Gaza from kilometers away result in death and destruction on a massive scale, but it is carried out remotely,” Waugh continued. “The deadly results are unseen by those who caused them and the source unseen by those [who] suffer and die.”

I’ve written a number of essays trying to point at the baseless and irrational way westerners view military explosives as a far more civilized and humane way of killing human beings than bullets or blades, but I’ve never written anything that sums it up as clearly as this frank admission by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s senior manager of journalistic standards.

Military explosives rip human bodies apart. They burn people alive. They trap them under rubble where they die excruciatingly slowly in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable. They leave people without limbs. They dismember and disfigure children for life. Many of the most agonizing deaths in human history have been caused by bombs.

There are thousands of Gazans who have yet to be counted among the dead because their bodies are still buried under the rubble of fallen buildings. Many of them would not have died instantly. Some are still alive, waiting for days in a state terror and searing pain for a rescue that will never come. 

A UNICEF report released last month said that more than a thousand children had had one or both legs amputated since October 7 as a result of damage received by US-sponsored Israeli airstrikes, a number which would be significantly higher by now. We know that many such amputations have occurred without anaesthesia, because Israeli siege warfare has cut off Gaza’s healthcare system from the necessary supplies.

If this is not vicious, then nothing is vicious. If this is not brutal, then nothing is brutal. If this is not murderous, then nothing is murderous. But it doesn’t get labeled as such by the western press, because it is being done “remotely”.

The belief that these attacks should be considered less vicious and brutal because they are launched from a distance by people who won’t see their effects is as psychologically immature as a little girl who believes you can’t see her because she has covered her own eyes. An attack which kills and maims and tortures doesn’t cease to be brutal and vicious just because it looks like a blip on a screen to you. Human suffering isn’t made less acute or less significant by being far away.

But this is how most westerners see the use of military explosives these days. We’re so used to hearing about our government and its allies raining bombs upon the middle east and Africa that we’ve developed a kind of immunity to the psychological impact of exactly what that means in reality. The typical western mind has come to view bombings more like a weather event that simply occurs in those places, like how south Asian countries experience monsoons.

In reality, bombings are no less savage than attacks by guns, grenades, knives or machetes. In fact they actually allow for more savagery to take place, because they kill so much more efficiently, and because the troops who use them can keep killing and killing without losing morale and accumulating mental trauma from the horrors they have been inflicting upon their fellow human beings. 

Dead is dead. Dismembered is dismembered. Pain is pain. Anguish is anguish. The unexamined assumption that the western empire’s prefered methods of killing are less brutal and murderous than those of an impoverished militant group is a psychological defense mechanism we have put in place to shelter ourselves from knowledge of our own brutality and murderousness.

In truth if you look at all the death, destruction, suffering and pain that Israel has inflicted on Gaza since October 7, there is no question that Israel is vastly more vicious, brutal and murderous than Hamas has ever been, and so are its allies who are supporting its actions. The only way to believe otherwise would be to psychologically hide away from the reality of what’s actually happening, which is as truth-based and mature as the kid with her hands over her eyes saying “Now you can’t see me!”

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/01/10/this-genocide-is-being-live-streamed-we-cant-say-we-didnt-know/

This Genocide Is Being Live-Streamed. We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know.

How is anyone still talking about October 7? What Israel has done since October 7 is many times worse than what happened on that day by any conceivable metric; the only way to feel otherwise is to believe Israeli lives are worth many times more than Palestinian lives. How is Israeli suffering still being centered over vastly less significant acts of violence three months ago while exponentially worse violence and suffering is being inflicted by Israelis right this very moment?

If your nation is attacked, and you respond to that attack by immediately murdering thousands of children with incredible savagery, then you forfeit any right to expect anyone to give a shit that your nation was attacked.

Israel responded to the Hamas attack by doing something much, much worse than anything Hamas has ever done, and in so doing completely delegitimizing itself as a state and completely validating everything the Palestinian resistance has been saying about the state of Israel since day one.

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This genocide is being live-streamed. We can’t say we didn’t know. For as long as we live we’ll never be able to say we didn’t know.

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Biden is everything people feared Trump would be. A genocidal monster facilitating racially motivated murder and ethnic cleansing while rapidly accelerating toward a nuclear-age world war. Nothing Trump did was as evil as what Biden has been doing. Biden is the real Trump.

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Israel is in a nonstop state of conflict largely because it is such an artificial creation. Most states emerge in a more organic way out of the geographical, political and cultural circumstances of the land and the people in their unique slice of spacetime. Israel emerged because some people who didn’t live anywhere near the land of Palestine got some narratives in their heads involving an ancient religion and its adherents, and dropped a newly created country on top of a civilization that already existed there which had emerged organically out of the circumstances of the region.

People came in from other nations all over the world, resurrected a dead language which had until then only remained used in religious rituals and called it their native tongue, and slapped together a 20th century nation and started LARPing that it was their native land. This caused massive shockwaves throughout the region because it didn’t happen in accordance with the organic geopolitical and cultural circumstances of the land and its people. It was an alien artificial construct from top to bottom, thrust upon a region for which it had no natural context or receptivity.

Because it was such an unnatural foreign imposition, the political circumstances of the middle east have ever since been rejecting it like a body rejecting an ill-matched organ transplant. This natural response is treated as unnatural unprovoked hostility from the people of the invading artificial construct, which invents more narratives to justify its violent actions against the inhabitants of the region.

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The west’s cultural obsession with WWII has made everyone dumber, because now everyone we want to fight is always Hitler and we’re always the Brave Good Guys who are fighting Hitler.

Nothing about Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza is comparable to the Allied offensive against Nazi Germany. They’re raining military explosives onto a trapped and besieged population in a giant concentration camp with the stated goal of eliminating a small militant group who poses exactly zero existential threat to the state of Israel, in response to an attack which was 100 percent provoked by the abuses of the apartheid Israeli regime.

Comparing the Gaza assault to the war against Hitler is like comparing a mass shooting to the war against Hitler, and saying the shooter is the Allied forces. It’s a completely foam-brained talking point that’s espoused solely by idiots and warmongers.

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It’s not too late to get involved in opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza.

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been talking about it until now. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t understood or paid attention to the Israel-Palestine issue before. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been supportive of Israel in the past, or if you’ve expressed opinions on this subject that you now know were misguided, or if you’ve never engaged in any kind of activism before.

If that’s the case for you, you need to understand that millions of people are on the exact same boat as you right now. Millions. The actions of the state of Israel over the last three months have caused huge numbers of people not previously aware of its depravity to open their eyes to what’s going on, do some research, and change their position.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with joining in with the opposition now. You can safely dismiss anything in you that feels self-conscious about not getting this until now, or feels like it would be inauthentic to join an activist cause after it has gained popularity. Changing your position and taking a stand now makes you more authentic, because it shows you are living a life guided by truth and compassion rather than sleepwalking through life guided by blind habit and partisan tribalism.

I guarantee you the people in Gaza would much rather have you than not have you, and losing your support over self-consciousness about joining in later than others did would be a very silly and unfortunate thing to happen. Moreover, you would definitely not be the last to join in this cause; millions more will be joining in after you as the Israeli regime loses support around the world and everyone starts waking up to what’s happening in Gaza.

Please disregard anything in you that has been holding back from helping to facilitate that awakening in whatever small way you can, whether that might be due to shame for not getting involved sooner or due to any kind of cringe around activism and political engagement you may have had before. This thing is so much more important than any of us, and it’s so much more important than any little feelings of self-consciousness we’d have about getting involved in ways we never would have imagined before. This matter is much too urgent for you to pay any attention to those misguided forces within you that are resistant to taking a stand here.

Take your stand. It will be welcomed, and you will be glad that you did for the rest of your life.