Eric Zuesse, updated from strategic-culture.org
The subterranean reality of U.S. foreign policy is that it serves the U.S. aristocracy, the owners of controlling blocs of stock in America’s international corporations, which include especially Big Oil, Big Armaments, Big Ag, and Big Banks. The United States’ vast military-industrial complex uses the NATO anti-Russian military alliance as its major international marketing arm, and relies heavily on the Sunni Arabic — or “Gulf States” — the U.S.-affiliated oil-monarchies, as their major customers. These are mainly the Saud royal family of Saudi Arabia, and the Thani royal family of Qatar, as well as the Sabah royal family of Kuwait, and the six royal families of UAE. Those royals own most of the world’s oil, and their top competitors as suppliers of oil and gas to the world are Russia and its ally Iran — countries that America’s aristocracy hope to conquer, preferably by coups, but militarily if need be. America’s public lose enormously in blood and money from their aristocracy’s conquest-agenda, and so a constant PR campaign against Russia, Iran, and any other nation (such as Syria) that’s friendly toward Russia, is essential in order to sell these wars. Strong evidence exists that the 9/11 attacks in the United States were a coordinated plan between “Bandar Bush,” Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, and his buddy in the White House George W. Bush, though with plausible deniability on the part of the U.S. President, the specific purpose being to blame those terror-attacks on Saddam Hussein, so that Saddam — who was friendly toward Moscow — could plausibly be identified as a danger to U.S. national security warranting a U.S. invasion to oust him. Muammar Gaddafi likewise had to be eliminated, and this occurred under the next U.S. President, Obama. And now, yet another Russia-friendly leader, Bashar al-Assad, also does.
But there is ongoing resistance from the American public, and thus a constant barrage of anti-Russian, anti-Syrian, etc., propaganda, is necessary, in order to win the public’s support for this invasion-program, which is so profitable to the military-industrial complex.
All of those Sunni Arab royal families (especially the Sauds) are the main financial backers of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadist groups, all of which are fundamentalist Sunni terrorist groups, which especially aim to exterminate all Shiites — and Shiites (which includes the Shiite-majority Iran, and the secular-majority Syria, which is led by a Shiite, Assad), just happen to be supported by Russia. (The U.S. in Shiite Iran overthrew the democratically elected progressive secular President there and installed the tyrannous fascist Shah, back in 1953, and Iranians have loathed the U.S. government ever since. This became the source of the 1979 Iranian hostages crisis in the U.S. Embassy.)
President Obama, in his second Administration, ceased his previous focus against the Sunni group Al Qaeda (which the U.S. public blamed for 9/11), and he refocused U.S. policy in his second term to be instead against Russia, even to the extent of his now supporting Al Qaeda and other rabidly anti-Russian Sunni groups, sometimes even ISIS, all of whom are driving millions of refugees from Syria, Libya, etc., into Europe, and creating problems there as well.
For example, in promoting this second-term agenda, the U.S. international-news site, Real Clear World, headlined on 4 August 2016, “Why America Gets Blamed in Syria”, and Frederic Hof, who is the Director of the NATO-generated Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, wrote as if the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad is the person mainly responsible for bringing tens of thousands of Sunni jihadists into Syria to overthrow him, and as if the Obama Administration is disappointing the Syrian people by not pursuing that overthrow-Assad-effort with sufficient vigor:
Syrian rebels desperately resisting besiegement in the city of Aleppo no doubt see the collaboration of the American-supported Kurdish PYD militia with Russia and the Assad regime as ‘proof’ that Washington supports the government of Bashar Assad. Locals find it hard to believe that what happens in Syria does not reflect American intent.
In truth, the ongoing disaster in Syria reflects a host of factors. Washington’s intent is not among them. Yes, President Barack Obama really does want Assad to step aside in a choreographed political transition. Yes, the president really meant it when he vowed in 2014 to degrade and destroy ISIS. But other things got in the way. They still do.
It is unlikely that President Obama would be in the position today of not having defended one single Syrian civilian from the Assad regime’s brutal tactics were it not for Iran’s involvement in the war. Fear that complicating Assad’s murderous rampage with modest military means would offend Tehran and nix the nuclear negotiations stayed the president’s hand. Keeping Iran on board with the deal reached last year continues to do so. Now, Russian intervention offers another excuse for looking the other way as civilians in their homes, hospitals, schools, bakeries, and mosques are deliberately targeted and obliterated, all for the recruiting benefit of ISIS. …
Syria is at the core of an international crisis, one roiling the domestic politics of U.S. allies in ways that give aid and comfort to a Russian leader eager to defeat NATO and dismember the European Union. Syrians and others in the region think America understands this. They cannot believe that Washington’s failure to halt Assad’s mass murder – terrorism of a different variety that sustains other terrorists — and its go-slow campaign against ISIS merely reflect indecision and loss of self-confidence. This is not the America they thought they knew.
Throughout there, is the underlying assumption that a majority of the Syrian public favor America’s efforts to overthrow Assad, and don’t despise America for trying to overthrow him. That underlying assumption is exactly the opposite of even what Western-sponsored polls throughout Syria show to be the case: America is despised and Assad is popular there. In other words, that article, by the Director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, published at Real Clear World, is basically a blatant lie regarding what it purports to be informing its readers about. The vast majority of Syrians suppot Assad and despise America for invading their country and for supporting the imported jihadists that the Sauds, Thanis, and Sabah’s hire to take him out. Like RFK Jr. has explained, “Syria: Another Pipeline War”. The Arabic royals and their Western oil-company allies want to replace Russia’s oil and gas into Europe, by their own oil and gas there. In order to do that, the pipelines would need to pass through Syria — an ally of Russia.
On February 20th, the anti-Russian propaganda site “Newsweek” headlined “How We Can Defeat Putin,” and presented an essay from Evelyn Farcas, also of the NATO-generated Atlantic Council, but didn’t indicate her being controlled by the same people who control NATO (the U.S. aristocracy). (Newsweek hid her connection to NATO — gave no indication of it.)
NATO is run by the North Atlantic Council, and its main PR agencies are the Atlantic Council and the Atlantic Treaty Association, both of which receive funding from international corporations. The head of the Atlantic Council is billionaire Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. Presidential candidate, and a member of the Bilderberg organization, which was founded in 1954 to engineer a takeover of national governments’ regulatory abilities and a replacement of national economic regulations by international economic treaties, which will supersede any national authority and will not be answerable to any voters except the controlling stockholders in international corporations. (Bilderberger David Rockefeller then created the Trilateral Commission in 1974, to extend the globally controlling aristocracy to include also Japanese aristocrats, and Huntsman is also a member of that Bilderberg spin-off: he’s a member of the Trilateral Commission’s ruling Executive Committee.) The list of donors to the Atlantic Council includes: Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Kingdom of Bahrain (ruled by a fundamentalist-Sunni royal family who are friends of the Saud family that rules Saudi Arabia), the (far-right) Smith Richardson Foundation, Google, Raytheon, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Thompson Reuters, (the far-right) Ukrainian World Congress, Bank of America, City of London, ExxonMobil, General Electric, PriceWaterhouse, Frontera Resources, Blackstone Group, United Technologies, Bank of Tokyo, Barclays Capital, ConocoPhillips, Gulf Keystone Petroleum, Microsoft, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. State Department, Bloomberg LP, Embassy of Latvia; and three donors who each contributed over a million dollars to the Atlantic Council during 2014: Adrienne Arsht (who sold her bank to Banco Popular Español), Bahaa Hariri (the billionaire “eldest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri” — the “Lebanese-Saudi business tycoon” who had been a famous assassinated enemy of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad), and United Arab Emirates (whose six royal families are friends of the Saud royal family and all of whom are among the top funders of jihadist movements; and, according to a U.S. State Department cable, “UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups, including Hamas.”). Saudi Arabia is the world’s top purchaser of U.S. weapons, but isn’t directly represented at the Atlantic Council. They buy enough U.S.-made weapons, so they provide far more financial support to NATO than do any of those others. However, that same State Department cable also said, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” So: outfits such as Al Qaeda are well-represented in NATO — and at the Atlantic Council, and the much smaller Atlantic Treaty Association.
Farkas’s propaganda-piece (written specifically for the Atlantic Council) opened: “Russia poses a geostrategic threat to the United States and our interests. Indeed, earlier this month Defense Secretary Ash Carter listed it first among the threats faced by our nation.” She continued: “The Kremlin’s objectives are clear: 1) Retain Vladimir Putin’s position as the leader of the Russian Federation, preserving the autocratic political system and mafia-style crony economy that together make up ‘Putinism’; 2) restore Russia’s status as a great power; 3) rewrite the international rules and norms to prevent intervention in states to protect citizens; 4) maintain political control of Russia’s geographical periphery; and, if possible, 5) break NATO, the European Union and trans-Atlantic unity.”
One could turn that around against the United States by saying that we Americans have a less personalized, more institutionalized, form of dictatorship, which doesn’t require continuance of the same person to be in control, but which provides foreign policies that extend little changed from one President to the next, even if the rhetoric differs considerably between individual Presidents, such as it did and does from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, with little real difference in policies except this: tortures such as waterboarding might possibly now be actually forbidden here. However, Putin’s international policies have been changing far more than that. (They changed a lot after Obama overthrew the democratically elected and pro-Russian President of Ukraine in February 2014 and instituted a rabidly anti-Russian fascist regime there.)
Domestically, Obama continued Bush’s Wall Street bailouts and reduced the prosecutions of white-collar crooks (and also of higher-level “financial fraud”), even lower than was the situation when Bush was the nominal President. Also, the prosecutions of government corruption declined under Obama. This was not the type of “change” that Obama’s voters had been voting for, but it’s what we got.
The only scientific study that has been done of whether or not the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship (rule of the public by an aristocracy, which may or may not have a king or other nominal dictator that rules answerable to that elite but not to any broader public) found that the U.S., at least since 1980, has been a dictatorship (the authors called it an “oligarchy”). That doesn’t sound much different from Russia, either.
The readers of Ms. Farkas’s propaganda-article, if one judges by the reader-comments there, were far less damning against Mr. Putin than they were against the con-job that had just been delivered to them by Newsweek (and so perhaps that ‘news’-site’s constant ads seeking new subscribers to the site are not producing nearly as much income as are the propaganda-services Newsweek delivers on behalf of their international-corporate advertisers). To read those comments from readers, Americans are getting jaundice from reading America’s propagandistic ‘press.’ Here were two typical such comments:
“I have been reading and watching western media and russian media equally. There is no bad guy here in geopolitics. If there is then its the US.”
Another said:
“Meanwhile Putin plays chess Americans play checkers. and the Americans(Obama) are sold as chess players(at least they make themselves believe it) to start with..Now they have propaganda outlets like this one, that want to sell you a ‘checkers’ play to win the game.”
Of course, such cynicism is also widespread among Russians, against their own nation’s media.
The Newsweek propagandist wrote in her article: “We must be united with our allies and partners worldwide and resolute toward Russian bad behavior.” But, what about America’s “bad behavior”: unjustified and catastrophic invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2013, and Obama’s keeping in power the coup-regime in Honduras that was installed there on 28 June 2009? That’s not very nice, either — and, unlike anything that can be charged against Russia, there’s no NATO-like organization against the United States to have provoked our invasions, as there is with regard to Russia, which had long ago terminated its equivalent, the Warsaw Pact (in 1991). They disbanded theirs; we continued and still continue ours, even though its alleged raison d’être likewise ended in 1991 (and NATO and its propaganda-arms now drown us with propaganda such as Newsweek published here). Clearly, the U.S. is the international aggressor, par excellence, and it needs propagandists — the U.S. press — in order to make the American public fear “Saddam’s WMD” (to invade Iraq in 2003) and “Russian bad behavior” (to attempt a “color revolution” against Russia’s leader, Putin, whose approval-rating among his people is nearly twice as high as Obama’s own — and yet America calls itself a ‘democracy’ that brings ‘democracy’ to places such as Ukraine, Libya, Syria, and Russia).
More and more Americans are learning that they’re suckers if they pay for their ’news’ — if they pay their hard-earned money in order to be manipulated by their insatiable corrupting aristocracy. And now, with google Chrome’s free autotranslate feature, one can receive the news from the media in every country, immediately translated into English, and thereby get a read not only on America’s propaganda but on that of the countries that the U.S. aristocracy want Americans to overthrow (in overthrows that are becoming a very bad habit of this country, and that drain America’s tax dollars for rotten weaponry and a bloated army but enrich the ‘defense’ contractors that our aristocrats invest so heavily in, so as to conquer the lands they don’t currently control). Americans are increasingly coming to recognize that they’ve been (and are being) had: by ‘their’ government and by ‘their’ ‘free press,’ if not by the aristocracy that controls them both.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.