{"id":14385,"date":"2020-02-24T12:29:24","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T17:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=14385"},"modified":"2020-02-24T12:32:38","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T17:32:38","slug":"u-s-foreign-policy-perpetual-perfidy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/24\/u-s-foreign-policy-perpetual-perfidy\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Foreign Policy Perpetual Perfidy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/a>U.S. Foreign Policy Perpetual Perfidy\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/span>

The Washington establishment was aghast in October when Donald Trump appeared to approve a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The United States was seen as abandoning the Kurds, some of whom had assisted the United States in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. But the indignation over the latest U.S. policy shift in the Middle East is farcical considering the long record of U.S. double-crosses. Rather than the triumph of American idealism, recent U.S. policy has been perpetual perfidy leavened with frequent doses of idiocy.<\/p>\n

Almost none of the media coverage of the Turkish invasion and flight of Kurdish refugees mentioned that President George H.W. Bush had urged the Kurds and other Iraqis to \u201ctake matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside\u201d just before the start of the U.S. bombing campaign in 1991 in the first Gulf War. After it became clear that the U.S. military could not protect the Kurds from Saddam\u2019s backlash, U.S. policymakers basically shrugged and moseyed along. As a CNN analysis noted in 2003, \u201cBush refrained from aiding Kurdish rebels in the north, although he finally sent troops and relief supplies to protect hundreds of thousands of fleeing Kurds who were in danger of freezing or starving to death. Bush has never regretted his decision not to intervene.\u201d George H.W. Bush\u2019s abandonment and betrayal of the Kurds did nothing to deter the media and political establishment from praising him lavishly after he died in late 2018.<\/p>\n

U.S. meddling in the Middle East multiplied after the 9\/11 attacks. Even though most of the hijackers were Saudis who received plenty of assistance from the Saudi government, the George W. Bush administration seized the chance to demonize and assault Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraqi regime. He portrayed his invasion of Iraq<\/a> as American idealism at its best. In his May 1, 2003, \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, <\/i>Bush hailed \u201cthe character of our military through history\u201d for showing \u201cthe decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies.\u201d Speaking three weeks later at a Republican fundraiser, he bragged, \u201cThe world has seen the strength and the idealism of the United States military.\u201d Washington Post<\/i> columnist David Ignatius declared in late 2003 that \u201cthis may be the most idealistic war fought in modern times.\u201d The torture scandal at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq has not been permitted to deter the recent embarrassingly fulsome praise of George W. Bush by the establishment media.<\/p>\n

The Bush administration and its media allies produced one smokescreen after another to justify the war. Almost all the pre-invasion broadcast news stories on Iraq originated with the federal government. PBS\u2019s Bill Moyers noted that \u201cof the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.\u201d A 2008 report by the Center for Public Integrity found that \u201cin speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.\u201d The report concluded that the \u201cfalse statements \u2014 amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts\u201d created \u201can almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war.\u201d Bush\u2019s falsehoods on Iraq proved far more toxic than anything in Saddam\u2019s arsenal. But the exposure of the official lies did not deter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from equating criticizing the Iraq war with appeasing Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoly warriors\u201d<\/h2>\n

The chaos from the 2003 invasion of Iraq was still spiraling out of control when the Bush administration began seeking pretexts to attack Iran, which Bush had designated part of the \u201cAxis of Evil\u201d in his 2002 State of the Union address. Bush officials and subsequent administrations chose to champion the Iranian terrorist group, Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK). That organization sprang up in the 1960s and proceeded to kill Americans in the 1970s and to kill large numbers of Iranians in the subsequent decades. A 2004 FBI report noted that MEK continued to be \u201cactively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism.\u201d NBC News reported in early 2012 that MEK carried out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and that it was \u201cfinanced, trained and armed by Israel\u2019s secret service.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the same year that a stampede of Washington hustlers took huge payoffs to publicly champion de-listing the MEK as a terrorist organization. As Trita Parsi noted in the New York Review of Books,<\/i> MEK \u201crented office space in Washington, held fundraisers with lawmakers, or offered U.S. officials speaking fees to appear at their gatherings. But the MEK did this openly for years, despite being on the U.S. government\u2019s terrorist list.\u201d Federal law prohibited taking money from or advocating in behalf of any designated terrorist group. But, as a 2011 Huffpost headline reported, \u201cFormer U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating for Terrorist Organization.\u201d Former FBI boss Louis Freeh, former CIA boss Porter Goss, co-chair of the 9\/11 Commission Lee Hamilton, former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge pocketed $30,000 or more for brief speeches at pro-MEK events. Glenn Greenwald rightly scoffed that the advocacy for MEK \u201creveals the impunity with which political elites commit the most egregious crimes, as well as the special privileges to which they explicitly believe they \u2014 and they alone \u2014 are entitled.\u201d Greenwald pointed out that average people were scourged by the same law the pooh-bahs brazenly trampled: \u201cA Staten Island satellite TV salesman in 2009 was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks in part to the torrent of insider endorsements, the Obama administration canceled the MEK\u2019s terrorist designation in 2012. While Washington poohbahs continue portraying the group as idealistic freedom fighters devoted to democracy, a simple online search shows that the translation of the group\u2019s name is \u201choly warriors of the people,\u201d as Ted Carpenter noted in his new book, Gullible Superpower.<\/i> Trump administration officials have gurgled about MEK\u2019s possible role in ruling Iran after the current government is toppled. But MEK remains odious to the Iranian people regardless of the group\u2019s PR successes inside the Beltway.<\/p>\n

Contradictions<\/h2>\n

The prior pratfalls of U.S. Middle East policy did nothing to stymie the outrage when Trump asserted that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from eastern Syria. Congress showed more indignation about a troop pullback than it had shown about the loss of all the American soldiers\u2019 lives in pointless conflicts over the past 18 years. The House of Representatives condemned Trump by a 354 to 60 vote, and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, proclaimed, \u201cAt President Trump\u2019s hands, American leadership has been laid low, and American foreign policy has become nothing more than a tool to advance his own interests.\u201d Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he felt \u201chorror and shame\u201d over Trump\u2019s action. Boston Globe<\/i> columnist Stephen Kinzer aptly described Congress\u2019s protest as \u201ca classic example of \u2018buffet outrage,\u2019 in which one picks and chooses which horrors to condemn.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama had promised 16 times that there would be no \u201cU.S. boots on the ground\u201d in Syria; when he betrayed that promise, Congress did nothing. Trump\u2019s plans to have fewer U.S. boots on the ground in Syria \u2014 or at least in part of it \u2014 somehow became the moral equivalent of giving Alaska back to Russia. Pundits attacked politicians who supported the troop pullback as \u201cRussian assets\u201d \u2014 i.e., traitors.<\/p>\n

Syria<\/a> offers another reminder that \u201cmaterial support of terrorism\u201d is a federal crime unless you work for the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, or White House. After Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of State John Kerry all publicly declared that Syrian president Assad must exit power, the U.S. government provided cash and a massive amount of military weaponry to terrorist groups seeking to topple the Assad regime. The Obama administration\u2019s beloved, nonexistent \u201cmoderate Syrian rebels\u201d achieved nothing. The Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, the PKK, a prime beneficiary of the U.S. occupation, has been considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government since 1997. Evan McMullin, a 2016 presidential candidate, admitted on Twitter, \u201cMy role in the CIA was to go out & convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us.\u201d Such absurdities spurred Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) to introduce The Stop Arming Terrorists Act in 2017 to prohibit any U.S. funding of terrorist groups. Gabbard\u2019s bill was mostly ignored and never enacted, though her outspoken criticism of U.S. policy did spur Hillary Clinton and others to vilify her.<\/p>\n

Prominent politicians and much of the media blamed Trump for the attacks on civilians that followed the Turkish invasion, carried out mainly by groups allied with the Turkish government. U.S.-armed terrorist groups involved in the Turkish invasion have freed Islamic State prisoners. A Turkish think tank analyzed the violent groups committing atrocities in Syria after the start of the Turkish invasion; \u201cOut of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon\u2019s program to combat DAESH [ISIS]. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA.\u201d A prominent Turkish journalist observed after his government invaded Syria, \u201cThe groups that were educated and equipped by the United States west of the Euphrates are now fighting against the groups east of the Euphrates that have been also educated and equipped by the United States.\u201d This is nothing new: in 2016, Pentagon-backed Syrian rebels openly battled CIA-backed rebels in Syria. A prominent Assad opponent who organized a conference of anti-Assad groups financed by the CIA was denied political asylum in 2017 because he provided \u201cmaterial support\u201d to the Free Syrian Army, which meant he had \u201cengaged in terrorist activity,\u201d according to the Department of Homeland Security. A press backlash spurred a reversal on that decision but the media mostly ignored the other contradictions in U.S. policy in Syria.<\/p>\n

Members of Congress were indignant that Syrian civilians suffered as the result of Trump\u2019s troop pullback. But both Congress and most of the American media ignored the Syrian women, children, and men who died as a result of U.S. policies that intensified and prolonged that nation\u2019s civil war. This is typical inside-the-Beltway scoring: the only fatalities worthy of recognizing are those that are politically useful.<\/p>\n

Despite Trump\u2019s declarations on Syria, the United States continues to have more than 50,000 troops deployed in the Middle East. The sooner those troops come home, the less likely that the United States will be dragged into another quagmire. The perennial follies and frauds of Middle East policy provide one of the strongest arguments for the United States to mind its own business. The dishonesty that has long characterized policies and policymakers ensures that the United States will continue failing to learn from mistakes.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the January 2020 edition of<\/em> Future of Freedom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Category: Foreign Policy & War<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Foreign Policy Perpetual Perfidy by James Bovard\u00a0February 24, 2020 The Washington establishment was aghast in October when Donald Trump appeared to approve a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The United States was seen as abandoning the Kurds, some of whom had assisted the United States in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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