How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State (67 page)

The report attempts to lull Russia by stating that “it is not our intent to negate Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent, or to destabilize the strategic military relationship with Russia.” However, the report backtracks on the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review that set the goal of limiting the purpose of US nuclear weapons to deterrence of nuclear attack.

The June 2013 report says: “we cannot adopt such a policy today.”

Washington’s excuse for retaining the right to initiate a nuclear attack is the threat of “nuclear terrorism” by “Al Qaeda and their extremist allies.” Al Qaeda is not a state or a country. The report does not say how a preemptive US nuclear attack can be used against Al Qaeda. Indeed, the extremism of Al Qaeda is the product of Washington’s imperialism. If Washington would leave Muslims alone, the extremism would be internalized between Sunni and Shi’ites and between secular rulers and Islamists.

If the US would renounce its interventionist policies, the terrorist threat would abate.

Even the present level of hostility does not prevent Chechen terrorists from cooperating with Washington in efforts to destabilize the Russian North Caucasus region.

Washington’s use of Muslim extremists against the Russian state dates to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When Gorbachev became General Secretary, he informed Washington that he was withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan. In their 2012 book, The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick report that instead of facilitating the end of the conflict, Washington worked to tie down Soviet forces in Afghanistan as long as possible by supplying Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri with money and weapons and by blocking UN attempts to broker a settlement.

The neoconservatives are bitter that the Cold War ended without a US military triumph over Russia. It is a triumph that the dangerous warmongers still hope to achieve.

CONCLUSION

As at the conclusion of this writing in December, 2013, it appears that Washington might have lost the initiative in fomenting wars in the Middle East. Most of the world has concluded, along with the Russian government, that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was an orchestrated pretext for US military intervention in behalf of the Islamist attempt to overthrow the secular Assad government. The diplomatic offensive by Iran’s president, Dr. Hassan Rouhani, has further constrained Washington’s ability to obtain support from other countries as a cover for Washington’s wars of aggression.

Washington, of course, is unhappy with these restraints, but the risk to Washington of initiating naked aggression without some kind of cover, such as a UN resolution, NATO support, or a “coalition of the willing,” is to be branded a war criminal. Washington’s ability to continue its march through the neoconservatives’ list of governments to be overthrown lacks the necessary support both at home and abroad. Washington might possibly use a false flag event in order to regain support for remaking the Middle East, but this would be risky considering the
high level of skepticism
that now exists related to the US government’s account of 9/11.

During the twelve years of Washington’s focus on the “war on terror,” other developments have occurred that Washington now regards as greater threats to its hegemony. Under the leadership of Putin and Medvedev, Russia has emerged as a diplomatic force independent of foreign financial control, and China has emerged as an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse that eclipses the US economy.

After a costly decade of wars in the Middle East with no offsetting gains, the Obama regime announced the “Pivot to Asia,” a policy of encircling China with military bases.

The Pivot to Asia calls for shifting 60 percent of the US fleet to positions from which the US can both control choke points, such as the Straits of Malacca, through which China’s vital trade and energy imports flow, and bolster other countries in their disputes with China over resource rich islands.

To accommodate and to protect the fleet, Washington is seeking air and naval bases in the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Myanmar. Additionally, Washington is pushing a Trans-Pacific Partnership designed to further dollar imperialism and to counter China’s growing trade with Asian countries.

Washington intends to offset Russia and China’s ability to constrain US hegemony with military encirclement and by fomenting internal instability. Washington has surrounded Russia with military bases and anti-ballistic missile sites and is attempting to make NATO members of former constituent parts of the Russian empire, such as Georgia and Ukraine. Washington has targeted Russia and China with Washington-financed Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and covertly supports Muslim separatists in both countries.

Washington’s policy is financially and diplomatically expensive and increases the risk of nuclear war. It is a very ambitious policy for the US, which is financially and diplomatically impaired from twelve years of war and which is unable to recover from five years of economic weakness despite unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus.

Washington now suffers from its own economic and political divisions, with the bulk of the population failing to advance and even regressing, while income and wealth have been concentrated in fewer hands. Washington’s superpower ambitions do not seem to be matched by its capabilities. The large disparity between Washington’s goals and capabilities implies failure. If Washington is unable to accept failure, Washington will resort to war.

The prospect of war is only one of the dangers emanating from Washington that confronts Americans and the rest of the world. The 21st century transformation of the United States from a democratic accountable government to a lawless tyranny is a threat not only to Americans but also to peoples everywhere.

The Bush and Obama regimes set themselves up as higher than law, declaring their independence from international law and the Geneva Conventions and from US statutory law and the Constitution. The hoax “war on terror” is used to provide legal legitimacy for these spurious claims.

Among all the democratic countries in the world, only the president of the United States proclaims that he has the right to murder citizens without due process of law, without charges presented to a court, without trial and conviction for a capital offense. Only the president of the United States claims the legal right to indefinitely imprison citizens without cause being presented to a court and conviction obtained in a court. Only the president of the United States has declared that he has the right to violate peremptory norms of international law by torturing detainees. Only the president of the United States declares that he has the right to spy not only on Americans in violation of their Constitutional right to privacy and statutory US law, but also on all the peoples of the world.

Little doubt but that brutal dictators murder people and throw them in dungeons without trial or conviction. Are these dictators behaving illegally and unconstitutionally, or are they ruling in countries in which there is no rule of law?

Certainly, no other government that claims to be democratic is equipped with a Department of Justice, as Obama is and Bush was, that concocts legal justification for the head of the executive branch to be elevated above law despite the Constitution’s prohibition of any such elevation. To rule independently of a rule of law is to be lawless.

In America the federal courts, both houses of Congress, law schools, the public and presstitute media have accepted the claims that the head of the executive branch, the president, has “unitary powers” that place him above accountability in certain circumstances such as war--thus the orchestration of “the war on terror.” Although the president fallaciously claims to be unaccountable, there is no provision in international law that provides exceptions for war crimes, and the US Military Code does not extend this protection to soldiers and military officers.

The Bush and Obama regimes have committed crimes against numerous peoples and laws comparable to those committed by members of Germany’s National Socialist government who were executed for their crimes. It was US prosecutors who established the basis for the capital crimes for which Germans were held accountable. Yet Bush and Obama have contrived legal arguments that seek to make them exempt from accountability, and the judiciary, Congress, and the media have failed to challenge the claims.

Is this what is meant when neoconservatives declare that the US government is “exceptional” and “indispensable”? Is America exceptional only because Washington can ignore both US statutory law and international law and avoid accountability?

A government cannot be both unaccountable and democratic. The 21st century Bush/Obama regimes have brought lawlessness and tyranny to America and to the world.