Targeting Iraq and Syria, 2003 and 2013

The New Superpower of Global Public Opinion.

 

Is It Finally Coming of Age?

Social Media, Public Perceptions, and the Changing Mental Environment of War Politics.

The people of the world have reached a critical mass of intolerance towards the rogue terror states of the US, Britain, France, Israel and a few other accomplices. We have watched their relentless mass murder and exploitation of fellow humans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We have witnessed how this tiny group of state terrorists imposes on the vast majority of humanity their vile criminality and in the process then insult us with grotesque lies and justifications. We have seen how these rogue states have stolen land, poisoned people’s water, burnt their crops, dispossessed their homes, assassinated families with aerial drones and ground drones in the form of death squads. They have committed all these shocking crimes with lies and impunity to the point where now these state terrorists are operating in more than one country simultaneously in a permanent state of relentless war, pushing the very future of humanity to the brink.
Finian Cunningham, “US Revealed as the Enemy of the World,” 31 August, 2013[1]

Finian Cunningham has argued that the showdown over the future of Syria is engendering widespread popular revulsion with the lethal state terrorism regularly advanced by the western powers. The United States in particular is perceived as the “enemy of the world… pushing the very future of humanity to the brink.” The other side of this equation of popular disgust is that the most strategic and demanding challenge facing the all world’s citizens, including decent men and women inside the United States and Israel, is to reign in the lethal violence and pervasive lawlessness that presently characterizes the West’s orientation to the global community.
In order to secure a viable future for humanity and all life on Earth, the United States, Israel, and the NATO group of countries must somehow be made to adhere to the imperatives of international law and due process espoused so enthusiastically by US prosecutors in the opening phase of war crimes proceedings at Nuremberg in 1945.

In this era when social media on the Internet both facilitates and reflects a dawning political consciousness of worldwide proportions, the old tactics of mass propaganda for aggressive warfare seem to be fast becoming obsolete. As demonstrated by the the worldwide rejection of the Obama administration’s claims that the West needs to intervene militarily in Syria to prevent the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad from committing crimes against its own on people, there is massive public distrust being directed at the planet’s dominant military-industrial complex and the discredited media cartels that are serve it.
The White House identified its war plans as a “humanitarian response” to its own allegations that the Syrian government had attacked thousands of its own civilians with chemical weapons in the Ghouta area just east of Damascus on August 21^st.
The power of public opinion was dramatically demonstrated on August 29 by the failure of UK’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, to carry the day when he convened the Westminster Parliament to gain legislative approval for a military assault on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This anti-war check on the power of the executive branch of Great Britain’s government was subsequently mirrored in the United States when President Barack announced his intention to seek Congressional support for war plans.
The claims put forward by Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, on the Assad regime’s alleged attack on its own people immediately drew comparisons with the specious justifications presented by the Bush White House in 2003. The allegations about Assad’s supposed deployment of chemical weapons invoked memories of the faked evidence deployed to manufacture public consent for an invasion of Iraqi. The accusations that Assad was directing chemical warfare against his own people smacked of the same genre of lies disseminated by the Bush White House about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As one protester in Vancouver proclaimed on her poster, “You lied about IRAQ, You lied about AFGHANISTAN, You lied about LIBYA, and You are lying about SYRIA and IRAN.”

Popular Revulsion at the Lies and Lawlessness of the World’s Dominant Military-Industrial Complex is Growing Day by Day

The concept of global public opinion as the new superpower of geopolitics was first introduced in response to the worldwide anti-war protests of many millions of global citizens in over 800 cities on February 15, 2003. That initiative failed to hold back the war machine. In spite of this massive display of popular opposition to the war plans of the Anglo-American Armed Forces directed by Bush and Blair, Iraq was invaded. It remains to be seen if the worldwide anti-war protests of August 31, 2013 will lead towards a different outcome.
Are we seeing a resuscitation of a global anti-war movement that will reach critical mass in terms of being able to restrain the expansionary momentum of the military establishment that has dominated the political economy of the United States ever since it entered the Second World War in 1941? Will popular revulsion with the obscenities of the permanent war economy put checks on the growth of the military-industrial complex whose agencies are becoming richer, more domineering, and more menacing to future survival of all life on earth than at any time in history?

The showdown over the future of Syria, which many see as a prelude of an even bigger showdown over the future of Iran, extends the frontiers of brinkmanship to new thresholds of impending global catastrophe. Just as the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 put on full display the massive dangers of organizing the world as a potential nuclear battleground between two mirrored superpowers, so the clash of antagonistic forces contesting the future of Baathist Syria puts in bold relief the vulnerability of humanity to the adventurism of those overseeing the changing configurations of military killing power in a multipolar world.
The government of China too continues to make it clear at the UN Security Council and on the ground of Eurasia that, if forced to choose, its interests lie more with the Assad regime and Iran than with those backing the 40,000 or so foreign Islamic jihadists who have been funded and armed to destabilize Syria. The backing for the armed insurgents comes largely from the USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Britain, and France.

This remote-control violation of Syria’s domestic sovereignty embodies an outgrowth of the long history of the West’s deployment of guerilla-style Islamic proxy forces to engage in violent opposition to atheistic communism, most notably in the mountains of Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
These same Islamic proxy armies that were praised by President Ronald Reagan as freedom fighters were cast as useful patsies in the Mother of All False Flag Terrorist events, namely 9/11.
After 9/11 the complex of armed Islamic militants that the CIA and its attending agencies had recruited, armed, organized, and financed were recast as the necessary global enemy to replace the defunct Soviet Union.
The transformation of the US-led side in the Cold War into the byzantine labyrinth of agencies and interests fighting the so-called Global War on Terror has maintained the continuity of the dominant elites overseeing monopoly capitalism. The hold on power of these dominant kleptocrats continues to depend on an audacious misrepresentation of 9/11 in order to justify increased militarism and police state gangsterism together with wholesale deception of the public in the name of national security.
As Bejamin Netanyahu readily acknowledges, the presentation of 9/11 as the violent acts of Islamic extremists served the interests of Israel most directly by transforming the Jewish state’s regional enemies into the global enemies of a reconstituted “West.”
The constant references to al-Qaeda as part of the “rebel” insurgency in Baathist Syria helps to clarify some of the most basic geopolitical realities of our time. The term Al-Qaeda was first identified with the mujahadeen, the US-backed Islamic proxy army that defeated the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan in the 1980s. After a stint as the chief boogeyman of 9/11 and then of the ensuing 9/11 Wars, al-Qaeda is being made to resort back to a role very much like that assigned to it in the 1980s.
Once again we see the name of al-Qaeda associated with a US-backed Islamic proxy force financed to destabilize and overthrow a Russian-backed regime in a strategic district of Eurasia. The showdown in Syria, however, holds the potential of being much more volatile globally than was the showdown between secular and religious forces in Afghanistan in the final years of the Cold War.
Demanding an End to False Flag Terrorism as a Pretext for Aggressive Warfare

There are broad implications to the wide public exposure that the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, probably lied in reporting that the chemical attacks on Syrian civilians were the actions of Syria’s Armed Forces. Dale Gavlak of Associated Press put his name on a widely disseminated social media post that began a stream of further revelations pointing to the likelihood that “Saudi-Supplied Rebels [were] Behind the Chemical Attack.”[2]

The White House’s story of how chemical weapons came to rain down on Syrian civilians has been skeptically received and even ridiculed by many including Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan, Alex Jones, George Galloway, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and legions of liberal and left-leaning bloggers. So far the popular contempt for US speciousness in efforts to justify its flexing of military muscle in Syria extends broadly across the political spectrum.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin sneered at John Kerry’s account of the chemical attack in Syria as “utter nonsense.” Putin challenged the US government to bring evidence of its version of what happened to UN inspectors and to the UN Security Council.
A Global Spotlight is Being Placed on the Whole Phenomenon of False Flag Terrorism
The broadly-based rejection of US accusations concerning the identity of guilty parties responsible for chemical-warfare in Syria is drawing the whole subject of false flag terrorism into worldwide prominence. False flag terrorism is a major tactic for justifying illegal aggressive warfare. This trend of international attention on false flag terrorism should be encouraged. The subject should be brought from the margins of political debate to the center of international attention.
This emphasis on the deployment of false flag terrorism can be finessed to kick start various forms of juridical investigations. This emphasis can lead to long overdue reckonings on the part of governments, but particularly those of Israel and the United States, with their own histories of covertly initiating and manipulating many violent episodes followed by the dissemination of well-calculated lies such as those that came in the wake of the Saudi-backed chemical attacks on Syrian civilians. Aided and abetted by compliant media cartels often owned by big military contractors like Westinghouse and GE, false flag terrorism has become standard procedure in cultivating popular support from home constituencies for aggressive warfare.
It seems, therefore, that it is imperative for the new superpower of global public opinion to draw our own red lines on the political careers of our elected officials. An exit from the repeated pattern of military madness requires that we end the war machine’s misrepresentation of its own manufactured violence with the hidden goal of shaping public opinion to pursue a predetermined course of action.
The growing call for empirically verifiable evidence to back up White House claims is thus a development of far-reaching significance. This demand for evidence from the White House could be seized upon as a wedge to press the case that the walls of public deception assembled in the name of national security have become too numerous, too hefty, and too closely attached to the interests of the war party . The restoration of the rules of evidence to dealings linking governments with each other and with citizens is one part of restoring the rule of law to a degraded international system whose proclivity for massive violence is taxing humanity’s resources to the limit even as it deforms, maims, and menaces the future of all life on Earth.
The insistence that an aroused global citizenry will no longer accept pseudo-truths in the name of national security leads inevitably to reckoning with “9/11,” the event that remains the Mother of All False Flag episodes. The exploitation of wholesale disinformation together with the shock and awe of 9/11 demonstrates, sadly, the dark efficacy of cultivating and sponsoring bands of well-armed Islamic militants to provide the “free world” with a new enemy to justify expanded militarism. The elevation of the largely concocted imagery of global Islamic jihad provides the world’s most zealous war mongers with useful patsies to be depicted as replacement enemies following the demise of global communism.
If the tyrannical momentum of the war machine is to be broken, the lies and crimes of the giant and continuing psychological operation (psy op) of 9/11 requires full exposure. We human beings cannot sustain ourselves much longer in a political economy of perpetual war that sucks vitality from life’s every source. To survive we must let in the light and liberate ourselves from the wholesale lies on which our continuing enslavement depends. The real culprits of 9/11 must be identified, apprehended, and brought to justice.
If the leadership of the resurgent anti-war movement continues to shirk responsibility for addressing the massive misrepresentations at the very origins of the ongoing 9/11 Wars, the worldwide demonstrations of August 31, 2013 are bound to become just one more exercise in futility.
 

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[1] http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/08/31/321425/us-revealed-as-enemy-of-world/