Everywhere you look in mainstream Western media you see the utter “reasonableness’ of our need to destroy this or that country because it is evil and isn’t democratic or reasonable enough.
History tells us a different story, but for some reason, we choose to ignore it. The recent non-revelation of the CIA and UK ‘intelligence” community’s overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister Mossaddegh of Iran, beginning on 19th August 1953 once again highlights what the Wikipedia entry aptly describes as the ongoing “grubby” adventures by these two states. Foolishly, Mossaddegh’s government had voted to nationalise the UK “owned’ oil fields production in Iran and so Mossaddegh and Iran had to pay the price- a lifetime of imprisonment and the re-installation of the brutal pretend-King of Persia -the Shah.
The UK and France’s ongoing adventure in Syria is another such example of history repeating itself, where the so-called socialist president of France, Hollande is salivating at the mouth with the opportunity to once again invade their old colony under the pretense of protecting its inhabitants ( identical story to last time), and the evil little UK Foreign Minister Hague will do absolutely anything to please his Israeli masters. Funding and supporting Al Qaeda is absolutely not a problem to Hollande and Hague and Obama -as it was no problem for the US in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Read a great account of the French aerial bombing of Damascus in 1925 and again in 1926. The US has a 60 year history of conflict with Syria, as noted by Adam Curtis in his wonderful blog, “The Baby and the Baath Water.”
In Afghanistan,the US repeats the old adventures played out by its now junior ally, “Great Britain”, in its nineteenth century wars of 1839-1842, and 1878-1880 and then 1919.
Were those wars about peace, justice and democracy and the rights of women? Then, as now, protecting opium production was one of the driving forces; protecting the Western interests who make huge monies from addicting and selling opium and now heroin to Chinese, Russians or any other brutalised public.
Protecting Western oil interests and profits is of course, the other game; a game that heavily relies on Israel forming a “western” buttress against the Arab hordes revolting against the ‘masters and betters’. Hence the less than subtle tacit support for the Egyptian Army generals and their counter-revolution, and the West’s unconditional support for the Wahhabi extremist fiefdoms in Saudi Arabia Qatar and the UAE.
“The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will’; “great beast” in which the ruler’s power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed, and “great fraud” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority” – 1491- New Revelations of the Americas”: Charles C Mann. I leave you to judge which of those categories of statehood the UK and US fit into.
The problem with all of these Western adventures is that they benefit only a tiny minority of the UK and US populations; the very very rich (or the less then ‘one-per cent’) , with the trickle-down effects to the British and US wider public negligible. The process can only continue while those publics can continue to be propagandized into believing that these wars and adventures are about peace democracy and justice and stopping evil terrorists blowing us all up..
The desperation of those in power and their mercenary backers can be seen in the massive state investment in knowing what everyone is writing and saying online and on the phone and the need to silence any whistleblowers quickly.
Time is running out for the predators.
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Links
An excellent analysis of the impacts of interventionism in Libya from the Belfer Institute by Alan Ku[perman
Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/23/manning-snowden-and-the-u-s-coup-in-iran/
New Antarctica 