Friday, January
19, 2018
Politics 101: The Influence of Money on
U.S. Foreign Policy. The Cases of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran
By Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay
(Author of the
books “The
Code for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”)
“I
am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight
these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. — And then God would tell me
‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
U.S. Republican President George
W. Bush (1946- ), in a conversion with a Palestinian delegation in July
2003, during the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm
el-Sheikh.
“They [the
George W. Bush administration] lied… They said there were weapons of mass
destruction [in Iraq]. There were
none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction…
We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives.
... Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make
mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have
destabilized the Middle East.”
U.S. Republican President Donald
Trump (1946- ), statement made during a CBS News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, February 13,
2016.
“I know what America is. America
is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't
get in the way.”
Benjamin Netanyahu (1949- ),
current Israeli Prime Minister, in a video in 2001, addressing Israeli
settlers.
[After 9/11 in 2001, I was shown] “a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in
five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan
and, finishing off, Iran.”
General Wesley
Clark (1944- ), in a video interview on Tues. Mar. 2, 2007
by journalist Amy Goodman.
Just
as Republican George W. Bush invented
the pretext of “weapons of mass
destruction”, in 2003, to deceive Americans and the rest of the world and
to justify a military invasion of Iraq, Donald Trump seems to follow on Bush’s
footsteps in actively searching for a pretext for another
military confrontation in the Middle East, this time against Iran. George W.
Bush had even claimed, at the time, that religion was behind
his military interventionism when he said, in the summer of 2003, in a bout of
hubristic delusion, that “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.”
Now another American Republican president, Donald Trump, appears to
see himself on a similar mission, i.e. to attack another country, in violation
of international law. This time the target of his nasty attack
du jour is the country of Iran, a country run by theocrats,
which is facing deep domestic problems, both economic and political. Indeed,
for some time now, Trump has been making inflammatory remarks against that
country’s domestic affairs, in the hope of provoking a response and thus
justifying a military aggression.
According to
Donald Trump, “We Should Have Never Been in Iraq.”
Donald Trump’s attacks against Iran are all the more
amazing and unreal because, on multiple occasions during the last U.S.
presidential campaign, candidate Trump openly accused George W. Bush of lying
to invade Iraq, adding during a CBS
News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, February 13,
2016, “We should have never been in
Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Is Donald Trump suffering from
amnesia, or is he simply incoherent in his thoughts?
As a matter of fact, and despite the neocon propaganda
to the contrary, the Bush-Cheney administration did destabilize
the Middle East, and these politicians caused the death of hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children, and they created millions of refugees,
many of them ending up in Europe. But possibly worse, from a U.S. and Israel
point of view, the 2003 American military invasion of Iraq has resulted in
significantly increasing the geopolitical influence of Shiite Iran in the
region, by removing from power the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein
(1937-2006) and by installing a Shiite government in its place.
This is a question that I raised in my book about the
Iraq war, The
New American Empire. In it, I not only questioned the
legality of such a military invasion of a sovereign country, in violation of
the U.N. Charter, but also its wisdom, since Iran was undoubtedly going to
profit immensely from a newly installed Shiite government in Baghdad… as it
did.
What is doubly amazing is that both Republican
American presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, received the same
uncritical financial and political support from the very same super rich American
Zionist donors and from American Evangelical
Christians, although Bush’s support was more widespread than
Trump’s, due to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. This time around, however, Donald
Trump is not only an abnormal
president; he is also a minority
president, staunchly supported by only about one third of Americans.
Money is King
in U.S. Foreign Policy, Especially Regarding the Middle East
Nowadays, in American politics, money talks and big
money talks even louder. In 2010, the
partisan U.S. Supreme Court made sure that this be the case when it imposed its
anti-democratic doctrine of “Money Is Speech”, in a 5-4
decision. For instance, in 2016, because of
huge campaign contributions from one-issue super
rich donors (mega donors), nearly all
GOP primary presidential contenders, Donald Trump in front, ended up
promising to move the American embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem
and to ring up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on their
first day in the Oval Office, according to a Newsweek
report.
So far, Donald Trump has already paid
some of his political
debt to his mega donors by announcing his willingness to move the U.S. embassy
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But even before his inauguration on January 20,
2017, Trump’s entourage was actively intervening on behalf of
a foreign government, the Israeli government, at the United Nations.
Such subservience of American politicians to the wishes
of big campaign contributors may partly
explain why the United States has one of the lowest
voter turnouts in its elections among modern
world democracies. During the 2016 American
Presidential election, for example, less than 56% of voting age citizens
bothered to vote,
a 20-year low. According to the Pew Research Center, among the 35 highly
developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), the United States ranks
28th in terms of turnout in recent national elections. For example,
electoral turnouts in Belgium (87%), Sweden (83%) or Denmark (80%) were much
higher.
Because of the overwhelming importance
of money in U.S. politics and because rich pro-Israel
lobbies are very active and prominent political donors,
American policies in the Middle East have been increasingly skewed in the
direction dictated by the Israeli government and its lobbies in the United
States. There seems to exist a de facto
US-Israel
axis, which often includes Saudi Arabia, as far as the Middle East is
concerned.
Indeed, it’s impossible to understand
what has been going on for decades in that part of the world, with its string
of wars, destruction and deaths, without taking into consideration the
overwhelming influence of that axis, which goes beyond partisan party lines in
Washington D.C. [In
a speech
during the
Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, in April 2008, when she was a presidential
candidate, Hillary Clinton declared “If I’m President, we will attack Iran… We would be
able to totally obliterate them!”]
A
Joint U.S.-Israeli Operation Against Iran could now be in the Making
When the U.S. government wishes to undermine a foreign
government and create the conditions for a regime
change, one should be on the lookout for some false flag operations
by well-funded so called “intelligence or covert
organizations”, which are specialists in fomenting
destabilization in a country, under the hypocritical
cover of defending human rights.
As General Wesley Clark (1944- )
revealed in 2007 (see quote above), Iran is the last country in a long list of
countries, whose government the Pentagon had plans to overthrow. The fact that
some superficial media fail to inform their readers and listeners about such
well-known plans is nothing less than a journalistic scandal.
Such an overall plan would fit perfectly
well with the recently announced American-Israeli
“strategic plan” against
Iran. It is a curious coincidence that the most important political protests
in Iran since 2009 have come about just after a secret agreement was finalized
between the U.S and Israel, (with the assistance of Saudi Arabia), to
destabilize Iran. Indeed, in their
relations with Iran, the United States and Israel seem to be acting as a single
political entity.
This could also
explain why President Donald Trump, against all logic, is so adamant in
insisting that the Iranian government is not in compliance with the P5+1 nuclear deal, even though
the U.N. and the five other nations in the deal (China, France, Russia, the U.
K. and Germany) all agree that Iran is actually in compliance with
the agreement. On January 12, Trump renewed his charges against the Iran Deal,
without completely withdrawing his country from the deal, but by adding new conditions
and economic sanctions against Iran, an act that is, in itself, a
violation of the deal. The only government that is in violation of the Iran
Deal is the Trump administration, not the Iranian government.
About Iran, it can be said that Donald
Trump is dutifully following the long established neoconservative script, at
the U.S. Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington D.C., to target this country for
the same destabilization overall plan, which was implemented successfully
against Iraq
in 2003, Libya
in 2011 and Syria in
2013, without forgetting the coup in Ukraine in
2014.
It doesn’t matter much who sits in the
White House or which political party controls the U.S. Congress, at a given
time, the same political forces are dominant and the same neocon-inspired
American foreign policy is implemented in the Middle East. The slight
difference recently has been that Barack Obama was somewhat less enthusiastic
in implementing the policy than George W. Bush or Donald Trump. The results,
however, have been the same: governments have been overthrown and people have
been killed.
Conclusion
In foreign
affairs as in other matters, the Trump administration is going full speed ahead
with improvised and dubious policies without fully considering all the
consequences ahead. The crises will come later on.
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_____________________________________________
International
economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”, and
of “The
New American Empire”.
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_____________________________________________
© 2018 by
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay