Tag Archives: Daesh

Did the US Support the Growth of ISIS-K in Afghanistan?

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Regional players have long accused the US of supporting the group with midnight helicopter transport into Afghanistan.

By Alexander Rubinstein

Source: Mint Press News

The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States as journalist Ben Norton recently noted, characterizing Karzai as “a former US puppet who later turned against the US, and knows many of its secrets.”

So what exactly is ISIS-K and what is it’s history? After ISIS’s Afghanistan variant became a household name overnight following a suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed more than 170 people and wounded more than 200, the group’s history demands renewed scrutiny.

Back in May, I tweeted that “I must not be the only one expecting a so-called ‘rise of ISIS’ in Afghanistan in the near future…”

I wrote this because mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries: the “counterterrorism mission,” or the “terrorist threat.” And it has been a long time since the Taliban has taken credit for any such acts.

In fact, all the way back in August 2016 — a little over five years ago — Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Iranian media that “In cooperation with the nation, [the Taliban] has prevented the terrorist group from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.”

The strongest argument in favor of a US withdrawal put forward by the Biden Administration is that the United States completed its counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan. The attack by “ISIS-K” on the Kabul airport collapses this argument, and so it benefits those who would prefer to see Afghanistan permanently occupied by the US.

It’s also not the actions of a calculating terrorist group: why commit mass violence at such a critical juncture? Why do it when all eyes are on Afghanistan and many in the Pentagon, in NATO, are looking for any excuse to invade again?

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was even able to interview a “senior ISIS-K commander” two weeks before the attack who made these points. The “commander” told CNN that the group was “lying low and waiting for its moment to strike.”

While the US-backed government was still in power in Kabul, the ISIS-K “commander” told Ward that “it’s no problem for him to get through checkpoints and come right into the capital.” He even let the CNN crew film his entrance into the city.

In the absurd interview, CNN sat in a hotel room with the supposed ISIS-K leader and protected his identity. Ward asked him comically upfront questions like “are you interested, ultimately, in carrying out international attacks?”

In response to a question about their plans for expansion in Afghanistan following a US withdrawal, the “commander” said “instead of currently operating, we have turned to recruiting only, to utilize the opportunity and to do our recruitment. But when the foreigners and people of the world leave Afghanistan, we can restart our operations.”

What changed?

This is not to say definitively that the ISIS-K attack was a false flag, but there are many holes in the narrative that demand scrutiny. It is worth noting here that the US is in charge of security at the airport until August 31, while the Taliban controls the surrounding area.

Moreover, the United States had advanced knowledge of the attack. “Because of security threats outside the gates of Kabul airport, we are advising US citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time,” read an August 25 security alert on the US Embassy in Afghanistan website. “US citizens who are at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate now should leave immediately.”

Britain and Australia issued similar warnings of a “high threat of a terrorist attack” and a “very high threat of a terrorist attack” respectively.

The following day, a suicide bomber blew himself up and killed scores of people. Additionally, US forces reportedly gunned down a large number of people as well. “Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast,” tweeted BBC correspondent Secunder Kermani, who reported from the area.

The very next day after the attack, the United State Central Command announced that “US military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan.”

In short, the US knew an attack was coming, the attack happened, and then within 24 hours the US announced that they killed the perpetrator, saying “initial indications are that we killed the target.”

Then on Saturday, US forces demolished a CIA base in the country.

These facts give us more questions than answers. Why was the US unable to prevent the attack? Giving the military and intelligence community the benefit of doubt that they didn’t know who was going to attack and therefore could not have prevented it, how did they figure it out so quickly after the attack? If it was the CIA, which is more than likely, who provided this information, why is the military destroying CIA infrastructure that could plausibly play a role in helping to figure such things out? This is an especially troubling question considering that less than a few hours before the New York Times reported that US troops destroyed a CIA base, President Biden said that military commanders informed him that another attack on the airport is “highly likely” in the next 24-26 hours.

Long Running Accusations of Support

Researcher and commentator Hadi Nasrallah noted on Friday that the leader of the Middle East resistance group Hezbollah “said that the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran.”

Hezbollah is not the first player in the area to make the accusation of the US setting up a ratline via helicopter flights to Afghanistan for ISIS: Russia and Iran, which borders Afghanistan, have been for some time.

As Hadi Nasrallah noted, Syra and Iraq have said more or less the same, with Syrian state media SANA saying in 2017 reporting that “US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an ‘unknown area.’”

As Hadi Nasrallah pointed out, “the same thing was reported for years in Iraq by the [Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces] along with reports that US helicopters dropped aid for ISIS.”

Back in 2017 and 2018, Iranian and Russian officials had questions of their own. Chief of Iranian General Staff Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri accused the US of “relocating members of the Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) terrorist group to Afghanistan after their defeats in Iraq and Syria” in early February of 2018.

“The Americans point to (the existence) of tensions in the southwest Asia region as an excuse for their presence in the region,” Major General Baqeri told reporters.

The following month, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the longtime foreign minister of Iran who departed from the post earlier this year, said “we see intelligence, as well as eyewitness accounts, that Daesh fighters, terrorists, were airlifted from battle zones, rescued from battle zones, including recently from the prison of Haska [Meyna].”

Iran and Russia have “consistently allege[d]” that unmarked helicopters were flying into regions of Afghanistan where ISIS had a foothold. But as Javad Zarif pointed out in March 2018, “this time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison. Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

As the US government propaganda outlet Voice of America wrote at the time in 2018, “the terrorist group uses Nangarhar as its main base to launch attacks elsewhere in Afghanistan.” This is the same province the US struck with an unmanned drone the day following the attack on the airport.

As Voice of America noted, the National Security Advisor of the recently-collapsed Afghanistan government offered Russian and Iranian delegates “joint investigations into allegations of unmarked helicopters flying IS[IS] fighters to battle zones in the country.”

In February 2018, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov implored the US to answer the question.

“We still expecting from our American colleagues an answer to the repeatedly raised questions, questions that arose on the basis of public statements made by the leaders of some Afghan provinces, that unidentified helicopters, most likely helicopters to which NATO in one way or another is related, fly to the areas where the insurgents are based, and no one has been able to explain the reasons for these flights yet,” Lavrov said. “In general [the United States] tries to avoid answers to these legitimate questions.”

Later that month, Lavrov had more to say on the issue: “According to our data, the IS[IS] presence in northern and eastern Afghanistan is rather serious. There are already thousands of gunmen.”

“We are alarmed as, unfortunately, the US and NATO military in Afghanistan makes every effort to silence and deny [ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan],” he added.

These mysterious dead-of-night helicopter flights even raised the eyebrows of the fallen US puppet government. All the way back in May 2017, a local official in the Sar-e-Pul province said two military helicopters landed in the dead of night.

“According to the report we have received from the 2nd Battalion of the Afghan National Army, which fights on the first line of the battle in Sar-e-Pul, two military helicopters landed in a stronghold of the enemy at 8pm last Thursday,” Mohammad Zahir Wahdat, the governor of the province, told Afghan media.

Following Lavrov’s comments in 2018, General John Nicholson, the commander of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, said that Russia was exaggerating the threat of ISIS in Afghanistan. “We see a narrative that’s being used that grossly exaggerates the number of Isis [Islamic State group] fighters here,” Gen. Nicholson told the BBC. “This narrative then is used as a justification for the Russians to legitimize the actions of the Taliban.

This talking point was reinforced by Navy Captain Tom Gresbeck, the public affairs director of NATO’s Afghanistan mission, who said that US forces have “no evidence of any significant migration of IS-K foreign fighters. We see local fighters who switch allegiances to join ISIS for various reasons, but the Russian narrative grossly exaggerates the numbers of ISIS fighters that are in the country.”

It appears that this week, the United States may be forced to eat its words.

7 lies about Afghanistan

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A scene of panic at Kabul airport as former CIA collaborators try to escape the revenge of the Afghan people.

In covering the fall of Kabul, the Western media are mindlessly repeating seven lies of Western propaganda. By misrepresenting the history of Afghanistan, they mask the crimes committed in that country and make it impossible to foresee the fate that Washington has written for it. And if the Taliban were not the most wicked…

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden addressed their nation on the capture of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021.

1.- THE AFGHAN WAR IS NOT A RESPONSE TO 9/11, IT WAS PLANNED BEFORE THE ATTACKS

According to these two politicians, the sole purpose of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to “pursue those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and to ensure that al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base for further attacks. » [1]

Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, is said to have said that “A lie repeated ten times remains a lie; repeated ten thousand times, it becomes the truth.” But the facts are stubborn and, whatever Mr Macron and Mr Biden may think, the 2001 war was decided in mid-July 2001, when the Berlin negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Taliban, not the Afghan government, on the other failed. Pakistan and Russia were observers at these secret talks. The Taliban delegation entered Germany in violation of the UN Security Council’s travel ban. After the failure of these negotiations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Naiz Naik returned to his country and sounded the alarm. Pakistan then looked for new allies. It offered China a gateway to the Indian Ocean (what we see today with the ’Silk Road’). The United States and the United Kingdom began to amass their troops in the area: 40,000 men in Egypt and almost the entire British fleet in the Arabian Sea. It was only after this arrangement was put in place that the attacks of September 11th took place.

2. AL-QAEDA IS NOT A THREAT FOR THE ANGLO-SAXONS, BUT AN INSTRUMENT

According to President Biden: “Our mission to reduce the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden has been a success.

However, it was the director of France’s foreign secret services, Alexandres de Marenches, who proposed to his US counterpart within the framework of the Pinay Circle [2] to provoke a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in order to trap them there [3]. President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, sought out anti-communist billionaire Osama Bin Laden in Beirut and asked him to lead Arab mercenaries in a terrorist campaign against the Afghan communist government [4]. Bin Laden was in Beirut to meet with former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, a member of the World Anti-Communist League [5]. Washington chose Bin Laden for two reasons: First, he was a member of a secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, which allowed him to recruit fighters; second, he was one of the heirs to the largest construction company in the Arab world. As such, he had the men and know-how to turn the underground rivers of the Hindu Kush into military communication routes.

Later, the same Osama bin Laden served as a military adviser to the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, in 1992-94. His fighters followed him there. They abandoned the name “Mujahideen” for the “Arab Legion”. His camp was visited by Russian commandos, who were taken prisoner there. However, before they were arrested, they had time to search his command room and found that all the military documents were written in English and not in Arabic. [6]

Later still, Osama Bin Laden used his fighters for one-off operations. He solicited them by choosing them according to his needs from his “roster”, in Arabic “Al-Qaeda” (القاعدة).

It is therefore indisputable that Osama Bin Laden was for many years an agent of the United States. However, the latter claim that he turned against them, which nothing, absolutely nothing, proves. In any case, Osama bin Laden was seriously ill. He needed daily care in a sterile room. He was therefore taken care of in the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001, as revealed by Le Figaro [7]. This information was denied by the said hospital, but was confirmed to me by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyane (the current President of the United Arab Emirates) who assured me that he had visited him there in the presence of the local CIA chief of staff. Finally, Osama bin Laden was treated at the military hospital in Rawalpindi (Pakistan) [8] where he died in December 2001. His funeral took place in Afghanistan, attended by two representatives of the British MI6 who wrote a report on the matter.

Also indisputably opposing the theory that Osama bin Laden had turned against his CIA employers was the fact that until 1999 – i.e. after the attacks attributed to him against the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the US embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) – he had a public relations office in London. It was from this office that he launched his Call to Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

The fact that for ten years we have heard and seen recordings of people claiming to be Osama Bin Laden only deceives those who want to believe: the Swiss experts of the Dalle Molle Institute of Perceptive Artificial Intelligence, which at the time was used by the big banks in sensitive cases, were formal. These recordings are forgeries (including the one released by the Pentagon in which he claims responsibility for the 9/11 attacks) and do not correspond to the real Bin Laden. If facial and voice recognition was a speciality at the time, it is now a common technique. You can check for yourself with software that is available everywhere.

After Bin Laden’s death, Ayman al-Zawahiri became the emir of Al Qaeda. He still holds this position. The latter – who had supervised the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat – lived for several years after 2001 in the US embassy in Baku (Azerbaijan). [9] He was, at least in that period, the only person who could be considered a terrorist. He was, at least during this period, protected by the US Marines. His current whereabouts are unknown, but there is no reason to believe that he is no longer under US protection.

3- THE US DOES NOT FOCUS ON “COUNTER-TERRORISM”, BUT FUNDS AND ARMS TERRORISM

President Biden explained at length, during his speech on the fall of Kabul, that the United States was not there to build states, but only to fight terrorism.

The phrase ’fight against terrorism’ has been repeated for twenty years, but that does not make it more meaningful. Terrorism is not a flesh-and-blood opponent. It is a method of combat. All the world’s armies can use it in certain circumstances. During the Cold War, the two blocs used it extensively against each other.

Since President George W. Bush (the son) declared the ’war on terror’ (i.e. the ’war on war’), the use of this military technique has been increasing. Westerners first think of attacks in a few large cities, but the worst has been achieved with the creation of small terrorist states in the wider Middle East up to the sinister ’Islamic State of the Levant’ (Daesh) and now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians initially believed the US narrative of events, but they are under no illusion. After 20 years of war, they have understood that the United States does not want to do any good. Washington does not fight terrorism, but creates, finances and arms groups that practice terrorism.

4- THE TALIBAN DID NOT FIGHT A WAR, THEY TOOK WHAT THE US GAVE THEM

Presidents Macron and Biden are playing dumb about the Taliban’s “takeover of Kabul”. According to them, “Afghan political leaders have given up and fled the country. The Afghan army has collapsed, sometimes without even trying to fight. But how did they flee, if not with Western military aircraft? And the Afghan army did not “sometimes seek to fight”, it was the other way round: it only “sometimes” sought to fight. The Afghan borders were among the most secure in the world. US soldiers recorded everyone’s identity with electronic means, including iris recognition.

The Afghan army consisted of 300,000 men – more than the French armies – who were very well trained by the US, France and others. It was over-equipped with sophisticated equipment. All its infantry had body armour and night vision systems. It had a very capable air force. In contrast, the Taliban has no more than 100,000 men, which is three times less. They are hooligans in sandals and armed with Kalashnikovs. They had no air force – they suddenly have one today with trained pilots from who knows where -. If there had been fighting, they would have been defeated for sure.

The regime change was decided under President Donald Trump. It was to take place on May 1st. But President Joe Biden changed that timetable to change history. He used the delay to set up military bases in the neighbouring countries and send at least 10,000 mercenaries. He has mobilised the Turkish army, which is already present in the country, but which no one is talking about. The latter has already recruited at least 2,000 jihadists living in Idleb (Syria) and continues to hire them.

It is important to remember that during the war against the Soviets, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was already a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of a militia, the Millî Görüş (the one that today opens mosques in Germany and France). It was in this double capacity that he came to kneel before Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and future Prime Minister. Hekmatyar subsequently pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, which did not prevent him from running in the 2019 Afghan presidential election under US protection.

The allies began repatriating their nationals several months ago. They thought they would have time before September 11th, or at worst before midnight on August 30th. But Washington decided otherwise by choosing August 15th, the date of India’s bank holidays. This was a warning to New Delhi, which does not appreciate the fact that President Ghani’s Pashtuns are being replaced by those of Emir Akhundzada, even though they support other ethnic groups.

The scenes of panic we saw at Kabul airports reminded us of those in Saigon during the US defeat in Vietnam. It is indeed quite the same. The Afghans clinging to the aircraft are not mostly translators from Western embassies, but agents of “Operation Omega” set up under President Obama [10] . They are members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS), counter-insurgency auxiliaries, like the Vietnamese of “Operation Phoenix”. They were responsible for torturing and killing Afghans opposed to the foreign occupation. They committed so many crimes that the Taliban were like choirboys [11].

Soon we will see a completely different landscape in Afghanistan.

5. THE US DID NOT LOSE AFGHANISTAN TO CHINA, BUT FORCED CHINESE COMPANIES TO ACCEPT ITS PROTECTION

The US has not lost anything in Afghanistan because it does not want to establish peace there. They don’t care about the one million deaths they have caused there in 20 years. They just want that region to be unstable, that no government can control the exploitation of the natural resources there. They want companies, from whatever developed country, to be able to exploit them only by accepting their protection.
This is the Hollywood-popularised scheme of the globalised world, protected by a compound, with special forces going abroad to monitor exploitation sites in wilderness areas.

This strategy was developed by Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who had already computerized the US military. On September 11, 2001, it became the way of thinking of the US military staff. It was popularised by Cebrowski’s deputy, Thomas Barnett, in his book The Pentagon’s New Map [12].

It was this paradigm shift that President Bush called ’War Without End’. By this he meant that the US would forever be fighting terrorism, or rather forever instrumenting terrorist groups to prevent political organisation in these regions.

Yes, Chinese companies are already mining in Afghanistan, but from now on they will have to pay a price to the US or be subjected to terrorist attacks. So what if it’s a racket?

6- WESTERNERS DO NOT DEFEND THE ENLIGHTENMENT AGAINST OBSCURANTISM, BUT RATHER INSTRUMENTALISE IT

The first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, made us all cry by telling us the story of little girls massacred by the Taliban because they dared to wear nail polish. But the truth is quite different.

When President Carter, Zbigniew Brzeziński and Alexandre de Marenches supported the Afghan Islamists in 1978, they were fighting the communists who were opening schools for girls. Because for them the fight against the USSR’s allies came before human rights. Similarly today, President Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken support the Taliban because, for them, controlling access to the natural wealth of the wider Middle East comes before human rights. And they are doing the same in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The US has not only supported Islamists in war-torn countries. For example, it put General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, in power in Pakistan to use his country as a rear base for anti-Soviet fighters. He overthrew democracy, hanged President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and re-established Sharia law. President Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir Bhutto, who was Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s, was also assassinated by the Taliban.

There is no need to go back over the crimes of the Western counter-insurgency, the panic of their collaborators at Kabul airports is enough.

If Islamism and secularism have been used to manipulate the Afghans and to smoke out the West, political life in Afghanistan is not based on these concepts, but first and foremost on ethnic divisions. There are about fifteen of them, the largest of which, the Pashtuns, are also strongly represented in Pakistan. It is still a tribal country and not yet a nation. Other ethnic groups are supported by other countries in the region because they are also present there.

7- FRANCE HAS NOT ALWAYS SUPPORTED US CRIMES IN AFGHANISTAN, BUT ONLY SINCE PRESIDENT SARKOZY

According to President Emmanuel Macron: “President Jacques Chirac, as early as October 2001, decided that France should participate in international action, in solidarity with our American friends and allies who had just suffered a terrible attack on their soil. With a clear objective: to combat a terrorist threat that was directly targeting our territory and that of our allies from Afghanistan, which had become the sanctuary of Islamist terrorism”. [13]

It is a distracting way to erase a characteristic French conflict. In October 2001, President Chirac violently opposed the participation of the French army in the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Afghanistan. He only authorised deployment under UN Security Council Resolution 1386. The French soldiers were indeed under the orders of Nato, but as part of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF). They were only involved in reconstruction assistance. They did not take prisoners, but eventually arrested fighters and immediately handed them over to the Afghan government. It was President Nicolas Sarkozy who changed this status and made France complicit in the crimes of the United States. It is because of this change that France is currently exfiltrating members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). And it will probably pay the price.

Hillary Clinton and American Empire

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By Rob Urie

Source: CounterPunch

Despite the lack of evidence linking Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen to Daesh (ISIS) in any operational (direct) sense, the first inclination of U.S. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was to renew American bombing of Syria, Iraq and Libya— the very nations that were destroyed by U.S. bombs directed by Mrs. Clinton and from whence Daesh arose. In so doing Mrs. Clinton made it evident that she is an unrepentant militarist whose bloodlust, combined with her longstanding interest in promoting American business interests, ties her to the U.S. imperial project of the last century and one-half. The precise moral difference between mass murders for personal and state reasons depends on a theory of the state at odds with this imperial project.

The company that employed Omar Mateen, G4S, is a British-based ‘security’ company that operates in 120 countries and as a ‘private’ supplier of public services to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army and to the very same State Department that Mrs. Clinton led as Secretary of State. The company advertises itself capable of ‘mitigating liability’ for the U.S. government— the ruse used by the CIA and other clandestine and quasi-clandestine government agencies to circumvent civil prohibitions on their activities by employing ‘private’ companies to carry them out. The NSA’s domestic surveillance programs tie to those of the FBI, DEA and CIA through this legalistic dodge. And ‘private contractors’ were behind some of the more grotesque slaughters in recent American wars.

The classical liberal separation of economic from political interests used to legitimate state violence is one that the Clintons have spent their ‘public’ careers undermining. As leading proponents of neoliberalism, the Clintons have spent three decades conflating ‘private’ interests with the public interest. In history this tie of U.S. business interests to U.S. military incursions runs from residual European imperialism, including genocide against the indigenous population and slavery, to direct wars, proxy wars, coups, assassinations, murders and particularly odious ‘wars of attrition.’ What is corruption in the liberal worldview is the nature of the capitalist-state acting in / on imperial interests in a Marxian frame. If this corruption is ‘solvable,’ such has yet to be demonstrated in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton’s use of the horrific crime in Orlando to instigate further crimes against untold innocents abroad is hidden behind manufactured fears of a lunatic and craven enemy (ISIS) that is in fact both a product of earlier U.S. atrocities across the Middle East and but a pale ghost of the savagery of combined U.S. actions in the region. The American leadership’s practice of creating crises that it must then ‘respond’ to led the way to the sequential slaughters, disruptions and dislocations that now finds substantial portions of the Middle East in ruins and millions of refugees flooding an increasingly xenophobic Europe. That this leadership never seems to learn from its ‘mistakes’ suggests motivations at work other than those presented at press conferences.

Where G4S, Omar Mateen’s employer, fits in is that Mr. Mateen was in many respects the perfect mercenary— ‘our psychopath’ if we were paying for his services. Murdering 49 people and wounding 50 more is, in addition to being an atrocity, a crime and a moral calamity, a complicated logistical feat. In 2004 U.S. Colonel James Steele was brought to Iraq, in a war that Bill Clinton publicly supported and Hillary Clinton voted for, to engineer like atrocities. Mr. Mateen’s crimes would have been business-as-usual in U.S. led slaughters of innocent civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and in Iraq in the 2000s. And G4S is precisely the type of ‘public-private partnership’ favored by the Clintons to ‘mitigate liability’ behind a veil of ‘private’ actions.

This isn’t to suggest that Hillary Clinton had any part in the murders carried out by Mr. Mateen. It is to suggest that in any human and / or moral sense she is congenitally unfit for public office. The most generous explanation of her support for George W. Bush’s criminal slaughter in Iraq is that she was misled by the manufactured evidence proffered by the Bush administration. That the war tied through history to the Clinton’s own sanctions against Iraq that resulted in half a million innocents dying from privation and to eight years of bombing that left much of the country in ruins suggests that Mrs. Clinton probably well understood that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. in 2001. That the war was coincidentally a boon to Western business interests was / is as grotesque as it was predictable.

If conceptual clarity around these issues seems wanting here— that is the point. Neoliberalism as some unified theory of political economy ties through history to the Washington Consensus that in turn ties to American imperial history. Western imperialism— state-corporatism as division of the global economic spoils through insertion / assertion of ‘national’ interests, has five centuries of reasonably well defined history behind it. In this regard Donald Trump’s relative rhetorical reticence to use military force as a first choice is a threat to this imperial order whereas Hillary Clinton’s willingness to destroy an entire region of the world on a whim to benefit Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs makes her the ‘safe’ choice from the institutional perspective.

Washington Consensus precepts are:

*Fiscal discipline

*A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health care, primary education, and infrastructure

*Tax reform (to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base)

*Interest rate liberalization

*A competitive exchange rate

*Trade liberalization

*Liberalization of inflows of foreign direct investment

*Privatization

*Deregulation (to abolish barriers to entry and exit)

*Secure property rights

Against this imperial history the U.S. view that national elections are an internal matter places U.S. voters as the nominal ‘choosers’ of political economy for much of the world. In political terms, the 800+ military bases that the U.S. keeps around the globe serve as quasi-private security forces to assure repatriation of ‘profits’ for multi-national corporations in the form of resources, plentiful, cheap labor and the broader economy of imperial conquest. In fact, as opposed to theory, these profits are the reciprocal of the death, misery, subjugation and immiseration inevitably put forward by Western economists and politicians as the result of ‘free-choice’ by those on the losing end of American imperial fortune. That increasing numbers of Americans are on this losing end helps explain current (and heretofore slight) political unrest and its reciprocal in establishment support for Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s toxic jargon that “America never stopped being great” poses a seeming conundrum for her supporters who aren’t dedicated sociopaths. If U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Northern Africa are evidence of this greatness, then what are the moral and political bases of such a judgment? Mrs. Clinton’s nostalgia for the days of alleged national unity following the attacks of September 11, 2001 is apparently for the erasure of the history that led to the attacks and not for unity per se. Conversely, given the absence of any operational link to Daesh, Omar Mateen could just as well have claimed that his crimes were motivated by Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ were ISIS not such a well-implanted foe.

Externally, and in contradiction of to the exceptionalists, the democratists and Western neoliberals, the U.S. is broadly considered the greatest threat to world peace on the planet. Brought to the fore in the current Presidential election cycle is that Western elites— inherited wealth, bailout-dependent bankers, the corporate lootocracy dependent on wildly goosed (by the Federal Reserve) asset prices and various and sundry agents, functionaries and court pleaders, are now well-understood to have interests diametrically opposed to those of the vast majority of Americans. The conceptual leap not yet taken by the American electorate is the international nature of this class divide.

bipartychart

Chart: the bi-Party system of electoral control in the U.S. is put forward as representing majority political views when combined it represents less than one-third of voting-age political affiliation. In terms of global political reach, the American political leadership represents such a small minority’s interests that even relatively minor rebellions could quickly overwhelm it. Source: Gallup, Pew Research.

This international ‘footprint’ is fact regardless of whether or not Americans consider it when voting. Internal economic dislocations, such as jobs lost and stagnant wages from trade agreements, find their reciprocals in indigenous economies destroyed, in ‘developing market’ industries shut out through subsidized ‘competition,’ in IMF ‘workouts’ that place ownership of developing industries in Western hands and through commodification and expropriation of millennia of accumulated knowledge to be put back as alien product against the peoples and cultures that developed it. In this respect, the ‘Clinton model’ of sweatshop labor as economic development joins the ‘Obama model’ of subverting civil law in the interests of corporate-state plutocrats.

Calls to unify behind Hillary Clinton in her bid to become President pose the heavily engineered outcome of the Democratic primaries as the popular will. In this sense they are roughly analogous to the calls to unite behind George W. Bush following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000. The Clintons paved the way for Mr. Bush’s brutal militarism much as Barack Obama maintained the institutional infrastructure of the ‘unitary Presidency’ and the capacity for launching criminal wars of opportunity. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Mrs. Clinton who has the proven record as guardian of empire and imperial prerogative. Her unbridled militarism is an expression of this prerogative.

The question for Democrats is how evil can someone be to still be worthy of voting for? Alleged stark differences between Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush find very high degrees of synchronicity between their actual policies (and those of Barack Obama). And lest this be unclear, it is the Democratic establishment that chose Mrs. Clinton as its candidate (chart above), and not the politically and economically dispossessed electorate. The grift that American elections reflect the popular will, and therefore confer political legitimacy, contrasts with the facts that the dominant Parties are largely and increasingly unpopular and that the popular will bears no relation to the policies decided upon and enacted by the American political establishment.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.