The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed.
US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.
Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.
Congress did not respond to these extraordinary announcements with impeachment proceedings. There was no uproar from the federal courts, law schools, or bar associations. Glenn Greenwald reports that the Department of Homeland Security harasses journalists who refuse to be presstitutes, and we have seen videos of the brutal police oppression of peaceful OWS protestors. Chris Floyd describes the torture-perverts who rule the US.
Now Washington is forcing as much of the world as it can to overthrow international treaties and international law. Washington has issued a ukase that its word alone is international law. Any country, except those who receive Washington’s dispensation, that engages in trade with Iran or purchases Iran’s oil will be sanctioned by the US. These countries will be cut off from US markets, and their banking systems will not be able to use banks that process international payments. In other words, Washington’s “sanctions against Iran” apply not to Iran but to countries that defy Washington and meet their energy needs with Iranian oil.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, so far Washington has granted special privileges to Japan and 10 European Union countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil. Requiring countries to shut down their economies in order to comply with Washington’s vendetta against Iran, a vendetta that has been ongoing ever since the Iranians overthrew the Washington-installed puppet, the Shah of Iran, more than three decades ago, was more than Washington could get away with. Washington has permitted Japan to keep importing between 78-85% of its normal oil imports from Iran.
Washington’s dispensations, however, are arbitrary. Dispensations have not been granted to China, India, Turkey, and South Korea. India and China are the largest importers of Iranian oil, and Turkey and South Korea are among the top ten importers. Before looking at possible unintended consequences of Washington’s vendetta against Iran, what is Washington’s case against Iran?
Frankly, Washington has no case. It is the hoax of “weapons of mass destruction” all over again. Iran, unlike Israel, signed the non-proliferation treaty. All countries that sign the treaty have the right to nuclear energy. Washington claims that Iran is violating the treaty by developing a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence whatsoever for Washington’s assertion. Washington’s own 16 intelligence agencies are unanimous that Iran has had no nuclear weapon’s program since 2003. Moreover, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s weapons inspectors are in Iran and have reported consistently that there is no diversion of nuclear material from the energy program to a weapons program.
On the rare occasion when Washington is reminded of the facts, Washington makes a different case. Washington asserts that Iran’s rights under the non-proliferation treaty notwithstanding, Iran cannot have a nuclear energy program, because Iran would then have learned enough to be able at some future time to make a bomb. The world’s hegemon has unilaterally decided that the possibility that Iran might one day decide to make a nuke is too great a risk to take. It is better, Washington says, to drive up the oil price, disrupt the world economy, violate international law, and risk a major war than to have to worry that a future Iranian government will make a nuclear weapon. This is the Jeremy Bentham tyrannical approach to law that was repudiated by the Anglo-American legal system.
It is difficult to characterize Washington’s position as one of good judgment. Moreover, Washington has never explained the huge risk Washington sees in the possibility of an Iranian nuke. Why is this risk so much greater than the risk associated with Soviet nukes or with the nukes of the US, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea today? Iran is a relatively small country. It does not have Washington’s world hegemonic ambitions. Unlike Washington, Iran is not at war with a half dozen countries. Why is Washington destroying America’s reputation as a country that respects law and risking a major war and economic dislocation over some possible future development, the probability of which is unknown?
There is no good answer to this question. Lacking evidence for a case against Iran, Washington and Israel have substituted demonization. The lie has been established as truth that the current president of Iran intends to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
This lie has succeeded as propaganda even though numerous language experts have proven that the intention attributed to the Iranian president by American-Israeli propaganda is a gross mistranslation of what the president of Iran said. Once again, for Washington and its presstitutes, facts do not count. The agenda is all that counts, and any lie will be used to advance the agenda.
Washington’s sanctions could end up biting Washington harder than they bite Iran.
What will Washington do if India, China, Turkey and South Korea do not succumb to Washington’s threats?
According to recent news reports, India and China are not inclined to inconvenience themselves and to harm their economic development in order to support Washington’s vendetta against Iran. Having watched China’s rapid rise and having observed North Korea’s immunity to American attack, South Korea might be wondering how much longer it intends to remain Washington’s puppet state. Turkey, where the civilian and somewhat Islamist government has managed to become independent of the US-controlled Turkish military, appears to be slowly coming to the realization that Washington and NATO have Turkey in a “service role” in which Turkey is Washington’s agent against its own kind. The Turkish government appears to be reassessing the benefits of being Washington’s pawn.
What Turkey and South Korea decide is basically a decision whether the countries will be independent countries or be subsumed within Washington’s empire. The success of the American-Israeli assault on Iran’s independence depends on India and China.
If India and China give the bird to Washington, what can Washington do? Absolutely nothing. What if Washington, drowning in its gigantic hubris, announced sanctions against India and China?
Wal-Mart’s shelves would be empty, and America’s largest retailer would be hammering on the White House door.
Apple Computer and innumerable powerful US corporations, which have offshored their production for the American market to China, would see their profits evaporate. Together with their Wall Street allies, these powerful corporations would assault the fool in the White House with more force than the Red Army. The Chinese trade surplus would cease to flow into US Treasury debt. The offshored-to-India back office operations of banks, credit card companies, and customer service departments of utilities throughout the US would cease to function.
In America, chaos would reign. Such are the rewards to the Empire of the globalism that the empire has fostered.
The White House moron and the neoconservative and Israeli warmongers who urge him on to more wars do not understand that the US is no longer an independent country. America is owned by offshoring corporations and the foreign countries in which the corporations have located their production for US markets. Sanctions on China and India (and South Korea) mean sanctions on US corporations. Sanctions on Turkey mean sanctions on a NATO ally.
Do China, India, South Korea and Turkey realize that they hold the winning cards? Do they understand that they can give the bird to the American Empire and bring it down in collapse, or are they brainwashed like Europe and the rest of the world that the powerful Americans cannot be resisted?
Will China and India exercise their power over the US, or will the two countries fudge the issue and adopt a pose that saves face for Washington while they continue to purchase Iranian oil?
The answer to this question is: how much will Washington pay China and India in secret concessions, such as eviction of the US from the South China Sea, for their pretense that China and India acknowledge Washington’s dictatorial powers over the rest of the world?
Without concession to China and India, Washington is likely to be ignored while it watches its power evaporate. A country that cannot produce industrial and manufactured goods, but can only print debt instruments and money is not a powerful country. It is a washed-up two-bit punk that can continue to strut around until the proverbial boy says: “the Emperor has no clothes”.
This article was originally published at PaulCraigRoberts.org and has been used here with permission.
A very good article as far as it goes.
“Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens” and the rights of many citizens around the world even more. The obvious lesson we should learn from this is that America’s view of human rights is either non-existent or severely flawed.
Human rights have been defined for us thousands of years ago as being the absolute right of each individual to the truth, life, a natural family and ownership of property. The perspective this puts on our modern version of human right is the divergence from the true human rights has been increasing at an alarming rate. The truth today is regarded as a matter of individual choice and all choices are becoming more and more legally and socially valid. The right to life has little or no validity in law. The right to a natural family has no validity in law or social structures. The right to property, while seeming to be the bedrock of American society, is considered the prerogative of the few with many of the legacies of slavery still being propounded as the American way of doing things.
well said Edward,hit the bulls eye there.
Great article!
Wow! amazing and Paul Roberts is an American, with a balanced view, there`s a thought to ponder. Bet he get`s some flack though. But thanks anyway.
Well written! The economic blowback of the unexpected kind will be interesting to watch unfold.
It is because of countries like the US that despots like Lee Kwan Yew of singapore can become the must successful despot in the world. Some even say he is the richest one also. Dozens of his critics have been bankrupted or languished in his famous jails under the dreaded ISA. All this while he is the darling of the US in South East Asia. We live in a sad world where the wicked and cruel, corrupt and addicted to power are ruling over the innocent wage earners. Now you can see the similarity between these two.
I am always at a loss to understand how your current president can espouse support for a vague New World Order. He has been given various powers under the American Constitution and none of them as far as I am aware allow him the power to authorise the American military to subjugate other nations without a declaration of war through the Congress. I do not know what a new World order is but I believe it will cost a lot for the American people, in terms of either lives or debt. The world is watching,the growth of the American Empire may only become a fully publicly understood concept when people like Mr Paul Craig Roberts disappear from public affairs and comment and then it will be a very late hour to rectify the damage but be rectified it will. People forced into slavery either domestically or externally do not remain there for very long. Even in the 1960’s I had not seen such adverse feeling towards a president as there exists today.Either I am a complete buffoon or the seeds for a New American Revolution by the people are being sown so very surrepticiously and unknowingly by the present administration.That it should come to a time when even the concept of an American president giving an executive power to himself to assassinate American citizens becomes a debating point rather than one of instant revulsion, then that time signals to men of integrity to lay down their lives for the society they have a right to under the Constitution. The threat of “terror” has robbed Americans of their rights, I myself would rather face that fear than have my rights removed on those spurious grounds. War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Afghanistan, war on Iraq,these are your childrens debts and deaths’. These things simply to serve the function of military control of the American people. Americans, if you fall, we all do.
Far too late to be concerning ourselves with economics when our borders are under asault by racial sewage pounding on the gate.
We ought rather to be exploring ways to make racism a respectable and popular philosophy comporting with the natural instincts inherent in men since the discontinuance of the Neanderthal. The alternative? Something about midway between Saudi Arabia and The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
(No need to explain. I knew you wouldn’t publish it.)
Tito Perdue
reactionary (the only one) novelist
Tito, I`m intrigued, what`s “racial sewage”?
Racial sewage…someone needs to get taken to the woodshed on that remark. Only Hitler would be proud. I know that we are seeing a stream, a flood of people from the Latin countries who seem like they have been misinformed in their schooling and are undereducated when they arrive, but have shown to be trainable and willing to learn a new language, not an easy task. Some are willing to risk their life in the military in exchange for citizenship
Some people never learn! Especially the “colonial” powers. A simple fact is if you rob someone of their property either they or their children are going to come looking for their property back.
I say this now because some foolish European countries are again trying to rob African people of their resources and nothing surer but the people of Africa are probably sooner rather than later going to come looking for their property back and the last state of Eupeopean colonialists will be far worse than the first.
*A country that cannot produce industrial and manufactured goods, but can only print debt instruments and money is not a powerful country*
amerika does have two formidable n deadly exports
….bombs n bushit
george carlin
+It can’t produce a toaster worth shit, it can’t furnish 80 million of its citizens with adequate health care, it can’t keep all of its citizens productively employed, but it sure can bomb the shit out of other countries and it sure can pump out bullshit to justify it. +
http://tinyurl.com/5cj9tq