“It is enough that a lie is believed for three days – it has then served its purpose.”
Marie de Medici, 1573-1642, queen consort and queen regent of France.
You may always learn a lot about militarist perversity when you visit Military Times. I mean, yes, of course, they’re just doing their job. Unfortunately, over time, this becomes bizarre and very revealing.
Look at this headline and read the story – U.S. Airstrike in central Baghdad kills Iran-backed militia leader. Did you notice this Pentagon liar’s words:
“It is important to note that the strike was taken in self defense [and] that no civilians were harmed and that no infrastructure or facilities were struck,” Ryder added.
Self defence ?? !!
The US upholds some 5-10 military bases in Syria. The US instigated the horrific sufferings of the Syrian people and deposed its president by decree in Marrakesh (whatever you think about Baashar al-Assad, that is not what you do). The US has never been invited by anyone in Syria. It’s an occupation (and they steal Syria’s oil on a daily basis).
The US has ravaged Iraq since 2003, and, as is correctly stated, the Iraqi leadership wants them all out after unspeakable atrocities and a complete moral, political, military and legal failure – remember Saddam had nuclear weapons, and George Bush wanted to liberate the Iraqi women and teach Muslims human rights!
That – predictably – led to yet another lost US war on the string of military fiascos since the Vietnam War in 1975 by human history’s most militarised state that has never been able to win a war in any decent sense of that word – the latest failure, of course, being Ukraine.
Over 50 years, the United States of America has not learned even a single lesson about these matters.
Now, Israel does not only perform a genocide on the Palestinians. For years it has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights and regularly bombed targets on Syrian soil – just last week, near Damascus and Aleppo. It killed a number of high-level Hamas leaders in Beirut – but, hey, Beirut is Lebanon.
And in December last year, Israel also killed a high-ranking Iranian who operates with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in Syria.
And just two days ago, twin blasts killed at least 84 people and injured 284 near the burial site of slain military commander Qassem Soleimani, CNN reported. He was the one eliminated by the US/Trump. It was Iran’s deadliest attack since 1979. Some believe this crime was committed by ISIS; others would see it as a possible chain reaction set in motion by Israel, perhaps via the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.
Of course, there are many hypotheses at this point, and we may never know the truth. Everybody is accusing everybody else. All of it is likely to increase the risk, terrible as it is, that Israel’s genocidal Gaza policy will ignite a larger fire throughout the Middle East. It would also take the attention away, a bit at least, from that genocide itself.
But – and here is my point: The two exceptionalist states, the US and Israel, seem to believe that they can get away with everything – also everything that they would not let anybody else get away with. They kill and wound, they expand, occupy, humiliate, provoke – have done so in the region for decades. They continue to systematically violate – grossly – provisions of international law, and the world’s governments seem to be watching in more or less silence. Except for South Africa, thank you! (According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, it is the duty of all governments to prevent and stop genocide).
And one more thing combines them: They argue that they act in self-defence. They occupy and mass kill people in foreign lands and claim, when someone hits back, that they are just acting to protect themselves. That they have a right to self-defence.
My simple comment – not without similarities with the little boy in the H. C. Andersen story about the Emperor’s New Clothes: What does occupier, apartheid Zionist Israel expect from its occupations and conquered territories? Love, cooperation and admiration?
And what does the US expect from the rest of the world, a large part of which it has implemented nothing but destructive policies in?
Occupiers, aggressors, humiliators and militarists always argue that they act in self-defence and that attacks on them are ‘unprovoked.’
They have lied to the world and – worse – to themselves for decades, and now believe they are telling the truth. So do the mainstream manipulating militarist media they control.
Some of us don’t need a lie detector to know what’s going on. It’s embarrassing to even point out how obvious those lies are and have always been.
But sometimes I wonder how those liars feel when seeing themselves in their Empire’s New Clothes in the proverbial mirror in the morning. Perhaps they dare no more.