“Our Partners”

The United States government routinely tells its subject citizenry and the world of “America’s” grand commitment to freedom and democracy. Putting aside the inconvenient problem of its own domestic oligarchy and plutocracy, let’s have a look at some of Washington’s “democracy”-loving key allies in its new coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – the latest “blowback” Frankenstein generated by decades of US petro-imperial meddling, murder, and mayhem in the oil-rich Middle East. “Our partners” include:

• The brutal, mass-murderous military dictatorship in Egypt, recipient of $1.3 billion in US military assistance each year.
• The Al Khalifi monarchy of Bahrain, which bloodily crushed its Arab spring with US arms, tortures political prisoners with cattle prods, and hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
• The United Arab Emirates, ruled by an absolute monarchy that jails and tortures critics of its royal family.
• Oman, where all authority is held by a hereditary sultan and political parties are banned.
• Saudi Arabia, ruled by an absolute monarchy that practices bloody and medieval punishments even against petty criminals and treats women with harsh repression.

Regarding the last state, home to the second largest oil reserves on the planet, renowned Left intellectual and Middle East expert Gilbert Achcar’s comments in the fall of 2006 hold true eight years later:

“….by far the most fundamentalist Islamic state on earth is the Saudi kingdom. It is the most obscurantist, the most reactionary, and the most oppressive of women. The treatment of women there is absolutely appalling. When you compare the Saudi kingdom to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iran looks like a beacon of women’s emancipation….By the standard of women’s emancipation, democracy, or whatever social value of modernity you want to take into consideration, Iran would rank much higher than the Saudi kingdom. And yet, the country that the United States vilifies as fanatically religious is Iran, whereas the Saudi dynasty are ‘our friends.’ And courted friends, at that.”

Consistent with Achcar’s reflection, Iran was not invited to the Paris conference at which diplomats from the West and Gulf States sought a strategy to fight the Islamic State even though majority Shia Iran is a blood enemy of the Sunni-extremist ISIS.

One wonders how US citizens feel watching US Secretary of States posing for photos with tyrannical and oil- and blood-soaked, princes, kings, emirs and sultans on the evening news. Weren’t the United States’ government and its political tradition formed in popular rebellion against the British monarchy, blood aristocracy, and the feudal traditions and absolutist states of Europe? The reality of the “American revolution” is more complicated than that, but that’s been the official story in US Civics and History textbooks for as long as anyone can remember here.   Surely some of the US citizens who paid attention to their high school history or government teacher much cringe a little when they see US officials embracing seemingly medieval monarchs and aristocrats half way across the world.

Oh, but those terrible beheadings and the savage, goading barbarism of ISIS! Surely the US must do something to stop this hideous new incarnation of pure, unmitigated evil in the name of “civilization” and everything decent!! Such is the conventional wisdom in the United States’ reigning media and politics culture, which has – with no small help from the grisly and theatrical beheading videos – generated majority support for an US air war on Iraq and Syria.

Not so fast, I say to my fellow (United States of) Americans. Below I advance seven considerations for US of Americans to bear in mind as they contemplate Washington’s anti-ISIS coalition with the royal rulers of the Arab world.

“An Uncomfortable Irony”

First, the United States’ grand partner Saudi Arabia is the greatest decapitator on the planet. A recent report from the Washington Post merits lengthy quotation:

“Though long an incubator of the Salafist ideology that now inflames the Islamic State and militant groups of its ilk, the kingdom has grown increasingly concerned with the destabilizing chaos the Islamic State has wrought in the region….But that doesn’t mean its state ideology is necessarily changing. The country is notorious for its draconian laws, which are derived from a strict Wahabbist interpretation of Islamic doctrine. In the space of two weeks last month, according to the rights group Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia executed as many as 22 people. At least eight of those executed were beheaded, U.S. observers say.”

“It appears that the majority of those executed in August were guilty of nonlethal crimes, including drug trafficking, adultery, apostasy and ‘sorcery.’ Four members of one family, Amnesty reports, were beheaded for “receiving drugs.’”

“Saudi Arabia is conspicuous in being the sole country to regularly carry out beheadings; last year, a reported shortage of trained swordsmen led to some hope that the practice could wane, but recent evidence suggests otherwise. It’s an uncomfortable irony given that the United States’ current military mobilization was triggered after the Islamic State beheaded two American journalists.”

“‘Beheading as a form of execution is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and prohibited under international law under all circumstances,’ said Juan Méndez, a U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, at a news conference in Geneva on Tuesday.…Beyond the grisliness of the method of punishment, observers also point to the unjust ways in which those who face death penalties are found guilty.

“‘The execution of people accused of petty crimes and on the basis of “confessions” extracted through torture has become shamefully common in Saudi Arabia. It is absolutely shocking to witness the Kingdom’s authorities’ callous disregard to fundamental human rights,’ Amnesty’s Said Boumedouha said in a statement circulated last week” (emphasis added).

A final comment from Post reporter Ishaan Thoroor is instructive: “U.S. politicians…routinely hector over the state of human rights in Iran — Saudi Arabia’s main geopolitical rival in the Middle East and a country with a far more democratic political system than that of the Saudis. But they are more quiet about the many abuses carried out in the kingdom” (emphasis added). Indeed.

Reader, please note the Post’s reporting of the skills gap that troubled the Saudi state recently: a shortage of trained swordsmen for beheading duty. Maybe part of the billions of US taxpayer dollars that go to the Saudi regime can be channeled into some good US-style job-training to address this skills deficit.

George Carlin I: “Strutting Around Another Man’s Country”

Second, ISIS’s beheadings of US journalists took place in the Middle East, something that makes it problematic for the White House to claim that the killing of Foley constituted ISIS’s “first terrorist attack against our country.” Beheadings and amputations and other terrible crimes committed by ISIS and for that matter (on a grander scale) by Saudi Arabia are atrocious but Americans who wish to avoid such horrors would be well advised to stay the Hell out of Middle Eastern battlegrounds where Islamic fundamentalists are in the field – battlegrounds that have been created to no small extent by US foreign policy. I am reminded (with qualifications – see below) of something that the brilliant and jaundiced comic George Carlin said during his 2005 “Life is Worth Losing” Tour:

“Human beings will do anything, anything. I am convinced. That’s why when all those beheadings started in Iraq, it didn’t bother me. A lot of people here were horrified, ‘Whaaaa, beheadings! Beheadings!’ What, are you fucking surprised? Just one more form of extreme human behavior. Besides, who cares about some mercenary civilian contractor from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Fuck ’em. Hey Jack, you don’t want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They ain’t cuttin’ off heads in Oklahoma, far as I know. But I do know this: you strap on a gun and go struttin’ around some other man’s country, you’d better be ready for some action, Jack. People are touchy about that sort of thing.”

Now, I personally think we should care about the lives of those ISIS kills and I am aware that the actually antiwar journalist James Foley was no Blackwater contractor from Oklahoma. Still, the point about “strutt’n around some other man’s county” applies, tragically enough in some cases, to journalists with cameras as well as to mercenaries with guns: “you’d better be ready for some action” in a war zone – one where jihadists know that most Western journalists are press agents for Empire.

It takes real imperial “we own the world” hubris to call the killing of Foley a terrorist attack on the United States. The jetliner attacks of September 9/11, 2011 were terrorist assaults on the US. The murders of overseas US journalists in the Middle East are not.

Carlin II: “A Moral Question” (Speaking of Murderous Barbarism)

Third, there is the problem of moral hypocrisy on a monumental scale. US-of-Americans need to ask themselves why they are ready to support war against ISIS in retaliation for the murder of two US journalists but not against Israel for engaging in the openly criminal state-terrorist mass-murder of 504 children in Gaza this summer [1] – an atrocity committed in remarkably full public view.

“Let me ask you this,” George Carlin said to his audience in 2005, “this is a moral question, not rhetorical, I’m looking for the answer: what is the moral difference between cuttin’ off one guy’s head, or two, or three, or five, or ten – and dropping a big bomb on a hospital and killing a whole bunch of sick kids? Has anybody in authority given you an explanation of the difference?”

“Mowing the Lawn”

Good question. It applies to the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces this past summer – and in past episodes of what Israel calls “mowing the grass” (wiping out Palestinians) in Gaza and elsewhere.

“Worse That Hiroshima” I

Carlin’s question is relevant also to the United States’ assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in the spring and fall of 2004 – massive attacks that among other things targeted hospitals and used radioactive ordnance that left a toxic legacy…worse than Hiroshima” (UK journalist Patrick Cockburn) and plagued the city with an epidemic of child leukemia and birth defects.

Worse Than Hiroshima II: “A Price Worth Paying”

We might broaden Carlin’s question: what’s the moral differences between decapitating a few military contractors and/or journalists and imposing “economic sanctions” that killed at least half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s? That’s the number of dead Iraqi minors that CBS’s Leslie Stahl famously asked US Secretary of State Madeline Albright about in 1996, adding that the child mortality count from the US-led sanctions was “more children than died in Hiroshima.” The Madame Secretary did not bother to dispute the appalling number. She said “we think the price [the giant juvenile death toll in Iraq that is] is worth it” – for the advance of inherently noble US foreign policy goals. As Albright explained three years later, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

“Then Thirty-Five People Are Going to Die”

What is the moral difference between cutting off some contractors’ and/or journalists heads and killing everyone in a house in the hope of killing just one officially, that is presidentially, targeted “terrorists”? A military source told journalist and author Jeremy Scahill about a standard Special Forces kill operation in the Age of Obama: “If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four [other] people in the building, then thirty-five people are going to die.”

A Shocking Scene

And what is the moral difference between chopping the heads of some contractors and an illustrative incident in the U.S. war on/of terror that occurred in the first week of May 2009. That’s when U.S. air-strikes killed more 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As the New York Times reported: “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to…the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that… the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred…. ‘Everyone was crying…watching that shocking scene.’ (NYT, May 6, 2009). (The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this incident—one among many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about loss of innocent life, but the Administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge U.S. responsibility. By contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11 [New York Daily News, April 28, 2009;  Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2009]).

“Shooting Fish in a Barrel”

Reaching back further into the long chronology of US imperial arrogance and criminality, what’s the moral difference between the ISIS decapitations that have so riled Washington and US major media and public opinion this late summer and early fall and the aerial massacre of thousands of retreating and surrendered troops in Iraq during the one-sided imperial slaughter that US History books call “the First Persian Gulf War?” I am referring to the infamous “Highway of Death,” when the US military slaughtered Iraqi conscripts withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26 and 27, 1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun…for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely…. ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer…. U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs…. U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions…. The victims were not offering resistance…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend” (emphasis added).

This great testament to “Western civilization” and US benevolence was the orgiastic culmination of “Operation Desert Storm,” on which the Obama administration wants to model its anti-ISIS coalition and air-war,

Beyond the Mongols: Massive Muslim “Bug-splat”

One difference between the mass US and Israeli killings just recounted and the ISIS killings of two US journalists is a simple matter of scale. The recent theatrical ISIS beheadings are tiny drops of murder compared to the giant river of blood generated by Israel (with US planes and helicopters) and above all the US in the Middle East.

As Obama claims to care that ISIS kills Muslims as well as Christians and others in the Middle East, nobody has killed and maimed more Muslims and ordinary people in the region than the United States. The number of unnatural deaths caused by US attacks and sanctions in Iraq East since 1990 certainly exceeds two million and may go as high as 3.3 million (including 750,000 children). The deadly havoc wreaked by “good” Uncle Sam is difficult to fathom, in all honesty. Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that left Iraq “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory” (Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch.com, January 17, 2008). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed…the American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century” (Current History, December 2007).

Another distinction has to do with target selection. ISIS picked out two US journalists for a very specific propagandistic purpose (see below). The US and Israel kill Muslims and others in the Middle East indiscriminately, treating thousands of “collaterally” killed and maimed Arab and Muslim victims as nothing more than “bug-splat” (a candid and elite US military terms for Muslim civilians who die in US military operations) and “grass” (murderously “mowed” by the IDF on a recurrent basis).

Some interesting context for something Obama liked to say on the campaign trail I the year of his first election to the US presidency: “it’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting [the US of] America back together.”

No Private Ransom Allowed

Fourth, hard as it might seem to swallow, US-of-Americans need to reflect on the ugly fact that the White House wanted ISIS to behead James Foley. The administration threatened Foley’s parents with prosecution if they tried to raise money to purchase their son’s life. Now, of course, and let’s be candid here, the world’s biggest Mafia don, the US Empire might have paid $2.3 million in blood money to free the accused CIA killer Raymond Davis from Pakistan in the March of 2011, but it can’t be seen paying ransom to some new upstart thugs on the regional block like ISIS. But why block the Foley family and private funders from trying to save Foley’s life? “Cynical” observers can be forgiven for guessing that the White House desired some gruesome prime-time dramatics to justify its pre-existing decision to attack ISIS, whose recent stunning military and territorial gains threaten, as Glen Ford notes, “to consume the kings, Emirs and Sultans the US depends on to keep the Empire’s oil safe.”

Playing Jihadists’ Game

Fifth, the escalation that Obama has ordered in the wake of Foley’s beheading promises to feed Middle Eastern jihadism – and (key point) that is precisely why ISIS released its murderous video, goading Obama to respond with force. As Tom Engelhardt observes, observes, ISIS militants share Osama bin-Laden’s sophisticated understanding of how US escalation fuels jihadism:

“Don’t consider [ISIS’] taunting video of James Foley’s execution the irrational act of madmen blindly calling down the destructive force of the planet’s last superpower on themselves.  Quite the opposite.  Behind it lay rational calculation.  ISIS’s leaders surely understood that American air power would hurt them, but they knew as well that, as in an Asian martial art in which the force of an assailant is used against him, Washington’s full-scale involvement would also infuse their movement with greater power.  (This was Osama bin Laden’s most original insight.)…It would give ISIS the ultimate enemy, which means the ultimate street cred in its world.  It would bring with it the memories of all those past interventions, all those snuff videos and horrifying images.  It would help inflame and so attract more members and fighters.  It would give the ultimate raison d’être to a minority religious movement that might otherwise prove less than cohesive and, in the long run, quite vulnerable.  It would give that movement global bragging rights into the distant future…ISIS’s urge was undoubtedly to bait the Obama administration into a significant intervention.”

What We Do, Not Who We Are

Sixth, as they watch the onetime Winter Soldier turned agent of imperial war John Kerry hold hands with Arab princes and sultans, US citizens should reflect on the how “our” alliance with Middle Eastern despots feeds jihadist sentiments. Along with its blank-check backing of Israel, the placement of imperial military forces near Muslim holy sites, the mass murder of Muslims (see above), and the constant US extraction of oil wealth from the region, Washington’s longstanding and transparently petro-imperial arming, funding, and protection of crooked and tyrannical Muslim states has long contributed to widespread hatred of the US across the region. The jihadists are not advocates of popular democracy or anything close to that, of course, but they have long sought (for their own religious and political reasons) to overthrow the despotic regimes the US sponsors in the Arab world along with the hated “Zionist enemy” Israel. This is something that the top CIA analyst and al Qaeda/bin-Laden expert Michael Scheuer tried to tell US-of-Americans in his 2004 book Imperial Hubris: Why The West is Losing the War on Terror. Scheurer’s volume was dedicated to the elementary observation that al Qaeda (of which ISIS is a spin-off) hated the US not because of who it is (purportedly a land of freedom, democracy, religious toleration, and women’s rights) but because of what it does in the Middle East. By Scheurer’s’ account:

“The greatest danger for Americans confronting the Islamist threat is to believe—at the urging of U.S. leaders—that Muslims attack us for what we are and what we think rather than for what we do. Blustering political rhetoric ‘informs’ the public that the Islamists are offended by the Western world’s democratic freedoms, civil liberties, inter-mingling of genders, and separation of church and state. However, although aspects of the modern world may offend conservative Muslims, no Islamist leader has fomented jihad to destroy participatory democracy, for example, the national association of credit unions, or coed universities.”

“Instead, a growing segment of the Islamic world strenuously disapproves of specific U.S. policies and their attendant military, political, and economic implications. Capitalizing on growing anti-U.S. animosity, Osama bin Laden’s genius lies not simply in calling for jihad, but in articulating a consistent and convincing case that Islam is under attack by America. Al Qaeda’s public statements condemn America’s protection of corrupt Muslim regimes, unqualified support for Israel, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a further litany of real-world grievances. Bin Laden’s supporters…will go to any length, not to destroy our secular, democratic way of life, but to deter what they view as specific attacks on their lands, their communities, and their religion. Unless U.S. leaders recognize this fact and adjust their policies abroad accordingly, even moderate Muslims will join the bin Laden camp” (emphasis added).

Twelve years later, Scheurer’s warning goes unheeded. Osama bin-Laden may have been taken out in a much US-celebrated though actually quite reckless and criminal Special Forces raid, but the “anti-American” Islamic jihad lives on, tied now to an actual territorial caliphate, and fueled by a US imperial jihad – a veritable effort to construct something like a US caliphate – in the region after 9/11. Once again, the US public is told that the vicious Islamist enemy is driven to “hate us” because of “who we are” (supposedly free, democratic, and tolerant) when in reality the main factor is what “we” (US policymakers) do in and to the Middle East.

Seventh, US-of-Americans who want to advance freedom, democracy, justice and security in the world should start in “the homeland.” The US itself is an ever more openly oligarchic state where the top hundredth owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent and a probably comparable share of the nation’s “democratically elected” officials.  Six Walmart heirs possess as much wealth between them as the bottom 42% of US citizens (or ex-citizens) while16 million US children live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level.  One in seven US citizens currently rely on food banks for basic nutrition (half of those people are employed, incidentally).  These terrible facts reflect more than three decades of deliberately engineered upward wealth and income distribution: a ruthless state-capitalist concentration of riches and power that has brought us to a New Gilded Age of abject oligarchy and (along the way) to the brink of environmental catastrophe: runaway global warming and deadly ocean acidification.

The intimately interrelated problems of domestic corporate and financial plutocracy, inequality, mass poverty, and ecocide are only and always deepened by war and militarism. The Pentagon System (the world’s leading polluter) and its gory campaigns abroad serve to further concentrate wealth and power in ever fewer hands while burning and wasting vast quantities of planet-heating fossil fuels, feeding authoritarian nationalism, stealing resources required for social welfare, and diverting the public’s focus from poverty and inequality at home to enemies largely of “our” own imperial creation.

US-of-Americans who are serious about confronting evil and threats to security in the world today would do well to focus especially on the plutocratic power of the giant fossil fuel corporations and lobby. As the national media obsesses over Islamist head-choppers, mythical Russian “expansionists,” and Scottish independence voters, it becomes ever more apparent to those willing to look that humanity is headed for epic disaster resulting from its seemingly unstoppable addiction to fossil fuels. Big Carbon and the broader capitalist system of which it is a key component are pushing the species (and countless other sentient beings) over an environmental cliff as Washington undertakes yet another military escalation in a region where its heavy imperial footprint has always been and remains primarily about the control of oil and gas – the very substances whose grotesque, profit-driven over-extraction and burning promise to close off prospects for a decent future.

Let’s hope the irony and its systemic taproots are properly noted by the tens of thousands marching for climate justice and action in the streets of Manhattan this Sunday.

Paul Street’s latest book, just released, is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.

1. Perhaps Michelle Obama should read aloud the 504 names in a memorial White House ceremony. Unthinkable, of course. Note how Gaza has moved almost completely off the news cycle and down the Western memory hole reserved for officially unworthy victims.

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