by
Chris Floyd
We, the West, overthrew Saddam by
violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow
Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than
our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been
the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows
wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of
aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by
Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent
people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of
extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to
strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go
back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation
by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of
armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations
(in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there
would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks
in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as
possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of
deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and
its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or
supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the
Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to
heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the
US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last
half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to
the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the
United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most
extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based
secular resistance to its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient
history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris?
Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient
history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of
Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious
extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more
violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet
more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of
course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in
Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the
egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in
human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of
power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent
people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to
their favored dictators — and again, again and again —
supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians
on earth.
And one further cause of despair:
that although this historical record is there in the open, readily
available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue
to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public.
The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and
regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old
agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again —
creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning
the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment