The US Establishment: The Dumbest People In The Room

With the unbending support provided by the US foreign policy establishment for the obvious Israeli “atrocity” propaganda ploy to facilitate a second Naqba, the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, that establishment has once again shown itself to be the dumbest people in the diplomatic and international relations room. Below, I cover the increasing utter ignorance and stupidity of those that have a self-image of the cleverest people in the room; a disabling combination of ignorance, stupidity, corruption and arrogance. The current Israeli elite, the vast majority of which hold US, other Western and even Russian passports, may not be as dumb but are being driven to desperate means by the demographic dynamics of the region together with the now obvious decline of US power.

Part of the pure dumbness of the US foreign policy establishment is due to its utter corruption. Within the military, the generals tend to be those that could kiss ass and politic well, not those that served their countries well. Part of that kiss-assing is to the deeply corrupt corporations of the Military Industrial Complex, who are focused on profits not improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the US military nor its use for the general benefit of the US population. That MIC is the retirement plan for the generals, and admirals, as this piece by the Quincy Institute details. To quote:

·      26 of 32 four–star officers who retired after June 2018 — over 80 percent — went to work for the arms industry as board members, advisors, executives, consultants, lobbyists, or members of financial institutions that invest in the defense sector.

·      The biggest category of post–retirement employment for four–stars, by far, was as board members or advisors for small and medium–sized arms contractors, with 15 choosing that option. This compares to five who became board members, advisors or executives for one of the top 10 arms contractors. 

·      Five retired four–stars became arms industry consultants, five became lobbyists for weapons companies, and four joined financial firms that make significant investments in the defense sector.

The politicians are also widely known to be utterly corrupted, with the MIC making sure that it has factories in the electoral districts of every senator and representative, and “money as free speech” rained down upon them like rain from the oligarch rain makers. Bob Menendez is only one of the worst examples:

Then we have the “intellectuals” who sell their knowledge and skills relatively cheap on the “thinktank” circuit. With respect to Occupied Palestine they have many such intellectual pimping organizations to choose from, one of them being the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, full of ex State Department operatives and craven academics. Nowhere can you find who actually funds this so obviously pro-Israel and pro-aggressive US foreign policy outfit. The beauty of such “thinktanks” is that propaganda can be so easily washed through their hands onto the pages of the mainstream media as if from some, “independent” academic source:

Today, almost daily, newspapers in the U.S. and Europe carry analysis about the Middle East by experts of the Institute, but without identifying the organization as pro-Israel and close to the Israel lobby … the Washington Middle East Scene … changed radically … with the advent of the Clinton administration. Clinton appointed Martin Indyk, who founded WINEP as the research arm of AIPAC, as his chief Middle East advisor (he did not have U.S. citizenship at the time and his papers were rushed in to meet the confirmation process).

The administration then cleansed all Arabists from the State Department and anybody who was identified as tilting to the Arab point of view was sent to Siberian posts. The message was loud and clear: the U.S. government would no longer tolerate anybody daring to express the “Arab point of view” in the Arab-Israeli question.

That quickly elevated the status of the Washington Institute and many of its researchers served in high positions of government, especially at State and Defense. At least three of its “experts” served as assistant secretaries of state for the Near East (the top Middle East post at the Department of State). The reputation of the Institute as the organization which staffs Middle East posts at the National Security Council in the White House, State, and Defense grew.

The US State Department was consciously made dumb, with those that understood the complexity of the Middle East replaced with Zionist ideologues. The same can be said for Russia, with true academics such as Stephen S. Cohen pushed to the media and academic edges as they had the temerity to consider that Russia may have its own legitimate interests. The same with those that truly understand China and understand that cooperation with China is the best option for the US long term.

The US establishment, dominated by the international and global corporations from at least the 1930s onwards, seeks complete domination of the globe for the facilitation of the extraction of resources and value added for the furthering of its own wealth and power. With the coming of the second unipolar moment, all arms of the foreign policy and security establishment were cleansed of those that understood and empathized with other nations and restaffed with ideologues that would happily implement the plan for global domination. This is the reason why the Eastern European Division of the State Department etc. was filled with extremist ethnic Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans who have a pathologic hatred of Russia. These people are simply tools of the oligarchy, courtiers who will only stay in place if they carry out the oligarch’s wishes. The same for the many Jews in senior state positions, who after the post-WW2 attack upon the Jewish community as communists (e.g. the McCarthyite taking down of the Jewish Hollywood moguls, Oppenheimer, the Rosenbergs etc.) quickly moved to the right to protect themselves; becoming consiglieres to the US Mafia-State in addition to the Italian Mafia.

Their positions are not a sign of their strength, rather a sign of their readiness to serve the US establishment; empires many times use compliant ethnic minorities to help administer their territories. The same as Israel itself being a colonial project of the UK and then the US as a Western island of influence to keep the Middle East weak, just as with Ukraine after the 2014 coup.

Even with the highly obedient ethnic courtiers, no risks are taken with the oligarchic control. Three oligarch-serving and quite prominent Muslim anchors, Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohieddine and Ali Velshi, have been removed by MSNBC during the current Israeli colonial escalation. This after the US Jewish courtier Dan Abrams (ABC’s Chief Legal Analyst and media entrepreneur) singled out the three of them for opprobrium for their delivery of an honest balanced view of the true causes of the conflict. How dare the ethnic courtiers question the oligarch’s policies! Perhaps they feel how US Jews felt after being victimized during the McCarthy era?

Taking Afghanistan and Iraq without a plan

Sheer over weaning arrogance drove the US establishment to invade Afghanistan and Iraq without a plan for “what after?” Six trillion dollars later they had exited Afghanistan through a pathetic retreat and had greatly enhanced Iranian influence in Iraq. For much less money the US could have easily funded the development of the two nations and gained the support of their populations. But of course, that would not have provided a massive process of financial extraction through which the MIC and US capitalist ruling class in general extracted vast amounts of money from the US state. The money would end up in the bank accounts of the already rich, and the debts were owed by the US people. As would much of the drug profits from the poppy fields that came back into production after the Taliban was removed, and ceased production soon after the Taliban returned.

Attempting to thwart Chinese technology parity to the US

After blindly profiteering from cheap Chinese labour for more than two decades, while facilitating the development of China as an industrial competitor to the US, the US establishment is now trying to close the technology door after the horse has bolted well down the field. Instead of crimping China, these policies will simply reduce the sales of Western technology companies. Within a decade at most, China will have equalled or surpassed the West in all technology fields. In microchips, as in many other technology fields, the Chinese were happy just to buy the goods from the West. It was the sanctions which actually galvanized Chinese corporations and the state to launch a massive program to overcome the Western technology lead, and the Western sanctions designed to keep China as a subaltern.

Attempting to use Ukraine against Russia

The utter ignorance and delusion of the foreign policy elites was shown in their utterly ridiculous belief that Russia would fold like a house of cards under Western sanctions and its population would rebel and overthrow Putin. The opposite has occurred, as Russia is poised to win the Ukrainian war in the next year or so, support for Putin has strengthened, and it is Europe that has been weakened. At the same time, the Western financial system has been exposed as a tool for the expropriation of those that disagree with the West. In addition, the sanctions have freed Russia to align with both Iran and North Korea; strengthening both in their opposition to the West and strengthening the EurAsian anti-West alliance.

Creating and Facilitating the extremist Zionist Israeli Settler Apartheid State

The vast majority of European Jews in the post-WW2 period wanted to emigrate to the United States, but the still relatively high level of antisemitism in the US blocked this route, as was the case with Canada and the UK as well. Another route would have been to carve a new nation out of the ruins of those that had attempted to exterminate them, primarily Germany but also perhaps a Lithuania where the extermination of the 200,000+ Jewish community had involved many members of a deeply antisemitic community. The latter option was not probable under the Stalin leadership and the former not under the German occupation by the US, Soviet Union, the UK and France. Instead, the Arab population would be made to pay for the centuries of antisemitism of the Europeans.

This option fit the foreign policy aims of the British (who issued the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917), and later the US, to have a European settler colony to aid the control of the Arab lands under which oil had been found while once and for all ridding themselves of the Jewish issue. This option also fit the aims of the Zionist Jewish minority, a group of non-religious Jews who planned for an ethnically pure Jewish homeland. With the support of the British, an increasing number of European Jews (Ashkenazi) were allowed to settle in Palestine; prior to the British mandate that started in 1920 only about 5%, 25,000, of the population was Jewish. During the mandate, over 400,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine, and by 1947 the Jewish population was 630,000 out of a total of a total of 2 million. Through a UN dominated by the Western powers (the Soviet Union had not taken its chair at the UN Security Council and the Chinese chair was taken by Taiwan), the Jews were allotted a contiguous homeland that was disproportionate to their relative numbers (56% of the land) and contained much of the coast as well as the best land; the desire to “hem in” the Palestinian population was obvious. The Zionists then grabbed much more land through the Nakba ethnic cleansing which was the primary cause of the Arab-Israeli War, forcing 700,000 Palestinians to flee. The UN have since passed endless resolutions telling the Israeli’s to relinquish this stolen land, but with the US, France and the UK enjoying veto powers at the UN Security Council these were toothless. The establishment of Israel was fundamentally a British and then a US geopolitical project, led by non-religious Jews who had planned a nationalist and racist project of ethnic cleansing for decades; the latter simply took advantage of the Holocaust to wrap themselves in religious victimhood clothing.

Since then, Israel has served the US Empire well both as an offsetting power in the Middle East and also as a provider of enforcers across the globe. The latter are extremely useful as they give the US a gift of deniability, with Israelis doing the Empire’s dirty work. Just as the Nepalese Gurkhas and Indian ethnic minority Sikhs had done for the British Empire. Over the past few decades a greater number of non-European Jews (the Mizrahi) have settled in Israel, and their birth rate has exceeded that of the European Ashkenazi. The Mizrahi tend toward a greater level of religiousness and extremism, with the worst elements being akin to a Jewish ISIS that wants a Jewish state ruled by Jewish religious law. It is this group that also wants to demolish the Al-Aksar mosque, the third holiest place in the Muslim world, and build a Jewish synagogue upon its ruins. The current Israeli government, and an increasing number of its armed forces and police, represent the Mizrahi. The Ashkenazi – Mizrahi ideological split represents the basic conflict within Israeli society that had broken out prior to the most recent Gazan conflict.

This excellent Duran panel with Alastair Crooke and Glenn Diesen covers this schism within Israel.

Both the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi are ethnically cleansing Zionists, their only differences are between the nature of the Israeli state and the tactics used to gain their objective. For the Ashkenazi, their plan of the slow death of the Palestinian West Bank communities under a thousand settler cuts has worked extremely well at keeping their ethnic cleansing under the geopolitical radar; greatly aided by Western and Arab elite complicity. The Mizrahi are pushing for tactics that would enflame the whole Arab world and make it impossible for the complicit Arab elites not to side with the Palestinians. Unfortunately for the Israelis the Middle East has greatly changed in the past few decades, and not in their favour:

·      Iran survived the Iraqi invasion meant to quash the still-young revolution against the Western-puppet Shah, and Western sanctions have also been resisted. The Western attempts to destroy Iraq, Syria and Lebanon have resulted in a great expansion of Iranian power in the region; an Iran of 90 million people possessing a highly developed Military Industrial Complex.

·      The second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 (the first was in 1976) proved to be an abject failure, with the Israeli army being forced back by the forces of Hezbollah. The latter has only grown stronger since then, now possessing over 100,000 soldiers (many having gained experience in Syria) and highly advanced military equipment including 130,000+ missiles.

·      Syria survived the attempts of the Western powers, Israel and some Arab powers to destroy it and has now substantially recovered. One result is a war-hardened armed forces and the presence of both Iranian and Russian military forces.

·      Demographic shifts have massively changed the balance of forces against Israel, with Arab populations growing much more rapidly than the Israeli one with a heavy skew to military-age adults.

·      The peace initiatives between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council states (which includes Saudi Arabia) and between Syria and the Arab states, have greatly increased the cohesion of the Arab world.

·      The Ukraine conflict has very significantly deepened diplomatic, economic and military relations between Iran and Russia. Turkey’s rapprochement with both Russia and Iran also removes it as a tool of Us foreign policy in the region, isolating Israel further. Significant amounts of Israeli munition stocks were also sent to Ukraine.

Fundamentally, the issue for the Israeli’s is that they need to come to terms with the new reality that they are no longer invincible or the dominant power in the West Asian region. But this would require Israel to retreat from all of the land stolen from 1947 onwards, together with the Syrian Golan Heights; something that both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi are completely unwilling to do. Together with the power of the US and the West waning, Israel only has a short window where it may be able to complete its ethnic cleansing and that seems to be the strategy that the Mizrahi-dominated government has set upon. The highly fabricated Hamas “atrocities” provide the propagandist smokescreen behind which the 2+ million Gazan population will be driven out through military terror tactics. After that the West bank can be ethnically cleansed in a much less visible way, one enclave at a time.

The fact is that this has to be one of the dumbest strategies possible; one guaranteed to unite the Arab world against Israel as well as ignite a significant proportion of Western populations. As has been noted even by the US state apparatus, Israel does not seem to have a plan for what to do after it has triggered the Arab world’s response. Can it fight a multi-front war against Hezbollah (who have stated that they will intervene if Gaza is invaded), Syria, an exploding West bank, 20% of its own population that is Arab, and possibly hundreds of thousands of Arabs travelling to fight a holy war against Israel? None of these considerations seemed to have passed through the Israeli leaders’ heads, nor at first through the heads of the US and Western leaders who knee-jerked absolute support for their colonial project.

This support, in parallel to the multiple crimes of humanity carried out by the Israelis against the Gazan population (cutting off of basic amenities such as electricity and water, bombing of hospitals, indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas etc.), has destroyed the West’s credibility with respect to the “other 7 billion” and the Arab states in particular. The Abraham Accords designed to support the slow quiet ethnic cleansing of Israel are dead and buried. The Western elites have also been forced into propagandistic gymnastics that serve to undermine their own narratives; for example, being for Muslims in Xinjiang but against Muslims in Palestine, applauding a Nazi in the Canadian parliament only weeks before being “fully behind Israel”. Not unexpectedly, the height of dumbness was reached by Blundering Blinken who on arrival in Israel stated that he came “as a Jew” as well as the US Secretary of State. What are the Arabs supposed to make of such a statement, or the non-Jewish citizens of the US? His partner in the Duo of Dumbness, The Joke Sullivan (US National Security Adviser) had stated that the Middle East was very stable only a couple of weeks ago.

As Bhadrakumar points out in Indian Punchline, an Arab-Iran-China axis has been created on this issue focused on the plight of the Gazan population, aligning the major Middle Eastern Arab and Persian powers and placing China as an ally of both them and the Palestinian people. Such an alliance attests to the incredible failure of US foreign policy in the region while Blundering Blinken flits from one country to another repeating Israel’s “right to defend itself” against those that it has imprisoned. The parallels with the statements of the Nazis with respect to the rebelling populations of the occupied territories during WW2 are redolent, but invisible to this ideologically blinded numbskull. A great product of the esteemed Dalton school, Harvard (social studies degree) and Columbia (law); none of which seem to have taught him any real history or improved his critical faculties. His ascent from lowly speech writer and political fixer to US Secretary of State reflects his craven courtier qualities much more than any great intelligence.

No matter what happens next, the US establishment and its foreign policy and security service courtiers have created a new foreign policy debacle that can only hasten the decline of their soft power across the globe while increasing the cohesiveness of their opponents. Through decades of support for the colonial ethnically cleansing apartheid Israel they have simply fostered an ever more extreme regime. One that threatens to destroy itself, and perhaps the rest of humanity by its actions. Unfortunately for the predominantly Anglo-Saxon US establishment, the Zionists have spent decades embedding themselves in the US state, political and economic circles. The disciplining of Israel would require the disciplining of a core section of the US Mafia-State, the US media, and significantly rich Zionist citizens and their powerful association AIPAC. So, instead Muslim anchors are quietly removed from the media to keep the “Israeli victims defending themselves / terrorist Hamas” narrative unchallenged.

The US establishment may be the “Empire of Chaos” but the result seems to be more of it reaping the whirlwind of blowback rather than gaining advantage against its opponents. Pepe Escobar called it nine years ago, perhaps the Duo of Dumbness and their establishment backers should have read his book.