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neoconservatives
As DOJ Unseals Murder Plot Charges, Fears of Trump Iran Policy Mount
"Trump is inheriting a mess that he helped create," said the National Iranian American Council. "All parties need to focus not on threats but on dialogue to end these crises."
Nov 08, 2024
Amid growing concerns about what U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House will mean for Washington's rocky relationship with Tehran, the Department of Justice on Friday announced charges against an Afghan national accused of plotting to assassinate the Republican at the direction of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Though Trump survived two shooting attempts during the campaign, neither appears to be tied to Iran's alleged plot to kill him.
"There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a Friday statement announcing the charges against Farhad Shakeri, "an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran's assassination plots against its targets," including Trump.
"We have also charged and arrested two individuals who we allege were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime," Garland added, referring to New Yorkers Jonathon Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, who are both in custody—unlike Shakeri, who is believed to be in Iran. "We will not stand for the Iranian regime's attempts to endanger the American people and America's national security."
The department did not publicly identify the reporter but its statement "matched the description of Masih Alinejad, a journalist and activist who has criticized Iran's head-covering laws for women," Reutersnoted Friday. "Four Iranians were charged in 2021 in connection with a plot to kidnap her, and in 2022 a man was arrested with a rifle outside her home."
The Friday announcement about these three men follows another case related to Trump and Iran. As Politicodetailed: "In August, Brooklyn federal prosecutors charged a Pakistani man suspected of plotting on behalf of Iran to kill high-ranking U.S. politicians or officials—including perhaps Trump. The man is accused of trying to hire hitmen to carry out the plot."
The next month, after Trump was reportedly briefed about alleged Iranian assassination threats against him, he declared during a campaign rally that "if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country—in this case, Iran—that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens."
"We're gonna blow it to smithereens, you can't do that. And there would be no more threats," added Trump, whose comments were swiftly decried by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) as "an outrageous threat" and "genocidal."
Responding to Reuters coverage of the Justice Department's Friday statement on social media, NIAC said that "threats of violence against political officials are unacceptable and only risk further opening Pandora's box of war and destruction. Trump is inheriting a mess that he helped create and reports like this demonstrate just how grave the stakes are. All parties need to focus not on threats but on dialogue to end these crises."
During Trump's first presidential term, he ditched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, often called the Iran nuclear deal; ramped up deadly sanctions against the Middle East country; and ordered the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq—actions that heightened fears of a U.S. war with Iran.
Such fears have surged since Trump's Tuesday win. He is set to return as commander-in-chief after more than a year of the Biden-Harris administration backing Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip and strikes on other countries including Lebanon and Iran.
NIAC Action executive director Jamal Abdi said in a statement after the U.S. election that "many in our community feared this day—worried about the return of the travel ban, attacks on our civil liberties, demonization of immigrant communities, and deepening militarism in the Middle East. But we have been here before and our resilience is unwavering in standing up for our community and our rights."
"In the coming weeks, Trump, along with his new vice president, JD Vance will select the advisers who will shape his policies," Abdi noted. "We will not stand down, disengage, or give up but will redouble our efforts for peace and justice by any means necessary. The resilience and unity of our community are more vital now than ever."
CNN and Politico have reported that Brian Hook is expected to lead Trump's transition team at the U.S. Department of State. As Drop Site News' Murtaza Hussain wrote, Hook is "known as a major Iran hawk who helped lead the 'maximum pressure' campaign of sanctions, sabotage, and assassinations that characterized Trump's approach to Tehran."
Speaking with Hussain, Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, pointed out that Trump's previous Iran policy was largely guided by John Bolton, who spent over a year as his national security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state and director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
"The Trump administration's approach towards Iran depends very much on who he chooses to staff his administration. In his first term, he was sold on an idea by people like Pompeo and John Bolton that Iran could be sanctioned and pressured into oblivion, but that was an approach more likely to deliver war than an agreement," Parsi said. "The Iranian view is that Trump himself wants to make a deal, but it depends on whether he appoints the same neoconservatives as last time to his administration."
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Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches
Jun 28, 2016
Suppose the human species extinguishes itself in a flash of thermonuclear craziness and the surviving cockroaches later develop the intellect to assess why humans committed this mass suicide. In that case, the cockroach historians may conclude that it was our failure to hold the neoconservatives accountable in the first two decades of the Twenty-first Century that led to our demise.
After the disastrous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq - an aggressive war justified under false premises - there rightly should have been a mass purging of the people responsible for the death, destruction, and lies. Instead the culprits were largely left in place, indeed they were allowed to consolidate their control of the major Western news media and the foreign-policy establishments of the United States and its key allies.
Despite the Iraq catastrophe, which destabilized the Middle East and eventually Europe, the neocons and their liberal interventionist chums still filled the opinion columns of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and virtually every other mainstream outlet. Across the American and European political systems and "think tanks," the neocons and the liberal hawks stayed dominant, too, continuing to spin their war plans while facing no significant peace movement.
The cockroach historiCockroachamazed that at such a critical moment of existential danger, the human species - at least in the most—advanced nations of the West - offered no signify—offered of the forces leading mankind to its doom. It was as if the human species could not learn even the most obvious lessons needed for its survival.
Despite the falsehoods of the Iraq War, the U.S. government was still widely believed whenever it came out with a new propaganda theme. Whether it was the sarin gas attack in Syria in 2013 or the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, U.S. government assertions blaming the Syrian government and the Russian government, respectively, were widely accepted without meaningful skepticism or simple demands for basic evidence.
Swallowing Propaganda
Just as with the Iraqi WMD case, the major Western media made no demands for proof. They just fell in line and marched closer to the edge of global war. Indeed, the learned cockroaches might observe that the supposed watchdogs in the American press had willingly leashed themselves to the U.S. government as the two institutions moved in unison toward catastrophe.
The few humans in the media who did express skepticism - largely found on something called the Internet - were dismissed as fill-in-the-blank "apologists," much as occurred with the doubters against the Iraqi WMD case in 2002-2003. The people demanding real evidence were marginalized and those who accepted whatever the powerful said were elevated to positions of ever-greater influence.
Suppose the cockroach historians could burrow deep enough into the radioactive ashes. In that case, they might discover that - on an individual level - people such as Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt weren't fired after swallowing the WMD lies whole and regurgitating them on the Post's readership; that New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and dozens of similar opinion-leaders were not unceremoniously replaced; that Hillary Clinton, a neocon in the supposedly "liberal" Democratic Party, was rewarded with the party's presidential nomination in 2016; and that the likes of Iraq War architect Robert Kagan remained the toast of the American capital with his opinions sought after and valued.
The cockroaches might observe that humans showed little ability to adapt amid very dangerous conditions, i.e., the bristling of such asr arsenals of eight or so countries. Instead, the humans pressed to their own doom, tagging along after guides who had proven incompetent repeatedly incompetent-wed toward a civilization-ending precipice.
These guides casually urged the masses toward the edge with sweet-sounding phrases like "democracy promotion," "responsibility to protect," and "humanitarian wars." The same guides, who had sounded so confident about the wisdom of "shock and awe" in Iraq and then the "regime change" in Libya, pitched plans for a U.S. invasion of Syria, albeit presented as the establishment of "safe zones" and "no-fly zones."
After orchestrating a coup in Russia's neighbor Ukraine, overthrowing the elected president and then sponsoring an "anti-terrorism operation" to kill ethnic Russian Ukrainians who objected to the coup, Western politicians and policymakers saw only "Russian aggression" when Moscow gave these embattled people some assistance. When citizens in Crimea voted 96 percent to separate from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the West denounced the referendum as a "sham" and called it a "Russian invasion." It didn't matter that opinion polls repeatedly found similar overwhelming support among the Crimean people for the change. The false narrative, insisting that Russia had instigated the Ukraine crisis, was accepted with near-universal gullibility across the West.
A Moscow 'Regime Change'
Behind this fog of propaganda, the U.S. and other Western officials mounted a significant NATO military build-up on Russia's border, complete with large-scale military exercises practicing the seizure of Russian territory.
Russian warnings against these operations were dismissed as hysterical and as further proof of the need to engineer another "regime change," this time in Moscow. But first, the Russian government had to be destabilized by making the economy scream. Then, the plan was for political disruptions and eventually a Ukraine-style coup to remove the thrice-elected President Vladimir Putin.
The wisdom of throwing a nuclear power into economic, political and social disorder - and risking that the nuclear codes might end up in truly dangerous hands - was barely discussed.
Even before the desired coup, the West's neoconservatives advocated giving the Russians a bloody nose in Syria where Moscow's forces had intervened at the Syrian government's request to turn back Islamic jihadists who were fighting alongside Western-backed "moderate" rebels.
The neocon/liberal-hawk plans for "no-fly zones" and "safe zones" inside Syria required the U.S. military's devastation of Syrian government forces and presumably the Russian air force personnel inside Syria, with the Russians expected to take their beating and keep quiet simply.
The cockroach historians also might note that once the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks decided on one of their strategic plans at some "think-tank" conference - or wrote it down in a report or an op-ed - they were single-minded in implementing it regardless of its impracticality or recklessness.
These hawks were highly skilled at spinning new propaganda themes to justify what they had decided to do. Since they dominated the major media outlets, that was fairly easy without anyone of note taking note that the talking points were simply word games. But the neocons and liberal hawks were very good at word games. Plus, these widely admired interventionists were never troubled with self-doubt whatever mayhem and death followed in their wake.
So, when the decision was made to invade Iraq, Libya and Syria or to stage a coup in Ukraine or to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia, the neocons and their friends never countenanced the possibility that something could go wrong.
And when setbacks andWhentastrophes resulted, the messes were excused away as the failure oe politician to implement the neocon/liberal-hawk scheme to the precise letter. If only more force had been used, if only people on the ground were more competent, and had the few critics been silenced and had been from sowing doubts about the plan's wisdom, the plan's wisdom succeeded. It was never their fault.
As the West's new foreign-policy establishment, the neocons and their liberal helpers validated their own thoughts as brilliant and infallible. And who was there to doubt them? Who had access to the West's mass media and had the cour,age to counter their clever arguments and suffer the predictable ridicule, insults and slurs? After all,, there were so many esle and prestigious institutions that stamped the neocberal-hawk plans with gilded seals of approval.
Still, the cockroach historians might yet be puzzled by how thoroughly the world's leadership failed the human species, particularly in the West, which prided itself in freedom of thought and diversity of opinion.
So, the pressures kept building, unchecked, until - perhaps accidentally amid excessive tensions or after some extreme nationalist had exploited Russia's "regime change" chaos to seize power - the final line was crossed.
'Extending American Power'
Though much of human information ld likely have been lost in the nuclear firestorms thunleashed nuclear firestorms, could learn much if they could get thefromroup called the CeAmerican Security, consisting of promi. This group consists and liberal interventionists, including some expected to play high-level roles in a Hillary Clinton administration.
These "experts" included foreign-policy stars such as Robert Kagan (formerly of the Reagan administration's State Department, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century - an early advocate for the Iraq War - and later a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a Washington Post columnist), James P. Rubin (who served in Bill Clinton's State Department and made a name for himself as a TV commentator), Michele Flournoy (the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during Barack Obama's first term and touted as Hillary Clinton's favorite to be Secretary of Defense), Eric Edelman (who preceded Flournoy in her Obama job except he served under George W. Bush), Stephen J. Hadley (George W. Bush's second-term national security advisor), and James Steinberg (a deputy national security advisor under Bill Clinton and Deputy Secretary of State under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton).
In other words, this group, which included many other big names as well, was a who's who of who's important in Washington's foreign-policy establishment. Their report was brazenly entitled "Extending American Power" and painted an idyllic picture of the world population living happily under U.S. domination in the seven decades since World War II.
"The world order created in the aftermath of World War II has produced immense benefits for peoples across the planet," the report asserted, ignoring periodic slaughters carried out across the Third World, from Vietnam to Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, often inflicted by the massive application of U.S. firepower and other times by tribal or religious hatreds and rivalries exacerbated by big-power interference.
Also downplayed was the environmental devastation that has come with the progress of hyper-capitalism, threatening the long-term survival of human civilization via "global warming" - assuming that "nuclear winter" doesn't intervene first.
Even though many of these benighted "experts" were complicit in gross violations of international law - including the aggressive war in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere; lethal drone strikes in multiple countries; torture of "war on terror" detainees; and subversion of internationally recognized governments - they deluded themselves into believing that they stood for some legalistic global structure, declaring:
"United States still has the military, economic, and political power to play the leading role in protecting a stable rules-based international order." Exactly what stability and what rules were left fuzzy.
In line with their underlying delusions, these "experts" called for feeding more money into the maw of the Military-Industrial Complex and flexing American military muscle: "An urgent first step is to significantly increase U.S. national security and defense spending and eliminate the budgetary strait-jacket of the Budget Control Act. A second and related step is to formulate policies that take advantage of the substantial military, economic, and diplomatic power Washington has available but has been reluctant to deploy in recent years."
Battling Russia over Ukraine
The bipartisan group - representing what might be called Official Washington's consensus - also urged a tough stand against Russia regarding Ukraine, including military assistance to help the post-coup Ukrainian regime crush ethnic Russian resistance in the east.
"The United States must provide Ukrainian armed forces with the training and equipment necessary to resist Russian-backed forces and Russian forces operating on Ukrainian territory," the report said, adding as a recommendation: "Underwrite credible security guarantees to NATO allies on the frontlines with Russia. Given recent Russian behavior, it is no longer possible to ignore the possible challenge to NATO countries that border Russia. The Baltics, in particular, are vulnerable to both direct attack and the more complicated 'hybrid' warfare that Russia has displayed in Ukraine.
"To provide reassurance to U.S. allies and also to deter Russian efforts to destabilize these nations, it is necessary to build upon the European Reassurance Initiative and establish a more robust U.S. force presence in appropriate central and eastern Europe countries, which should include a mix of permanently stationed forces, rotationally deployed forces, prepositioned equipment, access arrangements and a more robust schedule of military training and exercises. ...
"The United States should also work with both NATO and the EU to counter Russian influence-peddling and subversion using corruption and illegal financial manipulation."
Apparently that last point about "influence-peddling" was a reference to the need to silence dissident voices in the West that object to the new Cold War and dispute U.S. propaganda aimed at justifying the increased tensions with Russia. The report's Washington insiders clearly understand that their future career prospects are advanced by taking a belligerent approach toward Russia.
Regarding Syria, the bipartisan group of neocons and liberal hawks urged a U.S. military invasion with the goal of establishing a "no-fly zone" while building up insurgent forces capable of compelling "regime change" in Damascus, a strategy similar to those followed in Iraq and Libya to disastrous results.
"In our view, there can be no political solution to the Syrian civil war so long as the military balance continues to convince [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad he can remain in power. And as a result of Iran's shock troops and military equipment deployed to Syria, and the modern aircraft and other conventional forces Russia has now deployed, the military balance tilts heavily in favor of the Assad regime," the report said.
"At a minimum, the inadequate efforts hitherto to arm, train, and protect a substantial Syrian opposition force must be completely overhauled and made a much higher priority. In the meantime, and in light of this grim reality, the United States, together with France and other allies, must employ the necessary military power, including an appropriately designed no-fly zone, to create a safe space in which Syrians can relocate without fear of being killed by Assad's forces and where moderate opposition militias can arm, train, and organize."
It is not explained how a U.S.-led invasion of a sovereign country and the arming of a military force to overthrow the government fit with the group's enthusiasm for "a rule-based international order." Clearly, the prescribed actions violate the United Nations Charter and other international legal standards, but apparently, the only real "rules" the group believes in are those that serve its purposes and change depending on the needs for "extending American power."
Similar hypocrisy pervaded the group's other recommendations, but the blind obedience to these double standards - indeed the inability to see or acknowledge the blatant contradictions - might be of interest to the cockroach historians because it could help them understand how the U.S. foreign policy establishment lost its mind and blundered into unnecessary conflicts that could easily escalate into strategic warfare, even thermonuclear conflagration.
A Steady Drumbeat
But this collection of neocons and liberal hawks wasn't just an odd group of careerist "thinkers" trying to impress Hillary Clinton. Their double-thinking "group think" extended throughout the American establishment in the second decade of the Twenty-first Century.
For instance, The New York Times and other major publications were dominated by both neocon and liberal-hawk commentators, writers like Roger Cohen, who was one of the many pundits who swallowed the Iraq War lies whole and -- despite the disaster -- avoided any negative career consequences. So, in 2016, that left Cohen and his fellow Iraq War cheerleaders still pressing political leaders to expand the war in Syria and ratchet up tensions with Russia at every opportunity.
In a column about the mass shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, on June 12 - in which the shooter was reported to have claimed allegiance to ISIS - Cohen tacked on a typically distorted account of President Obama's approach to the Syrian conflict. Ignoring that Obama had the CIA and the Pentagon covertly train and arm rebel groups seeking to overthrow the Syrian government, Cohen wrote:
"Yes, to have actively done nothing in Syria over more than five years of war -- so allowing part of the country to become an ISIS stronghold, contributing to a massive refugee crisis in Europe, acquiescing to slaughter and displacement on a devastating scale, undermining America's word in the world, and granting open season for President Vladimir Putin to strut his stuff -- amounts to the greatest foreign policy failure of the Obama administration. It has made the world far more dangerous."
But Cohen did not acknowledge his own role as a brash supporter of the Iraq War in sparking the creation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State or ISIS. Nor did he address the fact that the United States and its allies, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have essentially kept the Syrian civil war going, a point even acknowledged by some supporters of Syrian "regime change.
For instance, Thanassis Cambanis of the "progressive" Century Foundation produced a report entitled "The Case for a More Robust U.S. Intervention in Syria," which acknowledged that "most of the armed opposition has survived only because of foreign intervention." In other words, much of the death and destruction in Syria, which also has fueled political instability in Europe because of the massive refugee flow, resulted from intervention from the United States and its allies.
So, in the view of Cohen and other eager interventionists, the cure for the mess created by these unthought-through interventions is more intervention. It was just such obsessive and irrational thinking—embraced as Official Washington's "conventional wisdom"—that pushed the world toward the brink of destruction in 2016.
Contemplating all this human foolishness, the cockroach historians might be left using one of their six legs to scratch their heads.
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Failed US Policy in the Middle East
Feb 29, 2016
The United States has been involved in the Middle East for almost one hundred years because of the vast oil reserves there, and the US has been militarily involved since 1967, when the US began supplying Israel with weapons with which to defend itself. However, the US has only been involved in the "quagmire" of Middle East wars since 2001.
The failed US policy in the Middle East began with the US's bombing, sanctioning and then invasion of Iraq, which was based on false information about Iraq's development of nuclear weapons. The forged information was most probably given by a neo-conservative with ties to Italian and Israeli intelligence, Michael Ladeen, to Italian intelligence, who gave it to US intelligence, causing the US to invade without justification another sovereign country. George H. Bush merely bombed Iraq and imposed sanctions that killed a million people, half of them children. Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center that killed 2,996 people was retaliation for those killings and for the US's supplying Israel with F 15's, F 16's and other weapons that were used to attack Palestinian refugee camps. Thus, the Israeli-motivated attack on Iraq and the US's funding of Israeli aggression against Palestinians resulted in great harm to US citizens in the US.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq resulted in the US's subsequent holding of elections there that put a Shia government in power and dismantled the former Sunni Baath Party and caused the persecution of the overthrown Baath Party military men, who were not allowed to obtain other jobs. The new Shia government of Iraq immediately allied itself with Shia Iran, the former enemy of Iraq. Iran thus gained regional power and challenged the hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the strongest Sunni Arab countries. Moreover, the infrastructure of Iraq has never recovered from the US bombing: electricity still is not universally available, nor are jobs, housing, education, and health care, as they were under the former Sunni government of Saddam Hussein. Farmers in southern Iraq also lost their farms and livelihood because of drought and the many Turkish and Syrian dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers cutting the water supply to Basra and the surrounding areas. Moreover, the human rights abuses by the Iraqi government are seldom mentioned by the western media, though those by the opposition Islamic State are highlighted. Yet, according to Hameedt Sooden of the Christian Peacemaker Team formerly in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iraqi security forces, including under the current Prime Minister al-Abadi, engage in similar practices. The Iraqi forces have practiced summary executions of civilians, including women and children, torture, hostage-taking, beheading, lynching, burning captives to death, and desecrating corpses. And they have celebrated the atrocities in photographs and videos posted online. The Iraqi forces also have engaged in looting and wanton destruction of property, as well as shelling and bombing residential areas and hospitals. Moreover, Iraqi and Kurdish authorities sometimes have prevented families fleeing the fighting from reaching safer parts of the country. Iraqi forces also have established "death zones" around Baghdad.
Furthermore, these abuses by Iraqi forces are often preceded by coalition airstrikes. Not only are the airstrikes effectively providing cover for what appears to be ethnic cleansing in areas re-captured from ISIS, but they are also directly causing civilian deaths that may amount to war crimes. According to the Red Cross, the airstrikes are compounding the humanitarian consequences of the conflict. The war against Iraq caused the deaths of 4,474 US military men and women and 2,300 military contractors, a total of 6,774. The war against Iraq from 2003 until 2008 was also harmful to US taxpayers: it cost the US $757.8 billion and brought no benefits to the US economy--except to the US war profiteers made the weapons and who allegedly rebuilt Iraq but in reality squandered billions.
George W. Bush continued the onslaught against Sunnis. He attacked Afghanistan to retaliate for Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 attack on the US World Trade Center and Pentagon. When George W. Bush demanded that Afghanistan turn Osama Bin Laden over to the US, Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban government, refused since Bin Laden was a benefactor of Afghanistan. But Mullah Omar did offer to turn Bin Laden over to a third neutral country for a trial by an Islamic court, an offer that conforms to international law, which states that "everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law." (UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 14.1) In spite of that offer, George W. Bush declared falsely that the Taliban were "harboring terrorists" and attacked Afghanistan, beginning the longest war the US has fought. When the Taliban were the government, they stopped the rape of women, the rape of boys by pedophiles, and the growing of opium poppies. Currently, under the US supported government, Afghanistan is the leading grower of opium poppies in the world, the rape of women is rampant, and the US Marines are instructed to ignore the pedophile warlords' rape of boys and are court-marshaled or forced out of the Marines if they disobey and try to help the boy-victims. Not surprisingly, the Taliban, of the majority Pashtun tribe, still enjoy strong support in Afghanistan and US troops are occasionally killed by "friendly" Afghan soldiers. Isn't it time to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban and let them clean up the mess the US has created? 1457 US military men and women have died in the war, and the US taxpayers have spent $2.5 trillion attacking the Taliban since 2001. With this great expenditure of money and life, the US has created unconscionable chaos in Afghanistan and no benefit to the US.
In Pakistan, also, the US has attacked the Taliban and has given the Pakistani government $20.7 billion since 2001 to convince it to attack the Taliban, even though Pakistan was the Taliban's earliest supporter. The US now conducts drone strikes in Waziristan to kill Taliban, and also kills many civilians, thus assuring the Taliban of ever-new supporters. Isn't it time to leave the Taliban in Pakistan alone and use the money to improve conditions in the US?
In Egypt, the situation is also non-viable. Although the US did support the people's revolution to overthrow Mubarak, their dictator of thirty some years; and told the military, which the US financed, not to intervene to support Mubarak. Moreover, the US accepted Mohammed Morsi, the first elected president of Egypt, and a Muslim Brotherhood member. However, when Gen. Al Sisi joined the people on the left to overthrow Morsi, the US did not object to the military coup, although US law prohibits funding a military coup, nor has it influenced Sisi to stop persecuting, arresting and killing the Muslim Brotherhood people in Egypt. In fact, the US taxpayers give Egypt $1.5 billion a year, and have given significant amounts since 1979 after Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Radical Islamists who oppose the military coup are taking power in the northern Sinai and elsewhere, and they have allied themselves with the Islamic State.
In Libya, the US supported the rebels seeking to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi because he did not fund their area adequately. The US however did not work with the groups to form a stable government, and now Libya is designated as almost a failed state because of the continued fighting there among various groups. The US spent $896 million to create the failed state.
In Syria, in which the large majority of Sunnis have been governed by the Assad family from a minority Shia group, the Alawites, the Sunnis revolted against Assad when he massacred 4500 Sunni farmers who demonstrated against the government's taking water from their farms to give to industry. Sunni soldiers in the army began defecting and shooting back at the army as it attacked the Sunni demonstrators. Thus began Syria's civil war, which has claimed 250,000 lives and displaced 12 million people from their homes. The civil war pits the Sunnis against the small minorities of Shias, Kurds, and Christians. Although the US formally supported the Sunni rebels, spending about $500 million training them, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have supported Assad and kept him in power. The subsequent flood of Syrian refugees is destabilizing the EU countries.
Moreover, in Syria itself the Islamic State (ISIS or Daash) has seized many areas in the largely Sunni Muslim country. The Islamic State is made up of the persecuted secular and socialist Iraqi Baath Party military men who joined with fundamentalist Islamic Salafists to form the Islamic State that has seized many Sunni cities and villages from the Shia governments in Iraq and Syria. The US has spent $4.59 billion attacking the Islamic State, which is seeking to gain self-determination for the persecuted Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria. Although a few US and NATO backed Sunnis have fought with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, only the Islamic State has made major gains against the Shia governments. Originally the Islamic State fought only against Assad and his supporters in Syria--the Alawites, the Kurds, including the Yazidis, and the Orthodox Christians. However, when other nations attacked the Islamic State, sometimes supporting the Yazidi Kurds, for example, then the Islamic State attacked citizens of those countries in retaliation for its people being killed: it attacked citizens of the US, France, and Russia, and it attacked the Kurds in Turkey. Turkey, however, remains fairly neutral about the Sunni Islamic State, and allegedly a number of Sunni Arab countries or their citizens support the it. Sunni fighters from around the world have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State to help the Sunnis gain self- determination and freedom from harsh Shia rule. US and NATO, however, are fighting the Islamic State because it retaliated when they first attacked it without good reason. Thus the US and NATO may join Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in fighting the Sunni Islamic State, which represents Sunni self-determination.
Thus in the Middle East, the US is fighting the Sunni Islamic State and illogically is trying to get other Sunni Arab countries to take the lead in fighting it. One might say that aggressive US policy in the Middle East has caused chaos in the region. Is that what the US desired to accomplish? No, but it certainly accords with Israeli policy of breaking up strong Arab countries and encouraging Muslim to fight Muslim, and US policy in the Middle East is largely but not entirely determined by Israel. However, the US is supporting its oil-supplying ally Saudi Arabia against the Shia rebels in Yemen. The rebels want the former president instead of the current Saudi-allied Sunni president. Saudi Arabia, however, has been committing war crimes against the Shia population, and the US is therefore implicated since it is militarily supporting Saudi Arabia.
The major cause of the current chaos in the Middle East, which is also affecting the EU because of the great number of Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Europe, is Israel's continuing harsh and illegal occupation of Palestine, for Israel and the US supporters of Israel are pleased that Muslims fight Muslims in the Middle East and that the US fights Muslims there, for when there is chaos, the Muslim nations do not think of attacking Israel nor of demanding an end of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is very ironic that Israel is now governed by extremists similar in political views to those of Igdal Amir, the settler who assassinated Rabin. It is as though Amir's act guided Israel into its current path--the path of racism and violent oppression of a subject Palestinian population. And the US government continues to fund the occupation, for money is fungible and money given to a nation or organization for one purpose frees money that can be used for other purposes. Thus the US aid to Israel funds at $3.2-4.2 billion a year the illegal occupation that the US officially opposes and that contributes to the chaos in the Middle East. In fact, since 2001, the US has given Israel $49.5 billion.
Isn't it time for the US to cease to fund a brutal and illegal occupation and instead follow US law and cut aid to Israel because of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Palestinians? Isn't it time for justice to prevail and bring peace to the Middle East as well as relief to US taxpayers, who have spent $3,450,896,000,000 (over $3 trillion) on the Middle East since 2001 and who now have more national debt than has existed previously in world history? Don't those taxpayers need to invest billions not in war but to repair the crumbling US infrastructure, to improve the declining US educational system, and to provide health care, parental leave, food and housing for the poor, and cost of living increases in Social Security for the seniors, as well as to restore the disappearing middle class. Why should the US taxpayers suffer in order for the neo-cons to fight endless wars in the Middle East? Isn't it time for the US to convince Israel to make peace with Palestine and thus lead the way to peace throughout the Middle East?
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