I just watched a video in which the participants argued about the perceived inconsistency and irrationality of Washington’s policy in the Middle East.
One participant intelligently noted that we can’t really say that Washington’s policy is either inconsistent or irrational if we don’t know what their actual policy (which might differ significantly from the stated one) really is. For instance, if the policy is to reduce to rubble all states that at one point or another made trouble for the USA, it seems to be unfolding brilliantly.
In my opinion, I think we must begin by stating that it might be Langley’s policy and not Washington’s that we are really dealing with. The political elite in Washington might be so defunct as to be a mere front for the CIA think-tanks who are playing their strategic games of chess, and the reason why I think that is that the policy change level between Bush and Obama administrations is essentially zero, which leads to the conclusion that someone else is the true player, and that the elected officials are merely figureheads for the TV show called “Democracy”.
So, what are we really dealing with? First of all, if we assume that it’s Langley and not Washington who’s pulling the strings, to understand their way of thinking is the only way for us to throw some light onto this unholy mess of a situation.
Essentially, CIA is quasi-rational in its behavior. The reason why I don’t call it rational, despite its own opinion of itself, is that they think they are rational, they think they approach things analytically, but they make so many mistakes in the process that one must question this assumption.
There are four classical examples of their operations: first, creation and support of “contra-revolutionary”, essentially fascist movements in Latin America to oppose the rise of Communism; second, the support to the Iranian client-regime that collapsed so badly that it brought the Islamist clerics to power; third, the radicalization of the Afghan Muslims in order to wage a religious war against the Soviets who were attempting to create a modern secular client state there; and, fourth, the systematic destruction of Laos during the Vietnam war, in order to make it more difficult for Vietcong to compromise American client regime in South Vietnam.
Essentially, what we see here is that in all situations CIA rationally assessed the situation and made moves that were intended to be detrimental to its enemies and supportive of its strategic goals, but in 50% of cases it outright failed, producing a situation that was the direct opposite of intended (South Vietnam collapsed and the communists achieved complete control; their client regime in Iran collapsed and Iran became a lasting strategic enemy of America in the region, while the client regime in Iraq, which they brought to power to oppose the suddenly hostile Iran, had the purpose of first solidifying the Iranian regime, and then turned on America and became a threat to its regional interests and had to be destroyed), in 25% of cases succeeded (there was no spread of communism in Latin America outside of Cuba), and in 25% of cases succeeded but with serious unintended consequences (the Soviets were seriously financially drained in Afghanistan, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and needed to cede control to the Mujahedeen movement; however, this fatally destabilized Afghanistan, sabotaged Soviet efforts of modernizing it and bringing it into the 20th century, and turned it into a chaotic tribal defunct state that is a safe haven and breeding ground for all kinds of Islamist terror groups, such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and recently ISIS).
So, essentially, CIA has a mixed record, so much that one could very well imagine that if they did nothing, things might have been better. In Iran, for instance, it is unlikely that such a radical religious group would have come to power without people’s huge frustration with CIA’s meddling; Iran would probably have become a reasonably governed secular state that would have joined the non-aligned movement during the cold war. If they didn’t meddle in Vietnam by supporting the French colonial interests, Ho Chi Minh, who was an American ally during the second world war, and was greatly inspired by the American constitution, would have remained their ally, wouldn’t have to turn to the Communists to aid him against the French, and Vietnam would have been a pro-Western Asian state like Japan or South Korea. So while their moves seem rational to them, they are rational within a very narrow set of assumptions about the world, which are frequently flawed. For instance, with Vietnam they assumed they needed to support the French in re-establishing their colonial rule after WW2 in order to bolster French national pride which was somewhat shaken, and they needed France as an ally against the Russians, and so they threw Ho Chi Minh to the lions. What was flawed in this assumption is that they didn’t predict that the colonies will have to become independent states worldwide, and that it would be better to have them as supportive of American interests, than to oppose their independence and become their enemy. This dissolution of colonialism was in the air even during the First World War, and as the European colonial powers were fatally weakened in the Second World War it became quite obvious and inevitable. Failure of CIA to anticipate this situation doesn’t speak well of their analytical powers, which leads us to the cause: CIA suffers from tunnel vision and is hugely influenced by short-sighted goals, failing to predict anything beyond the curtain of immediate events. Essentially, they ask the wrong questions. For instance, instead of asking “what’s going on in the world, what events are inevitable and how to best harness them to benefit our long-term goals”, they ask “how to make De Gaulle’s France more pro-American”. Their answers are rational in the context of providing a reasonable answer to the immediate question, but they often harm their long term goals so badly that one must question the validity and, indeed, sanity of the whole system. This is why I think that CIA, together with its client organizations such as NSA, is usually overestimated. Yes, they see and hear everything but it’s not their intelligence gathering that is flawed: it’s their ability to understand the world and make moves that are beneficial to the American long term interests that is suspect. Essentially, they act like an animal with excellent senses, but with a very small brain and a bad temper.
During the cold war, the CIA’s tunnel vision was defined by the zero-sum game of the cold war, where one didn’t have to bother with morality of one’s actions; as long as they were anti-Communist, they were good, because the Communists were defined as the ultimate evil, and everything that fights the ultimate evil is good. The error in this assumption is that the world is bipolar, that there are only two players fighting for supremacy, and that the other side is so bad that anything is permissible in order to fight it. In reality, this perception of the world was completely wrong, and made sense only from the point of view of the analysts in Langley. The real world was not divided according to the political fault lines of the post-WW2 Western civilization – and be assured that the Soviet Union was only an offshoot of the political discourse within the Western civilization, different in its perception of the role of religion and economy, but identical in everything else. It was a political entity that advocated equality of people regardless of gender, race or religion, advocated science and education, invented human spaceflight and taught Afghan women how to use microscopes and computers and be equal to men. Essentially, they shared most of the worldview with the Americans, Germans, French or any other Western nation. So the idea that the world was somehow divided between the political entities that were 90% identical is rather preposterous. No, the world was not divided into the first world (the Western capitalist parliamentary democracies), second world (communist states that adopted the Soviet model) the third world (the non-aligned countries which wanted nothing to do with all that) and the fourth world (the uncivilized pre-industrial post-colonial banana countries which had problems with growing crops and purifying drinking water). The world was divided along the more fundamental fault lines, of those countries that went through the process that began with the invention of printing press, science and humanism, and formed something that can be collectively called “the Western civilization”, and those who didn’t. The reality of the world is that the process which took place in Europe and America, that of transforming a civilization from the dark ages to an egalitarian free society, simply didn’t touch the rest of the world. Yes, the rest of the world often copied the results, such as trains, cars, airplanes and smartphones, but sociologically and politically it didn’t move a millimeter from the tribal mentality of the pre-scientific and pre-industrial ages. We can euphemistically call this part of the world “non-Western” but if we want to call things by their proper names, this part of the world is uncivilized. To paraphrase Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, there is only one civilization, and it’s European; one cannot pretend to be civilized and yet “seek material and spiritual benefits in the guidance of sheiks”. Essentially, if you want to be civilized, you need to leave behind your “culture” and “traditions” made in the times when people thought that the Universe consists of a flat Earth, Sun, Moon and a few dots in the small dome they called “heavens”. But this was all self-understandable a hundred years ago. The problems arose after the WW2, in the post-colonial era, when it became very unfashionable to divide cultures into superior and inferior, and address the natives of the post-colonial countries as “uncivilized” or “primitive”. This was not so because the uncivilized primitives suddenly became any different, but because Hitler’s Germany gave such concepts such a bad name, they were de facto banned from intellectual discourse overnight, and it became fashionable to say that all cultures are equal. The most schizophrenic thing there was the fact that the capitalists and the communists were in a cold war over minute differences in the understanding of economy and religion, and to say that those two cultures were equal would be very ill-advised, but somehow, to say that a tribal culture that “circumcises” (a newspeak for “genitally mutilate”) men and women because their tribal deity told them to do it or be damned in afterlife, is equal to the Western culture of freedom, science and equality, that was incredibly politically correct.
So, in my opinion the true divide of the cold war world was never the standoff between USSR and America. This political reality only masked the true standoff, which was between the part of the world that was civilized and socially, ethically and intellectually evolved, and the part of the world that was tribal to the degree that feudalism would be attainable to them only after centuries of progress, who were deeply entrenched in their tribal beliefs and customs, uneducated and basically a bunch of goat-herding savages who got stranded in the space age by a series of historical accidents. The irony is, you can give them a smartphone, and they will use it to denounce every single aspect of civilization, science and technology that was necessary to produce such a technological artifact. They will claim that the Earth is flat and it’s impossible to orbit it, while using a device that triangulates its position using a signal from at least three satellites orbiting the Earth.
Basically, the true problem of the world, both today and 50 years ago, is that the world consists of 10% civilization and 90% tribal savagery, and the tunnel vision of CIA is most visible in the example where they aligned themselves with tribal savages whose favorite custom is to rape teenage boys and keep them as sex slaves, in order to defeat the “evil empire” which in the meantime taught the female population of the nearby towns how to use modern lab equipment and walk in mini skirts around the university campus. Essentially, the narcissism of small differences so blinded the Americans, that it made sense to them to form a coalition with people who are 99% different from them in order to fight people with whom they share essentially all aspects of the worldview. It’s like helping a street robber kill your brother with whom you happened to have an argument over whether Pinot Noir is preferable to Cabernet Sauvignon.
We see this same tunnel vision over and over again – for instance, America whose claim to fame is “democracy, freedom and human rights” routinely sponsors totalitarian dictatorships whenever it needs them to oppose revolutionary regimes who, basically, attempt to reach American goals by un-American means.
America professes to see the world through the lens of principles, but that is not the reality. The reality is that America sees the world through the lens of “pro-American” and “anti-American”. What is pro-American is useful, either politically or economically or militarily, for furthering American current agendas. A Saudi monarchy is pro-American, and therefore “good”, despite obvious facts that it opposes everything America stands for, such as freedom, democracy etc; basically, it’s an oppressive despotic totalitarian theocracy which is a state-sponsor of all kinds of terrorists and fucktards who oppose all civilization, progress and peace. Soviet Union was “anti-American”, and therefore evil, despite the fact that it furthered science, education and technology and in many ways we would still technologically be in the 1950s if they didn’t drive America into competing with them technologically. It’s actually quite easy to prove: just look exactly what America had invented after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Exactly jack shit. Space travel is an excellent example.
A rational person would conclude that someone or something is anti-American if it is opposite to the basic principles and ideas that make someone or something American. For instance, if someone advocates freedom and democracy, he’s pro-American, and if he advocates totalitarianism and religious fanaticism, he’s anti-American, but that’s not how they see things in Langley. In Langley, they see America as some kind of a promised land of freedom, and the rest of the world either envies it or opposes it. Those who oppose it need to be fought, and those who envy it and attempt to emulate it need to be made useful to America in order to further its goals, and occasionally they can get a visa.
So, basically, if a corrupt dictator is willing to take Langley’s bribes and follow orders, he’s a useful tool, and therefore “one of ours”. If someone shares all American goals, principles and ideals, but opposes America economically and politically, he’s the enemy and “one of them”. Essentially, American foreign policy is not based on principles, but on the assumption that America is a separate, unique entity, and not a set of ideas and principles. They don’t perceive Australia as America just because they are almost identical. No, Australia is either an ally to be used, or a market to be exploited, but essentially “one of ours”, not “us”. Australia is someone whom you politically pressure to buy your super-shitty fighter planes in order to benefit the real Americans, the Lockheed-Martin. They are not someplace where you build a Lockheed-Martin factory in order to sell planes made there to Indonesia or whatever. No, Australia is merely a modern version of a colony, or, as Romans used to say, a province.
And here we finally come to the point where it is even possible to understand what America is doing in the Middle East today.
In normal circumstances, America would use its enormous economic leverage to slowly influence the rest of the world into adopting American principles and values and becoming a single market, such as Francis Fukuyama envisioned in the nineties. However, due to some reason they seem to think they don’t have enough time. For some reason known to the American elites, both in Langley and otherwise, America will collapse economically in a way quite similar to what happened to the Soviet Union. It is known how fragile and artificially supported their economy is, and it didn’t completely crash in the 2008 only due to very expensive and long-term unfeasible measures such as printing trillions of dollars without any backing in assets. This measure is so disastrous I can see it only as a way to buy time, to prop the doomed construction while giving the owners time to organize things.
Also, the 2008 collapse didn’t come unannounced. Also, it coincided with the oil production peak that was tested just prior. Essentially, if I can deduce those things based on the publicly available data, they must know more based on confidential reports. There is no more oil to fuel the world’s economy, and dollar is oil-based. Essentially, the whole economy of the world as we know it has a best-before date, and that date is actually behind us. We live on borrowed time.
The problem with oil is that vast quantities of it are located in the countries occupied by uncivilized camel-riding religious fanatics, and in post-colonial era those savages were allowed to profit hugely from this substance that just happened to be there, a nuisance at best until Rockefeller figured out how to refine this black gunk by fractional distillation and turn it into highly marketable products. Basically, the West did all the work and the Arabs just happened to be there and, simply because the West wanted to play nice, they were allowed to profit enormously from something that basically doesn’t have anything to do with them and is in no way their own contribution to civilization. Since those amounts of money make them very powerful, and since their spiritual state is immensely primitive, they combined those two to spread their primitive tribal beliefs across the world, and in a situation where the West will face an inevitable economic collapse, other powers might arise and take over in the interregnum, before America manages to recover from its difficulties.
And if we assume this to be the basic set of assumptions used in Langley, we can suddenly understand what is it that they are doing in the world, but I’m afraid it’s not an optimistic scenario. You see, one of the cornerstones of American assumption of their own uniqueness in the world is the assumption that they proved to be the best system. They fought the Soviets and won, basically. If they collapse only a few decades after the Soviets did, then there goes this theory – it could then be argued that both systems were flawed and the Soviet collapse might have been merely a fluke, or contributable to some specific flaws of the Soviet model, but basically that American and Soviet models were both almost equally bad and that neither is worth emulating, which would essentially end any kind of a leading role that America enjoys today, and instead of recovering from its impending crisis to resume a leading role, it might find that the world has gone elsewhere, and that it permanently lost its leading position, as the British Empire once had. Assuming that this is unacceptable to Langley, they would assign their analysts with finding acceptable alternatives.
I don’t think they made a tree with that many branches; essentially, they agreed that possible competition, meaning the forces that could take over the lead in the interregnum, need to be weakened before the crisis, and in such a way that they are too busy catching their own tails to notice much of what’s going on elsewhere. An excellent way of doing this is inciting regional civil wars. As the wars in India and Yugoslavia proved, any region that is inherently plural, meaning multi-ethnic, multi-religious or multi-racial, is a keg of gunpowder that could be easily ignited, and once that is done, it will seriously degrade the entire region, often locking it in a state of prolonged low-level military conflict for decades, during which it will be in no state to act as a global player. America has excellent knowledge of the Middle East, due to its long term involvement in the region, and could extremely accurately predict what would happen if the dictatorial governments were removed. The fact that they later decided to do so means that the result was intentional, and we must not waste time whining and moaning about irrationality of American foreign policy in the Middle East, but instead ask ourselves why did they deem it useful to intentionally put the entire region on the path to decivilization, of which Afghanistan is a prime example.
Basically, America by now destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. All those countries are no longer in a state where they could present a strategic danger to America, or be directly useful to their enemies. I expect that Saudi Arabia will be the next one to be decapitated and decivilized, and I’m not sure if they will then even bother with Iran, or if they will instead use the weak-minded and easily manipulated jihadi hordes to destabilize the Shia theocracy of Iran, which might be a much cheaper and simpler thing to do. In Europe, Ukraine was intentionally destabilized in order to create a vicious civil war right on Russia’s underbelly, inconveniencing them greatly and possibly even destabilizing Putin’s government. Press in America and its client states has been mobilized to demonize Putin, who appears to be the only rational and competent head of state anywhere, at the moment, and it appears that outside of Langley, the only significant and independent force acting in the sphere of world politics is Putin and his think-tank of geniuses.
At this point, Putin is still reacting to American moves, in a sense that he’s putting out fires that were set by American pyromaniacs, but some of his moves were so good that I think he is actually on the verge of turning the table on the world scene. You see, unlike American client-states, who are basically run by American-controlled satraps, there is a pretty significant number of states that still can at least see that the train is heading for the cliff and the brakes aren’t working, and will oppose American attempts to completely wreck the world for the duration of its anticipated collapse and recovery; and those states are presently rallying around Putin, whom they recognize as the only player on the world scene who doesn’t have an interest in seeing the world burn. However, so much chaos has already been sown that America essentially attained most of its goals; it converted most of the oil money accumulated in the Middle East into rubble and self-destructive hatred between the regional players, none of which are in any condition to meddle in the world affairs enough to even inconvenience America. Islam in Europe might look like a problem, but Europe, too, is already at the point of economic collapse and it, too, is propped-up artificially in order to live on borrowed time. When the money dries out, what will those Muslims in Europe eat? Most of them are reliant on welfare state and are below the cultural and intellectual level necessary to participate in a modern civilization as contributing members. We can anticipate vicious riots, even civil wars, but not a linear path to Islamic supremacy that would surely take place if this present state of affairs were to proceed indefinitely.
There is one very troubling aspect of the current world crisis that I noticed since the Sochi Olympics, and that is the total match between the state of propaganda produced by the Langley-controlled western mass media, and what I anticipated as a prelude to nuclear release by a country that intends to survive it and not be known as the greatest criminal in the history of mankind. You see, in order to justify launching hundreds of MIRV missiles on a country and killing a billion people worldwide, you need to portray that country as the greatest evil ever, threatening everything that is good everywhere, so that you are perceived as wearing a white hat of a savior knight when you push the button. In order to do that, you need to invoke the strongest Satan-archetypes known to mankind, essentially you need to portray the leader of that nation as a new Hitler who threatens everybody and must not be allowed to win, at any cost. And that’s what is actually unfolding. Just observe how Saddam was portrayed prior to the destruction of Iraq – basically, he’s the Satan’s henchman, someone who keeps his nation hostage, and all you need is to kill him and they’ll suddenly become the new Germany, democratic and progressive. The same with Gaddafi – he’s corrupt, he’s evil, he needs to die, and Libya will suddenly be free and democratic. Then with Syria: Assad is evil, he terrorizes his own people with chemical weapons, he needs to go, and then there will be freedom and democracy. In all cases, you see propagandistic vilification of a country’s leadership prior to a military intervention, and there’s only one conceivable form of military intervention against Russia: a full nuclear release accompanied with strong antiballistic defense mounted against Russia’s retaliatory strike. Since America systematically installs antiballistic systems around Russia for quite a while now, I would say it’s quite obvious where things are heading, and the Russians aren’t stupid, either. They see it all, and they understand how grim the prospects are, and that’s why their response has been so moderate and peaceful. It’s actually quite incredible to watch Putin, who appears to be the oasis of rationality and peace in the world affairs today, and is at the same time portrayed as a hitleroid Satan-substitute in the Western propaganda factories.
Basically, what it looks like to me is that America had laid out a very sophisticated plan for neutralizing all possible competition to its world dominance in order to be able to recover from its anticipated collapse as still the leading country, and, apparently, they intend to start a nuclear war to pull it off, but they intend to do it in such a way as to keep their white hat, so that the surviving population of the world doesn’t perceive them as the arch-villains of world’s history. And the most troubling sign of all is that they already prepared the ground at home for the aftermath of a huge disaster – they armed their police forces to the teeth and transformed them into an occupational force, they readied huge areas that look like concentration camps, either for disaster victims or insurgents, and they perform exercises that look very much like preparation for conditions of governmental collapse in the continental USA. Just one such thing in isolation could be explained as innocent, but all of them together are quite troubling. Honestly, I have only three possible explanations for the entire thing. First, they anticipate a huge natural disaster that is going to hit either only America or the entire world, and they prepare the chessboard so that they emerge on top when the dust settles. Second, they intend to create a nuclear war as a coverup for the collapse of their economic system, estimating that it’s their best chance of retaining some semblance of world leadership. Third, they are all completely insane and evil and there is no rationality whatsoever behind their actions, other than a desire to destroy all who are not subservient to them, without any understanding and regard for the consequences.
Although the third option looks tempting, I’m afraid that it all looks planned, and that the plan is just obscured by the fog of immediate events. In any case, we’re thoroughly fucked.