{"id":171226,"date":"2015-08-07T19:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-08-07T19:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=171226"},"modified":"2015-08-07T19:11:08","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T19:11:08","slug":"the-u-s-is-destroying-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/the-u-s-is-destroying-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Is Destroying Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and other countries at the periphery or edges of Europe, U.S. President Barack Obama has been pursuing a policy of destabilization, and even of bombings and other military assistance, that drives millions of refugees out of those peripheral areas and into Europe, thereby adding fuel to the far-rightwing fires of anti-immigrant rejectionism, and of resultant political destabilization, throughout Europe, not only on its peripheries, but even as far away as in northern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shamus Cooke at Off-Guardian headlines on 3 August 2015,\u00a0\u201cObama\u2019s \u2018Safe Zone\u2019 in Syria Intended to Turn It into New Libya,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and he reports that Obama has approved U.S. air support for Turkey\u2019s previously unenfoceable no-fly zone over Syria. The U.S. will now shoot down all of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s planes that are targeting the extremist-Muslim groups, including ISIS, that have taken over huge swaths of Syrian territory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cooke reports:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTurkey has been demanding this no-fly zone\u00a0from Obama since the Syrian war started. It\u2019s been discussed\u00a0throughout the conflict and even in recent months, though the intended goal was always the Syrian government. And suddenly the no-fly zone is happening \u2013 right where Turkey always wanted it \u2013 but it\u2019s being labeled an ‘anti-ISIS’ safe zone, instead of its proper name: ‘Anti Kurdish and anti-Syrian government’ safe zone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/i>\u00a0reported on July 27th,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that, “the plan calls for\u00a0relatively moderate Syrian insurgents to take the territory, with the help of American and possibly Turkish air support.\u201d However, the Times<\/i>, stenographically reporting (as usual) from and for their U.S. Government sources (and so propagandizing for the U.S. Government), fails to define \u201crelatively moderate,\u201d but all of the \u201crelatively moderate insurgent\u201d groups in Syria cooperate with ISIS and help them to\u00a0find and decapitate,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0or sometimes hold for ransoms, any non-Muslims there. Under Assad, Syria has been a\u00a0non-clerical state, and has enjoyed freedom of religion,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but all of the Syrian opposition to Assad\u2019s rule is alien to that.\u00a0The U.S. is now, even more clearly than before, anti-Assad, pro-Islamist<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Seymour Hersh\u00a0reported in the London Review of Books<\/i> on 17 April 2014,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that the Obama Administration\u2019s Libyan bombing campaign in 2011 was part of a broader program to bring sarin gas from Libya to the al-Nusra Front in Syria, in order to help produce a gas-attack upon civilians, which the U.S. Administration could then blame upon Assad, as being an excuse to bomb there just as Obama had already so successfully done in Libya. Both dictators, Gaddafi and Assad, were allied with Russia, and Assad especially has been important to Russia, as a transit-route for Russia\u2019s gas supplies, and not for Qatar\u2019s gas supplies \u2013 Qatar being the major potential threat to Russia\u2019s status as the top supplier of gas into Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s top goal in international relations, and throughout his military policies, has been to defeat Russia, to force a regime-change there that will make Russia part of the American empire, no longer the major nation that resists control from Washington.<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Prior to the U.S. bombings of Libya in 2011, Libya was at peace and thriving. Per-capita GDP (income) in 2010\u00a0according to the IMF<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was $12,357.80, but it plunged to only $5,839.70 in 2011 \u2013 the year we bombed and destroyed the country. (Hillary Clinton famously bragged, \u201cWe came, we saw, he [Gaddafi] died!\u201d) (And, unlike in U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, that per-capita GDP was remarkably evenly distributed, and both education and health care were socialized and available to everyone, even to the poor.<\/span><\/a>) More recently, on 15 February 2015, reporter Leila Fadel of NPR bannered\u00a0\u201cWith Oil Fields Under Attack, Libya\u2019s Economic Future Looks Bleak.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0She announced: \u201cThe man in charge looks at production and knows the future is bleak. ‘We\u00a0cannot produce. We are losing 80 percent of our production,’ says\u00a0Mustapha Sanallah, the chairman of Libya’s National Oil Corporation.\u201d Under instructions from Washington, the IMF hasn\u2019t been reliably reporting Libya\u2019s GDP figures after 2011, but instead shows that things there were immediately restored to normal (even to better than normal: $13,580.55 per-capita GDP) in 2012, but everybody knows that it\u2019s false; even NPR is, in effect, reporting that it\u2019s not true. The\u00a0CIA estimates<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that Libya\u2019s per-capita GDP was a ridiculous $23,900 in 2012 (they give no figures for the years before that), and says Libya\u2019s per-capita GDP has declined only slightly thereafter. None of the official estimates are at all trustworthy, though the Atlantic Council at least made an effort to explain things honestly, headlining in their latest systematic report about Libya\u2019s economy, on 23 January 2014,\u00a0\u201cLibya: Facing Economic Collapse in 2014.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Libya has become Europe\u2019s big problem. Millions of Libyans are fleeing the chaos there. Some of them are fleeing across the Mediterranean and ending up in refugee camps in southern Italy; and some are escaping to elsewhere in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Syria is now yet another nation that\u2019s being destroyed in order to conquer Russia. Even the reliably propagandistic New York Times<\/i> is acknowledging, in its \u2018news\u2019 reporting, that,\u00a0“both the Turks and the Syrian insurgents see defeating\u00a0President\u00a0Bashar al-Assad\u00a0of Syria as their first priority.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0So: U.S. bombers will be enforcing a no-fly-zone over parts of Syria in order to bring down Russia\u2019s ally Bashar al-Assad and replace his secular government by an Islamic government \u2013 and the ‘anti-ISIS’ thing is just for show; it\u2019s PR, propaganda. The public cares far more about defeating ISIS than about defeating Russia; but that\u2019s not the way America\u2019s aristocracy views things. Their objective is extending America\u2019s empire \u2013 extending their own empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly,\u00a0Obama overthrew the neutralist government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in February 2014, but that was under the fake cover of \u2018democracy\u2019 demonstrations,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0instead of under the fake cover of \u2018opposing Islamic terrorism\u2019 or whatever other phrases that the U.S. Government uses to fool suckers about America\u2019s installation of, and support to, a rabidly anti-Russia, racist-fascist, or nazi, government next door to Russia, in Ukraine. Just as Libya had been at peace before the U.S. invaded and destroyed it, and just as Syria had been at peace before the U.S and Turkey invaded and destroyed it, Ukraine too was at peace before the U.S. perpetrated its coup there and\u00a0installed nazis and an ethnic cleansing campaign there, and destroyed Ukraine too.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Like with Libya before the overthrow of Gaddafi there, or Syria before the current effort to overthrow Assad there, or the more recent successful overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, it\u2019s all aimed to defeat Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact that all of Europe is sharing in the devastation that Obama and other American conservatives \u2013 imperialists, even \u2013 impose, is of little if any concern to the powers-that-be in Washington DC, but, if it matters at all to them, then perhaps it\u2019s another appealing aspect of this broader operation: By weakening European nations, and not only nations in the Middle East, Obama\u2019s war against Russia is yet further establishing America to be \u201cthe last man standing,\u201d at the end of the chaos and destruction that America causes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consequently, for example, in terms of U.S. international strategy, the fact that\u00a0the economic sanctions against Russia are enormously harming the economies of European nations<\/span><\/a>\u00a0is good, not bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are two ways to win, at any game: One is by improving one\u2019s own performance. The other is by weakening the performances by all of one\u2019s competitors. The United States is now relying almost entirely upon the latter type of strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org In Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and other countries at the periphery or edges of Europe, U.S. President Barack Obama has been pursuing a policy of destabilization, and even of bombings and other military assistance, that drives millions of refugees out of those peripheral areas and into Europe, thereby adding fuel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":171227,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,96,93,880,535,882,59,524,754,523],"class_list":{"0":"post-171226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-eu","14":"tag-europe","15":"tag-global-news","16":"tag-libya","17":"tag-military","18":"tag-russia","19":"tag-syria","20":"tag-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}