HAVE LOOTED THE COUNTRY AS MUCH AS THE
BUSH CRIME FAMILY!
ttps://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/bush-family-mourns-hw-bush-man-who-did.html
The
perilous ramifications of the September 11 attacks on the United States are
only now beginning to unfold. They will undoubtedly be felt for generations to
come. This is one of many sad conclusions readers will draw from Craig Unger's
exceptional book House of Bush House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the
World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. As
Unger claims in this incisive study, the seeds for the "Age of
Terrorism" and September 11 were planted nearly 30 years ago in what, at
the time, appeared to be savvy business transactions that subsequently translated
into political currency and the union between the Saudi royal family and the
extended political family of George H. W. Bush.
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC KATRINA FLOOD, BUSH’S AIDS WERE
ABLE TO CONVINCE HIM TO APPEAR IN NEW ORLEANS.
HE SHOWED UP WITH A NO-BID DEAL FOR HALIBURTON AND OPENED THE
BORDERS FOR A MEX INVASION OF “CHEAP” LABOR FOR HALIBURTON.
HE ALSO REDUCED MINIMUM WAGE TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE PROFITABLE FROM
HIS HALIBURTON CRONIES. CONGRESS REVERSED THIS PRESIDENTIAL ACT.
THE MEXICANS POURED IN AND THERE WAS THE USUAL SURGE OF GANGS AND
ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS FOR WELFARE.
IT HAS ALSO BEEN REPORTED THAT BUSH ATTEMPTED A DEAL WITH NARCOMEX
PRESIDENT CALDERON WHEREBY BUSH WOULD INVITE MEXICO TO EXPORT THEIR POOR AND
CRIMINAL CLASS TO LOOT AMERICA AND CALDERON WOULD OPEN UP MEX OIL TO BE MANAGED
BY BUSH’S OIL CRONIES.
THE BUSH FAMILY STARTED TWO WARS FOR THEIR SAUDIS CRONIES THAT WE
ARE STILL IMPLICATED IN. ON SEPTEMBER 11 THE SAUDIS INVADED US AND THREE
THOUSAND PEOPLE WERE MURDERED.
THE SAUDIS ARE MAJOR FUNDERS OF THE BUSH, CLINTON AND OBAMA
PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND THE PHONY CLINTON CHARITABLE FOUNDATION.
Trump admits US killed millions in war based on lies
10 October 2019
Amid the storm of denunciations—extending from right-wing Republicans to the Democratic Party, the New York Times and the pseudo-left Jacobin magazine—of his decision to pull US troops out of Syria, President Donald Trump issued an extraordinary tweet on Wednesday in defense of his policy:
“The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE ... IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.”
Trump’s Twitter account has dominated the US news cycle ever since he took office. Tweets have introduced fascistic new policies on immigration, announced the frequent firings of White House personnel and cabinet members and signaled shifts in US foreign policy.
Last month, amid the mounting of an impeachment inquiry, which the Democratic leadership in Congress has focused exclusively on “national security” concerns stemming from Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US president set a new personal record, tweeting 800 times.
Yet the corporate media has chosen to ignore Trump’s tweet on the protracted US military intervention in the Middle East.
From the standpoint of the bitter internecine struggle unfolding within the US capitalist state, the tweet expresses the sharp divisions over US global strategy. While those around Trump want to focus entirely on preparation for confrontation with China, layers within the political establishment and the military and intelligence apparatus see the continuation of the US intervention to assert its hegemony over the Middle East and countering Russia as critical for American imperialism’s drive to impose its dominance over the Eurasian landmass.
But aside from these disputes over geo-strategic policy, the admission by a sitting US president that Washington launched a war under a “false” and “disproven” premise that ended up killing “millions” has direct political implications, whatever Trump’s intentions.
It amounts to an official admission from the US government that successive US administrations are responsible for war crimes resulting in mass murder.
Trump acknowledges that Washington launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the “false premise” of “weapons of mass destruction.” In other words, the administration of George W. Bush lied to the people of the United States and the entire planet in order to facilitate a war of aggression.
Under international law, this war was a criminal action and a patently unjustified violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. The Nuremberg Tribunal, convened in the aftermath of the Second World War, declared the planning and launching of a war of aggression the supreme crime of the Nazis, from which all of their horrific atrocities flowed, including the Holocaust. On the basis of this legal principle, Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top US officials, as well as their successors in the Obama and Trump administrations who continued the US intervention in the Middle East—expanding it into Syria and Libya, while threatening a new war against Iran—should all face prosecution as war criminals.
The real basis for the war was the long-held predatory conception that by militarily conquering Iraq Washington could seize control of the vast energy resources of the Middle East—giving it a stranglehold over the oil lifeline to its principal rivals in Asia and Europe—and thereby offset the decline of US imperialism’s global hegemony.
The World Socialist Web Site described the consequences of the US assault on Iraq and its people as “sociocide,” the deliberate destruction of what had been among the most advanced societies, in terms of education, health care and infrastructure, in the Middle East (see: “The US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a society”).
The casualties inflicted by this war were staggering. According to a comprehensive 2006 study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the death toll resulting from the US invasion rose to over 655,000 in the first 40 months of the US war alone.
The continued slaughter resulting from the US occupation and the bloody sectarian civil war provoked by Washington’s divide-and-rule tactics claimed many more direct victims, while the destruction of basic water, power, health care and sanitation infrastructure killed even more. The mass slaughter continued under the Obama administration with the launching in 2014 of what was billed as a US war against ISIS. This war, which saw the most intense bombing campaign since Vietnam and reduced Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities to rubble, claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands more lives.
Recent estimates of the death toll resulting from 16 years of US military intervention in Iraq range as high as 2.4 million people.
The Iraq war has had its own disastrous consequences for US society as well. In addition to claiming the lives of more than 4,500 US troops and nearly 4,000 US contractors, the war left tens of thousands of US troops wounded and hundreds of thousands suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.
What of all the families in the United States who lost children, siblings or parents in a war that Trump now admits was based upon lies? Together with the veterans suffering from the wounds of this war, they should have the right to sue the US government for the results of its criminal conduct.
The cost of the US wars launched since 2001 has risen to nearly $6 trillion, the bulk of it stemming from Iraq, while interest cost on the money borrowed to pay for these wars will eventually amount to $8 trillion.
These grievous costs to US society are compounded by the social and political impact of waging an illegal war, resulting in the shredding of democratic rights and the wholesale corruption of a political system that is ever more dominated by the military and intelligence apparatus.
The media’s silence on Trump’s admission of war crimes carried out by US imperialism in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East is self-incriminating. It reflects the complicity of the corporate media in these crimes, with its selling of the lies used to promote the aggression against Iraq and its attempt to suppress antiwar sentiment.
Nowhere was this war propaganda developed more deliberately than at the New York Times which inundated the American public with lying reports about “weapons of mass destruction” by Judith Miller and the noxious opinion pieces by chief foreign affairs commentator Thomas “I have no problem with a war for oil” Friedman.
By all rights, the media editors and pundits responsible for promoting a criminal war of aggression deserve to sit in the dock alongside the war criminals who launched it.
The corporate media has also ignored Trump’s indictment of the US wars in the Middle East because it speaks for those sections of the US ruling establishment that want them to continue.
Trump’s cynical nationalist and populist rhetoric about ending US wars in the Middle East is aimed at currying support with a US population that is overwhelmingly hostile to these wars, even as his administration—backed by the Democrats—has secured a record $738 billion military budget in preparation for far more catastrophic wars, including against nuclear-armed China and Russia.
If the fascistic occupant of the White House is able to adopt the farcical posture of an opponent of imperialist war, it is entirely thanks to the Democrats, whose opposition to Trump is bound up with the concerns of the US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon over his conduct of foreign policy.
While there was mass opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the pseudo-left in the United States, together with the media, worked might and main to channel it behind the Democratic Party, which provided uninterrupted support and funding for the war. Today, it is the most pro-war party, aligned with the opposition to Trump by the likes of John Bolton, Lindsey Graham and Bush.
Trump’s admission about the criminality of the Iraq war only confirms what the stated from its very outset. The struggle that it has waged for the building of a mass antiwar movement based upon the working class and armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unite the workers of the United States, the Middle East and the entire planet against the capitalist system provides the only way forward in the struggle against war.
TRUMP AND THE
MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper
and his family of parasites up their ar$es??
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s
charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching
par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---
-
Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will
they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they
live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in
penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other
charities.”
Opinion: Trump And
Pompeo Have Enabled A Saudi Cover-Up Of The Khashoggi Killing
October 2, 201911:45 AM ET
In the weeks
following the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally than he did
reacting to the killing.
Hasan Jamali/AP
Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) is a senior fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle
East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic
administrations. He is the author most recently of the End of Greatness:
Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.
Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, worked in the State Department for six
different administrations and was a member of the secretary of state's Office
of Policy Planning from 2005 to 2015.
It has been a year since Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist
Jamal Khashoggi entered Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul where he was slain
and dismembered. There is still no objective or comprehensive Saudi or American
accounting of what occurred, let alone any real accountability.
The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's admission in a
recent CBS interview that
he takes "full responsibility," while denying foreknowledge of the
killing or that he ordered it, sweeps under the rug the lengths to which the
Saudis have gone to obscure the truth about their involvement in the killing
and cover-up.
The Saudi campaign of obfuscation, denial and cover-up would never
have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Trump administration's
support over the past year. The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
not only refused to distance themselves from the crown prince, known by his
initials MBS, but also actively worked to relegitimize him. The Saudis killed
Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the
U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status. In short,
without Trump, the attempted makeover — such as it is — would not have been
possible.
The
Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to
protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah
status.
Weak administration response
The administration's weak and feckless
response to Khashoggi's killing was foreshadowed a year before it occurred. In
May 2017, in an unusual break with precedent, Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his
inaugural presidential trip; gave his son-in-law the authority to manage the
MBS file, which he did with the utmost secrecy; and made it unmistakably clear
that Saudi money, oil, arm purchases and support for the administration's
anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli policies would elevate the U.S.-Saudi
"special relationship" to a new level.
Predictably, therefore, the administration's reaction to
Khashoggi's killing was shaped by a desire to manage the damage and preserve
the relationship. In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent
more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a
purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did
reacting to the killing. Trump vowed to get to the bottom of the
Khashoggi killing but focused more on defending the crown prince, saying this was another example of
being "guilty before being proven innocent."
Those pledges to investigate and impose accountability would
continue to remain hollow. Over the past year, Trump and Pompeo have neither
criticized nor repudiated Saudi actions that have harmed American interests in
the Middle East. Two months after Khashoggi's death, the administration, in
what Pompeo described as an "initial step," imposed sanctions on 17
Saudi individuals implicated in the killing. But no others have been
forthcoming, and the visa restrictions that were imposed are meaningless
because none of the sanctioned Saudis would
be foolish enough to seek entry into the United States.
What's more, the administration virtually ignored a congressional
resolution imposing sanctions on the Saudis for human rights abuses
and vetoed another bipartisan resolution that would have ended U.S. military
assistance to Saudi Arabia's inhumane military campaign in Yemen.
The Saudis opened a trial in January of 11 men implicated in the
killing, but the proceedings have been slow and secretive, leading the United
Nations' top human rights expert to declare that "the trial underway in
Saudi Arabia will not deliver credible accountability." Despite
accusations that the crown prince's key adviser Saud al-Qahtani was involved in
the killing, he's still advising MBS, has not stood trial and
will likely escape punishment. A year later, there are still no reports of
convictions or serious punishment.
Legitimizing Mohammed bin Salman
The Trump administration has not only given the crown prince a
pass on the Khashoggi killing, but it has also worked assiduously to remove his
pariah status and rehabilitate his global image. Barely two months after the
2018 slaying, Trump was exchanging pleasantries with the crown prince at the Group
of 20 summit in Buenos Aires and holding out prospects of spending more
time with him. Then this past June, at the G-20 in Osaka, Japan, Trump sang his
praises while dodging questions about the killing. "It's an honor to be
with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really
done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi
Arabia," Trump said.
And you can
bet that when Saudi Arabia hosts the G-20, scheduled to be held in its capital
of Riyadh in November 2020, the Trump administration will be smiling as its
rehab project takes another step in its desired direction.
What the U.S. should have done
Trump has failed to impose any serious costs or constraints on
Saudi Arabia for the killing of a U.S. newspaper columnist who resided in
Virginia or for the kingdom's aggressive policies, from Yemen to Qatar. In the
wake of the Khashoggi killing, the administration should have made it
unmistakably clear, both publicly and privately, that it expected a
comprehensive and credible accounting and investigation. It should have suspended
high-level contacts and arms sales with the kingdom for a period of time. And
to make the point, the administration should have supported at least one
congressional resolution taking the Saudis to task, in addition to triggering
the Magnitsky Act, which would have required a U.S. investigation; a report to
Congress; and sanctions if warranted.
Back to business as usual
The dark
stain of the crown prince's apparent involvement in Khashoggi's death will not
fade easily. But for Trump and Pompeo, it pales before the great expectations
they still maintain for the kingdom to confront and contain their common enemy,
Iran, as well as support the White House's plan for Middle East peace, defeat
jihadists in the region and keep the oil spigot open.
Most of
these goals are illusory. Saudi Arabia is a weak, fearful and unreliable ally.
The kingdom has introduced significant social and cultural reforms but has
imposed new levels of repression and authoritarianism. Its reckless policies
toward Yemen and Qatar have expanded, not contracted, opportunities for Iran,
while the Saudi military has demonstrated that, even after spending billions to
buy America's most sophisticated weapons, it still can't defend itself without
American help.
Meanwhile,
recent attacks on critical Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blames on Iran
have helped rally more American and international support for the kingdom.
When it
comes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the kingdom's callous reaction to
Khashoggi's killing, the president and his secretary of state have been
derelict in their duty: They have not only failed to advance American strategic
interests but also undermined America's values in the process.
US Attorney General Barr invokes “state secrets” to cover up Saudi
involvement in 9/11
Last week, it was
revealed that the Trump administration has taken extraordinary steps to
continue the 18-year cover-up of Saudi government involvement in the September
11, 2001 terror attacks.
On Thursday, September
12, one day after the 18th anniversary of the attacks on New York and
Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, a federal court filing revealed
that Attorney General William Barr has asserted the "state secrets"
privilege to block the release of an FBI report detailing extensive relations
between some of the 19 hijackers and Saudi government officials. Victims of the
attacks and their families are pushing for access to the 2007 report as part of
a lawsuit against the Saudi government launched in 2003 charging the despotic
monarchy with coordinating the mass killings.
Barr declared there was
a “reasonable danger” that releasing the report would “risk significant harm to
national security.”
The court filing also
revealed that the FBI has agreed to turn over to the families’ lawyers the name
of a Saudi individual that is redacted in a four-page summary of the FBI report
released in 2012. The summary lays out evidence concerning three Saudis who
provided money and otherwise assisted two of the hijackers in California in
finding housing, obtaining driver’s licenses and other matters.
Government
investigations have established that the two people who are named in the FBI
summary, Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Saudi consulate official, and Omar
al-Bayoumi, suspected by the FBI of being a Saudi intelligence officer, were
working in coordination with the Saudi regime. The third person, whose name is
redacted, is described in the FBI summary as having assigned the other two to
assist the hijackers.
Lawyers for the
families last year subpoenaed the FBI for an unredacted copy of the summary
based on the contention that the third person was a senior Saudi official. But
as part of the court filing, citing the “exceptional nature of the case,” the
FBI issued a protective seal to prevent the name of the third Saudi from
becoming public. The agency also refused to provide any of the other
information requested by the families.
An FBI official said
the agency was shielding the name to protect classified information related to
“ongoing investigations” and to protect its “sources and methods.”
In fact, the
extraordinary measures taken to conceal the role of the Saudi regime in the
9/11 attacks are driven by the need of US imperialism to maintain its
reactionary alliance with the Saudi sheiks and continue the false cover story
on 9/11 that has served as an ideological pillar for aggression in the Middle
East and the buildup of a police-state infrastructure within the US, carried
out in the name of fighting a “war on terror.”
The Saudi monarchy has
been a key ally of the United States in the Middle East for 70 years, and since
9/11 it has become, alongside Israel, Washington’s most important partner in
the region. It has played a central role in the bloody wars for regime change
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, which have killed more than a
million people and destroyed entire societies. It is also the world’s biggest
purchaser of US arms.
Its intelligence
agencies have long worked in the closest collaboration with the CIA and the
FBI. The exposure of Saudi complicity in 9/11 immediately implicates sections
of the US intelligence establishment in facilitating, it not actively aiding,
the terror attacks, and sheds light on the multiple unanswered questions about
how 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, could carry out such a complex
operation.
The 9/11 attacks were
eagerly seized upon by the George W. Bush administration, with the support of
the Democratic Party and media allies such as the New York Times,
to implement longstanding plans to wage aggressive war in the Middle East.
The cover-up of Saudi
involvement has been carried out over three administrations, Democratic and
Republican alike. It began within hours of the attacks themselves. Eight days
after the attacks, at least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by
bodyguards and associates, were allowed to secretly leave the US on a chartered
flight. One of the passengers, a nephew of the supposed number one on
Washington’s “most wanted” list, had been linked by the FBI to a suspected
terrorist organization.
The US association with
bin Laden went back decades. Under the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, conducted
between 1979 and 1989, the US and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of
financial aid and weapons to the mujahedeen “freedom fighters” waging war
against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, an operation in which then-US ally bin
Laden played a key role. The proxy war in Afghanistan was pivotal in the later
creation of Al Qaeda.
In July of 2016, the US
government released to the public a 28-page section, suppressed for 14 years,
of a joint congressional inquiry into 9/11. The 28-page chapter dealt with the
role of the Saudi government and contained abundant and damning evidence of
extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers in the period leading up to the
attacks.
Among its revelations
were:
▪ Two of the Saudi
hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived for a time in Los Angeles
and San Diego in 2000, where they obtained pilot training. They were given
money and lodgings by Omar al-Bayoumi, who worked closely with an emir at the
Saudi Defense Ministry. Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an Al
Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and placed on a “watch
list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless they
were allowed to enter the US on January 15, 2000.
▪ Al-Bayoumi “received
support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense,”
drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The company also had ties to Osama bin
Laden. His allowances jumped almost tenfold after the arrival of al-Hazmi and
al-Mihdhar. Al-Bayoumi had found an apartment for the two, which they shared
with an informant for the San Diego FBI, advancing them a deposit on the first
month’s rent.
▪ Al-Bayoumi’s wife
received a $1,200 a month stipend from the wife of Prince Bandar, then the
Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of Saudi intelligence. The wife of
his associate, Osama Bassnan, identified by the FBI as a supporter of bin
Laden, received $2,000 a month from Bandar’s wife.
▪ Three of the
hijackers stayed at the same Virginia hotel as Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi
Interior Ministry official, the night before the attacks.
Despite such evidence,
and much more, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by George W. Bush
concluded that there was no conclusive evidence that “senior” Saudi officials
played a role in the 9/11 attacks. When the 28-page section of the
congressional report was released in 2016, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan,
denounced all suggestions of Saudi involvement as baseless.
However, former
Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, said,
“There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the
hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.”
Former Democratic
Senator Robert Graham, cochair of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11
attacks, said that there was “a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of
Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of the federal government, which
have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”
In the lawsuit filed by
the families of the victims, he filed an affidavit that stated, “I am convinced
that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who
carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”
It is significant, but
not surprising, that the corporate media has given only the most perfunctory
and muted coverage to the moves by the Trump administration to once again
suppress the role of the Saudi regime in 9/11, and the Democrats have been
completely silent.
One should compare this
response to damning evidence of Saudi culpability and US cover-up in relation
to an event that took nearly 3,000 lives to the hysteria of the anti-Russia
witch hunt led by the Democratic Party, the New York Times and
the bulk of the media, based on completely unsubstantiated charges.
Pollak:
Everything Joe Biden Said About Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Actually
Describes Barack Obama’s
Johannes Eisele / AFP Getty
12 Jul 20193
3:48
Everything
former vice president Joe Biden said about President Donald Trump’s foreign
policy speech on Thursday actually applies to the policy that Biden carried out
together with former President Barack Obama — and not Trump.
In his speech, at City University of New York, Biden called
Trump an “extreme” threat to the country’s national security. No one has yet
taken Biden to task for describing the sitting commander-in-chief in such
alarmist terms.
But that wasn’t even the most bizarre aspect of Biden’s speech.
He said the main problem in Trump’s foreign policy was … Charlottesville,
Virginia. Biden went on to recite a version of the debunked “very fine people”
hoax, claiming that Trump had drawn a “moral equivalence between those who
promoted hate and those who opposed it.” That, he said, was a threat to
America’s mission of standing for democratic values in the world.
But in fact, Trump
specifically condemned the neo-Nazis
in Charlottesville on multiple occasions. The entire premise of Biden’s speech
was a lie.
Biden went on to claim that Trump’s foreign policy rejects
democratic values and favors the rise of authoritarianism worldwide. He cited
Trump’s warmth to Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator
Kim Jong-un. And he claimed that Trump has undermined America’s alliances with
democracies in favor of flattery from dictators.
Apparently Biden forgot that Obama literally bowed to the Saudi
king; that he abandoned the pro-democracy protests during the Green Revolution
in Iran; that he pushed for a “reset” with Russia and abandoned our Czech and
Polish allies on missile defense; that he promised Putin he would be even more
“flexible” after he won re-election; that he tried to normalize relations with
the Cuban dictatorship without securing any democratic reforms there; that he
gave the store away to the communist dictatorship in China; and that he
abandoned Israel, a betrayal in which Biden himself played a direct and
shameful role, condemning Israel for building apartments in a Jewish neighborhood
of Jerusalem.
Trump praises dictators as a negotiating tactic; Obama praised
them because he, too, thought America was a problem.
One of the few times the Obama administration embraced
democratic change was during the Arab Spring, when “democracy” meant the rise
of the Muslim Brotherhood — which had no interest in freedom, only in power.
In 2008, the Obama campaign cast Biden as a foreign policy guru,
though he had been wrong on almost every foreign policy issue in his career. On
Thursday, he mostly ignored his own record.
Astonishingly, Biden claimed credit
for Trump’s success in crushing the so-called “Islamic State,” saying he worked
with Obama “to craft the military and diplomatic campaign that ultimately
defeated ISIS.” In fact, Biden was complicit in the rise of ISIS. He was
Obama’s point man on Iraq when the U.S. suddenly pulled out of the country,
leaving a vacuum that ISIS filled. He did not object when Obama called the
terror group “junior varsity.”
Biden offered nothing new in terms
of solutions to current foreign policy challenges. He claimed that the Iran
nuclear deal had been a success — on the very day Iran was reportedto have been
cheating all along. He said the U.S. should re-enter the deal once Iran did,
offering no idea how to ensure that it did so. On North Korea, Biden promised
he would “empower our negotiators,” whatever that means.
He said that he would get “tough”
with China, which Trump is already doing (and which Biden previously suggested he
would not do). And
on immigration, he ridiculed the very idea
of borders — literally: “I respect no borders.”
And this is the best Democrats have on foreign
policy.
Joel B. Pollak
is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a
winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the
co-author of How
Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from
Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Turkey launches US-backed offensive targeting Kurdish forces in Syria
After Washington on
Sunday withdrew its protection of Kurdish nationalist militias who previously
had been the main NATO proxy force in the Syrian war, Turkish forces launched
their attack across the Turkish-Syrian border at the Kurdish forces yesterday.
In the afternoon, air raids and artillery bombardments hit cities and military
and civilian targets along approximately 100 kilometers of the border,
stretching from Tal Abyad to Ras al-Ain. Early this morning, the Turkish
Defense Ministry announced it had hit 181 targets in the first day of its
invasion of northern Syria.
Reports of civilian
casualties and damage to civilian installations mounted as Turkish warplanes
and heavy shelling hit military installations, cities and the surroundings of
the strategic Bouzra dam, which provides water to hundreds of thousands of
people in northern Syria. Two civilians were killed, and two others injured in
a Turkish airstrike on the village of Misharrafa, west of Ras al-Ain. There was
also heavy damage to civilian homes in the village of Sikarkah, in the Qamishli
area.
CNN journalists on the
ground reported scenes of terror as civilians tried to escape Turkish shelling:
“Chaotic scenes are unfolding now, with roads choked with fleeing families,
motorcycles piled with five to six people, mattresses strapped to cars. Smoke
can be seen rising from at least one area, which appears to be on fire. People
don’t know where they will go, where they will sleep tonight, or what they can
expect from this Turkish operation.”
The Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF) militia, which had worked closely with US and European
special forces until this weekend, pledged to “clash against the Turks to stop
them from crossing the border” and “use all our possibilities against Turkish
aggression.” The SDF reportedly is calling on its forces from across the region
of northeastern Syria that it holds to march rapidly on the Turkish-Syrian
border to try to repel the Turkish invasion.
Late last night,
however, the Turkish Defense Ministry confirmed that its ground forces had
invaded regions of Syria held by the SDF after the initial artillery barrages.
It tweeted, “The Turkish Armed Forces and the Syrian National Army [a
collection of Turkish-backed Syrian militias] have launched the land operation
into the east of the Euphrates river as part of the Operation Peace Spring.”
The principal
responsibility for the bloody onslaught mounted by Turkey lies with Washington
and its European imperialist allies, who ever since the 1991 Gulf War against
Iraq have waged decades of war in the Middle East, including the proxy war for
regime change in Syria launched in 2011.
Trump, who
double-crossed NATO’s Kurdish proxies by giving the green light to Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the attack, bears direct responsibility for
its consequences. However, the entire political establishment in the United
States and in Europe is directly implicated in the bloody attack set into
motion by Trump’s Sunday phone call to Erdoğan, in which he withdrew guarantees
of protection to the Kurdish militias. Attempts by the European and American
ruling elites to distance themselves from this invasion reek of hypocrisy.
Statements rained in
from across Europe yesterday criticizing the Turkish offensive. After British
Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Trump, Downing Street issued a statement
declaring Britain’s “serious concern at Turkey’s invasion of northeast Syria
and the risk of humanitarian catastrophe in the region.” NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg, who is traveling to Turkey to speak to Erdoğan, called on
Turkey to “act with restraint.”
Perhaps the most
repulsive statement came from French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
Though he has played a central role in the French state’s extrajudicial
targeted assassination program and is close to Egypt’s bloodstained dictator
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Le Drian claimed to be morally outraged by the
Turkish army’s bloodshed. “I condemn the unilateral operation launched by
Turkey in Syria,” he tweeted, adding that it threatened the “security and humanitarian
efforts” of the NATO powers against terrorist groups in Syria.
French European Affairs
Minister Amélie de Montchalin added last night that Germany, Britain and France
were preparing a joint statement “that will be extremely clear on the fact that
we condemn very strongly and firmly what has been reported.” They are also
calling for a joint, closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council.
These statements reek
of hypocrisy. Not only does the NATO powers’ eight-year proxy war in Syria have
nothing to do with “humanitarian efforts,” but they have no need to rely on
“what has been reported” when formulating their policy on the Turkish attack.
This is because they were working closely with the Turkish government as it
launched its bloody offensive against the NATO powers’ Kurdish “allies” in
Syria.
Yesterday afternoon in
Turkey, envoys of the United States, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, Italy,
NATO, and the UN went to the Turkish Foreign Ministry for briefings on the
upcoming attack.
The offensive then
began at 4 p.m. local time, as Erdoğan announced the attack on Twitter. He
tweeted: “Our Turkish Armed Forces with Syrian National Army has started
Operation Peace Spring against the PKK/YPG and Daesh terrorist organizations,
in northern Syria. Our aim is to wipe out the terror corridor, trying to be
implemented in our southern border, and bring peace and security to the region.
… We will protect the territorial integrity of Syria and save the region’s
people from the claws of terror.”
NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg, who is arriving today in Turkey for talks with Erdoğan from
Italy where he met with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, endorsed the invasion.
Claiming that Turkey has “legitimate security concerns” about Syria, he said:
“I am ensured that any action it may take in northern Syria is proportionate
and measured.”
Amid a growing outcry
against the Turkish invasion of Syria, as calls spread internationally for
protests outside Turkish consulates, top US officials backtracked, distancing
themselves from the offensive. After Trump called the attack a “bad idea,” US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied US responsibility for the Turkish attack.
“The United States didn’t give Turkey a green light” for the offensive, he
lied. At the same time, Pompeo echoed Stoltenberg’s claim that Ankara has a
“legitimate security concern” to justify bombing the Kurds.
Trump’s decision to
abandon US security guarantees to the Syrian Kurdish militias and effectively
green-light a Turkish invasion of Syria is proving to have catastrophic
consequences. But it is the final product of decades of wars waged by
successive US governments, including when Washington was ruled by Trump’s
Democratic critics, and their European imperialist allies. The 1991 Gulf War in
Iraq and the 2001 NATO invasion of Afghanistan began decades of Middle East
wars that have claimed millions of lives, turned tens of millions into
refugees, and devastated entire societies.
The Democratic Obama
administration in Washington launched the Syrian war in 2011 with the support
of Berlin, London, Paris and the other European imperialist powers. Initially
they relied on Al Qaeda-linked militias carrying out car bombings and attacks as
the spearhead of their war against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. It was
only when these Islamist militias were defeated, and the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS) militia turned on the US puppet regime in Iraq in 2014, that
Washington turned to Kurdish-led militias as its principal proxy force in
Syria.
The Kurdish bourgeois
nationalists betrayed the Kurdish people, by subordinating their struggle for
democratic rights to the maneuvers of US imperialism to dominate the Middle
East.
While the US and
European media hailed the SDF as a democratic ally of the NATO powers, the SDF
aligned itself on the war policy of the NATO powers—including by jailing 11,000
people in the territory they controlled, on the pretext that they were
irredeemable ISIS fighters. Yesterday, SDF officials announced that the forces
they had assigned to imprison ISIS personnel had abandoned these duties to
instead redeploy to fight the Turkish invasion.
Only a few years after
the Kurdish nationalists emerged as the main US proxy force in Syria,
Washington has sacrificed it to the latest zigzag in its Middle East policy,
tacking closer to the Turkish government—which violently opposes Kurdish
nationalism both in Syria and Turkey itself.
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