Han är känd sedan 80-talet
när han avslöjade mycket av Iran-Contraaffären
På svenska har nyligen kommit
hans bok ”BAKOM KULISSRNA I KIEV”.
Redan i undertiteln ”Om hur amerikansk
nykonservatism och ukrainsk nynazism drev fram en kupp och ett krig i Ukraina”
får man en slags kort sammanfattning.
Parry är minst sagt föga
imponerad av västliga mediers opartiskhet i fråga om Ryssland och Ukraina utan
kallar det för ”den mest ensidiga
bevakningen i mannaminne av en större internationell kris”.
Den
28 juni skrev han följande text:
Neocons want a new Cold War – all the better to pick
the U.S. taxpayers’ pockets – but this reckless talk and war
profiteering could spark a nuclear war and leave the world to the cockroaches,
If the human species extinguishes itself in a flash of
thermonuclear craziness and the surviving cockroaches later develop the
intellect to assess why humans committed this mass suicide, the cockroach
historians may conclude that it was our failure to hold the neoconservatives
accountable in the first two decades of the Twenty-first Century that led to
our demise.
After the disastrous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq – an
aggressive war justified under false premises – there rightly should have been
a mass purging of the people responsible for the death, destruction and lies.
Instead the culprits were largely left in place, indeed they were allowed to
consolidate their control of the major Western news media and the
foreign-policy establishments of the United States and its key allies.
Despite the Iraq catastrophe which destabilized the Middle
East and eventually Europe, the neocons and their liberal interventionist chums
still filled the opinion columns of The New York Times, The Washington Post,
The Wall Street Journal and virtually every other mainstream outlet. Across the American and European political systems
and “think tanks,” the neocons and the liberal hawks stayed dominant, too,
continuing to spin their war plans while facing no significant peace movement.
The cockroach historians might be amazed that at such a
critical moment of existential danger, the human species – at least in the most
advanced nations of the West – offered no significant critique of the forces
leading mankind to its doom. It was as if the human species was unable to learn
even the most obvious lessons needed for its own survival.
Despite the falsehoods of the Iraq War, the U.S.
government was still widely believed whenever it came out with a new propaganda
theme. Whether it was the sarin gas attack in Syria in 2013
or the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down over eastern
Ukraine in 2014, U.S. government assertions blaming the Syrian government and
the Russian government, respectively, were widely accepted without meaningful
skepticism or simple demands for basic evidence.
Swallowing Propaganda
Just as with the Iraqi WMD case, the major Western media
made no demands for proof. They just fell in line and marched closer to the
edge of global war. Indeed, the learned cockroaches might observe that the
supposed watchdogs in the American press had willingly leashed themselves to
the U.S. government as the two institutions moved in unison toward catastrophe.
The few humans in the media who did express
skepticism – largely found on something called the Internet – were dismissed as
fill-in-the-blank “apologists,” much as occurred with the doubters against the
Iraqi WMD case in 2002-2003. The people demanding real evidence were
marginalized and those who accepted whatever the powerful said were elevated to
positions of ever-greater influence.
If the cockroach historians could burrow deep enough into
the radioactive ashes, they might discover that – on an individual level –
people such as Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wasn’t fired
after swallowing the WMD lies whole and regurgitating them on the Post’s
readership; that New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and dozens of similar
opinion-leaders were not unceremoniously replaced; that Hillary Clinton, a neocon in the
supposedly “liberal” Democratic Party, was rewarded with the party’s
presidential nomination in 2016; and that the likes of Iraq War architect
Robert Kagan remained the toast of the American capital with his opinions
sought after and valued.
The cockroaches might observe that humans showed little
ability to adapt amid very dangerous conditions, i.e., the bristling nuclear
arsenals of eight or so countries. Instead, the humans pressed toward their own
doom, tagging along after guides who had proven incompetent over and over again
but were still followed toward a civilization-ending precipice.
These guides casually urged the masses toward the edge
with sweet-sounding phrases like “democracy promotion,” “responsibility to
protect,” and “humanitarian wars.” The same guides, who had sounded so
confident about the wisdom of “shock and awe” in Iraq and then the “regime change”
in Libya, pitched plans for a U.S. invasion of Syria, albeit presented as the
establishment of “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.”
After orchestrating a coup in Russia’s
neighbor Ukraine, overthrowing the elected president and then sponsoring an
“anti-terrorism operation” to kill ethnic Russian Ukrainians who objected to
the coup, Western politicians and policymakers saw only “Russian aggression”
when Moscow gave these embattled people some assistance. When citizens in
Crimea voted 96 percent to separate from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the West
denounced the referendum as a “sham” and called it a “Russian invasion.” It
didn’t matter that opinion polls repeatedly found similar overwhelming support among the
Crimean people for the change. The false narrative, insisting that Russia had
instigated the Ukraine crisis, was accepted with near-universal gullibility
across the West.
A Moscow ‘Regime Change’
Behind this fog of propaganda, U.S. and other Western
officials mounted a significant NATO military build-up on Russia’s border,
complete with large-scale military exercises practicing the seizure of Russian
territory.
Russian warnings against these operations were dismissed
as hysterical and as further proof for the need to engineer another “regime
change,” this time in Moscow. But first the Russian government had to be
destabilized by making the economy scream. Then, the plan was for political
disruptions and eventually a Ukraine-style coup to remove the thrice-elected
President Vladimir Putin.
The wisdom of throwing a nuclear power into economic,
political and social disorder – and risking that the nuclear codes might end up
in truly dangerous hands – was barely discussed.
Even before the desired coup, the West’s neoconservatives
advocated giving the Russians a bloody nose in Syria where Moscow’s forces had
intervened at the Syrian government’s request to turn back Islamic jihadists
who were fighting alongside Western-backed “moderate” rebels.
The neocon/liberal-hawk plans for “no-fly zones” and “safe
zones” inside Syria required the U.S. military’s devastation of Syrian
government forces and presumably the Russian air force personnel inside Syria
with the Russians expected to simply take their beating and keep quiet.The
cockroach historians also might note that once the neocons and their liberal
interventionist sidekicks decided on one of their strategic plans at some
“think-tank” conference – or wrote it down in a report or an op-ed – they were
single-minded in implementing it regardless of its impracticality or
recklessness.
These hawks were highly skilled at spinning new propaganda
themes to justify what they had decided to do. Since they dominated the major
media outlets, that was fairly easy without anyone of note taking note that the
talking points were simply word games. But the neocons and liberal hawks were
very good at word games. Plus, these widely admired interventionists were never
troubled with self-doubt whatever mayhem and death followed in their wake.
So, when the decision was made to invade Iraq, Libya and
Syria or to stage a coup in Ukraine or to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia, the
neocons and their friends never countenanced the possibility that something
could go wrong.
And when setbacks and even catastrophes resulted, the
messes were excused away as the failure of some politician to implement the
neocon/liberal-hawk scheme to the precise letter. If only more force had been
used, if only people on the ground were more competent, if only the few critics
were silenced and prevented from sowing doubts about the wisdom of the plan,
then it would have succeeded. It was never their fault.
As the West’s new foreign-policy establishment, the
neocons and their liberal helpers validated their own thoughts as brilliant and
infallible. And who was there to doubt them? Who had the necessary access to
the West’s mass media and who had the courage to counter their clever arguments
and suffer the predictable ridicule, insults and slurs? After all, there were
so many esteemed people and prestigious institutions that stamped the
neocon/liberal-hawk plans with gilded seals of approval.
Still, the cockroach historians might yet be puzzled by
how thoroughly the world’s leadership failed the human species, particularly in
the West, which prided itself in freedom of thought and diversity of opinion.
So, the pressures kept building, unchecked, until –
perhaps accidentally amid excessive tensions or after some extreme nationalist
had exploited Russia’s “regime change” chaos to seize power – the final line
was crossed.
‘Extending American Power’
Though much of human information would likely have been
lost in the nuclear firestorms that were unleashed, the cockroach historians
could learn much if they could get their antennae around a 2016 report by a
group called the Center for a New American Security, consisting of prominent
neocons and liberal interventionists, including some expected to play
high-level roles in a Hillary Clinton administration.
These “experts” included foreign-policy stars such as
Robert Kagan (formerly of the Reagan administration’s State Department, a
co-founder of the Project for the New American Century – an early advocate for
the Iraq War – and later a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a
Washington Post columnist), James P. Rubin (who served in Bill Clinton’s State
Department and made a name for himself as a TV commentator), Michele Flournoy
(the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during Barack Obama’s first term and
touted as Hillary Clinton’s favorite to be Secretary of Defense), Eric Edelman
(who preceded Flournoy in her Obama job except he served under George W. Bush),
Stephen J. Hadley (George W. Bush’s second-term national security advisor), and
James Steinberg (a deputy national security advisor under Bill Clinton and
Deputy Secretary of State under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton).
In other words, this group, which included many other big
names as well, was a who’s who of who’s important in Washington’s
foreign-policy establishment. Their report was brazenly entitled “Extending
American Power” and painted an idyllic picture of the world population living happily
under U.S. domination in the seven decades since World War II.
“The world order created in the aftermath of World War II
has produced immense benefits for peoples across the planet,” the report
asserted, ignoring periodic slaughters carried out across the Third World, from
Vietnam to Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, often inflicted by the
massive application of U.S. firepower and other times by tribal or religious
hatreds and rivalries exacerbated by big-power interference.
Also downplayed was the environmental devastation that has
come with the progress of hyper-capitalism, threatening the long-term survival
of human civilization via “global warming” – assuming that “nuclear winter”
doesn’t intervene first.
Even though many of these benighted “experts” were
complicit in gross violations of international law – including aggressive war
in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere; lethal drone strikes in multiple countries;
torture of “war on terror” detainees; and subversion of internationally
recognized governments – they deluded themselves into believing that they stood
for some legalistic global structure, declaring:
“United States still has the military, economic, and
political power to play the leading role in protecting a stable rules-based
international order.” Exactly what stability and what rules were left fuzzy.
In line with their underlying delusions, these “experts”
called for feeding more money into the maw of the Military-Industrial Complex
and flexing American military muscle: “An urgent first step is to significantly
increase U.S. national security and defense spending and eliminate the
budgetary strait-jacket of the Budget Control Act. A second and related step is
to formulate policies that take advantage of the substantial military, economic,
and diplomatic power Washington has available but has been reluctant to deploy
in recent years.”
Battling Russia over Ukraine
The bipartisan group – representing what might be called
Official Washington’s consensus – also urged a tough stand against Russia
regarding Ukraine, including military assistance to help the post-coup
Ukrainian regime crush ethnic Russian resistance in the east.
“The United States
must provide Ukrainian armed forces with the training and equipment necessary
to resist Russian-backed forces and Russian forces operating on Ukrainian
territory,” the report said, adding as a recommendation:
“Underwrite
credible security guarantees to NATO allies on the frontlines with
Russia. Given recent Russian behavior, it is no longer possible to ignore
the possible challenge to NATO countries that border Russia. The Baltics in
particular are vulnerable to both direct attack and the more complicated
‘hybrid’ warfare that Russia has displayed in Ukraine.
“To provide reassurance to U.S. allies and also to deter
Russian efforts to destabilize these nations, it is necessary to build upon the
European Reassurance Initiative and establish a more robust U.S. force presence
in appropriate central and eastern Europe countries, which should include a mix
of permanently stationed forces, rotationally deployed forces, prepositioned
equipment, access arrangements and a more robust schedule of military training
and exercises.…
“The United States should also work with both NATO and the
EU to counter Russian influence-peddling and subversion using corruption and
illegal financial manipulation.”
Apparently that last point about “influence-peddling” was
a reference to the need to silence dissident voices in the West that object to
the new Cold War and dispute U.S. propaganda aimed at justifying the increased
tensions with Russia. The report’s Washington insiders clearly understand that
their future career prospects are advanced by taking a belligerent approach
toward Russia.
Regarding Syria, the bipartisan group of neocons and
liberal hawks urged a U.S. military invasion with the goal of establishing a
“no-fly zone” while building up insurgent forces capable of compelling “regime
change” in Damascus, a strategy similar to those followed in Iraq and Libya to
disastrous results.
“In our view, there can be no political solution to the
Syrian civil war so long as the military balance continues to convince [Syrian
President Bashar al-] Assad he can remain in power. And as a result of Iran’s
shock troops and military equipment deployed to Syria, and the modern aircraft
and other conventional forces Russia has now deployed, the military balance
tilts heavily in favor of the Assad regime,” the report said.
“At a minimum, the inadequate efforts hitherto to arm,
train, and protect a substantial Syrian opposition force must be completely
overhauled and made a much higher priority. In the meantime, and in light
of this grim reality, the United States, together with France and other allies,
must employ the necessary military power, including an appropriately designed
no-fly zone, to create a safe space in which Syrians can relocate without fear
of being killed by Assad’s forces and where moderate opposition militias can
arm, train, and organize.”
How a U.S.-led invasion of a sovereign country and the
arming of a military force to overthrow the government fit with the group’s
enthusiasm for “a rule-based international order” is not explained. Clearly,
the prescribed actions are in violation of the United Nations Charter and other
international legal standards, but apparently the only real “rules” the group
believes in are those that serve its purposes and change depending on the
needs for “extending American power.”
Similar hypocrisy pervaded the group’s other
recommendations, but the blind obedience to these double standards – indeed the
inability to see or acknowledge the blatant contradictions – might be of
interest to the cockroach historians because it could help them understand how
the U.S. foreign policy establishment lost its mind and blundered into
unnecessary conflicts that could easily escalate into strategic warfare, even
thermonuclear conflagration.
A Steady Drumbeat
But this collection of neocons and liberal hawks wasn’t
just an odd group of careerist “thinkers” trying to impress Hillary Clinton.
Their double-thinking “group think” extended throughout the American
establishment in the second decade of the Twenty-first Century.
For instance, The New York Times and other major
publications were dominated by both neocon and liberal-hawk commentators,
writers like Roger Cohen, who was one of the many pundits who swallowed the
Iraq War lies whole and — despite the disaster — avoided any negative career
consequences. So, in 2016, that left Cohen and his fellow Iraq War cheerleaders
still pressing political leaders to expand the war in Syria and ratchet up
tensions with Russia at every opportunity.
In a column about the mass
shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, on June 12 – in which the
shooter was reported to have claimed allegiance to ISIS – Cohen tacked on a
typically distorted account of President Obama’s approach to the Syrian
conflict. Ignoring that Obama had the CIA and the Pentagon covertly train and
arm rebel groups seeking to overthrow the Syrian government, Cohen wrote:
“Yes, to have actively done nothing in Syria over more
than five years of war — so allowing part of the country to become an ISIS stronghold,
contributing to a massive refugee crisis in Europe, acquiescing to slaughter
and displacement on a devastating scale, undermining America’s word in the
world, and granting open season for President Vladimir Putin to strut his stuff
— amounts to the greatest foreign policy failure of the Obama administration.
It has made the world far more dangerous.”
But Cohen did not acknowledge his own role as a brash
supporter of the Iraq War in sparking the creation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which
later morphed into the Islamic State or ISIS. Nor did he address the fact that
the United States and its allies, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have
essentially kept the Syrian civil war going, a point even acknowledged by some
supporters of Syrian “regime change.”
For instance, Thanassis Cambanis of the “progressive”
Century Foundation produced a report entitled “The
Case for a More Robust U.S. Intervention in Syria,” which acknowledged
that “most of the armed opposition has survived only because of foreign
intervention.” In other words, much of the death and destruction in Syria,
which also has fueled political instability in Europe because of the massive
refugee flow, resulted from intervention from the United States and its allies.
So, the cure to the mess created by these
not-thought-through interventions, at least in the view of Cohen and other
eager interventionists, is more intervention. It was just such obsessive and irrational
thinking – embraced as Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” – that
pushed the world toward the eve of destruction in 2016.
Contemplating all this human foolishness, the cockroach
historians might be left using one of their six legs to scratch their heads.
[For more on these topics, see Consortiumnews.com’s “A Family Business of Perpetual War“; “Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas
Kill“; and “The State Department’s Collective
Madness.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or as an e-book
(fromAmazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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