Its been nearly a month since the villagers chased off Orange Man Bad with pitchforks and torches and most of my liberal friends in group therapy have sunk into that warm bath of post election honeymoon euphoria. The more human side of my fractured brain envies their bliss. After all, don't they deserve it? Don't all of us? But I'm a lifelong anti-imperialist and I've seen too many third world sneak attacks not to be this goddamn jaded. While the liberal-progressive world sleeps, I'm left here waiting for the first bombs to drop, and I've got plenty of reasons to be vigilant.
Donald Trump may have been a B-movie monster but Joe Biden's jacket makes him look like a goddamn pacifist. With over half a century of enthusiastically engaging in every illegal war that ever crossed his desk, I would count myself lucky that the twisted old fuck appears to be deep in the throws of full blown dementia if he hadn't picked a young neoliberal death squad to run his cabinet. Aside from the Obama era Tarantino post-feminists in black aka Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland, Biden's bloodthirsty grey-care advisors also include lesser known monsters like Director of Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have had their fingers in every other corpse going back to the Clinton years. These kids are the architects of the Clintonian school of Humanitarian Intervention aka Smart Power, Hillary's neocolonialist gift to the third world.
Humanitarian Intervention is essentially neoconservatism in an NPR tote bag. It's warmongering carefully packaged and sold to peace loving liberals as human rights. It usually involves funding some token oppressed minority like, say, the Albanians of Kosovo, highlighting and all too often exaggerating crimes committed against them by the target, and then selling war crimes to the international community as the only cure for more war crimes. It's the school of imperialist meddling hip in most European nations who've outworn their stay as colonialist rapists, even among their own citizens, and it is with this school of thoughtful, PR savvy, skullduggery that Biden's foreign policy can be predicted to likely be a series of politically correct nightmares like the obliteration of Libya.
Never the less, recently, even pissed off jerks like me have been presented with reasons for hope with Biden's calls for peace, love, and diplomacy in Yemen and Iran, and there is some legitimate reasons for optimism, but also way too many reasons for skepticism. Every peace song Biden seems to sing is more riddled with hidden meanings, contradictions, and frightening metaphors than Highway 61 Revisited. Call me a bastard (I prefer to self-identify as a bitch), call me whatever the fuck you like, but I'm not buying it and those poor motherfuckers in Yemen and Iran shouldn't either. Sadly, most of them are too desperate for skepticism. It's a white privilege that tends to go out of style when you're forced to eat your own shoes just to keep from starving to death.
On the surface, Yemen looks like an obvious win and in many ways it is. After 5 years of American sponsored onslaught, those beautiful bearded crusaders known as Houthi rebels have held their ground like Tet and fought our rented Wahhabi monster army to a smoldering standstill. In just such a scenario a peace deal isn't so much heroic on our part as it is a no-brainer. The Saudis and the UAE failed miserably to achieve anything but grossing a bunch of white people out by bombing kindergarteners with white phosphorous and starving whatever was left writhing. Of coarse Biden wants peace. Only a braying jackass like Trump would see anything but diplomacy as a way to save face on the international stage. But Biden's trumpeted commitment to peace in Yemen is a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors once you scrape that surface.
The old goat calls for an end to American support for all "offensive operations" and "relevant arms sales." But who gets to define what constitutes 'offensive' and 'relevant?' The 'allies' Biden promised to protect in Riyadh in the very next sentence? According to those jackals, the entire genocide is an act of defense against Iranian proxies, a lude conspiracy theory that Biden himself continues to uphold even as he reviews the Houthi freedom fighters heinous terrorist designation. Biden also continues to pledge military support to defend Riyadh from the neighbors they torment. But this would be impossible without selling those bastards the exact same toys they use to slaughter peasants in Yemen.
What's really going on here is an attempt by the US to save face while changing virtually nothing substantial about their policy in Yemen. This is Clintonian Smart Power 101. Bill and Hill went out of their way to get international approval for their massacres in Kosovo and Libya and ended up with bloodbaths every bit as gruesome as Iraq and, well, Iraq, with less than half the blowback from bleeding hearts like mine. It just goes to show, if you ask nicely and use the right words, white liberals will feel safe while you annihilate more brown people.
The holocaust in Yemen has done more to galvanize the long dormant antiwar left across the West than any tragedy since Abu Ghraib. Biden's Angels know that a key part of any successful crime is getting away with it. So they are dressing themselves up in the robes of diplomacy while virtually nothing stops the Saudis from going forward with their forever crusade. They aren't changing the story, they're just changing the cover on the same damn book, and a lot of this, if not most of this, has to do with softening up Iran by selling a love tap against their enemies in Riyadh as a spanking so we can pretend they're playing fair. But Washington doesn't do fair.
This leads me to that colossal word forest that has become the Biden Administration's peace deal with Iran. We've been told since the Donald childishly violated the JCPOA back in 2017 that the Dems would bring it back to compliance on day one. But since Biden's nomination as the Democratic nominee, we've been blitzed by mind bending doublespeak. Biden wants peace but he doesn't. He's open to conversation but not until Iran returns to a deal he technically continues to violate every second in power he refuses to make the the first step. What the fuck do these people want?
Any sane imperialist would make peace with Iran and tell Saudi Arabia and Israel to fuck off. Iran is a moderate stable young nation that has gone out of its way to please it's Yankee tormentors. They've aided and abetted every one of our insane interventions in the region going back to the original Gulf War, and we've thanked them with nothing but spit and treachery. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia arms every one of our jihadist enemies from the Maghreb to the Philippines, including the 9/11 hijackers, and we throw these dustland barbarians a fucking parade. No one supports more factions of Al-Qaeda than Riyadh, and no one has done more to crush them than Tehran. Their entire foreign policy is whacking jihadists like arcade moles and they've gotten pretty goddamn good at it. So why don't we just make up with these fuckers already?
The answer is pretty fucking gross. In my opinion, America will never truly respect and support Iran precisely because they are a moderate theocratic democracy built on the bedrock of a popular anti-imperialist revolution that explicitly rejected Western Capitalism in favor of something more indigenous. Tehran has morals, you and I may disagree with them, but they clearly have a moral compass that overpowers any state's natural thirst for greed or they wouldn't keep making these stupid goddamn peace deals with a country who has made ripping them up a competitive sport. Ask any gangster and they will tell you that there is nothing more dangerous than a criminal partner with morals because morals get messy. America likes butcher factories like Saudi Arabia and the UAE precisely because they have no moral compass. We can work with that. We have worked with that. The only country who has done more business with Al-Qaeda than Arabia is America because instability is good for our business of international domination, and Iran is just way too stable to be trusted.
The dirty secret of Obama's peace deal with Iran is that it was designed to be violated by us and no one else. We asked everything from Iran up front and offered them nothing but empty promises. Otherwise a single moron like Trump wouldn't have been able to just pull the fucking plug so easily. The JCPOA was put in place to control Iran's right to a peaceful nuclear program and anything Biden sells them will be worse. It may sound harsh, but Trump violating that deal may have been a gift in disguise. Since then, Iran has proven its own capabilities to responsibly create nuclear products for themselves and their neighbors from the high road of a country that's been thrice fucked by a sinking empire.
Iran has also faced starvation sanctions during the height of a plague. But if America is capable of such repeated hypocrisy and cruelty, especially with a nest of treacherous Clintonians in the cockpit, you better believe they will do it again. My advice to Iran is to ditch my homeland and look east to an empire not yet strong enough to meddle in your affairs. My advice to America, my home, my country tis of thee, is to fuck off and mind your own continent before you run out of gas in a really pissed off neighborhood. Just a piece of wisdom from one of your own native anti-imperialist bitches. Take it home with you.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Desolation Row by Bob Dylan
* Crash by Nilufer Yanya
* Star Spangled Banner by Black Lips
* Plump by Hole
* Candy Sam by Ty Segall
* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes
* Crash by the Primitives
* Fight Song by the Flaming Lips
* Here It Comes by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
* Smile Like You Mean It by the Killers
* Chick Habit by April March
* Long Time Ago by Concrete Blonde
Although I thoroughly agree with your emotional response to Biden's half assed attempt to get away with a weak necessary rebuttal to Trump's psychotic nonsense, it seems that the USA must subject itself to a good deal more of the punishment of nature's response to humanity's outrageous behavior, to not responding correctly to the obvious three simultaneous disciplines of a pandemic, of global warming,and a final totally disastrous nuclear war. Obviously, if world human civilization does not stop its vicious internal ingrained habit of prejudices, crazy greeds, and psychotic disregards of ecological good sense, it is determined to commit suicide on a massive scale we are only beginning to experience currently. A decade or two at most of the refusal of all humanity to join together for an intelligent and decent worldwide civilization is a certainty to send what is left of humanity to live like underground rats for the better part of a thousand years if they are lucky.
ReplyDeleteI am an Iranian-American. I read the part of your article related to Iran. I agree with most of what you say about USA's policies and the detrimental/criminal effects that it has around the globe. However, I am flabbergasted that in condemning US policy most of the leftist/progressives resort to presenting the regimes such as Iranian regime as "popular," "righteous," and benevolent. Where do you get your information that Iran is after peaceful nuclear program? On what basis do you suppose sanctions are hurting Iranian people not Iranian regime? Has it occurred to you that if sanctions are so detrimental to people of Iran, shouldn't be incumbent upon Iranian regime to put away its nuclear program and costly adventurism in the region so that its people can have a better life and progress? Sanctions never work, in fact, to Iranian regime sanction is a godsend the same way as Khomeini described Iran/Iraq war as a godsend for Islamic Republic(Islamic Republic, not Iran and not Iranian or Iraqi people for sure). Did you know that in development of an economy %95 of development is homegrown development and foreign aid/investment and foreign policy accounts for less than five percent at best? So, if the sanctions are hurting, it is almost %100 domestic issue with a "big country"(in economic sense) such as Iran. Did you know that sanctions is a godsend for the regime to blame every criminal act and corruption, and mismanagement that it has spawned itself upon sanctions? Why would a carbon rich and solar rich country want the most expensive source of energy(atomic energy) in the first place? How about human rights abuses against the secular forces, leftists, progressives, women, ethnic minorities,...? It is sad that in criticizing US actions around the world we resort to turning a blind eye up to the point of cleansing a brutal, criminal regime. It behooves us, in defense of human rights, and solidarity with suffering people, that while criticizing US action, we don't go overboard in turning a blind eye to other protagonists. Enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.
ReplyDelete