Glenn Greenwald writes about the conflict between the U.S. government’s claim to be on the side of freedom and democracy even as it enthusiastically supports the worlds worst despots.
Greenwald describes how clearly this point is made in a recent memo to Obama from former CIA officer and adviser to four presidents, Bruce Riedel.
Riedel stridently argues that the US must remain steadfastly opposed to any democratic revolutions in the region. That’s because Saudi Arabia is “America’s oldest ally in the Middle East, a partnership that dates back to 1945.” Thus, “since American interests are so intimately tied to the House of Saud, the US does not have the choice of distancing the United States from it in an effort to get on the right side of history.”
Riedel is not exactly a principled advocate of peace, being an enthusiastic supporter of starting a war with Iran, the only beneficiary of which would be Israel.
In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings “scholars” which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world “as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression” – exactly what Brookings’ Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq.
It’s not hard to see that the U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would easily be considered an act of war if the situation were reversed, fit into that strategy and are remarkably similar to the initiation of war with Iraq. There can be no doubt that the U.S. has been trying to coax Iran into a response that will justify military action. So far, Iran hasn’t taken the bait, even though Israel has been chomping at the bit to attack Iran.
American politicians and their PR branch, commonly known as the mainstream press, spew forth all manner of rhetoric about humanitarian motives, but Greenwald points out that their actions say otherwise.
Just listen to the patently deceitful rhetoric that spews forth from US political leaders and their servants in the Foreign Policy Community when it comes time to rail against anti-US regimes in Libya, Syria and Iran. That the US and its Nato allies – eager benefactors of the world’s worst tyrants – are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face.
The fact is that the U.S. government must maintain allies in the Arab countries if it is going to fulfill its commitment to AIPAC to protect Israel. As Israel continues to occupy and expand further into Palestinian territory, the U.S. must sacrifice it’s integrity to maintain “friendships” with the few Arab countries that can be bought off with favors and advanced military technology. Our continued support for these dictators is very likely to come back in the form of further terrorist attacks on U.S. property and citizens.
Greenwald sums it up this way:
The fact that one can have a memo like Riedel’s so clearly explaining US policy to support the worst tyrannies that serve its interests, sitting right next to endless US pro-war rhetoric about the urgency of fighting for freedom and democracy, is an outstanding testament to that myth-making.