How long must we wait before the media begins to connect the dots?
- After twelve years of war supposedly against Al Qaeda, ithe U.S. is getting ready to sit down with the Taliban, who, by offering hospitality to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, made 9/11 possible;
- The US has supported its right-wing Gulf allies, starting with Saudi Arabia, in their efforts to funnel arms and fighters to Syria, for the purpose of toppling the only left-wing, secular government in the Arab world.
- Assad is accused of murdering his own people, while neither Bahrein, which is home to the US Sixth Fleet, nor Yemen, another close US ally, receives the slightest reprimand for violently repressing mass demonstrations, arresting doctors who assist victims of government violence, and jailing journalists.
Now consider this: Like Syria today, Iraq was governed by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party until we invaded. In the Iraq/Iran war (1980-1988), we sided with Iraq against the Revolutionary government of Iran, either because our diplomats didn’t have a clue about the Ba’ath Party, or because a decision was made to first eliminate Iran, then go after Iraq.
It seems clear to me that the struggle that began early in the last century, and which appeared to end with the demise of the Soviet Union, has continued by the United States. That is the struggle between the many and the few, now known as the 1% and the 99%.
It is a struggle that no longer simply opposes trade unions to bosses, but now would make every human activity a cash cow for someone. It pits a military/financial/-industrial complex, feebly represented by government, against the survival of a growing world population and the planet that sustains it.
The neo-conservatives who effectively run the United States, are determined to eliminate every vestige of democratic socialism, whether it be the European Union’s welfare states, Assad’s Arab socialism, Iran’s revolutionary ayatollah’s, or anyone other regime in which economic rights are as important as civil rights.
To that end, Washington has taken the gigantic step of throwing its weight behind Salafist fighters in Syria, together with the retrograde Gulf States, Turkey and Israel - which went from a socialist project to a country whose lower class struggles to make ends meet. The mealy-mouthed excuse that the important thing is to get rid of Assad, hoping that ‘moderate’ Islamists will ultimately prevail over the others is not about saving the Syrian people, it’s about shoring up world capitalism. The United States prefers conservative - ven Salafist - Muslims, to progressive Judeo-Christians.
Increasingly arrayed against this project are a majority of the world’s governments, shepherded by Russia and China. Washington plays down the fact that the Moscow/Peking alliance is stronger than it was during the Cold War, as illustrated by the arrival of Edward Snowden in Moscow from Hong Kong, which is no longer a British colony, but a Chinese administrative region.
Snowden is rumored to have been offered asylum in a country in Latin America, America’s former back yard.
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