The laughable campaign sales pitch the American people were suffocated with over the past year and before was that Joe Biden, apartheid “Israel’s man in Washington” as well as the de facto author of the Patriot Act, was going save us from President Donald Trump’s fascism and restore “normalcy.”
We were endlessly told that the Trump era’s racism and authoritarianism were an unfortunate, ugly aberration, a hiccup, in the long, progressive arc of history. An arc we are all encouraged to simply love and adore. Of course, all of this is ludicrous.
Biden, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with his right-hand man and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in their role overseeing hearings on whether or not to invade Iraq lied the American people into the second of almost four American wars. For thirty years, since this January, the U.S. has been bombing Iraq. As a result of the Iraq War, more than a million people were killed.
In his new book covering the sordid history of U.S. interventions and wars in the Middle East, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton tells the story of Biden’s role rolling America into the invasion of Iraq:
Biden did not just support the war. He served as Bush and Cheney’s Senate gatekeeper and whip, guaranteeing a majority vote for the war in the upper chamber while controlled by the opposition party. If Biden had any moral courage at all, he would have stopped that war. All he would have had to do was bring in real experts like former UN weapons inspection chief Scott Ritter and former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni to debunk the case that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons of mass destruction or had programs that necessitated that war. The senator could have asked Gen. Scowcroft to testify. He could have held up the authorization vote and refused to support an aggressive war. Instead, Biden conspired with the White House to force the authorization through.
His red baiting, ‘National Security Democrat’ Vice President Kamala Harris (formerly California’s top cop) has manically cackled while discussing how she imprisoned poor people for non-violent offenses. She also told us that “very smart people” say the controversy around American cops killing black people, and popular support for Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests, really “wasn’t a thing” and was artificially boosted by “Russian bots.”
Blinken, along with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Samantha Power, Biden’s pick to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), helped engineer the disastrous wars in Libya and Syria. Power served on Barrack Obama’s National Security Council at the time, before being promoted to be UN ambassador, and was one of the main players advocating for the Libyan war.
As Dave Decamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, reported,
Power argued in favor of U.S. intervention in Libya under the guise of protecting human rights and preventing genocide. She was joined in her crusade by then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Susan Rice, who served as the UN ambassador at the time.
Reports from 2011 say the pressure from Power, Rice, and Clinton is what led Obama to intervene militarily in Libya, even though his other top advisors were against it. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates would later say that in a “51 to 49” decision, Obama decided to bomb Libya.
The U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya that led to the brutal murder of former Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi was an absolute disaster. Destabilizing Libya turned the country into a haven for al-Qaeda-linked militants, resulted in targeted killings of black Africans, sparked a refugee crisis in North Africa, and even led to the creation of slave markets.
Additionally, the aforementioned Rice has been tapped to be Biden’s Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Half a million people were killed in Syria as a result of the CIA’s proxy war against the Bashar al Assad government. The main beneficiaries of this treasonous policy in this case were the former CIA director John Brennan’s proxies, al Nusra, the Syrian variant of al Qaeda in Iraq. In the early stages of this war, Sullivan boasted to his boss, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that, in Syria, al Qaeda was on “our side.” In fact, the whole Benghazi scandal, and its partisan war of words, was a cover up over this policy and its true cause. Susan Rice lied and said the embassy was hit over an offensive internet video. The attack was actually blowback, encouraged by al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, after a U.S. drone assassination in Pakistan. In the early days of the Syrian operation, under the auspices of Secretary of State Clinton and then CIA director David Petraeus, guns were being run from that embassy to al Qaeda linked militants to aid them in their war against Damascus.
Just over a week into his term, a spokesmen from Biden’s State Department said the administration intends to continue Trump’s policy of an indefinite occupation of northeastern Syria. Of course, instead of saying it’s to ‘take the oil,’ like Trump, the Foggy Bottom spokesman said this is now about supporting the Kurds.
Blinken, and the Obama/Biden administration, deliberately took the side of the Saudi/UAE coalition in its war against the people of Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country. By January 2015, the Houthis, north Yemen’s Zaydi Shi’ite tribesmen, who seized the capital from the Saudi backed puppet government there in late 2014, had an active alliance with CENTCOM against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This was when General Lloyd Austin, Biden’s pick for Defense Secretary, led the Middle East command. The Houthis were then betrayed by the likes of Blinken, then Deputy Secretary of State, and John Kerry, then Secretary of State now Climate Czar. The U.S. backstabbed the Houthis in favor of their enemies AQAP and the Islamic State, both of whom fight for and alongside the Saudis’ coalition. Austin oversaw the double cross and while he gossiped about how he was displeased about it behind the scenes, he never resigned and did what he was told. Before being recently confirmed as ‘War Secretary,’ Austin left CENTCOM and found a seat on the Raytheon board, so he could profit off the war’s countless civilian deaths. The U.S. Navy and Air Force, along with the Saudis, launched effectively a full blockade of the country, where, even prior to the war, 90% of food was imported. The country has since been decimated with conservative UN estimates of nearly a quarter of a million dead, about half due to violence and half from mass starvation, as well as widespread disease, and malnutrition. For years human rights groups and UN agencies have declared this war to be the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
In his Senate confirmation hearings, Blinken promised the Biden regime would end U.S. support for the Saudis’ war in “short order.” Some arms sales have been paused and are under review. The war continues, Yemeni children are still being starved to death and bombed. When will they get to have some “normalcy?”
In 2014, when she was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Joe Biden infamously teamed up with Victoria Nuland, to put the finishing touches on a US multi-billion dollar coup launched in Ukraine. The street putsch managed by Nuland and the National Endowment for Democracy enabled a coalition infested with fascists and Nazis to take power in Kiev. A proxy war between the coup government and Russian backed separatists in the east has taken the lives of more than 10,000 people. Trump then sent Ukraine anti-tank missiles from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, a move even Obama wouldn’t make.
During the early years of the Iraq War, Nuland was Dick Cheney’s National Security Advisor. She’s the wife of Robert Kagan, the arch neoconservative, ardent Russia hawk, and cofounder of the notorious Project for a New American Century. Kagan was a longtime advocate of “arms shipments to Ukraine.” During her 2016 campaign, he advised Hillary Clinton to do so. Biden has nominated Nuland to the number three position at the State Department. Her appointment, in and of itself, is a major escalation with Russia. Putin detests Nuland. She is an avid proponent of regime change in Moscow.
In the words of the great Ron Paul,
More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared.
Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded – after thousands of civilians were killed.
All of the above cannot be accepted as any kind of normal. The American people can neither afford this “normalcy” financially nor morally. Empire costs trillions of dollars. The debt is skyrocketing, just a shade under $30 trillion, and growing every second. Interest payments on the wars alone will cost multiple trillions. The cost is in lost lives and liberties will be catastrophic. We are all now in the crosshairs of nuclear annihilation as well due to our government’s unprovoked aggressions. America’s new Cold Wars with Russia and China are rapidly warming. The American Empire is the most dangerous, destructive, and cruel entity in the world and we must stop its rampage.
From the genocide in Yemen, to Israel’s apartheid regime that Palestinians suffer under daily, to the myriad regime change operations, the NATO drills on Russia’s borders, the American aircraft carriers sailing in the South China Sea, the U.S. warships in the Black Sea, the B-52s flying over the Persian Gulf, etc.
Empire always comes home, which is why we are now seeing a burgeoning domestic terror war, as well as the hideous spectacle of Biden’s fascistic, taxpayer funded militarized inauguration. The wars are coming home to terrorize the Empire’s host population. At home and abroad, let us permanently break from these norms immediately.
