US Imperialism’s Failed Tactics

US imperialism and its allies learned a hard lesson from their unsuccessful adventure in Vietnam. Escalating US troop involvement to nearly half a million serving at the war’s peak, drawing on forced enlistment (conscription) to rotate nearly three million personnel serving throughout the war, and incurring over 200,000 casualties proved to be a politically destabilizing, consensus-challenging endeavor.

Military planners recognized that unless they were able to generate a broad consensus for war or guarantee a short, decisive duration, the draft risked a politically volatile backlash. Consequently, they opted for developing a volunteer army and a war-friendly culture to legitimize its use.

But they drew an even more important conclusion. Where imperialism fought a foe defending its homeland, the costs were usually far too great for the US public to tolerate. Certainly US engagement in the world-wide, anti-fascist war of 1939-1945 enjoyed unwavering popular support. But US forces never fought on Japanese soil and only briefly in a crippled Germany.

When engaged in supporting a rump regime in Korea, the US military achieved, at best, a stalemate. The same boots-on-the-ground approach in Vietnam collapsed before a people deeply resentful of US occupiers.

After Vietnam, imperialist war planners devised a tactic of relying more and more upon surrogates. Understanding that local populations furiously opposed foreign occupiers, the US sought to impose its objectives by creating and supporting mercenary forces who could claim, at least tenuously, to local status. From supporting UNITA or FNLA in Angola to creating, arming, and aiding the Contra movement in Nicaragua, the US preferred waging aggression with surrogate forces. An effective, massive propaganda effort “legitimized” the client armies as “freedom fighters.”

Probably the most successful use of the post-Vietnam tactic was in Afghanistan, where US covert services armed a reactionary tribal opposition to destabilize a secular, modern government and, as a result, gave a decisive, strong impetus to an emergent Islamic fundamentalist war against secularism of all kinds. The jihadist movement found its legs, its confidence as surrogates against an urban-based Afghanistan government supported by the Soviet Union, then a bulwark against US imperialism.

After the demise of the Soviet state, the US cautiously employed its “professionalized” and volunteer military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and once more in Iraq. Still, military planners hoped to quickly train a surrogate force and just as quickly evacuate US ground forces, leaving client states with militaries sufficiently armed and motivated to crush any domestic resistance to a US-friendly regime.

While the tactic held the promise of minimizing domestic resistance by using a compliant media to construct the false narrative of democratic change and humanitarian intervention and while the tactic hoped to generate tolerable US casualties and minimal material costs, resistance movements once again proved to be far more determined, and stability far more elusive, than the best minds of the military or covert services imagined.

Fourteen years in Afghanistan and twelve years of propping up a client state in Iraq, manufacturing a failed state in Libya, and sparking a devastating civil war in Syria are testament to a failed policy.

More importantly, the failure is part of a continuous, irreversible decline in US imperialism’s ability to impose its will in a world of stiffening anti-imperialist resistance and growing inter-imperialist rivalries.

Nothing underlines this new reality more than the latest events in Afghanistan and Syria.

Despite a massive concentration of weaponry, superior pay, and the best US training, the Afghan surrogate army suffered its worst defeat ever at the hands of the Taliban in the siege and occupation of Kunduz. All reports indicate that the Taliban forces were inferior in numbers and weapons and that the US-trained government forces had little stomach for the fight.

US officials have been obliged to announce a delay in the exit of troops from Afghanistan in the face of this defeat. President Obama has decided to pass on the Afghanistan quagmire to the next President, just as President Bush passed it on to him.

Russian engagement in Syria has inadvertently exposed the lies and failures of US actions in that country. Since the Obama administration began encouraging and assisting the overthrow of Syrian President Assad, the government and the lapdog media have claimed the existence of a democratic, moderate opposition. From late in 2011, US and UK military leaders began planning armed action against Assad. A surrogate army (the Free Syrian Army) was projected as an alternative to the fundamentalist jihadists seeking a feudal-theological state (Qatar and other Gulf states intervened, pretending no such distinctions). Weapons were diverted from Libya and CIA training began in earnest with a projected military force numbering in the tens of thousands.

After the ISIS threat emerged, the US and the other interventionists further pretended that its client fighting forces were equally engaged against ISIS and the many other groups fighting Assad who were designated “terrorist” by the West.

In reality, the US “freedom fighters” were virtually non-existent or collaborating enthusiastically with the jihadists. Their sole target was Assad.

The Obama government has conceded that of thousands vetted by the CIA program only a few hundred remain on the war front. Most have shared their weapons with or joined the jihadists or left Syria with the thousands of immigrants. The half-billion-dollar program is a disaster, with the US administration pledging to pass the remaining weapons and resources on to existing fighting groups in Syria.

The spectrum of the Western media reports that, especially since the Russian intervention, there is extensive cooperation, coordination, and joint action between all elements of the Syrian anti-Assad forces—so much for the ruse of an independent force in opposition to fundamentalism.

As the Wall Street Journal reports: “…the Homs Legion of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army… together with the Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham and Nusra Front [Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate] has formed joint command in Northern Homs.” The Washington Post has identified a similar unholy alliance of jihadist and “moderates” that was crafted into a Nusra-led Army of Conquest. Only the most gullible continue to believe that there is a significant difference between Western-backed “freedom fighters” and their jihadist allies.

Western liberals can make believe that US involvement in Syria is for some greater good, but the facts speak clearly. As with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, tens of thousands are dead, infrastructure is devastated, and the social fabric is irreparably torn simply because imperialist powers seek more compliant, more subservient states. The facts expose the lie that the US and NATO seek the values of democracy, freedom, or the other values that prove so persuasive to those apologizing for self-interested regime change.

Anti-imperialists can draw a small consolation from these tragic, morally repellent aggressions: the US tactics have failed to achieve their goal of creating global fealty to US interests.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

A Cesspool of Hypocrisy

If there were a hypocrisy meter, the Obama administration surely would have achieved unprecedented numbers in recent weeks. With the Putin government announcing and swiftly executing military action in Syria, the US government and its NATO allies went apoplectic, accusing the Russians of destabilizing the Middle East, increasing the threat of terrorism, adding to homelessness, and risking the widening of the war. Of course any sane observer knows that the US has already destabilized the Middle East, fomented terrorism, brought on mass homelessness, and dramatically widened the war, while causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.

The Obama administration and its hyper-patriotic opposition within the ruling class are most indignant because Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Russian Federation have signed a mutual assistance accord that mounts a real anti-extremist front in the wars raging in Syria and Iraq. Irony of ironies, US meddling in the Middle East has brought two former intransigent enemies-- Iran and Iraq-- together. To the shock of US Geo-political schemers, a client state-- Iraq-- dares to defy its sponsor-- the US-- in forging this agreement. Iran and Russia, both squeezed extortionately by the vise of US/EU sanctions, have defied the school yard bullies to support the Syrian government.

Responding to recent Russian bombings of targets in Syria, Obama denounced the Russian moves as a “recipe for disaster.” No one in the administration has explained how Syria-- or Iraq, Libya, Yemen, or Afghanistan-- could be a bigger disaster.

Obama has accused the Russians of not discriminating between ISIS (ISIL) and the other opponents of the Assad government. He maintains that the Russians are supporting Assad rather than the anti-ISIS effort. At the same time, the US government concedes that the CIA has armed its own surrogates with sophisticated anti-tank weapons (TOW missiles) only useful against Assad's tanks and not ISIS. Hypocrisy!

While Obama maintains a fictitious difference between good and bad elements within the “opposition” and an expressed abhorrence of the violence, the opposition has achieved a “rare” unity in refusing to even attend meetings to discuss negotiations organized by the United Nations, according to the Associated Press. The AP story (Russia Launches New Wave of Air Raids in Syria, Targets IS Posts, Albert Aji and Jim Heintz, 10-04-15) goes on to acknowledge that the Syrian Opposition Coalition statement “was signed by the Salafist-jihadist Ahrar al-Sham as well as some of the rebel units that have received training and weapons from the United States and its allies.” Just how this motley united front of accused “terrorist” organizations and supposed moderates will offer a better life to Syrians after Assad has never been explained by the US government. Skeptics would, with justification, fear a repeat of the Libyan tragedy.

Equipped with the short memory and stunted imagination typical of US journalists, few have reflected upon the telling origins of the Syrian civil war. Of course the official account requires a massive dose of gullibility. It spins a tale of dedicated democrats who, foiled by the Assad government in their peaceful demonstrations, take up arms in a matter of months, even weeks, in 2011. No one in the media questions how this amorphous mass of private citizens is shaped up, armed, and led, in such a short span, against a sophisticated modern military and government security forces. Despite the miraculous appearance of arms from the late Muammar Gaddafi's destabilized Libya, despite the appearance of foreign fighters, US journalists found no cause to look for the hidden hands.

Instead, journalists continue to churn out copy that carefully follows the US/NATO line on all Middle Eastern matters. Consider the aptly named Liz Sly who slyly pumps out dispatches through the Washington Post that resemble rewrites of State Department releases. As with her equally discredited colleagues Judith Miller and Brian Williams, there seems to be no journalistic sins that warrant her consignment to journalistic hell. Sly infamously disseminated the fabricated story “Gay Girl in Damascus”:

On June 7, 2011 she wrote 'Gay Girl in Damascus' Blogger Detained, a news article that merged claims from a blog post with what appeared to be independently gathered facts in a way that suggested that youthful, attractive Syrian-American, Amina Arraf, was grabbed off the street along with 10,000 other Damascus citizens by the evil Assad forces. On June 8, the Washington Post retracted the story and on June 10, a 40-year-old US citizen confessed that the person, the story, and the blog were a hoax that he concocted. (ZZ's blog)

Of course perpetrating a hoax has not stopped Sly from advancing her career. On October 1, 2015, Sly (along with Andrew Roth) wrote from Beirut a story appearing in the Washington Post:

The expanding Russian involvement in Syria threatened to further complicate efforts to secure a negotiated settlement to the 4-year-old war at a time when the influx of refugees into Europe and the endurance of the Islamic State is focusing world attention on the unrelenting bloodshed in Syria.

Negotiated settlement? The “rebels” steadfastly refuse to even discuss a UN-sponsored meeting about negotiations as reported by the Associated Press. How does Russian involvement threaten something that only exists in the mind of Liz Sly?

As for refugees, Sly had previously written a fantastic, tortured story of how refugees in Lebanon voting absentee and en masse for Assad were actually coerced from afar by the nefarious Assad. This wild disparagement of Syrian refugees' sentiments for Assad reveals profoundly Sly's lack of understanding of the roots of the conflict and her determination to view the refugee crisis through the lens of State Department policy goals and not compassion.

Following the lead of US policy makers, Sly and her colleague denounce the Russian bombing targets:

Some of the towns struck are strongholds of a recently formed coalition, Jaish al-Fateh, or Army of Conquest, that includes the Syrian al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra alongside an assortment of Islamist and moderate factions. Among them was a mosque in the northern Idlib town of Jisr al-Shugour, whose capture by the rebel coalition in April underscored the growing threat to the regime.

But notice how she concedes that Russian planes target a coalition-- a diverse ideological “assortment”-- of combatants, a concession that al-Qaida cooperates with the so-called moderates. Surely this acknowledges that the anti-Assad movement is a snake pit of opportunists. And the Russians are to be faulted for not asking for a show of hands within the Army of Conquest?

In light of the recent criminal bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan, a murderous act that NO journalist in the West can lay at the US's doorstep without preceding the fact with a host of mealy-mouthed “alleged,” “suspected,” or “charged” disclaimers, isn't it hypocritical that Sly so easily and assuredly blames the Russians for blowing up a mosque?

Roy Gutman at McClatchy (10-3-15) reports that the Kurds, the only reliable fighters against ISIS, support the Russian effort in Syria: “'We want Russia to provide us air support as well as weapons in our fight against the ISIL militants,' a YPG commander, Sipan Hemo, was quoted as telling the Russian Sputnik news portal. 'We can organize an effective cooperation with Russia on the issue'... Some analysts speculated that the YPG was interested in Russian support because Moscow was unlikely to respond to Turkey's worries that the Kurds' success would fuel a push for independence among its own Kurdish minority.”

Similarly, Iraq's Shiite militia welcome the Russian engagement. The Washington Post reports (10-05-15): “...Iraq's most powerful Iranian-backed Shiite militias said Monday they would welcome Russian airstrikes on IS in the country and accused the U.S. of failing to act decisively against the hardline group.”

As they have in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so many other countries, US and NATO meddling in Syria has unleashed destructive forces further destabilizing the Middle East.

Sadly, the forthcoming US Presidential elections promise no respite from this cesspool of hypocrisy. All the Republican candidates separate themselves from the administration by advocating more military intervention.

Hilary Clinton, similarly, appeals to the war mongers by advocating a no-fly zone over Syria-- an act that would strengthen ISIS and the Islamists by weakening Assad.

And Bernie Sanders evades the issue.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Democracy Soiled: The Case against the US Ruling Class

Reading the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News opinion poll is like glimpsing a snapshot of an alien civilization. Surely these are not the opinions of the flag-waving, beer-guzzling US masses depicted on television and by the rest of popular culture. Surely this is not the world view of the self-absorbed, numbed populace, addicted to the NFL and movie weepers.

Are we to believe that nearly two out of three (62%) of those polled are dissatisfied with “America's role in the world”? If most citizens are unhappy with the US government destabilizing Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, or supporting genocide in Palestine despite unrelenting media lies and government deception, then how do our leaders justify their acts? Why do innumerable and endless wars continue?

Why do almost two-thirds of those polled (64%) express dissatisfaction with the “state of the US economy”? Are they not following stock market euphoria? Are they not listening to pundits who have declared “recovery”? Aren't US citizens paying attention to financial cheerleaders?

Why do three out of four (76%) of the people have no confidence that “life for our children's generation will be better than it has been for us,” up from 60% in 2007?

Why the negativism? Why the pessimism? Why do over half (54%) of poll respondents believe that “[t]he widening income gap between the wealthy and everyone else is undermining the idea that every American has the opportunity for a better standard of living”?

How can our fellow citizens hold such bold, radical ideas? How have they escaped the constant beating of the drums of war and the ubiquitous celebration of prosperity and American grandeur?

The answer is really quite simple: they have lost confidence in politicians, the political system, and other key institutions. The WSJ/NBC poll reveals that approval for President Obama has, this month, reached an all-time low of 40%. While this may seem like good news for the Congressional Republicans, it is not. Only 19% of respondents held positive views of the Republican politicians.

Perhaps the most stark demonstration of popular anger is the wholesale rejection of the “political system”: four out of five polled (79%) were dissatisfied with “the political system.”

Two things stand out: First, hyper-patriotism, economic confidence, and trust in the widely heralded US democracy is a myth. Second, the US people have far greater dissatisfaction with the course of the country than our leaders and the commentariat would like us to believe.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between the sentiments and desires of the masses and the actions and views of politicians and their media lackeys. In the most basic sense, the US political system does not respect or reflect the popular will. That is just to say it does not function democratically. Paraphrasing the pundits, the US is a failed democracy.

The same undemocratic leadership arrogantly postures as the guarantor of democracy to the rest of the world! The US government audaciously assumes the privilege of telling everyone else how to live! Knowing no shame, US rulers ignore the democratic crisis at home while mounting a crusade to enforce sham democracy abroad-- a bitter irony.

Forcing US “Democracy” upon the World

Nothing exposes the hypocrisy of US rulers like their tragic destruction of Iraq. Driven by a lust to control the fate of all oil reserves in the Middle East and an intolerance of any regime that shows even a spark of defiance to US dictates, successive administrations have invaded, bombed, economically terrorized, invaded a second time, occupied and rekindled ethnic and religious animosities for over two decades---all in the name of fostering democracy. As a result, a once stable state is now what the US media like to call a “failed state.”

Never mind that the US had covertly helped to install the vicious, anti-Communist Saddam Hussein as a puppet ruler of Iraq. Never mind that the US encouraged and aided his brutal regime in a war against Iran. Never mind that despite Saddam's iron grip, Iraqis enjoyed a relatively high standard of living and one of the more secular cultures in the Middle East in a country now often without electricity, insecure, and ridden with ethnic hatred.

Nonetheless, US elites celebrate the gift of democracy to the Iraqi people, dismissing the pain of war and occupation as a price well worth paying (by the Iraqis!).

Yet paradoxically the US government has friends--intimate friends--who are far more in need of a lesson in democracy, friends with even less regard for human rights and democratic practices. Consider the 1989 version of the CIA's World Factbook, hardly a source likely to present the US's foes in a good light or its friends negatively. Compare pre-invasion Iraq to imperialism's best friend on the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia. Despite the massive losses incurred in the war with Iran, Iraq had a slightly higher life expectancy than did Saudi Arabia in 1989. Literacy was also higher. More to the point, the CIA describes trade unions as “illegal” in Saudi Arabia, and suffrage and elections as “none.” Saddam's brutal Iraq, by contrast, citing the same source, allowed some trade union activity and boasted universal suffrage and National Assembly elections last held four years prior. While Saddam's democracy scorecard was pathetic, surely the feudal-like theocracy of Saudi Arabia was even more deserving of remediation.

Iraq's once regionally stellar economy, measured by GNP per capita, was set back greatly by the Iraq-Iran War and was further devastated dramatically by US intervention and its aftermath, sinking to levels below those of 1950. Is that, and a decline in life expectancy, an acceptable price for US-imposed “democracy”?

We got a taste of the flavor of US-style democracy as we watched the US Administration call for the peaceful overthrow of the constitutionally installed Prime Minister of Iraq. It was no secret that the call for Maliki's retirement or removal from the position was a condition of continued US support. Shamelessly, the Iraqi peoples' will played no role in this extortionate change; the US Administration, not the Iraqis, decided Maliki must go. So Maliki is gone and another puppet is in his place.

While poll after poll demonstrate that most US citizens are tired of endless war, imagine what the Iraqi people feel about constant death and destruction from 1990 until today, unending war and death-dealing sanctions without relent.

The powerful, aggressive ISIS today poses the latest threat to Iraqis, thanks to the US government's meddling in the affairs of her neighbors. Stirring the Syrian opposition and encouraging US allies to support the sectarian-driven insurrection against Assad has provided both the material means and tacit acceptance for ISIS's machinations. Only unmatched hubris and unlimited hypocrisy could so irresponsibly unleash the dogs of war. Now the most militarily effective force in the US crusade against Syria's president has crashed the Administration's party in Iraq, threatening the very existence of a US puppet-state. And, despite desperate bombing by the US military, the only effectively proven counterforce to the brutal ISIS now is the guerillas of the Kurdish Workers Party, a movement that the US and its allies have hysterically labeled “terrorists.” How ironic, how insane, how tragic!

Twenty-first Century Crusades

Extinguishing independence and advancing US capitalism are unquestionably the constant goals of US foreign policy. But since the demise of Soviet power, those policies are advanced by a world-wide crusade under the false banners of democracy and human rights. Like the crusades of old, sanctimony proves to be a good cover for otherwise naked, indefensible aggression, plunder, and intervention. Whether it’s soft intervention (USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, NGOs) or military aggression (the CIA, NATO, US military), US rulers continue to push the limits of popular tolerance of a malignant foreign policy, an effort aided immensely by the lap-dog media.

Most recently, the US and NATO have destroyed Libya as a stable, viable state, interfered in political events in Egypt, and sparked a civil war threatening the future of Syria. The US arms and encourages Israel in its apartheid and genocidal policies while uncritically protecting it from the censure of most of the rest of the world.

In Ukraine, the US has played an irresponsible role-- not unlike its strategic engagement with religious, anti-secular zealots in the Middle East-- by funding, training, and encouraging the most xenophobic, nationalistic, even fascist elements to stage a coup against the elected president. Since the stage-managed replacement of Viktor Yanukovych with one of the country's richest elites, Ukraine is waging a cruel, bloody assault on its dissident Eastern territories. Sickening irony: the US angrily condemns even the most moderate government actions against dissent in Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and a host of other countries perceived as adversaries, yet it finds no cause in the bombardment of innocent civilians in Eastern Ukraine. Where are the human rights organizations? The civilizing NGOs?

No country has been targeted by the US's hypocritical “democracy” and “human rights” crusade as has Cuba. No country has so admirably repulsed that campaign. From assassination attempts to invasion, from raids to biological warfare, from slander to blockade and terror, the Cuban people have successfully guarded their independence and defended their chosen path. The latest exposures only show how desperate US elites are to return Cuba to the Empire. USAID, a government agency masquerading as a nonpartisan promoter of democracy, unleashed two recent covert programs against Cuba. Both programs bordered on the ridiculous: one, a “twitter” like program to seduce Cuban youth into dissent and, the other, a phony health care project to enlist Latin American youth to travel to Cuba pretending to promote health care and HIV prevention while planting seeds of opposition to Cuban socialism. Both programs show how easily deceit and dishonesty mix with US-style “democracy”.

Retire the word?

Once, the word “democracy” had meaning for those living in the US, a connection-- often slender, but a connection-- to the interests and collective will of the majority of people, the masses. No rational person ever thought that democracy was perfect, complete, or absolute. But many drew hope from the promise of democratic rule and democratic institutions. Many celebrated the democratic content of freedom from the bondage of slavery, of universal suffrage, and of the progress of labor. At the very least, the democracy inherited from the colonial revolutionists served the bourgeoisie and its cohorts well and left the the door cracked open for some truly democratic reforms (though the door was slammed shut when the danger of radical democracy arose).

But in the US today, the word is used to deceive, cheat, and oppress. “Democracy” serves to mask an oligarchic regime employing a Gestapo-like surveillance of every citizen. “Democracy” seeks to legitimize a two-party system that produces one-party results. “Democracy” is bought and sold like any other commodity. And “Democracy” is the protector of wealth and power.

Perhaps the D word, like the word “terrorist,” should be retired until sensible people with a principled commitment to popular rule can counter its defamation. Maybe “democracy” should be put on the shelf until a movement truly worthy of the word emerges. Judging by the recent WSL/NBC poll, the people are waiting for it.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Shame of Iraq Once More

As the Sunni Jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham conquer city after city in northern Iraq and as black-clad soldiers from Shiite military muster to repel them, it is tempting to blame the chaos there on ancient religious hatreds. But the strife in Iraq today is less the mystifying product of of primordial grievances than the predictable result of very modern power politics.

The US shouldn't repeat the mistake made two decades ago, when a generation of Western leaders explained away the wars that ripped Yugoslavia apart as the result of primeval ethnic hatreds. Then as now, such resignation is an easy way to avoid hard thinking. Hatreds Bred by Power Politics, Daniel Benjamin (Wall Street Journal, June 28-29, 2014)

Benjamin, a former US State Department coordinator, is right on both counts: politics fundamentally drives the crisis in the Middle East and simplistic, but convenient explanations for the catastrophic events supplant any real analysis.

Apologists in both Parties and the supplicant media want to pass off the blame to the victims of the quagmire that the US and its allies have created in the Middle East. They insist that it is not a malignant foreign policy designed to advance US corporate interests and install puppet governments lurking behind the violence and chaos, but tribal and religious animosities, disdain for “human rights,” and ignorance of “democratic” values that thwart the “civilizing” mission of the US and the EU. Just as US ruling elites evaded the lessons of defeat in Vietnam, their twenty-first century counterparts revive the same chauvinistic, self-serving explanations for the hatred and mass slaughter they perpetrate.

To his credit, Benjamin insists on more nourishing explanations. As an insider and participant in shaping US policy, he knows better; he knows that interests-- economic and politic interests-- play the decisive role in shaping the events now spinning out of control in Iraq. He concedes, regarding “the demons of sectarianism,” that “[a]t key points, the US has even unintentionally abetted them...” [My italics] While this confesses far more than most of the US foreign policy commentariat wants to admit, it falls far short of the truth.

As I argued in a previous article (The Shame of Iraq, ZZ's Blog June 22, 2014), Western nations, especially the US and Israel, have devoted enormous resources and attention towards re-directing a decidedly post-World War II secular trend in the Middle East by courting religious fundamentalism. They have, with some success, quashed secular movements and promoted religious zealotry in its place. It is not difficult to discern their motive: in the calculus of imperialism, encouraging backwardness-- ethnic and religious frictions-- often overwhelms the struggle for economic independence and social justice that usually finds fertile soil in secularism.

That I did not make this point clearly was underscored by several critical comments received. It was not my intention to portray Nasserism, the early Ba'ath Party, the brief leadership in Iran of Mosaddegh, or even the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan as paragons of national sovereignty, unity, or socialism. Nevertheless, they were part of a healthy anti-imperialist, pro-independence movement worldwide, a movement that gathered momentum after World War II. In Central and South America, this trend was associated with leaders like Peron, Goulart, Bosch, Fidel, and Arbenz. While they were not all untarnished exemplars of social progress or even radical democracy, they all sought to eke out an independent path for national development, a path that drew the attention and ire of the US and its allies. Similarly, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and a host of African leaders joined Nehru and Sukarno in Asia in using the opportunity offered by the Cold War stand-off to escape subservience to Western capitalism. In most cases, the escape was thwarted through assassination, CIA coup, covert corruption, or division. In the Middle East, the primary tool was the fueling of the ever present, but dormant, ethnic or religious sectarianism.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, that opportunity is gone and the road to political and economic independence is far rockier.

In understanding the Iraq debacle, context-- historical context-- is everything, a truth that the former State Department official, Daniel Benjamin, fully understands. Scornful of the patently nonsensical explanations that begin and end with alleged Middle Eastern pathologies, he insists that “The spark behind today's fires sprang from the 1979 Iranian Revolution.” Certainly, the Iranian Revolution is a handy scapegoat for those unwilling to fully expose the critical role of the US in fueling, igniting, and stoking the “fires” burning throughout the Middle East.

Yes, the overthrow of the Shah, both a reliable puppet and guardian of US interests, unleashed a firestorm of fundamentalist zeal. But it is impossible to imagine the religiously fomented revolution without grasping the decades of violent and complete repression of the secular Iranian left, beginning with the US- and UK-instigated coup against the moderate, secular and democratic Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh, in 1953.

While Benjamin insists that we ask credible questions about the Iraqi catastrophe, he purposely directs us away from credible answers.

Nothing exposes the complete bankruptcy of US policy in the Middle East more dramatically than the widespread “surprise” accompanying the sweeping offensive of ISIS across a huge segment of Iraq. Despite decades of intense scrutiny and the most sophisticated technologies, US security services were caught completely off guard by the speed and success of the offensive. Equally embarrassing and “surprising” was the complete collapse of the US-trained, financed, and armed Iraqi military faced off against ISIS.

But US policy makers were equally “surprised” by the treachery of their fundamentalist surrogates who launched an attack on the US in 2001 after undermining a revolution in Afghanistan.Of course, they were also "surprised" by the chaos in Libya after the US and NATO waged war on Gaddafi, creating destruction, death, and instability. They are “surprised” that their sponsorship of an insurrection against Assad in Syria has drawn mercenary armies bent on creating a fundamentalist Caliphate (ironically, challenging the US puppet government in Iraq). They will be “surprised” when the puppet government in Afghanistan also collapses in the next few years.

At the same time, US rulers, wrapping themselves around the banners of human rights and democracy, readily accept the greatest abusers of human rights and of democracy, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia, in their crusades against “terror.”

What does this callousness to peace and stability, this unprecedented hypocrisy, tell us?

Surely, it leaves no doubt that US policy in the Middle East, like its policy toward Cuba, Venezuela, and many other countries, is disconnected from high-minded values. Instead, it is deeply embedded in US interests, not the wholesome interests of the US people, who consistently show their disapproval of US intervention in polls, but the interests of US corporations and their courtesans.

One can only wish that this truth could permeate the nearly impenetrable corporate media filter that denies access to all but inane entertainments and surreal politics.

But that doesn't excuse the quiescence and inaction of the broad US left. Even if most cannot bring themselves to utter the word “imperialism,” they must surely see the pattern of violence and destruction that is the constant companion of US policies. They cannot escape the human toll of unrelenting, perpetual war since the phony “war on terror” was birthed. They cannot ignore the contradiction of massive resources devoted to destruction and domination while infrastructure, services, and welfare starve for funding in the US.

The only plausible explanation for this ubiquitous meekness in confronting imperialism is a groveling subservience to the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. I say “groveling” because no other word could capture an allegiance that only stiffens in the face of a Democratic Party leadership that is completely contemptuous of the Party's “left” and even more contemptuous of the left in general.

If the Democratic Administration that enjoyed a rousing mandate from US voters, inherited a congressional majority, and spoke of urgent change, fails to deliver a cessation of aggression, then there is little prospect for it doing so in the future. Therefore, remaining mute in the face of the murderous Iraqi debacle, not voicing an objection to US engagement is tantamount to groveling before morally corrupt Democratic Party elected officials.

Certainly some have spoken up, organized, demonstrated, but too few to challenge the media fire wall. We need more to join with UNAC or the ANSWER coalition into assembling local actions. Or for those whose ideological purity is threatened by rubbing elbows with different shades of the radical left, organize your own rally. But public renunciation of the march of imperialism cannot be set aside for electoral opportunism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Shame of Iraq

The close of the Second World War saw the rise of Arab nationalism, a movement that promised to unite much of the Middle East around independence and social advancement. The imposition of a Jewish theocratic state in the midst of Arab homelands no doubt accelerated this movement, as did later imperialist meddling such as the Suez intervention of 1956.

Both Nasserism and the Ba'ath Party were early vehicles of a growing nationalism centered on an Arab identity. Nasser's engagement with non-alignment in the Cold War, his secularism, his advocacy of land reform and Egyptian socialism resonated with the Arab masses. Similarly, the pan-Arab Ba'ath Party organized around unity, independence, and socialism-- all with a decidedly secular tone. Islam, rather than the basis for identity, was second to ethic national identities that proudly offered Islam to the world as a gift from the Middle Eastern peoples. This secular trend grew rapidly, resulting in a unified United Arab Republic in 1958, a development that was soon terminated by a coup in Syria.

Of course there were counter trends, reactionary trends in the Arab world that worked against the progressive, secular movement. Centered on the oil-driven dynasties, these forces, frightened by Arab nationalism, aligned themselves with the imperialists, and were vigorously anti-socialist. They offered an ideology counter posing rigid Islamic fundamentalism to secular nationalism. Of course their Western partners shared their hostility and were eager to exploit their influence and resources against Arab nationalism.

The opportunities were forthcoming with the humiliating defeats of Arab military power by the Israeli armed forces. Tarnished by these defeats, afflicted with corruption, and covertly impaired by Western and Israeli security services, the leaders of Arab nationalism began to lose support among the Arab masses.

Israel and its Western imperialist friends contrived a strategy of encouraging fundamentalism and religious sectarianism as an alternative to the Middle Eastern Enlightenment. Once the lightening rod for Arab unity and secular progressivism, the Palestinian Liberation Organization fell victim to this strategy when the Israelis disparaged the leadership of Yasir Arafat, rebuffing his concessions and mocking his weaknesses. At the same time, they sought to vitalize the influence of the religious-based Hamas among Palestinians. This strategy, like so many similar strategies, backfired when Hamas launched the Intifada that struck back effectively against the Israeli occupiers. Envisioned as a classic divide-and-conquer maneuver, the courtship of Islamic fundamentalism underestimated the deeply ingrained hostility to imperial intrigue. It was one thing to undermine Arab unity and secularism, but quite another to scorn Arab independence.

The US embraced the same tactics in its support for Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan. As an answer to the assumption of power by a secular, anti-imperialist, socialist movement and its support by the Soviet Union, the US, along with its Gulf allies, raised, armed, and assisted a merciless, sectarian fundamentalist insurgency openly contemptuous of the human rights that the West pretends to cherish.

The backfire-- or “blowback” as some have dubbed it-- came quickly and often, culminating in the deadly coordinated attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September of 2001. Thousands of innocent civilians in the US died because US policy makers, through ignorance and irresponsibility, sponsored religious zealots against the tide of democratic, secular, and progressive movements in the Middle East. While the tactic succeeded in turning back the tide of secularism in the Middle East, the tacticians failed to understand that their erstwhile Islamist allies deplored imperial manipulation as much as they hated secularism. In other words, they weren't the dupes that their “masters” wanted them to be. As the divide-and-conquer strategy collapsed, generating anti-Western violence, the Western puppeteers could only react in panic: “Terrorists!” The liberal apologists for this dangerous game offered their own term of derogation: “Islamo-fascists!”

And nothing was learned from the unholy alliance.

Once again, policy makers thought they could ride the tiger of religious sectarian intolerance and create a loyal satrapy to US interests. The US fabricated outlandish excuses to invade Iraq in 2003, though not so outlandish as to nonetheless seduce nearly the entire US intelligentsia, as Frank Rich recently recounted in a nastily angry, bitter article in New York magazine (The Stink of Baghdad, June 2-8, 2014). Rich reminds us of the hysterical reaction to absurd claims about the dangers supposedly latent in the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Cobbled together by League of Nations mandate, the British had established the country as a semi-colonial kingdom that lasted until its independence in 1958. Its brief life as a republic was afflicted with internal ethnic, religious, and political divisions. Through brutal repression of these many divisions, Hussein was able to establish a reasonably stable country, a country to be counted as one of the most outwardly secular in the Middle East at the time of the US's unprovoked massive invasion.

With the senseless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the shearing of a fragile social fabric, and the wholesale destruction of the country's infrastructure, the US invaders and their compliant allies succeeded in sowing chaos and instability never before seen in a land once celebrated as the cradle of civilization. Quite an accomplishment for the twenty-first century super power heralding itself as the paragon of democracy and human rights!

The vandals could not leave without creating a mock democracy to accompany a massive military and security apparatus constructed to hold the bloody mess together. In 2006, the US vetted potential leaders and permitted the Iraqi parliament to “choose” the hand-picked prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. In the last week, President Obama now wants to fire him; rather, he wants the parliament to fire him and select another hand-picked prime minister. This process passes for democracy, with the scribes populating the major media in the US.

In the last month, the massive military/security apparatus has crumbled in the face of a well coordinated offensive by a ruthless, dedicated band of zealots seemingly more welcome in some parts of Iraq than the former invaders. The only thing that the warring factions in a once stable country can agree upon is their animosity towards those who pretended to liberate them from the Saddam Hussein regime.

It is a supreme-- but cruel-- irony that a country with a tenuous hold on nationhood, a country still barely beyond the legacy of colonialism, a country enjoying a rare period of secular culture and stability, was pushed back into barbarism and destructive sectarianism by a supposedly enlightened, advanced country flexing its muscles under the absurd banner of a “War on Terror.”

There is not a Hall of Shame large enough to accommodate the talk-show propagandists, witless syndicated columnists, and mindless news anchors who cheer-leaded the Iraqi debacle; but surely Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, deserves a seat near the front row. His enthusiasm and repeated mistaken projections of final victory are well documented. One of his most recent columns tells us that our attention should shift from the bloody confrontation currently bringing death and displacement to Iraq to the conflict of “the extremists vs. the environmentalists in the Middle East” (The Real War of Ideas, NYT, 6-10-14). Demonstrating his ignorance again and again, he announces that he has uncovered the environmentalists' secret: “The environmentalists think of this region [the Middle East] without borders...” He seems to overlook the important fact that all of the existing borders are largely irrational products of colonial governance, borders designed to exploit tribal and religious animosities to the benefit of colonial masters. For Friedman, history and context are nothing weighed against his latest conversation in a whirlwind tour of a region.

For another journalistic scoundrel deeply implicated in the Iraq debacle, we can turn to John Burns. In the words of Michael Munk: “As chief of the NYTimes Baghdad bureau during much of the war, [John] Burns was a notorious cheerleader for the invasion and occupation. He now blames his failure to understand how 'deeply fractured' Iraqi society was. I guess you failed to notice, John, that it wasn’t fractured before the invasion, and as Naureckas observers, 'Is it typical for countries to respond to unprovoked military invasions by becoming strong, stable democracies?'”

Burns, without a hint of contrition, now says: “I think the mistake we made was–I'm talking here about myself as well as some of my colleagues, not just at the New York Times but many publications–was not to understand how deeply fractured that society was, how strongly held those animosities were, and how they would not likely relent under any amount of American tutelage and encouragement.” (quoted by Naureckas above)

This is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw, a conclusion exposing both dishonesty and servility to US government policy. Iraq was not, as Munk reminds us, a fractured society until the US fractured it.

Moreover, Libya was not a fractured society, nor was Syria a fractured society, until the US joined with others in fracturing them. It was no coincidence that, like Iraq, both were among the most secular countries in the Middle East with relatively high standards of living, high educational levels, and developed social safety nets. Today, Libya is largely ungoverned and ungovernable, a failed state. And Syria is in the throes of an ugly civil war stoked by the US, EU, and the Gulf states.

Put simply and clearly, Iraq is not an honest mistake, as Burns would have it, but an instance of a systematic, aggressive foreign policy designed to divide and conquer the Middle East, a policy designed to use religious fundamentalism and tribalism, formerly on the wane, as an instrument against independence, nationalism, and social progress. It is the foreign policy of imperialism.

It is not only the policy of Bush, as Democratic Party stalwarts want us to believe. It is not only the incompetence of Obama, as the Right shouts. It is not the over-reach of super patriots or chicken hawks. It is not only an arrogant, unrestrained military, as many pretend. It is the willful, unwavering program of a US ruling class determined to shape the Middle East to meet the interests of elites and corporations in the US and with its allies.

The failure to face this truth guarantees that the Iraqi debacle and many more like it will bring shame to the self-styled democracies and the hypocritical bastions of human rights.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com