Hyperempire: Spreading
Chaos and Trivia Everywhere in Its Path
By John Chuckman
December 31, 2014 "ICH"
- "DV"
- The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the
United Nations’ Security Council on a
resolution favoring their statehood,
unquestionably a reasonable proposal in the
minds of most of the world’s people. Of
course, the United States, a permanent
member of the Security Council, would
automatically veto such a resolution, as it
vetoes all efforts to restore order to the
chaos of the Middle East. And of course,
were such a resolution somehow miraculously
to pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as
it has ignored a long list of binding UN
resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt
are not enough for an upright, God-fearing
Southern gentleman like US Senator Lindsey
Graham. He busied himself recently with
threatening America’s withholding funds from
a United Nations that gets involved in the
“peace process.” Imagine, the United Nations
getting involved in peace? That is a
chilling thought. Since the United States
has a history of withholding its UN dues
against its solemn treaty obligations to
bully its way to certain changes, such
threats do carry weight.
Senator Graham, regarded
neither as an idealist nor a voice for
peace, is only doing what so many American
politicians do under the unbelievably
corrupt, money-drenched American election
system, and that is to make ridiculous
public statements about the Middle East in
return for generous dollops of campaign
funds from the world’s most tireless
political lobby, that for Israel. You might
think that the lobby itself would tire of
funding backwater blowhards demanding the
other ninety-five percent of humanity play
the game by America’s rules or America is
picking up its marbles or chips or whatever
and going home, but clearly it does not.
“The peace process” is the
longest running farce on the planet,
continuing for nearly fifty years. It might
have been funny in the vein of The Mouse
That Roared, but there is nothing remotely
funny in the killing of thousands of people
and the extreme abuse and hopelessness of
millions. You just could not make a worse
hash of a diplomatic and human welfare
situation than America has made in the
Middle East. And the situation has only
intensified in its cruelty and injustice.
Today, Israel openly and regularly steals
homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
It threatens ancient Muslim shrines and
desecrates some of them. It has savaged
Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison
camp, twice, killing close to four thousand
including nearly a thousand children. It has
attempted to starve Gaza’s people out with a
years-long embargo, and is making ugly
noises about still another invasion. It is
about to steal Syrian oil on the occupied
Golan Heights, drilling there illegally, and
it is busy arranging the theft of offshore
natural gas that belongs to Gaza and
Lebanon. It does all of this with complete
impunity and not even a cross word from the
likes of Senator Graham. I do think the
Middle East provides the strongest possible
evidence of the complete unsuitability of
the United States to play a dominant role in
international affairs. It is genuinely a
case of the inmates running the asylum.
In another example of
chaos mixed with farce, the United States
pretends to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria,
and while that charade continues, planes
loaded with American weapons keep flying out
of Turkey to make the seeming lunatics even
stronger. Indeed, the various ragtag
factions trying to overthrow the Syrian
government, cutthroats assembled by the US
and its friends from all corners of the
globe in a kind of hellish foreign legion,
announced a new alliance, so telling
Washington’s approved terrorists in the
conflict from those who haven’t made the cut
is more difficult than ever. Recently, one
or another of the lunatic mobs shot down two
fighter jets, and how do you think they
managed that without American anti-aircraft
missiles? Turkey’s certifiably unbalanced
president, Tayyip Erdoğan, one day makes
fiery speeches threatening Israel (to please
the poor fools voting for him) and the next
makes new secret deals with Israel.
Remember, this is a man who just built a
one-thousand room palace for himself – yes,
that’s right, exactly one thousand rooms –
and it is the ugliest, most pointless large
structure built since the early Soviet era,
a kind of gigantic sprawling warehouse
encrusted with jewels and filled with
porcelain.
Well, dippiness is no
barrier to membership in a secret club in
the region which includes the UAE, Saudia
Arabia, and Israel, all lovingly assisted by
the US. They are all governments who regard
change as desirable only when it results in
an even more rigid status quo, as in Egypt.
Never mind the welfare of the region’s
people or democracy or human rights or
national boundaries. These guys resemble
twelfth century lords seeing paupers cross
their paths: they run them down and proceed
to a rollicking good dinner in the great
hall. The club is all about security for
hereditary monarchs, security for America’s
crusader fortress colony in the Middle East,
and security for helper states in the
American agenda. We’ve had many reports
recently of secret air-freight flights
between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. We also have
reports of flights out of Turkey into Syria.
The never explained events at Benghazi were
undoubtedly blowback from an operation
collecting unemployed thugs and arms for
secret shipment to Turkey and then into
Syria. Saudi Arabia is voluntarily taking a
bath by pushing oil prices down, a favor to
the US and Israel and Turkey and a way of
hurting Russia, Iran, Syria, and even
Venezuela – all current members in good
standing of Captain America’s ever-changing
galaxy of villains – aka, the Axis of Evil.
The US is willing to sacrifice for the time
being its booming shale oil industry, whose
more costly production requires higher
prices than Saudi conventional crude, in
return for the Saudi sacrifice.
Since both countries are
desperate to hurt Russia, Iran, and Syria,
the deal is a marriage made in Realpolitik
heaven. Russia has helped Syria and does
business with Iran, and Saudi Arabia and
Israel hate Iran and Syria. The US has made
a large investment in toppling Syria for
Israel’s benefit, but the plan has been
thwarted by Syrian endurance and Russian
help. The plan also overlooked the loyalty
of important Syrian societal groups to
President Assad, but America often overlooks
details as it attempts to reshape the world
to its liking with bombs. Of course, there
was also the precedent of Iraq, a bloody
fiasco that achieved nothing but a million
deaths and splintering a country into
pieces. That splintering, by the way,
continues with the ISIS fiasco: Iraq’s Kurds
are being used against ISIS to strengthen
their own region’s quasi-independence from
Iraq.
The chaos the secret
club-member countries have created in Syria
– perhaps 200,000 killed and a couple of
million refugees – appears not to bother
them in the least, just so many paupers in
the roadway when galloping home to dinner at
the great hall. The victims do provide
useful free material for the propaganda war
being waged, the understanding implicit in
America’s and Canada’s and Europe’s press
being always that President Assad is
responsible for the catastrophe. The US, and
cheerleaders on the sidelines like Canada’s
current dismal right-wing government, are
doing virtually nothing for the refugees, or
for the many civilians crippled or wounded.
Ironically, Israel actually accepts for
treatment in its northern medical facilities
some of the very fanatics wounded in the
dirty work. After all, it is ultimately
Israel’s dirty work they do, regardless of
their fanaticism. It’s a phenomenon we might
call selective terrorism: fanatical killers
who do America’s work, or Israel’s, are not
treated as terrorists at all. No matter how
many women and children you kill, no matter
how many places you bomb, you only become a
terrorist if you oppose the interests of
America or Israel.
The toll in killed and
wounded and homeless in Eastern Ukraine
continues to mount. New punitive measures
come regularly from Kiev, undoubtedly with
American advice about possible
vulnerabilities – after all, a top cabinet
minister in the coup-created government is
American. Only the other day we read reports
of Ukrainian militia-types, the kind of
right-wing thugs who helped the US overthrow
an elected government in Kiev, blocking food
traffic into the East. Attempting to starve
people into submission is defined in
international law as a war crime, but we
hear no word of concern from America, just
as we heard no word of concern for Israel’s
original blockade of Gaza which actually
included a calculated level of calories
intended to just keep the population alive
(since modified under intense secret
international pressure).
In all these induced
chaotic situations, we hear little or
nothing from the UN, an institution which
should be among the first condemning
aggressive behavior. But the UN, despite the
many differing private views of its members,
is now in all official capacities under the
thumb of the US. Its current
Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, a candidate
favored by America, is ineffectual and
behaves at times almost as though he headed
an organization having nothing to do with
peace or human rights.
Well, there is some
intimidating history. Boutros Boutros-Ghali
was the only UN secretary-general not to be
elected to a second term in office, and the
reason was an American plan to be rid of
him, one of Madeleine Albright’s glorious
career achievements. America vetoed his
second term because it was most unhappy when
he did not embrace the bombing of Bosnia,
and they disliked other of his views which
tended to be thoughtful and compassionate.
Earlier, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld,
a much admired man, was assassinated in an
engineered plane crash, said to have been
the work of Belgian mining companies unhappy
with the UN’s policies in Congo, a place the
mining companies had drained of wealth for
decades of brutal exploitation, but I think
it unlikely anything of that nature happened
without at least a nod of approval from
Washington, which after all was a major
customer for the products of Congo.
The evidence is piling up,
despite delays and many irregularities in
the official investigation into the crash of
airline Flight MH-17 in Ukraine, that a
Ukrainian pilot deliberately shot the plane
down. His fighter is said to have been armed
with air-to-air missiles on take-off,
something completely out-of-the-ordinary in
the conflict since Eastern Ukrainians have
no air force. It returned, according to an
eye-witness, with no missiles and the
pilot’s muttering cryptic phrases. Of
course, this would be the kind of act you
might expect from people who used sniper
rifles earlier this year to kill many
hundreds of civilians in Maidan, the central
square of Kiev, in order to terrorize the
population and start the coup. But where is
America’s voice in these grotesque doings?
As Russia has patiently pointed out, an
American spy satellite was virtually
overhead at the time of the crash, so
definitive evidence exists without a doubt
but is not produced. But then neither is it
produced for the destruction of Flight
MH-370 in the Indian Ocean, an event it is
virtually certain was the work of American
forces at the secret Diego Garcia base as
the plane came their way for whatever
unknown reason.
The irregularities around
Flight MH-17’s investigation include
Malaysia, owners of the airline, being
excluded from the group conducting the
investigation and include the fact that
segments of the wreckage were left behind at
the crash site, and that after taking a very
long time to get there in the first place,
making manipulation of forensic evidence
possible and even likely. We also have the
absence of any American satellite or radar
records, and we have not a word about the
autopsy on the pilot, something which might
solve the entire mystery, as from the
discovery of Ukrainian missile fragments in
his body.
What kind of world do we
want to live in? One where coups and civil
wars are engineered for the pleasure of
others? One where airliners full of people
are shot down deliberately? This is the
chaos, and just part of it, America has
bestowed upon us in the twenty-first
century. I won’t even go into the financial
tsunami it created in 2008 with the same
lack of caution for others and concern about
doing things correctly. The full impact of
that has yet to strike us all.
But America brings
laughable trivia, too. The President of the
United States spending time and breath on
the hacking of a private company’s web site?
A Japanese company, no less? And turning the
relatively trivial business of hacking,
which happens every day now somewhere, into
an international incident by blaming, almost
certainly incorrectly, North Korea?
The President said the FBI
had investigated and assured him that North
Korea was responsible. What he didn’t tell
us was that the FBI has a decades-long
record of being wrong, seriously wrong, a
great deal of the time. Given the FBI’s
history, it certainly is in the running for
the title of Most Incompetent Security
Organization in the Western World, although,
like other national security institutions in
the United States, it is grossly over-funded
with money gushing out like water from
broken plumbing. Americans pay more per unit
of misinformation than likely any other
people on the planet.
Anyone familiar with the
record of the FBI listens to assurances like
the President’s with a sarcastic smile at
best. (1)
Shortly after the
president’s silly words, we had several
world-class tech experts tell us why it
could not have been North Korea, and I’ll
take bets against the FBI on this one from
anyone.
It likely was someone at
Sony doing a publicity stunt to promote what
by all reports is a dud of a film, but why
should the man with the biggest job in the
world join in? Consider also the fact that
if you make what can be viewed as a
threatening comment or presentation of any
kind against the President of the United
States, you will be visited and interviewed
by the Secret Service, who will then keep
you on file permanently. Why is it okay to
make a movie about the assassination of
North Korea’s president then, the subject of
The Interview? Sony certainly has right to
do stupidly foolish things, but it is more
than a little muddled for the President
eagerly to support it. Will he now address
the rights of porn actors in California to
work without condoms?
As I write this, a British
newspaper reports that some Sony employees
have been quietly dismissed. Reported also
is the discovery of a web site strongly
suggesting disgruntled employees. See what I
mean about America overlooking the facts
before it acts?
John Chuckman is former
chief economist for a large Canadian oil
company. He has many interests and is a
lifelong student of history. He writes with
a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of
reason, and concern for human decency. John
regards it as a badge of honor to have left
the United States as a poor young man from
the South Side of Chicago when the country
embarked on the pointless murder of
something like 3 million Vietnamese in their
own land because they embraced the wrong
economic loyalties. He lives in Canada,
which he is fond of calling “the peaceable
kingdom.”
Copyright ©
by John Chuckman