Eisenhower, Ike

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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MIC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 8 23 $</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'</b></font></div><div>Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative</div><div>
</div><div>Thom Hartmann</div><div><b>August 30, 2023</b></div><div>
</div><div>As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.</div><div>
</div><div>All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”</div><div>
</div><div>It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents, </b>although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Republican presidents have exploded the national debt, while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama</span>.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">We enforced <b>anti-trust laws </b>so aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.<b> Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.</span></div><div>
</div><div>One study found, as Reuters reported:</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.</div><div>
</div><div>In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.</div><div>
</div><div>From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “<b>Common Core.”</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory</b>, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.</div><div>
</div><div>Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same. </b>It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.</div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</b></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Republican President Dwight Eisenhower </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:</span></div><div>
</div><div>“<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peac</span>e.’”</div><div>
</div><div><b>As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent, </b>with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in the<b> Powell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div>Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by <b>Russell Kirk </b>in his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.</div><div>
</div><div>President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a<b> $50 trillion transfer of wealth </b>from the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. </span>And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Dwight <b>Eisenhower</b> created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare</b> to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children</b>, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.</div><div>
</div><div>Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.</div><div>
</div><div><b>But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada,</b> which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.</span></div><div>
</div><div>If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.</b></div><div>
</div><div>So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.</div><div>
</div><div><b>The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.</b></div><div>
</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ronald-reagan/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/ronald-reagan/</a></span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hartmann on RR pivot to greed neo-liberal</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">===</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171840"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171840</span></a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="article-info">4/28/19 </span>

    </span></font></p><h1 class="no-uc"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beware Anew the Military-Industrial Complex: Revisiting Eisenhower's Warning</font></h1><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

    <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/category/3">
        News at Home    </a><br />

    tags:
                <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/tag/576" target="_blank">military history</a>,            <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/tag/6584" target="_blank">Eisenhower</a>,            <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/tag/7759" target="_blank">military industrial complex</a></font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><br /></font><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;" align="left"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”</font><br/>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>  – G.W.F. Hegel</strong></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/military-industrial-complex" style="text-decoration: underline;">military-industrial complex</a>, a term brought to life by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html" style="text-decoration: underline;">farewell address</a> to

the nation, is widely acknowledged, quoted, and even embraced

today.Yet, ironically, the ubiquity of this embrace hasn’t actually

affected the outsized influence of that complex.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In

the councils of government,” Eisenhower warned, “we must guard against

the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by

the military-industrial complex [‘military-industrial-congressional

complex’ in the original text]. The potential for the disastrous rise of

misplaced power exists and will persist.” </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He

had prefaced these words in the same address by observing: “The total

influence [of the then-new conjunction of an immense military

establishment and a large arms industry] – economic, political, even

spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the

Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this

development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave

implications.” </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If

we were blessed with an ideal state of civil-military relations in this

country, its distinguishing characteristics would include – in addition

to a strategically effective military and strategically competent

civilian overseers – what we might call a <strong>properly subordinated military-industrial complex</strong>.

This complex would, accordingly, be subordinated to and supportive of

national interests, aims, and responses. Quite the opposite has been the

case, though, throughout the almost six decades since Eisenhower

alerted the American people the centrality of military industries to

civilian life. Today, it is a mammoth, strategically distorting, even

strategically dysfunctional confluence of political, ideological and,

yes, economic interests that warrants renewed attention, if not

alarm. This is especially important as the military-industrial

complex has been given new, unfettered life and license by the 2018 <a href="https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf" style="text-decoration: underline;">National Defense Strategy document</a>, now in place, that has assumed the de facto position of representing America’s current strategic posture.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Roughly 13% of the U.S. federal budget now goes to <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R44010.pdf" style="text-decoration: underline;">private-sector contractors</a>,

63% of those contracts beingfor defense. Some 51% of defense contracts

are for products, 41% for services, the rest for R&D. Defense

contracts <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/acquisition-trends-2018-defense-contract-spending-bounces-back-executive-summary" style="text-decoration: underline;">represent 52%</a> of overall defense spending. In FY 2018 alone, the Defense Department awarded over $358 billion in contracts. The <a href="https://people.defensenews.com/top-100/" style="text-decoration: underline;">top 10 defense contractors</a>–

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics,

United Technologies, L3 Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Leidos, Booz

Allen Hamilton – collectively receive some $167 billion a year in

defense revenues. That amount exceeds the GDPs of more than 130 of the

world’s countries. Lockheed’s defense revenues alone – $48 billion –

exceeds the annual military expenditures of all but six countries; while

numbers 2 and 3 – Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – each receive over $20

billion in defense revenues, thereby exceeding military expenditures of

all but 13 countries. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To

be fair, economically speaking, overall defense expenditures represent

3.5% of U.S. GDP; the defense sector provides over 4 million jobs; and

roughly 10% of the $2.2 trillion in U.S. factory output goes to arms

production. These are not inconsequential considerations for the

politically minded and politically motivated among us. At the same time,

the United States claims the dubious honor of ranking first in the

world in <a href="https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/fs_1903_at_2018.pdf" style="text-decoration: underline;">international arms transfers</a>,

commanding 36% of the global market. This also isn’t inconsequential

for thestrategically minded among us who recognize the potentially

destabilizing, arms-race-inducing effects of such transactions.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because

Eisenhower’s warning conveyed concern about the well-being of

democracy, it is especially important to note thatthe defense sector of

industry assiduously exercises its First Amendment rights through <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?Ind=D" style="text-decoration: underline;">lobbying and campaign contributions</a>:

$128 million spent on the former, $30 million on the latter in the

2017-18 federal campaign cycle alone. Since 1990, the defense sector has

accounted for nearly $200 million in campaign contributions – dwarfed,

in comparison, by other sectors, but nonetheless more than mere

“beanbag,” as they say.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eisenhower’s April 1953 “<a href="https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/chance_for_peace.pdf" style="text-decoration: underline;">Chance for Peace</a>”

speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, delivered almost

immediately after he took office, is even more telling even than his

1961 farewell address. Also broadcast nationwide, it is worth quoting at

some length for the examples it affords:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Every

gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies,

in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,

those who are cold and are not clothed. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This world in arms is not spending money alone.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.  </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This

is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of

threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, that was <a href="https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/what-would-a-fighter-jet-buy-60-years-after-eisenhowers-speech/" style="text-decoration: underline;">then</a>, when a destroyer cost something on the order of $6 million apiece, a bomber $2.4 million, a fighter jet $211,000. <a href="https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6304_%28Weapons_Systems_Factbook_2018%29Final-web.pdf" style="text-decoration: underline;">This is now</a>,

when an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer runs $1.2 billion (and a

Zumwalt-class destroyer $4.5 billion), a B-21 stealth bomber $564

million, an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter $141 million. Thanks to the <a href="https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/trade-offs/" style="text-decoration: underline;">National Priorities Project</a>, we can see what some selected tradeoffs akin to those Eisenhower offered might look like:</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For

the $19.95 billion we are paying for nuclear weapons and associated

costs, we could create, for example, 359,099 infrastructure jobs for a

year, or pay 246,838 elementary school teachers for a year.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For

the $11.45 billion we are paying for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, we

could provide, for example, 1.11 million military veterans VA medical

care for a year, or 344,676 scholarships for university students for

four years.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For

the $1.51 billion we are paying for Predator and Reaper drones, we

could provide, for example, 638,124 children or 424,963 adults

low-income healthcare for a year.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These

aren’t just incongruent apples-and-oranges tradeoffs; they are

strategic tradeoffs. Those, most notably, who either produced or

zealously support the NDS consider such tradeoffs anything but

strategic, precisely because the types of domestic spending alternatives

offered aren’t militarily relevant. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The

NDS is a retro, militaristic call for a self-reaffirming, self-serving,

self-fulfilling New Cold War that implicitly bows to and embraces a

dominant and domineering military-industrial complex.The NDS claims that

(a) the world we face today is determined by Great Power competition,

defined in predominantly military terms, in which “revisionist powers”

China and Russia seek to unseat us; (b) our supremacy in every domain of

warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace – is now contested and

begs restoration; (c) peace (through strength) is achievable primarily,

if not solely, by being prepared for war; and (d) the primary line of

effort for carrying out this “strategy” is heightened lethality. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The

NDS would have us believe that the preferred vehicle for restoring

America’s deserved primacy in all the aforementioned domains of warfare

is the technological superiority provided by what is now labeled the

“National Security Innovation Base.”  Such labeling seemingly implies

that national security and defense are essentially synonymous, and that a

future-oriented Innovation Base is somehow different (at least

rhetorically) than a backward-looking Defense Industrial Base. Irony

again intrudes here, by the way, since mobilization is implicitly given

new life, but mobilization in the most parochial World War II, giant

on-off switch terms. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For

the various parties that make up the military-industrial complex, the

New Cold War ideology put forth in the NDS is a boon of inestimable

consequence, an incestuously preserved warfighting profiteer’s dream. It

is also a tacit guarantee that defense industry, not government of, by,

and for the people, will continue to call shots most of us don’t even

acknowledge it calls on strategic priorities and commitments, military

doctrine, the perversely irreversible American Way of War, technology,

force structure and disposition, and manpower requirements. And, lest we

forget, there is the massive international traffic in conventional arms

that ensures the perpetuation and expansion of the arms industry (to

“keep the industrial base warm,” of course), even as it feeds

provocation, escalation, and destabilization abroad.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though

it may seem hyperbolic, even alarmist, one is tempted to harken back to

the post-World War I period, when soul-searchingly pejorative

“merchants of death” rhetoric was in vogue. With irony again our guide

for the moment, one of the most outspoken critics of war profiteering

was Marine Major General <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler" style="text-decoration: underline;">Smedley Butler</a>,

a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had spent his

34-year career in uniform dutifully fighting various colonial wars at

the turn of the 20th century. His highly publicized 1935 speech/short

book <em style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html" style="text-decoration: underline;">War is a Racket</a> </em>spoke bluntly in terms worth remembering today: </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">War

is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the

most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one

international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are

reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described,

I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of

the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is

conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very

many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let

us now, if we are to restore or establish strategic sanity in this

post-post-Cold War era, revisit these words and those of President

Eisenhower. We – the taxpayers, the citizenry, the source of

citizen-soldiers, the repository of popular sovereignty – owe ourselves,

our progeny, and our future nothing less.</font></p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171840">https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171840</a>
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ecowatch.com/syria-another-pipeline-war-1882180532.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syria: Another Pipeline War</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syria: Another Pipeline War</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba'ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup" and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran's lopsided contracts with the oil giant BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran's 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors' pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran's new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles' needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax," Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Flush from his Operation Ajax “success" in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti's democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria's Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm" provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba'athists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CIA's plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA's newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA's bribery attempts to the Ba'athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA's aborted attempt to overthrow Syria's legitimate government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Syrian's ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone's confession as “fabrications and slanders," a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh's idealistic view of their government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria's borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria's democratically elected Ba'athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain's MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee" and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot." (Matthew Jones in The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA's mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq's pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalists in Syria today are regularly threatened and harassed when they attempt to uncover the government's decades-long repression — which is a far cry from those scribes who have reported on the glamorous lifestyle and open accessibility of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his family in recent years. And therein lies the impact of government-affiliated public relations — with the help of high-priced PR advisers who had worked in the Clinton, Bush and Thatcher administrations, Assad and his family have sought to portray themselves in the Western media as accessible, progressive and even glamorous, the NY Times reports. Preferential treatment of world leaders in the media is nothing new, but the Assads have been especially determined to burnish their image — and have hired experts to do so. Lifestyle magazines and online outlets have published feel-good features about Assad and his wife Asma, often focusing on their glamorous lives. For example, in March of 2011 — just as Assad and his security forces initiated a brutal crackdown on political opponents that has led to the death of an estimated 10,000 Syrians — Vogue magazine ran a flattering profile of the first lady, describing her as walking "a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles," a reference to her Christian Louboutin heels. The Assad family paid the DC-based PR firm Brown Lloyd James $5,000 a month to act as a liaison between Vogue and the first lady, according to the firm. The Assads were in many ways ripe for celebrity treatment by the news media — the president, a trained ophthalmologist, received part of his education in Britain, where he met his wife, a Briton of Syrian descent who grew up in London and worked as an investment banker in New York. The campaign to make the ruling family the face of a more Westernized and open Syria began in 2006, when Mrs. Assad approached the PR firm Bell Pottinger in London. Tim Bell, a co-founder of the firm and a former media adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said Mrs. Assad contacted the firm after several first ladies, including Laura Bush, began to hold annual meetings and conferences. "She wanted to be a part of that club," Bell told the Times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. Roosevelt's replacement, as CIA Station Chief, James Critchfield attempted a failed assassination plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief. Five years later the CIA finally succeeded in deposing the Iraqi president and installing the Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA's Ba'athists team. The Ba'ath Party's Interior Minister, Said Aburish, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train." Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a “murder list" ...CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, and weapons and battlefield intelligence knowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reagan and his CIA Director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Bagdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam's enemy—Iran—with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of those CIA supplied weapons against the American people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even as America contemplates yet another violent Mid-East intervention, most Americans are unaware of the many ways that “blowback" from previous CIA blunders has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mid-East today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA's failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America's imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S. Kennedy's speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today." The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America's international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America's reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA's bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Pipeline War</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Note the purple line which traces the proposed Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline and note that all of the countries highlighted in red are part of a new coalition hastily put together after Turkey finally (in exchange for NATO's acquiescence on Erdogan's politically-motivated war with the PKK) agreed to allow the US to fly combat missions against ISIS targets from Incirlik. Now note which country along the purple line is not highlighted in red. That's because Bashar al-Assad didn't support the pipeline and now we're seeing what happens when you're a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world's richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar's gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command's Mid-East headquarters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin's stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia's second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia's conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline" running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bashar Assad's family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president," says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before the war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country—“They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Assad's regime was deliberately secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The Syrian government and military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained peace among his diverse peoples by a strong disciplined army loyal to the Assad family, an allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient intelligence apparatus and a penchant for brutality which, prior to the war, was rather moderate compared to other Mideast leaders, including our current allies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn't beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca." Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad's regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we've done it previously in other places [Iraq], they'll carry the cost," he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents." But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the “Friends of Syria Coalition," which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British T.V. channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad's ouster. Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad's Shia allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. U.S. personnel also provided logistical support and intelligence to the rebels on the ground. The Times of London reported on Sept. 14, 2012, that the CIA also armed Jihadists with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons from Libyan armories that the agency smuggled by ratlines to Syria via Turkey. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shia civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes so as to maintain control of the region's petro-chemical supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon's lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority" that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rand recommends using “covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare" to enforce a “divide and rule" strategy. “The United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign" and “U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world ... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WikiLeaks cables from as early as 2006 show the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the Israeli government, proposing to partner with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to foment Sunni civil war in Syria to weaken Iran. The stated purpose, according to the secret cable, was to incite Assad into a brutal crackdown of Syria's Sunni population.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As predicted, Assad's overreaction to the foreign made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria's Shia/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war. When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the Western Coalition armed the “Free Syrian Army" to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syria Army as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of whom were commanded by or allied with Jihadi militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the battalions of deserters from the Free Syria Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad, U.S. Intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIS throat cutters stepped on the world stage, a seven-page Aug. 12, 2012 study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), obtained by the right wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using U.S. and Gulf State funding, these groups had turned the peaceful protests against Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian (Shiite vs Sunni) direction." The paper notes that the conflict had become a sectarian civil war supported by Sunni “religious and political powers." The report paints the Syrian conflict as a global war for control of the region's resources with “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting [Assad's] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If the situation continues unravelling, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime." The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by ISIS exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But then in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding," says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force between 2004 and 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. Military. “We made the same mistake when we trained the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When ISIS' “Jihadi John" began murdering prisoners on TV, the White House pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about regional stability. The Obama Administration began putting daylight between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The White House pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On Oct. 3, 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard that “Our allies in the region are our biggest problem in Syria." He explained that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad" that they had launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war" funneling “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons to Jihadists of the al-Nusra front and al-Qaeda"—the two groups that merged in 2014 to form ISIS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Biden seemed angered that our trusted “friends" could not be trusted to follow the American agenda. “ISI[S] is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion," declared Obama, disassociating himself from the Sunni rebellion, “which is an example of unintended consequences which is why we should generally aim before we shoot." As if to demonstrate their contempt for America's new found restraint, our putative allies, the Turks responded to the U.S. rebukes by shooting down a plane belonging to our other putative ally, the Russians—probably to spoil a potential deal between Russia and the U.S. that would leave Assad in power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Across the Mid-East, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created ISIS. To most Americans immersed in U.S. media perspective, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering ISIS must have been deliberate. On Sept. 22, 2014, according to the New York Times, Iraqi leader, Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Baghdad demonstrators that “the CIA created ISIS." Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Bahaa Al-Araji, echoed al-Sadr's accusation. “We know who made Daesh," Iraq's Treasury Secretary, Haidar al-Assadi, told the Digital News Aggregate, “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, many of the ISIS fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the Jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for 30 years. The CIA began arming and training the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in 1979 to fight the Soviets. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the CIA's Afghan Mujahedeen became the Taliban while its foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, formed Al-Qaeda. In 2004, then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al-Qaeda took its name—meaning “database" in Arabic—from the voluminous CIA database of Jihadists—Mujahedeen foreign fighters and arms smugglers trained and equipped by the CIA during the Afghan conflict.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Bush destroyed Saddam's secularist government and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named ISIS. Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party laying off some 700,000, mostly Sunni, government and party officials from ministers to school teachers. He then disbanded the 380,000 man army, which was 80 percent Sunni.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bremer's actions stripped a million of Iraq's Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. General Petraeus' decision to import dirty war tactics, including torture and death squads, from the CIA's El Salvador conflict in order to shock and awe the Sunni resistance, instead ignited a shockingly bloody spiral of sectarian violence that devolved quickly into escalating atrocities topped finally by the Sunni Army signature head cutting. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beginning in 2011, our allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In June 2014 having entered Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIS. According to the New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a council of former Iraqi Generals ... many are members of Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'ath Party, who converted to radical Islam in American prisons." The $500 million in U.S. military aid that Obama did send to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant Jihadists. On Sept. 16, 2015, incredulous senators from the Armed Services Committee listened to U.S. General Lloyd Austin, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, explain that the Pentagon had spent $500 million to train and arm “moderate" insurgents in Syria and had only “four or five reliable moderate fighters" to show instead of the promised 5,000. The remainder apparently deserted or defected to ISIS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tim Clemente told me that the incomprehensible difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts are the millions of military aged men who are fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. “You have this formidable fighting force and they are all running away. I don't understand how you can have millions of military aged men running away from the battlefield. In Iraq, the bravery was heartbreaking—I had friends who refused to leave the country even though they knew they would die. They'd just tell you it's my country, I need to stay and fight," Clemente said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The obvious explanation is that the nation's moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad's Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can't blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hat is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mid-East, self-government by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using the same imagery and language that supported our 2003 war against Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to believe that our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny, terrorism and religious fanaticism. We tend to dismiss, as mere cynicism, the views of those Arabs who see the current crisis as a rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudi's just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clemente compares ISIS to Colombia's FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to inspire its foot soldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel," Clemente said. “In the end, money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Once we strip this conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict as an oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Instead, our first priority should be the one no one ever mentions—we need to kick our Mid-East oil jones, an increasingly feasible objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy independent. Next, we need to dramatically reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel's borders, the U.S. has no legitimate role in this conflict. While the facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis, history shows that we have little power to resolve it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we contemplate history, it's breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency with which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East since World War II by our country has resulted in miserable failure. The long list of CIA and military adventures has each cost us dearly in national treasure, in liberty at home, in our moral authority abroad and in our national security. Without any memorable exception, every violent intervention has resulted in a catastrophic blowback far more costly to our country than any problems the authors meddling intended to solve. Our mischief has neither improved life in the Middle East nor has it made America safer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S." Let's face it, what we call the “war on terror" is really just another oil war. We've squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Cheney declared the “Long War" in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies who have pocketed historic profits. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have turned America, once the world's beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Adams' words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home. They wanted America to be a “city on a hill"—a model of democracy for the rest of the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney Gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors who have literally made a killing from these conflicts. It's time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending our ruinous addiction to oil.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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