In Mafia terms, it’s called “making an offer that can’t be refused”. The “offer” is not one of free choice between options that may benefit the object party. In reality, it is about setting up a scenario of duress, under which the object party is coerced to capitulate to detrimental terms of extreme prejudice determined cynically by the other party.

This is the scenario that Washington and its NATO allies are contriving for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad…

The so-called international peace conference that may take place in the coming weeks, at the behest of Washington and Moscow, is ostensibly aimed at finding a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria that is now in its third year and which has resulted in up to 80,000 deaths. At least half of these deaths are believed to be civilian.

Russian officials have confirmed that the Syrian government is willing to participate, in principle, in the conference with factions of the Syrian “opposition” – provided, says Damascus, that the latter participants do not have “blood on their hands”.

That criterion may yet turn out to make the forthcoming conference a non-runner since the main opposition group – the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) – is entwined with a host of mercenary forces on the ground that are drenched in blood from a relentless campaign of terrorism and sabotage. 

However, it is not even clear if the fractious and mainly exile-based SNC has any authority over the motley crew of militant groups – more than 75 per cent of whom are foreign self-styled jihadi extremists that emanate from 30 or more Arab and other countries, according to United Nations reports. 

Chief among these groups that comprise the so-called Free Syrian Army is the Al Nusra Front, the main fighting force, which is aligned with the Al Qaeda-affiliated network that stretches from Russia’s Caucus region, through Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Mali and Niger. 

It has to be said that Russia’s intentions for a negotiated peace settlement seem to be honourable – and based on the principle of arriving at some kind of internal Syrian consensus. To that end, Russia maintains the position of not setting preconditions about the political fate of the incumbent President Assad. Russia is supported in this view by Iran and China. It is not, they say, for foreign governments or their regional allies and proxies to determine the outcome of the conference and in particular the political future of Assad.

Contrast that with the position of the other broker – Washington. At a preliminary meeting in Jordan this past week, the US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted, along with NATO allies, Britain, France, Italy and Germany, as well as the Persian Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, that Assad “must go”.

Kerry told the assembled “Friends of Syria” that the US was not dictating the outcome of the planned peace conference, but then contradicted himself flatly by repeating the assertion that President Assad would not be part of any Syrian political transition. 

“Can a person who has used artillery shells and missiles and Scuds and tanks against women and children and university students – can that person possibly be judged by any reasonable person to have the credibility and legitimacy to lead that country in the future?” asked Kerry.

The veracity of these allegations against the Assad regime is more than a moot point. There is substantial evidence that the violations Kerry was attributing to Syrian government forces, such as the rocket attack on Aleppo University in January that resulted in more than 80 deaths, were in fact committed by Western-backed militants. The use of chemical weapons near Aleppo in March has also been shown recently by Russian RTR journalists to be the work of Western-backed militants, not the regime, as Western governments have been insinuating. 

But that aside, the immediate point here is that Kerry and his “Enemies of Syria” coalition are very much trying to dictate terms on the anticipated political process. That same Western intransigence was largely why the Geneva accord reached last June by the UN Security Council came unstuck – and tens of thousands more Syrian deaths followed. 

Adding to the warped framework of negotiations, the US, Britain and France are also insisting – in contrast to Russia and China – that Iran should not be permitted to take part in the process. Of course, the NATO powers can rely on their Sunni allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to endorse that stipulation. Why the Western powers and their Arab dictator friends have any more right than Iran – an ally of Syria with vital interests at stake in the conflict – is beyond their permitted rationale or discussion. 

So, the upshot is that Assad is being offered a poisoned political chalice. On one hand, he is being told to forfeit the sovereign rights of his people to have him as their leader, and by all accounts a leader with a popular mandate, to give way to a negotiation with “opposition” parties who are solely designated, funded and patronised by foreign powers. 

The SNC’s Ghassan Hitto, a Texas-based Syrian businessman, is designated by Washington, London and the former colonial power Paris as Syria’s premier-in-waiting. It is fair to say that Hitto, as with many other American-accented members of the SNC, has negligible popular support within Syria. That is, without any mandate from the Syrian population, these exiles are being foisted to negotiate the political future of Syria – a future that is extremely prejudicial in favour of Western geopolitical interests. 

On the other hand – and this is where the Mafia analogy takes hold – the Western powers are making thinly veiled threats that if Assad does not conform to the warped political framework, that is, drink from the poisoned chalice, then all hell will break lose on this country with an even greater escalation of Western-backed violence. 

“The United States is lobbying European governments to back a British-led call to amend [lift] the EU arms embargo on Syria,” reported the British Guardian this week, as Washington and its friend were gathering in Jordan. 

Up to now, Washington has at least been maintaining the fiction that it is not arming the anti-Assad militants. It has, of course, been plying the mercenaries covertly with weaponry and logistics, along with its NATO allies and the Gulf Arab dictatorships. 

Militant commander Brigadier General Salim Idriss has been pleading for Washington to begin openly supplying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles – not just the assault rifles and explosives that have come so far through the clandestine CIA/MI6 conduits of Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. 

Since last month, Washington officials have begun briefing media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, that the Obama administration is moving towards more direct military intervention in aid of the militants in Syria. “We’re clearly on an upward trajectory,” a senior US official said somewhat cryptically on 30 April. “We’ve moved over to assistance that has a direct military purpose.”

Days later, in the first week of May, US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosted a press conference at the Pentagon with his British counterpart, Philip Hammond. “Arming the rebels, that’s an option,” said Hagel, indicating an apparent reversal of White House policy of ostensibly only sending “non-lethal aid”.

And this week a US Senate committee voted in favour of Washington arming the “rebels” in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry is adding to this increasingly articulated threat. Voice of America reported from the Jordanian meeting last week: “Kerry says the Obama administration hopes President Assad ‘will understand the meaning of that’ [shift in US military policy towards Syria].”

This latent threat of greater aggression against Syria by the US, if it does not toe the political line as ordained by Washington, is not a new tactic in America’s underlying objective of regime change. 

Last month, the Iranian FARS news agency reported that Syrian envoy to Iran, Adnan Mahmoud, disclosed that as far back as March 2011 – when the conflict was kicking off in Syria – that the then US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, had starkly told the Damascus government that it faced “a choice”.  

The Syrian envoy to Iran was quoted by FARS as saying: “Of course, in the very first weeks of the conflict in Syria, the US Secretary of Defence [Robert Gates] sent a message to the Syrian government, and said we should have cut our ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran if we wanted to stop the war, and stressed that if we did so, they [the US] would provide us with whatever we want”. In other words, Washington was making Syria back then “an offer it couldn’t refuse”. Well, Syria did refuse back in early 2011 to comply with US demands to cut its strategic ties with Iran, and as time has shown Damascus has since paid a heavy price in terms of human lives and the destruction of the country.

Now again, as the American-backed “peace conference” is being dangled in front of Damascus, Washington is replaying that same cynical offer. Either, drink from this poisoned political chalice – or “we’ll send the boys around to do their worst”. 

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

This past Thursday and Friday, President Obama delivered two speeches designed to outline his new thinking on national security and counter-terrorism. While much was made in the media of the president’s statements at the National Defense University and the US Naval Academy suggesting that the most active phase of US military action overseas was coming to an end, this “new” approach is but the same old policy wrapped in new packaging. In these addresses, the president panders to the progressives, while continually expanding and solidifying the “enabling act” principle.

The president will continue and even expand drone attacks overseas because they are “less deadly” than ground invasions. He promises to be more careful in the future.

He is entertaining the introduction of “kill courts” which will meet in secret to decide who is to be executed without trial or charge. He promises these will have sufficient oversight.

He will seek a new and updated Authorization for the Use of Military Force to expand his legal authority to wage war wherever and whenever he wants. He promises it will one day be repealed.

He will continue to indefinitely detain at Guantanamo individuals who have been neither charged nor convicted of any crime, and who cannot even be tried because they were tortured and thus the evidence is tainted. He promises to “commit to a process of closing GTMO.”

The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.

The president warns of the threats of the new al-Qaeda affiliates that have sprung up in places like Iraq without explaining that it was the US invasion of Iraq that opened the door to their entry in the first place. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, just as there was little extremism in Libya before the US attack on that country in 2011.

The president claims that “unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.” However, it was the US-led attack on Libya that resulted in extremists gaining power there, with many fighters afterward spreading unrest and destruction by joining the wars against the Syrian and Malian regimes. The extremists brought to de facto power in places like Benghazi were responsible for the murder of the US ambassador, yet the president says nothing about that unintended consequence of his interventionist policies.

He calls for even more interventionism in the future, but he promises that it will be a different kind of interventionism. He wants the US to shape democratic transitions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya while actively supporting those seeking to overthrow the government in Syria.

He wants to take nation-building to a whole new level, urging that the US “help countries modernize economies, upgrade education, and encourage entrepreneurship.” He promises to battle extremism overseas by “training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists.”

What the president does not seem to understand is that we do not have the money to build schools, upgrade education, modernize economies, and encourage entrepreneurship overseas at a time when our national debt is $16 trillion. And besides, isn’t it a deeply flawed idea that the US government can achieve all of these remarkable results overseas when we know what a disaster these big government undertakings have produced at home? What we reject at home as Soviet-style central planning is fully embraced as effective foreign policy overseas. Should it really be the US government’s role to “modernize economies” or “encourage entrepreneurs” anywhere? Those are activities best left to the private sector, whether here at home or in far off lands.

President Obama’s speech is not at all what it seems. It is a call for more empire and more power to the executive branch. The president promises that “this war, like all wars, must end.” Unfortunately the war on the American taxpayer never seems to end. But end it will, as we are running out of money.

Several observers have pointed out the similarities between today’s savage attack in London, where a British soldier was reportedly beheaded by two men shouting “Allahu Akbar,” and the gruesome recent attack by US/UK-supported Free Syrian Army Commander Abu Sakkar, who cut out and devoured his Syrian Army soldier victim’s heart.

Indeed one of the eyewitnesses of today’s London attack could well have been describing Syrian rebel Commander Sakkar’s butchery a few weeks ago in Syria:

“We thought the two guys were helping him. We then saw two kitchen knives like you would find in a butchers shop, they were hacking at this poor guy literally. We thought they were trying to remove organs or something.”

Nearly identical behavior.

It is important to point out that while the US and UK increasingly condemn (and exaggerate) the role of Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian fighters on the side of the government in next-door Syria, the truth is thousands of foreign fighters, including at least hundreds from Europe and handfuls from the US, have signed up to fight with the radical Islamist insurgents in Syria.

Time Magazine reported yesterday of a young Belgian teenager who dropped his Western life and went to Syria to fight a jihad against the secular government of Bashar Assad. The story is repeated thousands of times, as foreign fighters in Syria are so significant a part of the insurgency that they overshadow domestic Syrian rebels.

The Moon of Alabama blog has helpfully assembled just a few of the press reports of foreign fighters

Strangely enough, just a couple of weeks ago the Economist published an article titled “British fighters in Syria: Will they come home to roost?”, which points out UK fears:

“British intelligence sources cite three particular worries. First, some of the British fighters may have already been inclined to attack their home country, but simply lacked expertise: they will acquire that. Second, they may be exposed to al-Qaeda’s ideology in Syria, and perhaps even talent-spotted as potential leaders. Third, the prospect of a large, ungoverned space close to Europe that could be used as a base from which to stage an attack on Britain is troubling.”

Though there is no indication the attackers had spent time in Syria, clearly these fears are all of a sudden much more relevant.

Incredibly, US Secretary of State John Kerry and British Prime Minister David Cameron appear blind to this reality. Speaking in Jordan today, Kerry condemned the violence of a handful of Hezbollah fighters in Syria while acting as if the documented evidence of the overwhelming foreign radical Islamist presence in the insurgency simply did not exist:

“The United States, I think, joins the other core nations who are supporting the opposition in condemning Hezbollah’s destructive role of all of the foreign fighters who are in the region, particularly in Syria. And active military support to the Assad regime simply exacerbates the sectarian tensions and it perpetuates – perpetuates – the regime’s campaign of terror against its own people.”

That US overt and covert support of the insurgency in Syria, including its radical and al-Qaeda affiliated elements, is a known fact. Yet Kerry with a straight face simply fails to mention it. As in the days of Bush, the Obama administration is making its own reality. But we know that eventually these US-supported Islamist radicals with Western passports will come home — and now we have a better idea of what might be in store for us when they do.

Kerry today in Jordan also drags out the old tried and true trick — see Saddam, Gaddafi, etc. — of condemning a foreign leader for killing his own citizens and using that to demonstrate that therefore the leader has lost all legitimacy and must be regime-changed:

“And finally, with respect to Assad and the future of Syria, just as a matter of practical negotiation, I’d ask anybody of common sense: Can a person who has allegedly used gas against his own people; can a person who has killed more than 70,000, upwards of 100,000 people; can a person who has used artillery shells and missiles and Scuds and tanks against women and children and university students – can that person possibly be judged by any reasonable person to have the credibility and legitimacy to lead that country in the future? I think the answer to that is obvious.”

This is particularly devious considering that any government on earth — the US certainly included — would use the force of arms if a foreign-funded and supported insurgency sought its overthrow.

But here is the really good part: Kerry in the above quote argues that a government using deadly military force on its own citizens without trial justifies foreign-sponsored “regime change” on the very day that the US government has admitted to using deadly military force on its own citizens without trial!

It is also interesting to see Kerry walking the administration back from his colleague Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s claim that the Syrian government has used WMD against its citizens — while leaving the implication squarely on the table. No mention at all of the UN findings that it was the Syrian rebels who used the prohibited weapons.

Kerry also misrepresents the Russian position on implementing last year’s Geneva agreement for a political settlement in Syria, suggesting that the Russians agree with the Obama administration that Assad must go as a precondition for any meaningful talks between government and insurgent forces scheduled for next month. Said Kerry:

“I want to thank President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov for their willingness to say that they will work in good faith, in good conscience, to try to find a way to implement Geneva 1. And I will simply remind everybody: Geneva 1 is clear; it says there must be a transition government with full executive authority with mutual consent. And it is very, very clear as a starting point that mutual consent will never be given by any member of the broad opposition of Syria for Assad to continue to run that government.”

Kerry is putting words into Putin’s and Lavrov’s mouth that are very different from what they actually said. On Monday the Russian Foreign Minister was clear that the insurgent pre-condition that Assad must depart is a non-starter. Period:

“The main thing is to ensure the consent of opposition groups to take part in the conference without any precondition. Our colleagues, including Americans together with who we put forward this initiative [to hold the conference], took the obligation to work closely with the opposition in order to make it change its approach to the immediate start of the negotiations and stop conditioning it with unrealistic things.”

Will the Russian government correct Kerry’s “mistake”?

And God help us when the European and American Islamist insurgents the US and EU sponsor in Syria come home.

As three administration-wrecking scandals – Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP phone records – continue to unfold, it will become increasingly clear that President Obama is: (a) stupid; (b) unable to control his felonious subordinates; or (c) a liar and a trimmer. And as this clarity evolves, Obama will engineer a U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria. This week Obama told the press his administration has fairly solid evidence that chemical weapons were used by Damascus against al-Qaeda and its allies. Obama also said he still wants more and better evidence that Asaad used the weapons. This long has been his standard line.

But then, before closing his remarks, Obama lapsed into his patented weeping-for-humanity mode, saying in an almost off-hand manner enough thousands of Syrians had been killed in the civil war to justify intervention by that American-killing and nation-bankrupting fiction of our bipartisan governing elite’s imagination, the “U.S.-led International Community.” In other words, our beleaguered president already is looking to distract Americans from his administration’s rampant felonies, and what better way to quiet the hounds of just retribution than by consigning U.S. soldiers and Marines to death in a useless intervention in Syria, a place where no genuine U.S. national interest is at stake. One straw in the wind: Friday’s news brought word of Obama’s talking-points-changing, intelligence-leaking lickspittle of a CIA Director, John Brennan, sneaking into Israel to “discuss Syria.”

Odds are that we are going to see the same old story: Obama will intervene militarily in Syria, get Americans worried about the safety of their soldier-children, stoke their patriotism and fierce support for the troops, and – voila – the Obama-butt-kissing media will refocus the victims of the Obama-ites’ domestic felonies on an unnecessary war in the Levant.

The saddest part of the foregoing scenario is that it probably will work. Obama artfully masks his casual willingness to get Americans killed – seen in his zeal for abortion; keeping troops in Afghanistan to die (6 more on 16 May 2013) long after conceding defeat there; and refusing to try to save soon-to-be-dead Americans in Benghazi – with a maudlin “deep concern” for people suffering abroad, in this case in Syria. Obama’s faux concern for those suffering overseas is just another indelible sign of his and his party’s absolute disdain for the needs of everyday Americans. Under Obama’s two secretaries of state – Clinton and Kerry – the United States have dispersed more than $500 million to strengthen the “Syrian Resistance”; which is to say, to strengthen al-Qaeda and its allies. Both secretaries and their master have deceitfully described the aid as “humanitarian,” but as always this funding is military in every way because it frees up the Islamists’ other funds to be spent for weapons.

With Democrats ever ready to leave Americans to fend for themselves, Obama’s diversionary campaign – obscure impeachable offenses by launching an unnecessary war – will be abetted by Senators McCain, Graham, Lieberman, and dozens of other U.S. Senators and Congressman intent on war with Syria. Obama will use these useful idiots to convince the American people of three bipartisan lies: that (a) genuine U.S. interests are at risk in Syria; (b) Americans “owe” the Syrian people U.S. dollars and blood to stop their suffering in a war they started; and that (c) Americans “must” expend their dollars and kids to staunch the anarchy spreading in the Levant in order to protect our “loyal and indispensable ally Israel.” Most of the media – left and right – will concur in and support this self-defeating nonsense and, once again, we will all go off intervening in a Muslim country where we have nothing at risk, thereby prolonging our already losing war with Islam and motivating more U.S. Muslims to stage attacks like April’s in Boston.

Will Americans ever see the plain fact that they are being played for fools? If every Syrian dies tomorrow – along with every Palestinian, Israeli, Saudi, etc. – it matters not a lick to the way we live and conduct ourselves in North America. Is it too bad and very sad that they die? You bet, but it is neither our fault they are fighting nor our responsibility to stop their wars; say a prayer for them, but know their deaths are of their own making and no skin of an American’s nose.

And if some self-righteous Americans want to help these folks, let them open their individual wallets and donate; or let them light candles, pile up bouquets, weep, hold hands, and sing for peace; or, better yet, let them renounce their U.S. citizenship and go abroad to fight alongside those in the countries they love better than their own. In fact, it seems only right that some leaders of the anti-U.S., pro-Israel movement – perhaps people like Limbaugh, Lieberman, Levin, McCain, Hannity, and Graham – set the example for others of their ilk. These fearsome tough guys could buy airline tickets to the Levant; turn in their U.S. passport and acquire – at long last – the passport from their country of first allegiance (if they do not have it already); and then go off to the war they have tried so hard to start from their out-of-harm’s-way safety in North America. I would like to be helpful here and would willingly contribute to a fund to buy Rush, Joe, Mark, John, Sean, Lindsey and all others of their interventionist, anti-U.S., and Israel-First orientation an AK-47 and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Each of these folks could claim their arms as soon as they renounce their citizenship and turn in their U.S. passport. America would be far better off without them.

Sound harsh? Well, think for a moment of the cruel and cynical madness of a situation that finds Americans in New Jersey and New York still flat on their backs from Hurricane Sandy while both U.S. political parties are dumping a half-billion dollars into the hands of al-Qaeda-ism in Syria. And think of the billions going to Turkey, Egypt, and Israel, while America’s infrastructure continues to rot; millions of our kids are undernourished; our borders remain undefended; and thousands of wounded and crippled U.S. military veterans must depend on public charity to assist their recovery. And think of all the money and military lives we have and will waste making Muslim enemies overseas by intervening at bayonet point to promote education, women’s rights, irreligion, and the spread of secular democracy.

It seems likely that today’s preeminent Democratic and Republican foreign-policy motto –“Give and pander to foreigners and to hell with the real interests and welfare of America and Americans” – is not one the Founders had in mind when they created America. Indeed, if the Founders could hear it now, they would have yet another reason to thank Providence for their decision to include the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair willfully and gleefully disseminated and embellished the lies of President Bush to propagandize the public and pave way for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of its secular dictator, Saddam Hussein. In the process Blair invented plenty of lies of his own. The ongoing UK Chilcot Inquiry investigation of the dodgy events leading up to the attack on Iraq continues to produce damning information about Blair, including that he most surely knew at the time that he was spreading lies about Iraq’s WMD.

Because of Bush and Blair‘s lies, hundreds of thousands have died.

But feeding the war machine is always profitable for those who deal in death, and Blair is no exception. In fact, not only is Blair not ashamed of the carnage that his lies produced, he has actually directly personally profited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from his miserable deeds. According to the above link:

“The former Prime Minister of the UK is earning an estimated 5 million (British Pounds) per year from private business ventures connected to his role in the illegal wars in the Middle East — particularly the invasion and conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Now we hear that in the poorest country in Europe, Albania, the successor party to that of communist dictator Enver Hoxha, the Socialist Party of Albania, has hired Tony Blair to tell some more lies to Europe about how suited it is to govern Albania and bring it into the European Union. The Albanian Socialists are expected to pay Blair several million British pounds as a “consultant.”

The Albanian Socialist Party was responsible for a violent coup against the democratically-elected government of Sali Berisha in 1996 which left thousands dead, including leading politicians of Berisha’s party. The party is now headed by Edi Rama, a politician with deep familial ties to the communist nomenklatura, who was investigated for misappropriation of funds while serving as mayor of Albania’s capitol city, Tirana.

In a glowing profile in the New Yorker magazine in 2005, Rama is praised for shutting down the small businessmen who sprang up spontaneously when communism fell, to provide goods and services where before there had been — literally — nothing to buy. He is also praised for attracting all manner of foreign funding to assist him in wiping out the nascent domestic capitalist entrepreneur to make way for the big European and US corporations to snap up at “special” prices everything left in the wake. The New Yorker writes disdainfully of the “post-communist freedom feeding frenzy” and approvingly of Rama’s West-funded move against it:

“Within a few years, Rama had managed to clear the choked, riverine city center of two thousand illegal kiosks and bars and cafes and shops and whorehouses and sleeping barracks and traffickers’ storeroom ‘motels’ — the detritus of a decade of post-Communist freedom frenzy on city property…He cajoled the money for this transformation out of the World Bank and the European Union and the United Nations Development Program and George Soros and the scores of foundations and aid agencies and N.G.O.s that had set up shop in Albania in the nineties. And he cajoled the work out of local contractors: anybody who wanted to build anything in the capital had to ‘contribute.'”

This is, sadly, quite often the story of the post-communist pseudo-capitalist development. A collusion between the best connected of the former communist elite and their offspring with government-connected Western large corporations. In many cases the small businessman was a former victim of the profoundly anti-market communist state and was bewildered when the privileged offspring of the former elites transformed their prior status to new, unheard of levels of prosperity by teaming up with eager Western partners. This is the world from which sprang the Edi Ramas of the former East. The other political parties in Albania have unfortunately seen the benefit of such arrangements and made their own deals.

So where does Rama’s current opposition party in the poorest country in Europe — where the average gross salary is $332 per month — come up with the millions of dollars with which it will pay Tony Blair for his consulting work? We likely know the answer. There are still many beautiful beaches on Albania’s Mediterranean coast to be developed by the right companies…

TIME magazine reports on a gruesome video of a member of the armed rebel forces fighting to overthrow the Syrian government:

In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand. With his right hand he moves what appears to be the dead man’s heart onto a flat piece of wood or metal lying across the body. With his left hand he pulls what appears to be a lung across the open cavity in the man’s chest. According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body. The man believed to be Abu Sakkar then works his knife through the flesh of the dead man’s torso before he stands to face the camera, holding an organ in each hand. “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.

Videos like this prompt a troubling question: How do countries who want to support Syria’s rebels make sure they’re not unintentionally aiding rebels who might commit war crimes? Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are already providing the rebel forces with military aid, and the U.S. is helping with nonmilitary aid. There is an ongoing debate in Washington about whether the U.S. government should provide further aid to the rebels, possibly including weapons. Eating an enemy’s liver may be an extreme example of what appears to be a rebel atrocity, but there is enough documented evidence of extrajudicial killings, torture and desecration on the part of the rebels that it would be near impossible to know for certain who, exactly, are the “good” guys, says Peter Bouckaert, director of emergencies for the New York–based group Human Rights Watch. “In this context, where different rebel groups are fighting alongside each other, and sharing weapons, it’s difficult to control where the weapons end up. It is very likely that some of the weapons will end up in the hands of the likes of Abu Sakkar.”

There are no good options for the international community. Western intervention on behalf of the rebels could exacerbate sectarian tensions.

Western intervention on behalf of the rebels “could” exacerbate sectarian tensions? As though the U.S. hasn’t already intervened on their behalf, including by coordinating the flow of arms to the rebels, amongst whose top fighters include Islamic extremists such as the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra group?

I’ve repeatedly commented on the media’s propaganda narrative whereby these facts are swept down the memory hole. See my last post on the subject, which includes links to previous ones.

The New York Times offers yet another example. Reporting on the same video and other atrocities committed by the rebel forces, it states:

That lurid violence has fueled pessimism about international efforts to end the fighting. As the United States and Russia work to organize peace talks next month between Mr. Assad and his opponents, the ever more extreme carnage makes reconciliation seem more remote.

So the U.S. is working “to end the fighting”. That is all you need to know. No one single mention of how the U.S. has been in fact working to escalate the fighting by backing the armed rebels to implement its policy of regime change, thereby contributing to “the ever more extreme carnage” that “makes reconciliation seem more remote.”

For another example, there’s this op-ed in the Times asking “Can Obama Save Turkey from a Syrian Quagmire?” and urging the administration to do so because “Only Washington can change the equation”, which it should do “by arming the rebels or enforcing a no-fly zone” so as to “tilt the balance of power in favor of the rebels”. Perhaps if the U.S. was really interested in saving Turkey from a Syrian quagmire, it wouldn’t have joined Turkey in helping to create that quagmire in the first place.

Another recent Times article comments on some of the consequences of the U.S. policy of backing armed rebels to overthrow the Assad regime:

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

After more than two years of conflict, Syria is breaking up. A constellation of armed groups battling to advance their own agendas are effectively creating the outlines of separate armed fiefs. As the war expands in scope and brutality, its biggest casualty appears to be the integrity of the Syrian state.

On Thursday, President Obama met in Washington with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and once again pressed the idea of a top-down diplomatic solution. That approach depends on the rebels and the government agreeing to meet at a peace conference that was announced last week by the United States and Russia.

Once again, we see that the narrative is how the lack of U.S. intervention has resulted in Syria falling apart, making its most recent effort to seek a peaceful solution all the more urgent. Syria is Humpty-Dumpty:

Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

All the King’s men have their work cut out for them. Further down the page, one reads:

Although the Obama administration and its allies share the rebels’ goal of removing Mr. Assad from power, they have little else in common with the many rebel brigades that define their struggle in Islamic terms and seek to replace Mr. Assad with an Islamic state. Among them is Jabhet al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, the local branch of Al Qaeda, which the United States has blacklisted as a terrorist group.

No mention of the fact that most of the arms directed by the CIA to the rebels have ended up in the hands of such Islamic extremists (again, see my last post on the subject), which is undoubtedly what prompted the U.S. to blacklist al-Nusra in the first place, in order to be able on one hand to paint the public picture that it opposes such forces while the other hand it continues to back the same rebel forces whose ranks include this al-Qaeda affiliate.

And while we are supposed to believe that the only role of the U.S. in Syria is that of the peacemaker, that villain Bashar al-Assad is showing his true colors by backing away from any willingness to negotiate with the armed opposition, according to another Times article. The lede tells us how Assad “appeared to dismiss the possibility of serious progress arising from any peace talks”. Further down we read what Assad actually said:

“We do not believe that many Western countries really want a solution in Syria,” Mr. Assad told Argentina’s Clarín newspaper in an interview published online on Saturday, blaming those countries for supporting “terrorists” fighting his government.

No mention, naturally, of the fact that the U.S. has indeed been supporting Assad’s armed opposition, whose ranks include an al-Qaeda affiliate even the U.S. government has labeled as a group of “terrorists”. Returning to Assad’s actual remarks:

“We support and applaud the efforts, but we must be realistic,” he said, referring to efforts by the United States and Russia to broker talks they hope will be held in June. “There cannot be a unilateral solution in Syria; two parties are needed at least.”

…“We are willing to talk to anyone who wants to talk, without exceptions,” he said. “But that does not include terrorists; no state talks to terrorists. When they put down their arms and join the dialogue, then we will have no objections. Believing that a political conference will stop terrorism on the ground is unreal.”

“We, the government, and me, personally, will meet, without exceptions, with Syrian opposition groups inside and outside” the country, he said. “The president of the country has said that we will try with everyone that is against us politically. And even those who use arms — we must try with them.”

So while the Times would have readers believe that Assad—unlike the greatest of peacemakers, the U.S.—is uninterested in peace talks, what he actually suggested was that his government is interested in talking to the armed opposition, but not as long as they are engaging in acts of terrorism, and that the idea of a U.S.-led peace effort would be beneficial while the U.S. at the same time backs the very same armed groups seeking to overthrow him should be met with skepticism.

He would seem to make a valid point.

The armed drone is being heralded as the next generation of American military technology. It can fly overheard with its unblinking eye, almost invisible to its targets below. Without warning, its missiles will strike, bringing certain death and destruction on the ground. All the while, the military pilot, sitting in a cushioned recliner in an air-conditioned room halfway across the world, is immune from the violence wrought from his or her single keystroke.

While the debate about drones in this country swirls around the precision of the weapon, the sometimes faulty intelligence behind its unleashing of a missile, the ability to keep American boots off the ground, or the legality of the strikes, few take into consideration the morality of the weapon and the damaging effects of its use on both the people targeted and the individuals operating it. The ripples of the drone strikes are felt far beyond those killed or wounded in the actual strike.

The drone is destabilizing the small tribal communities of the Pukhtun, Somali, and Yemeni with their ancient codes of honor, making it difficult to implement any long-term peace initiatives in the volatile regions already being pounded by their own militaries. Too many stories have filtered into the media of innocent men, women, and children being killed.

People have fled their families and their homes due to the constant violence and are forced to live as destitute and vulnerable refugees in the slums of larger cities. They are lost without the protection of clan and code. The drone is also feeding into a growing anti-Americanism, becoming a deadly symbol of the United States, and fueling the recruitment of future terrorists.

At one stroke, the drone has destroyed any positive image of the United States in the countries over which it operates. It has contributed to the destruction of the tribal codes of honor, such as Pukhtunwali among the Pukhtun tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And this immorality and destructive nature reflects back on those who use it, harming the warrior ethic of the American military so critical to battlefield bonding among soldiers in combat.

The warrior ethos may be largely a myth but, like most myths, it protects something very important: the psychology of killing in the name of the state. That killing becomes nothing less than murder when the soldier doing it is utterly invulnerable. Most US citizens, so long divorced from any responsibility to take up arms and fight and kill, do not understand this. Soldiers – good ones – do. Such understanding was behind the recent cancellation by Secretary of Defense Hagel of the valor award for drone operators.

Moreover, remote-controlled killing is a dishonorable way of fighting battle, not simply because it often results in the deaths of women and children and removes the combatants from face-to-face combat. It is making war more like a video game and giving technicians the dissociated power of life and death for the figures on the screen before them. It is making war into murder.

Read the rest of the article here.

A number of articles about the Boston terrorist attack that I have read recently reminded me that what is either kept out of the media or otherwise hidden is often more important than what actually appears. One was a feature article entitled “Ron Paul Slams Boston Police. Has he Gone too Far?” by Peter Grier of the normally sensible Christian Science Monitor. The remainder were also related to the Boston Marathon, a discussion in various places in the media of the possibility that the United States will take steps to make it easier for the intelligence services and law enforcement to read emails and social media entries in “real time” to be able to forestall home grown terrorists. Making such access easier means eliminating those few restrictions that currently exist to protect personal privacy and prevent unlawful searches.

I think it is fair to say that the mainstream media, frequently owned by large corporations, operates in its own bubble on a consensus basis when it reports the news. Further, each media outlet has a system of political monitors who control what is allowed to appear and who determine what is unacceptable, frequently on a highly subjective basis. If a journalist thinks a story is worth reporting he still has to run the gamut of the politics involved in getting something in print or on television. While such politicking exists even in the alternative media, it is much more in evidence for the newspapers and broadcasts that are dependent on sponsors to turn a profit as they are always conscious of the need not to offend anyone. Powerful sponsors mean that stories that might be viewed as objectionable rarely make the cut. That means that independent analysis of news stories is pretty much confined to internet outlets that tend to live and die based on meager diet of voluntary contributions, which also means that the only independent voices tend to be resource poor and unable to do the type of investigative reporting that would be required to have a story break through and receive national attention.

Since most Americans get their news – what there is of it – from the mainstream, it means that citizens are poorly informed on most issues unless they make an independent effort to discover the story behind the story. Which brings us to media reporting on Ron Paul. Paul accused the government of illegally engaging in a military style occupation of an American city in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. Searches were conducted without warrants, armored vehicles patrolled streets emptied in response to a lockdown mandated by the civil authorities, and drones patrolled the skies. And to top it all, the tactics did not catch the fugitive suspects, one of whom was killed in a shoot-out following a carjacking, while the younger brother, hiding in a boat located outside the lockdown zone, was discovered by an alert citizen. The article notes that “…Paul’s contrarian take perhaps should not be surprising,” before lambasting him for his libertarian leanings. Grier observes, somewhat irrelevantly, that the “Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity has an advisory board that contains a ‘bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet,’ according to Daily Beast writer James Kirchik,” but does not note that Kirchik is a leading neocon who is associated with Bill Kristol’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

To his credit, Grier does also quote Glenn Greenwald, who told Bill Moyers on PBS that “The way in which Americans now relate to their government, the way in which they get nationalistic pride is through the assertion of this massive military or police force, and very few other things produce that kind of pride.” But he does not really accept that Paul is, of course, right. The lockdown of Boston, the searches, and the militarization of what was essentially a response to a criminal act were all completely illegal and extralegal plus unconstitutional. The average reader, however, would note the “Has he gone too far?” in the headline and would, without reading much further, begin to mutter about the “crazy uncle” being at it again. The article is designed to give the impression that anyone who questions a massive police and military response to a criminal act is somehow off center and can safely be ignored, whereas the contrary is true and every American should be questioning the outsized response to the bombing.

The bombing spawned new demands to curtail civil liberties to enable the police and intelligence agencies to do their job more effectively. No matter that the U.S. authorities already had warnings that they did not heed or properly disseminate, a repeat of the mistakes of 2001 and a clear indication that the trillions of dollars spent on security since 9/11 has been a waste of money. The FBI is instead suggesting that just a bit more intrusion into private communications is the real problem and are basing their argument at least in part on the Tsarnaev brothers’ use of Twitter and YouTube. One police source notes how Boston has shifted the ground on guilt and innocence, saying that comments on social media will be prima facie evidence of criminal intent, “If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a real threat, prove it,” adding unintentionally though somewhat ironically, “This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It’s just the way it is.”

The head of the Bureau Robert Mueller is asking for still more resources and relaxed legal guidelines to enable the authorities to monitor social networks and other internet traffic in real time. He calls it the Next Generation Cyber Initiative. The FBI’s request for added powers is being supported by the usual suspects in congress and reportedly also by the “change we can believe in” Obama Administration. If you are thinking that there is a secondary agenda in all the posturing, which is to enable and empower the federal government to finally move to its plan for “total information awareness” on every citizen and legal resident, a program initially floated by the Pentagon back in 2002, you would certainly be correct. But no one in the government is admitting that.

Mueller’s complaint is that some social media providers actually have impediments built into their operating systems to prevent snooping. That is why they incorporate passwords and software that impedes hacking. Most users of the systems would refer to it as “privacy.” The federal government wants to have the power to compel the providers – which would include Google and Facebook – to incorporate new features referred to as backdoor technologies that will enable the FBI and NSA to snoop at will, which is already a power they have over phone systems based on the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994. If they companies do not comply, they can be subject to fines that will start at $25,000 per day. Foreign based communications providers will also be subject to the same rules, opening the door for countries like Iran, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia to exercise reciprocity against U.S. companies and turning internet access into a political football.

Now one might well think that in a constitutional republic like the United States there would be judicial hurdles in place to inhibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from obtaining private information in what many might consider illegal searches. But consider for a moment what the government already can do. It was recently revealed that it can and does record and store all digital communications in the United States. That means all phone calls, emails, and online chats, totaling 1.7 billion items per day adding to a data base of more than 20 trillion items relating to U.S. citizens. A considerable portion of that haul is then screened by computer for words or expressions that might denote terrorist or criminal activity, but most of it just goes into a computer data bank for possible later use.

The sole judicial filter on FBI surveillance is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISC, which reviewed 1,856 requests from the government in 2012 and approved every one. The court is a board of judges which only hears the government side of the argument as the target of the surveillance has no idea that he is being scrutinized. The government case is inevitably framed around national security. And the FBI also has considerable latitude to investigate outside the purview of the FISC. It uses administratively issued National Security Letters (NSLs), a feature of the Patriot Act, to demand information from companies and public institutions. More than 15,000 NSLs were issued last year on more than 6,000 American citizens. An estimated 25,000 more NSLs were issued on non-U.S. persons. The NSLs require no judicial review and they do not allow the source of the information to reveal the FBI approach to the person or group being targeted. This latter feature of the NSL is currently being challenged in court, with one judge ruling the practice unconstitutional.

So the fallout from Boston has been more of the same lashing out that we saw post 9/11. People like Ron Paul who decry the breakdown in the constitution and rule of law are lambasted for being out of touch and “going too far” while the “liberal” Obama Administration prepares to give the FBI sweeping new powers. Unfortunately power is a zero sum game. If you take away rights and liberties they are not safe somewhere waiting to be restored, they are gone forever and have been transferred to someone else. If we establish the principle that any criminal act inflicting multiple casualties can be defined as terrorism and be treated by the imposition of martial law we will quickly lose constitutionally guaranteed access to some aspects of civilian rule of law. If we decide that no conversation or message, even if it originates in one’s home, is truly private then we will have lost a large measure of our personal liberty. And it can even get worse. There is speculation that the Obama Administration will use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a model for another secret federal court that can decide on the use of drones to assassinate American citizens. As FISC rules 100% in favor of the government, we can only expect rubberstamp kill lists as part of our future.

Reprinted by permission of Antiwar.com.

What really drives American foreign policy…is a post-Cold War determination on the part of the United States to dominate the Middle East, to play a hegemonic role in the Middle East,  to micromanage political outcomes in key Middle Eastern states so that those states’ strategic orientation is subordinated to U.S. foreign policy preferences and the Middle East has a regional order which is essentially run by the United States.

When you look at the situation in Syria, it’s obvious that many innocent people have been killed, and that is a profound tragedy.  But I think that the narrative in the West — that this was basically a peaceful protest by Syrians that was responded to brutally, and these people took all of this violence until a year later, eighteen months later, they had to start responding violently — I don’t think that’s really the way things played out. Outside powers — the Saudis, others — were pouring money and weapons into Syria from a very early point.

The agenda was not to bring democracy to Syrians.  I don’t think the Saudis care about that; frankly, I don’t think the United States cares all that much about that.  The agenda was to topple Assad as a way of hurting Iran’s regional position.  70,000 dead Syrians later, this project has not worked. Now countries like the United States face a choice.  They can either accept that this project of toppling Assad to hurt Iran has failed, and they can get serious about a diplomatic process that might produce a political settlement and end violence.  Or if they keep doing this, if they keep supporting the opposition, we’re going to be looking at literally years of continued violence, and who knows how many more tens of thousands of dead Syrians.

That is the choice. For as long as opposition groups have outside supporters like the Saudis, like the United States, who are in a sense egging them on, they have absolutely no incentive to face political reality and enter some kind of negotiating process…They don’t have an interest in doing that because there are outsiders who will help them keep the violence rolling along indefinitely.

As far as the United States doing what ‘was necessary’ early on, there is this small matter of sovereignty, there’s this small matter of international law that says you only get to use force when the Security Council authorizes it or under a fairly narrow interpretation of self-defense in the UN Charter.  The United States has no right—it may have a hegemonic prerogative (or think it does), but it has no right—to impose no-fly zones over sovereign states to get rid of a leader that it doesn’t like…

Find one case in which the United States applied military force, ostensibly for the protection of civilian populations, in which part of its agenda was not also regime change in that country.  If you look at the Balkans, if you look at Iraq, if you look at what we did in Libya, if you look at what we say we want to do in Syria—in every one of those cases, the argument for humanitarian intervention is inextricably bound up with the argument for coercive regime change.  Frankly, I think Russia and China are eminently justified in saying that they’re not going to enable that.

Read the entire piece here.

Congressional hearings, White House damage control, endless op-eds, accusations, and defensive denials. Controversy over the events in Benghazi last September took center stage in Washington and elsewhere last week. However, the whole discussion is again more of a sideshow. Each side seeks to score political points instead of asking the real questions about the attack on the US facility, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans smell a political opportunity over evidence that the Administration heavily edited initial intelligence community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that might reflect badly on the president or the State Department.

Are we are supposed to be shocked by such behavior? Are we supposed to forget that this kind of whitewashing of facts is standard operating procedure when it comes to the US government?

Democrats in Congress have offered the even less convincing explanation for Benghazi, that somehow the attack occurred due to Republican sponsored cuts in the security budget at facilities overseas. With a one trillion dollar military budget, it is hard to take this seriously.

It appears that the Administration scrubbed initial intelligence reports of references to extremist Islamist involvement in the attacks, preferring to craft a lie that the demonstrations were a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video that developed into a full-out attack on the US outpost.

Who can blame the administration for wanting to shift the focus? The Islamic radicals who attacked Benghazi were the same people let loose by the US-led attack on Libya. They were the rebels on whose behalf the US overthrew the Libyan government. Ambassador Stevens was slain by the same Islamic radicals he personally assisted just over one year earlier.

But the Republicans in Congress also want to shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place, Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.

Neither side wants to talk about the real lesson of Benghazi: interventionism always carries with it unintended consequences. The US attack on Libya led to the unleashing of Islamist radicals in Libya. These radicals have destroyed the country, murdered thousands, and killed the US ambassador. Some of these then turned their attention to Mali which required another intervention by the US and France.

Previously secure weapons in Libya flooded the region after the US attack, with many of them going to Islamist radicals who make up the majority of those fighting to overthrow the government in Syria. The US government has intervened in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the same rebels it assisted in the Libya conflict, likely helping with the weapons transfers. With word out that these rebels are mostly affiliated with al Qaeda, the US is now intervening to persuade some factions of the Syrian rebels to kill other factions before completing the task of ousting the Syrian government. It is the dizzying cycle of interventionism.

The real lesson of Benghazi will not be learned because neither Republicans nor Democrats want to hear it. But it is our interventionist foreign policy and its unintended consequences that have created these problems, including the attack and murder of Ambassador Stevens. The disputed talking points and White House whitewashing are just a sideshow.

The controversy over Iran’s nuclear activities has at least as much to do with the future of international order as it does with nonproliferation.  For this reason, all of the BRICS have much at stake in how the Iranian nuclear issue is handled. 

Conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is driven by two different approaches to interpreting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); these approaches, in turn, are rooted in different conceptions of international order.  Which interpretation of the NPT ultimately prevails on the Iranian nuclear issue will go a long way to determine whether a rules-based view of international order gains ascendancy over a policy-oriented approach in which the goals of international policy are defined mainly by America and its partners.  And that will go a long way to determine whether rising non-Western states emerge as true power centers in a multipolar world, or whether they continue, in important ways, to be subordinated to hegemonic preferences of the West—and especially the United States. 

The NPT is appropriately understood as a set of three bargains among signatories:  non-weapons states commit not to obtain nuclear weapons; countries recognized as weapons states (America, Russia, Britain, France, and China) commit to nuclear disarmament; and all parties agree that signatories have an “inalienable right” to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.  One approach to interpreting the NPT gives these bargains equal standing; the other holds that the goal of nonproliferation trumps the other two.    

There have long been strains between weapons states and non-weapons states over nuclear powers’ poor compliance with their commitment to disarm.  Today, though, disputes about NPT interpretation are particularly acute over perceived tensions between blocking nuclear proliferation and enabling peaceful use of nuclear technology.  This is especially so for fuel cycle technology, the ultimate “dual use” capability—for the same material that fuels power, medical, and research reactors can, at higher levels of fissile isotope concentration, be used in nuclear bombs.  The dispute is engaged most immediately over whether Iran, as a non-weapons party to the NPT, has a right to enrich uranium under international safeguards. 

For those holding that the NPT’s three bargains have equal standing, Tehran’s right to enrich is clear—from the NPT itself, its negotiating history, and decades of state practice, with at least a dozen states having developed safeguarded fuel cycle infrastructures potentially able to support a weapons program.  On this basis, the diplomatic solution is also clear:  Western recognition of Iran’s nuclear rights in return for greater transparency through more intrusive verification and monitoring. 

Those recognizing Iran’s nuclear rights take what international lawyers call a “positivist” view of global order, whereby the rules of international relations are created through the consent of independent sovereign states and are to be interpreted narrowly.  Such a rules-based approach is strongly favored by non-Western states, including BRICS—for it is the only way international rules might constrain established powers as well as rising powers and the less powerful.    

Those who believe nonproliferation trumps the NPT’s other goals claim that there is no treaty-based “right” to enrich, and that weapons states and others with nuclear industries should decide which non-weapons states can possess fuel cycle technologies.  From these premises, the George W. Bush administration sought a worldwide ban on transferring fuel cycle technologies to countries not already possessing them.  Since this effort failed, Washington has pushed the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group to make such transfers conditional on recipients’ acceptance of the Additional Protocol to the NPT—an instrument devised at U.S. instigation in the 1990s to enable more intrusive and proactive inspections in non-weapons states. 

America has pressed the UN Security Council to adopt resolutions telling Tehran to suspend enrichment, even though it is part of Iran’s “inalienable right” to peaceful use of nuclear technology; such resolutions violate UN Charter provisions that the Council act “in accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations” and “with the present charter.”  The Obama administration has also defined its preferred diplomatic outcome and, with Britain and France, imposed it on the P5+1:  Iran must promptly stop enriching at the near-20 percent level to fuel its sole (and safeguarded) research reactor; it must then comply with Security Council calls to cease all enrichment.  U.S. officials say Iran might be “allowed” a circumscribed enrichment program, after suspending for a decade or more, but London and Paris insist that “zero enrichment” is the only acceptable long-term outcome.                 

Those asserting that Iran has no right to enrich—America, Britain, France, and Israel—take a policy- or results-oriented view of international order.  In this view, what matters in responding to international challenges are the goals motivating states to create particular rules in the first place—not the rules themselves, but the goals underlying them.  This approach also ascribes a special role in interpreting rules to the most powerful states—those with the resources and willingness to act in order to enforce the rules.  Unsurprisingly, this approach is favored by established Western powers—above all, by the United States.          

All of the BRICS have, in various ways, pushed back against a de facto unilateral rewriting of the NPT by America and its European partners.  Since abandoning nuclear weapons programs during democratization and joining the NPT, Brazil and South Africa have staunchly defended non-weapons states’ right to peaceful use of nuclear technology, including enrichment.  With Argentina, they resisted U.S. efforts to make transfers of fuel cycle technology contingent on accepting the Additional Protocol (which Brazil has refused to sign), ultimately forcing Washington to compromise.  With Turkey, Brazil brokered the Tehran Declaration in May 2010, whereby Iran accepted U.S. terms that it swap most of its then stockpile of enriched uranium for new fuel for its research reactor.  But the Declaration openly recognized Iran’s right to enrich; for this reason, the Obama administration rejected it. 

The recently concluded 5th BRICS Summit in Durban saw a joint declaration that referred to the official BRICS position on Iran:  “We believe there is no alternative to a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.  We recognize Iran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy consistent with its international obligations, and support resolution of the issues involved through political and diplomatic means and dialogue.”

At the same time, the BRICS have all, to varying degrees, accommodated Washington on the Iranian issue.  Russian and Chinese officials acknowledge there will be no diplomatic solution absent Western recognition of Tehran’s nuclear rights.  Yet China and Russia endorsed all six Security Council resolutions requiring Iran to suspend enrichment.  Beijing and Moscow did so partly to keep America in the Council with the issue, where they can exert ongoing influence—and restraint—over Washington; at their insistence, the resolutions state explicitly that none of them can be construed as authorizing the use of force against Iran.  Still, they acquiesced to resolutions that make a diplomatic settlement harder and that contradict a truly rules-based model of international order.

Russia, China, and the other BRICS have also accommodated Washington’s increasing reliance on the threatened imposition of “secondary” sanctions against third-country entities doing business with the Islamic Republic.  Such measures violate U.S. commitments under the World Trade Organization, which allows members to cut trade with states they deem national security threats but not to sanction other members over lawful business with third countries.  If challenged on this in the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism, America would surely lose; for this reason, U.S. administrations have been reluctant actually to impose secondary sanctions on non-U.S. entities transacting with Iran.  Nevertheless, companies, banks, and even governments in all of the BRICS have cut back on their Iranian transactions—feeding American elites’ sense that, notwithstanding their illegality, secondary sanctions help leverage non-Western states’ compliance with Washington’s policy preferences and vision of (U.S.-dominated) world order. 

If the BRICS want to move decisively from a still relatively unipolar world to a genuinely multipolar world, they will, at some point, have to call Washington’s bluff on Iran-related secondary sanctions.  They will also have to accelerate the development of alternatives to US-dominated mechanisms for conducting and settling international transactions—a project to which the proposed new BRICS bank could contribute significantly.  Finally, they will need to be more willing to oppose, openly, America’s efforts to unilaterally rewrite international law and hijack international institutions for its own hegemonic purposes.  By doing so, they will underscore that the United States ultimately isolates itself by acting as a flailing—and failing—imperial power.

Central to the thinking of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution was the need to tame power. The drive for power had to be contained most fundamentally in the souls of individuals but also through external restraints, including constitutional checks. The Constitution continues to enjoy great respect, at least in ceremonial contexts, but today is a norm for political conduct less in practice than in theory. The spirit of traditional American constitutionalism has greatly dissipated, if not disappeared.

In the last few decades many American leaders have spoken much about America having a moral mission in the world. But the conception of virtue that they assume is different from virtue of the traditional kind in that it does not involve a strong sense of moderation and limits. On the contrary, this putative virtue has manifested and fed the will to power and a sense of limitless possibilities. Influential forces in both the American parties have wanted the world’s only superpower to attain global supremacy in order to promote the allegedly moral cause. They have espoused an outlook on man and society that contrasts sharply with that of the moral-spiritual and political heritage that gave shape to the Constitution.

In the last several decades an ideology of American empire became increasingly common in the American foreign policy and national security establishment inside and outside of government.[i] Needless to say, the advocates of this ideology do not aspire to empire in the old sense of permanent occupation of large territories. The United States can work its will on recalcitrant powers by other means. What the ideology advocates is armed and uncontested global supremacy.

The proponents of the ideology have been able to draw upon various American antecedents, such as the foreign-policy idealism of President Woodrow Wilson, but they have provided a more comprehensive and ideologically intense and systematic justification for U.S. interventionism.

The advocates of the ideology typically stress foreign affairs, but it offers a general view of man, society and the world. For example, the ideology assumes a particular understanding of the so-called “American Founding.” It is characteristic of the ideology that it views political and cultural arrangements with deep roots in history with suspicion. What is great about America, it asserts, is that America broke with tradition, which it regards as the bad old days. America was founded on abstract, universal principles and represents a fresh start for humanity. America, therefore, has a great mission: to spread its principles across the globe, to make possible a similar start for other nations.

The notion that America represents the cause of all mankind is by itself an argument for boosting and accepting American power. To assume in addition that the ideal for which America fights is very different from what history has produced in most countries accentuates the need for mobilizing and asserting American power. All decent, morally sentient people will of course flock to the American cause. As America’s goal is noble, so is the power needed to achieve it noble.

The ideology of empire questions the old American fear of concentration of power. It implies that power exercised for the sake of a better world can be exempted from ordinary restraint. During the George W. Bush presidency, the argument was advanced within and without the administration that especially in times of national emergency the prerogatives of the president trumps the powers of the other branches of government. This is the theory of the so-called “unitary” presidency. Needless to say, we are understood to be living today in a state of permanent emergency, due to Terrorism with a capital “T.”

As presidential advisors and speechwriters, proponents of the ideology of moral empire were able after 9/11 to help shape President Bush’s reaction to the attacks. The latter became the stated reason for launching an enormously ambitious new foreign policy, which was virtually the opposite of what the American people had been led to expect during the president’s 2000 election campaign. George W. Bush had then advocated a more “humble” U. S. foreign policy and had expressed strong reservations about interventionism and nation-building. Now America would not only pursue a world-wide campaign against terrorism but strike preemptively against potential threats; America would also promote freedom and better governance in the world; it would foster and take charge of what the president called “the global democratic revolution.”

The selling and implementation of the “Bush doctrine” was greatly facilitated by the fact that rarely had an ideology become so strongly entrenched in a country’s foreign policy and national security and opinion-molding establishments. Though President Bush became the ideology’s most prominent spokesman, he was assuredly not its originator. It had been spreading for decades. By 9/11 it had strong support in both of the major political parties. Many of its leading advocates had come out of the Democratic party. Some had in their youth been Trotskyite Marxists. Especially on foreign-policy issues, the ideology was well-represented in America’s major media outlets. In the daily press, this was particularly true of the Wall Street Journal, but the Washington Post and the New York Times also gave it much space, as did the main news magazines. Among the opinion magazines, the Weekly Standard supported it most enthusiastically, but very similar foreign-policy views were voiced in National Review. In think tanks that give prominence to foreign policy and national security the ideology was very common. The American Enterprise Institute had perhaps become its political-intellectual nerve-center. The same foreign policy agenda flourished, though certainly not uncontested, on the television networks and major cable channels. On the radio and elsewhere it presented itself as kick-butt American patriotism and attracted millions of flag-waving supporters.

Many of the ideology’s proponents had long promoted war against Iraq. Virtually all of them seemed to assume that its most immediate and urgent practical upshot was to sanitize the Middle East. Millions of so-called “evangelical” Christians here provided grassroots support. In anticipation of Armageddon, America had to be supportive of God’s chosen people, Israel.

Curiously, the political and intellectual activists who did the most to make government and public opinion receptive to the ideology and policies of American empire became known as “neoconservatives.” That designation can be shown to be rather paradoxical. You know who some of the most prominent neoconservatives are: Elliot Abrams, William Bennett, Max Boot, Midge Decter, Douglas Feith, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, the late Irving Kristol and his son William, Michael Ledeen, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, James Woolsey, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Many prominent politicians besides President Bush made the ideology of empire their own. As vice president, Richard Cheney became an especially effective and energetic advocate. Donald Rumsfeld had long associated with and been cultivated by the neoconservative network. In the case of businessmen-politicians like them, the fondness for the ideology probably had less to do with intellectual considerations than with neoconservative rhetoric being politically useful.

Contrary to traditional conservatism, as represented by the British statesman-thinker Edmund Burke (1729-1797) or as represented by many of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, the ideology of American empire is not respectful of and conservative of an old historical heritage. Neoconservatives are prone to regarding traditional ways as inherently backward and outdated. What is old should give way to what all enlightened persons now realize is mankind’s destiny, which they call “democracy” or “freedom.” The late, much-celebrated political theorist Allan Bloom (1930–92), the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1988), is here representative of the neoconservative prejudice against traditional ways. Bloom was a leading disciple of the German-American political theorist Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Strauss is famous for his anti-“historicism.” In his best-selling book, Bloom argued that the essence of America is not its historically evolved, culturally distinctive traditions, which we know to be full of classical, Christian and British resonances.  No, the U.S. broke with the past. It was founded not on an historically evolved cultural foundation but on abstract, universally valid principles. America is, Bloom asserts, first and foremost an idea, a “proposition.” What he calls “the American project” is for all peoples. The “principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” Because America the idea stands above historically generated notions and represents universal right, the United States has a special role to play in the world.[ii]

Bloom and other Straussians simply disregard that American political and other traditions have deep roots in ancient Western civilization, especially as mediated through British culture. Significantly, this old heritage stresses the moral and other weaknesses of human beings and that they need internal and external checks. Power must be constrained.

The ideology of empire points in the opposite direction. It justifies the removal of obstacles, including constitutional obstacles, to the triumph of the American cause. The ideology sanctions an unleashing of what it declares to be virtuous power.

That the United States of America represents the aspirations of all humanity became a staple of the speeches of President George W. Bush. He went so far as to say to his countrymen that advancing the values of freedom and democracy is “the mission that created our nation.” America sees further than other countries. In the State of the Union address in 2005 President Bush told Americans that “we live in the country where the biggest dreams are born.” By then he had long asserted that America’s values are for all people. “There is a value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the values we praise. And if the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others.”[iii]

I have argued at length in various places that there are striking similarities between the proponents of the ideology of American empire and the Jacobins who inspired and led the French Revolution. Those French ideologues and political activists were members of clubs that had sprouted all over France. The clubs combined features of a debating society, school and secular church. The most prominent of these clubs met in an abandoned Jacobin monastery in Paris, hence the name of the larger movement. The Jacobins proclaimed “liberté, égalité, et fraternité.” They saw themselves as a great moral force in the world. They even called themselves “les vertueux,” the virtuous. They regarded themselves as champions of universal principles. They demanded a society and world radically different from what history had produced. They stood for liberation and popular rule. They felt called to destroy evil.

So there are good reasons to call the advocates of virtuous American empire “the new Jacobins.”[iv] Like the old Jacobins, the advocates of American empire see themselves as promoting universally valid principles. The demand for American intervention in the world springs from what they like to call “moral clarity.” America must conduct a global campaign for “democracy” and “freedom.” To borrow the title of a 2004 book by David Frum and Richard Perle about the objectives of U.S. Foreign policy, America should put “an end to evil.” 

The French Jacobins were inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). This was particularly true of Maximilien Robespierre, who became the leader of France. Rousseau had argued, in The Social Contract (1762), that “man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”[v]  Historically existing societies had warped and imprisoned man’s natural goodness. For man to be liberated, inherited societies and beliefs had to be destroyed. The Jacobins dealt harshly with “evil,” guillotining representatives of the old order and employing a general ruthlessness that culminated in the Reign of Terror.[vi] Considering the vileness of existing society, there was for the Jacobins nothing paradoxical about liberating men by force. In 2002, President Bush informed the U.S. Congress that the “Department of Defense has become the most powerful force for freedom the world has ever seen.”[vii] One recalls Rousseau’s idea that those who resist political right will have to be “forced to be free.”[viii]

An obvious difference between the French and the new Jacobins is that the latter have chosen not France but America as the Liberator of mankind. An obvious similarity is that each would give moral carte blanche to a particular country.

On his European tour in the winter of 2005, President Bush solicited the support of Europe for America’s worldwide campaign for freedom and democracy, saying about Americans and Europeans that “our ideals and our interests lead in the same direction.”[ix] What that direction was had been indicated in a most telling way just a few days earlier in Paris by the president’s then newly-appointed secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. She made the connection between U.S. foreign policy and Jacobinism probably more explicit than she knew. She said that “the founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values and by each other.” [x] In other words, the American and French republics had origins in the same revolutionary spirit. This was a flagrant misrepresentation of history, but the statement amply confirmed the Jacobin-like impetus behind the Bush-administration’s foreign policy.

It is here pertinent to observe that, although the people called neoconservatives are not intellectually uniform, their movement is in its main thrust not a variety of conservatism. It is a special, ideologically intense form of modern progressive liberalism. As already mentioned, many of its leaders used to be Trotskyite Marxists, and from their past they brought with them a sense that the world needs to be remade in the image of their own principles.

A traditionally conservative concern for higher values, as in Edmund Burke, has nothing to do with a belief that a single political and social model fits all circumstances or with an urge to transform the world. Burkeans do believe that something better is always possible, and they grope for what is intrinsically right, for what advances the common good and moral universality—this in a complex and imperfect world. But they stress that any society must seek guidance in and build upon the best of its own past and adapt a sense of higher direction to the historical circumstances of time and place.[xi]

I have long pointed to the connection between American neo-Jacobinism and a prominent element in the thought of Leo Strauss and the Straussians. Strauss famously rejected what he called “historicism,” that is, any inclination to be guided in the formulation of moral goals by historical experience or to adapt to historical circumstance. For Strauss and the Straussians, the standard of right has but one source, ahistorical ratiocination. And so Straussians have taught Americans that real philosophers must be “alienated” from the society in which they find themselves and disdain the “ancestral,” that is, whatever is favored by tradition or convention. Do not look to history to learn who you are or ought to be. To philosophize properly is to consider “universal or abstract principles,” and this “has necessarily a revolutionary, disturbing, unsettling effect.”[xii] That neo-Jacobin ideology shares this prejudice against the old and sees abstract universal principles as unsettling should be illustrated further.

Most leading neoconservatives think of themselves as representing a progressive, even revolutionary force. Professor Harry Jaffa, another prominent disciple of Strauss, asserts the following: “To celebrate the American Founding is . . . to celebrate revolution.” The American Revolution in behalf of freedom may appear mild, “as compared with subsequent revolutions in France, Russia, China, Cuba, or elsewhere [but] it nonetheless embodied the greatest attempt at innovation that human history has recorded.”[xiii] What is admirable about America, then, is how it differs from the past. What is at once distinctive, innovative and noble is the idea of America. For the late Irving Kristol, the reputed “godfather” of neoconservatism, who claimed to be an admirer of Strauss, the United States is defined by the abstract principles to which it is committed. America is, Kristol wrote, “ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.”[xiv]

Straussians and neoconservatives are fond of referring to “the Founding,” because that term suggests that America had a fresh start. Adopting ahistorical universal principles, America turned its back on the bad old ways of Europe. This use of the term “Founding” conceals that prior to the War of Independence, which Straussians prefer to call “the American Revolution,” and prior to the framing of the Constitution, America already comprised well-functioning societies based on Christian, classical, and specifically British traditions. The term “American Revolution” appeals to neo-Jacobins because it conceals the great extent to which, after the War of Independence, America, including the U.S. Constitution, was a continuation, indeed, in important respects a reaffirmation, of that heritage.[xv]

Neoconservatives have long tried to transfer the allegiance of Americans to a redefined, Jacobin-style America. William Kristol has insisted that America must have great military and other governmental might vigorously to promote its universal principles. He has called for “national greatness conservatism.” He has argued that the old American suspicion of strong, centralized, activist Federal government must be abandoned.[xvi] According to Kristol senior, it was the historical role of neoconservatism “to convert the Republican party, and conservatism in general, against their wills” and to make them accept the new, far more ambitious conception of government.[xvii]

Another leading neoconservative, Michael Ledeen, an advisor on national security in the Reagan White House, openly portrays the America with which he identifies as a destroyer of existing societies. According to Ledeen, “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day . . .  Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions . . . . [We] must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”[xviii]

It should be obvious that the term “neoconservatism” is very misleading.

The American Framers saw man as having both higher and lower potentialities. They were acutely aware of the moral preconditions of responsible freedom. They feared original sin in themselves and others. They stressed the need to check the darker potentialities of human nature, the unleashing of which could wreak havoc on the individual and society. They hoped that in personal life moral character would restrain the desire for self-aggrandizement and that in national political life the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution would contain and domesticate the all-too-human desire for power. Personal self-control and constitutionalism were but different aspects of the effort to tame the voracious ego. Freedom could not be bestowed on a people. It had to be achieved over time by individuals acting responsibly, which involved protracted inner and outer struggle. Freedom could be safeguarded in America only by the continuation of the kind of culture and personality type that had fostered it in the first place.[xix] The primary reason why the U.S. Constitution has become a mere shadow of its former self is that it cannot function as intended without the just-mentioned culture and character traits. [xx]

Today a more grasping, “imperialistic” ego is throwing off the old American constitutional self and related constitutional restraints. A desire for self-aggrandizement that is hard to reconcile with the original constitutional temperament is today transforming traditional limited, decentralized American government into a national security Superstate. The neo-Jacobin desire for armed global supremacy is less importunate at this moment only because of the enormous budget deficits and a staggering national debt.

It was partly to break free of the old American fear of unlimited power and the view of life that it implies that the new Jacobins tried to transfer the allegiance of Americans to a reinvented America. They propounded and keep propounding a new myth that I discuss at length in my 2003 book America the Virtuous—the myth of a morally noble, “exceptional” America—according to which America should be given free rein in its mission to transform the world. This myth provides the appetite for power with the moral justification that it likes to have.

The old Western notion of human moral and intellectual imperfection and the accompanying recognition of a need for self-control and humility can be traced back through Christianity, the ancient Greeks and the Old Testament. This view of human nature and the political attitudes that it fosters tend to forestall, censure, and defuse an inordinate desire for power, hence is not pleasing to the ego that wants to dominate other human beings.

The ideology of neo-Jacobinism, by contrast, offers a potent stimulant to the will to power. That will often breaks through the moralistic surface behind which it hides. One prominent media commentator, who gave expression to the will to dominate long before 9/11, is Charles Krauthammer. He kept telling his countrymen that America is no “mere international citizen” but “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.” It should be using its power to create a world more to its liking. It should “reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”[xxi] Given America’s noble cause, why should its exercise of power not be “unapologetic” and “implacable”? Robert Kagan, another leading foreign policy commentator, similarly wants America to be more forceful and confrontational. He wrote in 2002: “America . . . can sometimes seem like a bully on the world stage . . . . But really, the 1,200 pound gorilla is an underachiever in the bullying business.”[xxii]

The U.S. framers assumed not only a need for restraints on power but for particular interests to accommodate each other. As applied to international affairs, this assumption would mean that states should check and balance and try to accommodate each other—which is the opposite of unilateralism. The notion that America knows better than all other nations and has a right to dictate terms to them is alien to the spirit  that informs American constitutionalism.

The sharp contrast between neo-Jacobin supremacist thinking and the ethos of an earlier America is suggested by comments that Alexander Hamilton made in 1797 about the French government. Having been a leading champion of the U.S. Constitution, Hamilton was secretary of the treasury in the George Washington administration. He found the French government’s Jacobin-flavored desire to dictate to other nations unacceptable. France “betrayed a spirit of universal domination; an opinion that she had a right to be legislatrix of nations; that they are all bound to submit to her mandates, to take from her their moral, political, and religious creeds; that her plastic and regenerating hand is to mould them into whatever shape she thinks fit; and that her interest is to be the sole measure of the rights of the rest of the world.” Such claims, Hamilton argued, are repugnant “to the general rights of nations, to the true principles of liberty, [and] to the freedom of opinion of mankind.”[xxiii] The American constitutionalist temperament was and remains incompatible with the Jacobin spirit. 

For Christians, the greatest sin is pride. Before them, the Greeks warned of the great danger of conceit and arrogance. Hubris, they said, invites Nemesis. Two inscriptions on the Apollonian temple at Delphi summed up the proper attitude to life. One was “Everything in moderation,” the other “Know Thyself.”  To know yourself meant to recognize that you are not one of the gods but a mere mortal. In the Old Testament we read in Proverbs: “Humility goeth before honor.” (15:33) “Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord.” (16:5) “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” (16:18) “The Lord will destroy the house of the proud.” (15:25)

To the new Jacobins, such warnings and calls for humility have the quaint sound of something long outdated. Why should those who know how humanity should live question their own ideas or right to dominate? What the world needs is, to use again that favorite term of theirs, “moral clarity”—not obfuscation. This self-absorbed and self-applauding attitude could hardly be more different from the character type that the old Americans admired and that the Framers of the Constitution hoped would animate and sustain America’s political institutions. In 1789 President George Washington proclaimed a day of thanksgiving for all the good bestowed by Almighty God on the American people. He asked his fellow Americans to unite “in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the Great Lord and Ruler of nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions.” This is the voice of an older America that in recent decades has been shouted down by neo-Jacobin nationalism.

The vast influence of the new Jacobins was decisive in formulating and launching the Bush doctrine and in pushing through the war against Iraq. For obvious, reasons they have suffered a loss of prestige since then. But so numerous, well-funded and deeply entrenched are they in institutions that form American policy and opinion that they cannot be expected simply to fade away. They are more likely to regroup and to reappear in somewhat different garb, for the moment more prominently in the Democratic party. As for the old American constitutional republic, it suffered severe blows in the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. A come-back for constitutionalism would, most fundamentally, require a cultural and moral renaissance that nurtures the constitutional personality in some contemporary form, but of such a development there are at present only flickering signs.