Sustaining misery criminals “cleanse” the “uncivilized”: U.S. officialdom channeling Churchill

Proponent of chemical weapons
(gassing people)
Britain's Winston Churchill

Eugene Weekly’s Ted Taylor’s “Experts on chemical weapons”

Editing, bracketed comment, ending commentary by 

Carolyn Bennett

The first country that was alleged to have “used chemical weapons in the Middle East,” Taylor writes, “was Great Britain in 1920, as part of its efforts to put down a rebellion by Iraqi tribesmen when British forces seized the country following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.” Britain’s Secretary of State for War and Air Winston Churchill is reported to have said:

‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. 

‘I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.’

[A fair question is: Who is/was actually uncivilized, Iraqis or Churchill?]

Syria blocked by United States

Iraq

In 2007, when Syria had a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, Taylor continues his experts’ reporting, its leaders introduced a draft resolution to create a weapons of mass destruction zone for the entire Middle East (the measure would have included addressing Egypt’s chemical weapons and Israel’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons). The United States blocked this move. 

Treaty nations fail treaty promise

Syria

Nations who are parties to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) agreed but failed to destroy all their chemical weapons by May 2012. Most of these nations ─ including the United States of America ─ failed to meet either the initial 2007 deadline or the 2012 extension deadline, which means that the United States and other nations are not in compliance with their responsibility and promise to destroy all their chemical weapons. There is also uncertainty as to whether all nations have declared their possession of chemical weapons and thus the accuracy or inaccuracy of the number of existing stocks in the world. 

“Had the 189 nations who are members of the OPCW complied with the terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention’s required destruction of chemical weapons,” Taylor writes, “there would be far fewer of these weapons available for transfer and use.

So when U.S. President Barack Obama says his government “knows” Syrian President Bashar al- Assad has chemical weapons, “Assad could be saying the same thing” about the United States.

U.S. war on Iraqis

Breaking law on pretext of lawbreaking

“

It is hard to see how [the United States’] breaking solemn undertakings to most of the countries of the world by neglecting treaties and principles of international law” agreed to by the United States “will either bolster U.S. ‘credibility’ or enhance respect for international law,” Taylor quotes a paper by the Western States Legal Foundation.

“International law provides no exception for the ad hoc use of force by states in cases involving actual or possible use of prohibited weapons by states with which they are not at war. 

Standing alone, allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government do not provide a legal basis for military action by any non-party to the conflict.

“Unilateral punitive strikes justified as a defense of the global norm against chemical weapons are unlikely to protect Syrians or others against use of chemical weapons and other attacks. …” Such strikes, however, “could lead to a significant increase in the level of violence throughout the region.”

U.S. war on Vietnamese

I

n my view, a view which is not only mine, the United States of America plays out the same predictably deadly pattern, over and over again.

Through entrenched and, by definition, corrupt government officials and their paymasters, their profit and nonprofit co-conspirators, they execute the same historic pattern: create a problem (conflict, war, factionalism, misery); then, on some dire-sounding trumped-up charge or pretext, propose to solve that problem by more violence.

Real problems of relations among people and within regions, conflict, disease, hunger, human rights, and the basics of living are of course never solved. This is a deliberate consequence, as the co-conspirators, government officials and their “partners” and paymasters, continue to enrich themselves, propagandizing their “solutions” on the backs of the world’s peoples. Global misery, endless misery ─ as with circular arguments and self-fulfilling prophesies ─ is created and sustained by dark(sinister) knights of the realm.

Sources and notes 

“Experts speak out on chem weapons,” Ted Taylor’s blog, September 4, 2013, http://www.eugeneweekly.com/blog/experts-speak-out-chem-weapons

EXPERTS quoted by Taylor

From the Institute for Public Accuracy, Eryl Nassruns the Anthrax Vaccine blog

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco

Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation

Journalist Ted Taylor is editor-in-chief at Eugene Weekly

“The Rush to Bomb Syria: Undermining International Law and Risking Wider War,” by Western States Legal Foundation, Executive Director Jacqueline Cabasso

Jacqueline Cabasso appeared last night on The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays, for September 4, 2013 - 6:00 p.m., http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/94985

See also: Western States Foundation at http://www.wslfweb.org/aboutwslf.htm#brd

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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Embarrassing belligerence in U.S. foreign relations

No position to lecture any nation or its leaders
Re-reporting by Carolyn Bennett

“Reset” incident

Hillary Clinton meets Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Careless ignorance dangerous and shameful

Flag of Syria

Russian reporters in 2009 looked on in laughter as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a mock ‘reset’ button to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, symbolizing, she said, U.S. hopes to mend frayed ties with Moscow.

Press stories quoted Clinton boasting how hard her staff had “worked to ensure” the accuracy of what was an apparent blunder.

“Was it right?” she asked the Russian foreign minister.

No, he said, “You got it wrong.”

What careless Americans translating Russian called “reset” was a Russian word, “peregruzka,” meaning “overloaded” or “overcharged.” The Daily newspaper Kommersant had a front-page laugh: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button.”

This was prelude to four years of gaffes and a deepening of boorish, belligerent, coarse outbursts from the U.S. Secretary of State, her staff, and her administration.   

Recklessly breaching character of diplomacy

In a joint press conference with India’s prime minister last month, the U.S. Secretary declared that the United States was not sending “military support” to the “opposition” in Syria.

She said, “All of our support has been medical and humanitarian.” She demanded that the Russian government “cut all military ties” with and “suspend all further support and deliveries” to Syria.

Her belligerence seems to know no bounds. Quoted by Democracy Now and other sources today, Mrs. Clinton boorishly labeled the Russians liars. “We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria,” she said.

The Russians have said “… everything they’re shipping is unrelated to their (Syria’s) actions internally [but] that’s patently untrue; and we are concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria….”

Russia’s defense minister responds

The same Russian foreign minister with whom Hillary Clinton had embarrassed herself and the United States in 2009 responded to the statements about Russian military supplies to Syria.

Sergei Lavrov said the Russian Federation supplies only what “Syria would need in the event of an armed attack on it from without. … We do not supply Syria or anyone else with things that are used to fight against peaceful demonstrators—unlike the United States, which regularly supplies that region with such special equipment.”

The Russian defense minister pointed out that Clinton’s comments were at direct variance with U.S. Defense Department (Pentagon) reports that had denied having information showing Russian weapons exports to Syria as charged by Secretary Clinton. The United States on the other hand has recently made such a shipment “to one of the Gulf countries, [a move] which the Americans consider…to be acceptable.”

Russian analyst Konstantin Makiyenko added to Lavrov’s statement.

The United States has no moral right to lecture Russia on weapons supply to Syria, he said. “Even if we assume that combat helicopters are indeed being passed to Syria, this action would not at all contradict current norms of international law dealing with weapons trade.”

Moreover, the deputy director of the Center for Strategies and Technologies Analysis said, the United States “sells huge amounts of weapons to the repressive Saudi regime, which took part in the tough suppression of peaceful Shiite protests against the despotic regime in Bahrain”; and in Saudi Arabia, there is “Systematic suppression of the opposition.”

As a major provider of military weapons to many global hotspots, the United States, Makiyenko said, “has no moral right to lecture Russia on who should get weapons and who should not.”

Makiyenko concluded that “the U.S. state secretary’s invectives are part of a broad media war being waged in the West against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

Failed U.S. relations in pre- and post-Cold War Middle East

At the end of May, a news article posted at the Russia Television website commented rather cynically but painfully on point. “With the arrival of Barack Obama at the White House four years ago, many in Moscow [and elsewhere] genuinely believed there would be a normalization of relations [remember the “reset” incident] between the two former Cold War opponents.”

“There is no crime in dreaming,” the writers said.

However, in relations with the Middle East, “America’s behavior seems inconsistent with that of an impartial, objective observer.”  The United States behaves “like a third party to the turmoil with a lot to gain should the Syrian government fall.

“Instead of waiting for an official investigation to determine the identity of the culprits in the latest massacre, the Houla massacre,” the United States “is instigating the situation by tossing rhetorical grenades, needlessly provoking the situation.

“After all, there are many actors in the region who stand to gain in the event that Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad is removed from power.” The strong U.S. ally in the region, seemingly “on a collision course with Iran …, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would benefit from the overthrow of Assad.”

A further truth is, the United States has not been an honest broker in the Middle East for the past thirty years; in more distant times, not since 1945 or 1946.

The Cold War is recorded historically as having reached its peak in 1948–53. In this period the Soviet Union “unsuccessfully blockaded the Western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948–49). The United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe (1949).” The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the U.S. monopoly on the atomic bomb. The Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949) and the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded U.S.-supported South Korea (1950), “setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953.”

The United States internally experienced an extended “Red Scare,” McCarthyism in which citizens were haunted, hunted down, hauled before rabid Congressmen, their professional lives destroyed or subjected to constant threat. The causes of human rights stymied.

Years passed in which sleepwalking Americans believed they were in the “good times”: “Ossie meets Harriet,” “Daddy knows best.” Today some on the Left and Right nostalgically pine for those times.

In late 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and 15 newly independent nations were born and Russians held a “democratic” election. The Cold War was over. But in the years since the end of the Cold War—from another Bush and another Clinton through several governments seated in Washington—there has been a shameful waste of foreign relations opportunity.

The United States of America in the twenty-first century is burdened with a kind of leadership that is defined by belligerence, boorishness, superficiality, willful ignorance and incompetence. It is not only void of moral sensibility but is woefully lacking in requisite imagination.

Sources and notes

“Button gaffe embarrasses Clinton,” BBC, March 7, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7930047.stm

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/13/is_syria_in_a_civil_war

“‘Russia does not sell combat helicopters to Syria’ – Lavrov” (Robert Bridge, RT),

June 13, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/us-russia-syria-weapons-lavrov-689/

“Al-Qaeda behind terror attacks in Syria, Russia warns” (Robert Bridge, RT), May 14, 2012,

http://rt.com/politics/al-qaeda-syria-russia-opposition-220/

“Is U.S. preparing for broad Middle East conflict?” May 31, 2012,  

http://rt.com/politics/us-russia-iran-syria-missile-defense-opposition-688/

Historical note revised from Britannica

Images
WW3 Trigger: U.S. Implement Syria Aerial Blockade,Despite repeated warnings from Russian and China to respect the sovereignty of Syria’s airspace, the US plans on implement an aerial blockade without UN backing
http://uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com/2012/02/ww3-trigger-us-to-implement-syria.html

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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