Reportedly, even US Central Command Thinks that Aspects of American Foreign Policy Are Self-Destructively Dumb

18 April 2015

Senator McCain, the Obama Administration and the American Idiot Clan

In a realism-based world, just because someone else’s geopolitical interests are different than ours does not make them an enemy worth engaging:

[Senator] John McCain . . . has accused the Obama administration of going soft on Iran’s regional ambitions in pursuit of what he sees as a bad nuclear agreement with Tehran, and has praised “our Arab partners” for intervening in Yemen.

The fact that the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen was planned and launched independently of the U.S. was, in McCain’s eyes, a rebuke of the administration’s policies.

A senior commander at Central Command (CENTCOM), speaking on condition of anonymity, scoffed at that argument.

“The reason the Saudis didn’t inform us of their plans,” he said, “is because they knew we would have told them exactly what we think — that it was a bad idea.”

Military sources said that a number of regional special forces officers and officers at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the target of the intervention, the Shia Houthi movement — which has taken over much of Yemen and which Riyadh accuses of being a proxy for Tehran — has been an effective counter to Al-Qaeda.

Central Command appears to have been overruled by the Obama Administration. We are supporting the Saudi effort.

Costs

A March 2015 report — distributed by the Physicians for Social Responsibility — reasonably maintains that American policy (during the War on Terror) killed about 1.3 to 2 million people through 2011:

This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.

Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen.

The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate.

The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.

Investigations were based on the results of individual studies and data published by UN organizations, government bodies and NGOs.

Figures for Afghanistan and Pakistan are only estimates based on the numbers of observed or reported deaths (passive determination).In Iraq, however, several representative surveys were also conducted in the context of studies seeking to determine the increase in the mortality rate since the onset of war, and therefore the total death toll among Iraqis arising from war or occupation.

Although extrapolation of the results of such ‘active’ determination techniques inevitably causes significant breadth of range, this investigation shows that the data it provides is still far more reliable.

Decisive for the publishers of this paper is not the exact number of victims, but their order of magnitude.

They believe it crucial from the humanitarian aspect, as well as in the interests of peace, that the public will become aware of this magnitude and that those responsible in governments and parliaments are held accountable.

© 2015 Joachim Guilliard, Lühr Henken, Knut Mellenthin, Tim K. Takaro, Robert M. Gould, Ali Fathollah-Nejad, and Jens Wagner, Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the War on Terror — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Internationale Ärzte für die Verhütung des Atomkrieges [International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)], Ärzte in sozialer Verantwortung, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Physicians for Global Survival (March 2015) (at Executive Summary, page 15) (paragraph split)

Body Count in context

2,977 people died in the World Trade Center on 11 September 2011 (9-11).

The United States then killed 1.3 to 2 million people through 2011 in its attempt to crush terroristic criminality.

Only the deranged — and those who demonize people who think differently than we do — would think the continuing American onslaught makes defensible ethical or strategic sense.

The scope of our lunacy is revealed in the fact that today we cannot even keep our purported enemies straight, or explain how these flavors of the month pose us existential threats.

Peter Van Buren wrote recently:

The U.S. is running around in circles in the Middle East, patching together coalitions here, acquiring strange bedfellows there, and in location after location trying to figure out who the enemy of its enemy actually is.

The result is just what you'd expect: chaos further undermining whatever’s left of the nations whose frailty birthed the jihadism America is trying to squash.

And in a classic tale of unintended consequences, just about every time Washington has committed another blunder in the Middle East, Iran has stepped in to take advantage.

Incidentally, Iran is not the egregious enemy that the United States likes to pretend

See, for example:

Gary Leupp, Blaming Iran for Shi’ite Unrest throughout the Middle East, CounterPunch (08 April 2015)

The moral? — American foreign policy is taking an increasingly lunatic course

Our warmongering benefits America’s war-supporting industries, which (given the nature of “force projection”) increasingly span the breath of the US economy.

Who are the planet’s most arguably dangerous exporters of death and destruction?

PeteFree.com

Reportedly, even US Central Command Thinks that Aspects of American Foreign Policy Are Self-Destructively Dumb