War
With Russia Is On The Agenda
By Paul Craig Roberts
27 August,
2008
Vdare.com
Thinking
about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is
sobering. The United States, bristling with nuclear weapons and pursuing
a policy of world hegemony, has a population that is kept in the dark--indeed
brainwashed--about the most important and most dangerous events of
our time.
The power of the Israel Lobby is an important component of keeping
Americans in the dark. Recently I watched a documentary that demonstrates
the control that the Israel Lobby exercises over Americans’
view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary is available
here
As a result of the US media’s one-sided coverage, few Americans
are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians
from their homes and lands under protection of America’s veto
in the United Nations. Instead, the dispossessed Palestinians are
portrayed as mindless terrorists who attack innocent Israel.
If one reads Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz, or publications
from Israeli organizations, such as the Israeli Committee Against
House Demolitions, one gets a radically different view of the situation
than the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical
pulpits.
Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the
USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and 39 wounded American
sailors. But few have heard of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS
Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured
by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father
of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To
this day there never has been a congressional investigation.
The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage
of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict
as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American
and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak
attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia,
a separatist province.
Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed
in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili,
the American puppet “president” of Georgia, the Georgian
peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers
and murdered them.
This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative
National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony,
was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili,
as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein. But it is Russia,
not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized.
Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell’s Big
Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York
Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them. What is
wrong with Americans? Why do they put up with it? Are Americans the
nation of sheep that Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says they are? Americans
flaunt “freedom and democracy” and live under a Ministry
of Propaganda.
Two decades ago, President Reagan reached agreement with Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev to end the dangerous cold war. But every one of
Reagan’s successors has sought to pick a new fight with Russia.
In violation of the agreement, NATO has been taken to Russia’s
borders, and the US is determined to put former constituent parts
of Russia herself into NATO. In an effort to neutralize Russia’s
nuclear deterrent and compromise her independence, the US is putting
anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia’s borders.
The gratuitously aggressive US military policy toward Russia will
lead to nuclear war. I am confident that if Americans elect John McCain,
or the Republicans steal another presidential election, there will
be nuclear war in the second decade of the 21st century. The neocon
lies, propaganda, macho flag-waving, and use of US foreign policy
in the interests of a few military-security firms, oil companies,
and Israel are all leading in that direction.
The November election is perhaps the last chance to avoid nuclear
war. But the opportunity might already have been missed. The Republicans
have chosen as their candidate one of the most ignorant warmongers
alive. The Democrats’ choice was between one of the most divisive
women in America and a man of mixed race with a funny name. Considering
American’s taste for war, the Democratic candidate could fail
to defeat the GOP war candidate.
Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black. Why does
mixed ancestry confer the black label? If America’s population
was predominantly black, would Obama be considered white?
Race and propaganda are more likely to determine the outcome of the
November election than any awareness or consideration of real issues
by voters.
The real issues are suffocated by the media. The American middle class
is being destroyed by jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners,
while the incomes of the super rich are soaring. The US dollar’s
reserve currency status is eroded. The US is massively in debt at
home and abroad. Health insurance is unaffordable for the vast majority
of the population. Injured veterans are being nickeled and dimed,
while Halliburton’s profits escalate. Americans are losing their
homes, while the US government bails out banks. Wars with Iran, Russia,
and China are being planned in order to secure US hegemony.
Americans no longer have a government that is for the people and by
the people. They have a government for and by special interests and
an insane ideology.
But Americans have war, which lets them take out all their frustrations,
resentments, and disappointments on “Muslim terrorists”
and “Russian aggressors.” Few Americans are disturbed
that 1.25 million Iraqis and an unknown number of Afghans have died
as a result of American invasions based on Bush regime lies and deceptions.
Even Americans, like Senator Biden, Obama’s selection for vice
president, who understand that the wars are based on lies, still want
the US to win. So, it was all a mistake and a deception, but let’s
win anyway and keep on killing.
I know people who still complain that the US did not nuke North Vietnam.
When I ask why Vietnam should have been nuked, they reply, “if
we had nuked them we would have won.”
What would America have won? The answer is world loathing and the
loss of the cold war.
For many Americans, war is like a sports contest in which they take
vicarious pleasure and cheer on their side to victory. Millions of
Americans are still bitter that “the liberal media” and
war protesters caused America to lose the Vietnam war, and they are
determined that this won’t happen again. These Americans have
no realization that there was no more reason for the US to be fighting
in Vietnam 40 years ago than to be fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan
or tomorrow in Iran.
Obama, if elected, is no guarantee against nuclear war. Obama has
shown that he is as much under the Israel Lobby’s thumb as McCain.
Obama’s foreign affairs advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not
a neocon, but he was born in Warsaw, Poland, and has the Pole’s
animosity toward Russia. The Bush administration has already changed
US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack. With the US government
determined to ring Russia with puppet states and military bases, war
is inevitable.
Presidential appointees face confirmation in the Senate. Any of Obama’s
appointees who might be out of step with plans for US and Israeli
hegemony could expect opposition from large corporations and the Israel
Lobby. There is no assurance that an Obama administration would not
be positioned on “the issues” by the same special interests
that have positioned the Bush administration.
Americans are filled with hubris, not with knowledge. They have no
awareness of the calamity that their government’s pursuit of
hegemony is bringing to themselves and to life on earth.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury
in the Reagan Administration. He is a former Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal, a 16-year columnist for Business Week, and a
columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and Creator’s
Syndicate in Los Angeles. He has held numerous university professorships,
including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center
for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and
Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He
was awarded the Legion of Honor by the President of France and the
US Treasury’s Silver Medal for “outstanding contributions
to the formulation of US economic policy.”