On September 3, 2014 The Associated Press reported: “Secretaries of State past and present meet for rare reunion for a museum ground breaking event…a museum and education centre that will demonstrate the ways in which diplomacy matters now and has mattered throughout American history. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Wednesday against creeping American isolationism, making the case that U.S. global leadership is essential in uncertain times as he hosted a rare public reunion of five of his predecessors.”
Accompanying the text was a picture of these emissaries of tokenism walking in single file on a strip of carpet laid down so as to facilitate clean passage to the ‘digging area’. Each individual was carrying a shiny new shovel (made in China perhaps?) and seemed to be conspicuously involved in something groundbreaking for the first time in their lives. They looked like the ghosts of empires past… their collective credibility receding like dinosaur bum rash into a fog of hubristic chauvinism.
Simply put, they were there to praise Caesar. Their collective diplomatic plumage had always been rife with a cosmetic cupidity that rendered inscrutable lip service to faux negotiations while advancing the interests of the ‘deep state’…The Military Industrial Complex,The Empire,The Puppet-masters. Strangely, all five of them appear to project the notion that they are interchangeable and specious. The accolades they were there to receive were their due by virtue of having perpetrated the mythology of American exceptionality…a false historic narrative ablaze with an assortment of ear bending palaver and myths supporting ‘false flag’ nasties of the them-as-demon, us-as-the-virtuous variety. All of this stoked by a Machiavellian intelligence designed to sell fear and paranoia to the mesmerised multitude. A multitude more numerous than the bison that once roamed that great continent protected by two oceans. And now led by the nose into believing that some ogre beyond its borders would come and blow them all away unless they condone the presence of a very large standing army in their midst. If power, in the mind of the military establishment, is anything less than superpower in scale, and the threats to the homeland are anything less than omnipotent in magnitude, then the ability to secure dominance of the national security agenda through technical means would be curbed by default.
Surely, the following statement by John Kerry “a museum and education centre that will demonstrate the ways in which diplomacy matters now and has mattered throughout American history” is as risible as the English nursery rhyme “hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed…” All of this said with a straight face by one steeped in a tradition that relishes the intrigues that are central to the ‘Great Game’. The Military-Industrial Complex (Deep State) forever on the lookout for yet another paddock to exploit is voracious in its determination to achieve world domination. With so much military muscle lobbying Washington, the voice of diplomacy is rendered anaemic in the process.
The Military-Industrial Complex is hardly a passive beneficiary of Government Policy. It is The Government, and they are not there to do diplomacy. They never have and never will do other than advance the cause of power by consolidation.
There are at present five distinct war theatres in The Middle East-Central Asian region : Afghanistan-Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya and Syria.
The 2000 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), first formulated by the NeoCons, was predicated on ‘waging a war without borders’.
The PNAC’s declared objectives were to ‘fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars’ in different regions of the world as well as perform the so-called military ‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions’. Global constabulary implied a worldwide process of military policing and interventionism, including covert operations and ‘regime change’, all of which are carried out in accordance with a ‘humanitarian’ mandate.
Did it matter much to any of the seven Secretaries of State that the CIA took down the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, 1951–1953 and commenced the first of many programmes that sought to destroy every vestige of nationalism, every expression of their sovereign rights that stood in the way of America’s capitalist interests in the Middle East? Did bathing Vietnam in ‘agent orange’ come before or after ‘diplomacy’ failed? And then on 11th September 1973 the military moved to oust Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, in a coup d’état sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, a precursor of the ‘humanitarian’ mandate …but enough, the list of America’s nasty covert operations across the world are too numerous to record here.
Will the new museum project, like the George Bush Library, go any way toward elucidating on what happened in Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, etc. by revealing the facts to the moms and dads who are likely to spend fill-in time at yet another theme park?…or will they be content to purchase a souvenir card memorializing the comments George Bush made when demonstrating his commitment to the Iraq war, “I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me”. Will the lumbering mammoth of American patriotism reveal itself as the Vision Splendid to the mesmerised multitude, when they come to gape at the portraits of the portentous minions who made it to the elbow of the Emperor in this future theme park?
Was Donald Rumsfeld speaking through his big ‘schtick’ when he said of Iraq after pushing for illegal ingress to its oiliness, ‘I cant tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that’? Did the ‘shock and awe’ of America’s weapons of mass destruction unleashed upon Iraq, have more innate appeal to the ‘mesmerised multitude’ within America than the soft shoe shuffle of diplomacy?
Did Colin Powell, an admirer of Karl von Klausewitz, a famous Prussian general and military theorist, stay true to the spirit of Karl’s aphorism ‘ War is the continuation of Politik by other means’, or did he slip into amnesia in the moments before saying ‘ You don’t know what you can get away with until you try’, or, ‘Get mad, then get over it’? Was Powell, a four star General, enabling the Military Industrial Complex to shove its proboscis ever more deeply into the body politic?
Was Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. Secretary of State, January 1997 merely a Kissinger epigone gone cold on the human costs arising from sanctions America imposed upon Iraq? She diplomatically conjured up a justification for hundreds of thousands of children dying from depredations resulting from medicines being denied them. She also had the gall to say;
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future”.
But apparently she did not see far enough. She did not see that while America was indeed the regime changer par excellence in the Middle East, its total lack of respect on the other hand for things Arabic and its ignorance of religious or secular systems peculiar to that region of the world, would eventually lead whole societies into chaos upon being denied their right to evolve in ways that permitted their own indigenous values to thrive.
Condoleezza Rice, who famously said ‘what’s the point of having a first class military unless you use it’ may have been in the wrong branch of government. Madeleine Albright, on the other hand, had this to say, ‘after all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history’…each statement here will schtick in the diplomatic craw. American might is right, and consonance is achieved by accord, or concurrence is achieved by force…either way its my way or the highway.
Speaking at the opening of a new museum celebrating the achievements of American diplomacy, Kerry said that the United States looks inward at its peril and that U.S. engagement is needed more than ever. Kerry was joined at the State Department ceremony by his predecessors– Henry Kissinger, James A. Baker 111, Madeline Albright, Colin Powel and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Of the seven living ex-secretaries of state, all of whom are honorary directors of the U.S. Diplomacy Centre, only Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz were not present.
To observe the single file purposefulness of the Secretaries of State, shiny shovels at the ready, is to recognise the depth to which these Marx Brother (plus extended family) types have dug themselves a hubristic hole that sinks them ever more deeply into the nether regions of hubris … nobody is there to tell them to stop digging because the ‘mesmerised multitude’ share wholeheartedly in the same delusion, believing America to be a force for good in the world …unquestioningly !
John Kerry, in the company of Henry (blood-on-his-hands) Kissinger, Hillary Rodham Clinton (‘I’m undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair’…ahem…ahem…and ‘The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not’), Madeleine Albright (I love the American military uniform), James A. Baker (‘never let the other fellow set the agenda’) and Colin Powell (‘death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war’) had this to say;
“American leadership and engagement should not be up for debate in the first place”, Kerry said, listing Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan, Libya and North Korea as among the trouble spots that Washington must address. “I’m not saying that we can or should do any of it alone; that’s not the proposition, but the world–and I think most people here understand–will not do it without us”. Was he referring to doing the wrecking of countries, alone ? At this point you have to start wondering what part of the word ‘trouble’…as in American Foreign Policy… Kerry does not understand?…and all this after listing the countries where the American footprint denotes toxicity!
Finally, John Kerry’s stream of consciousness shows how abject his failure is when it comes to understanding the reality of the contemporary world. Perspicacity is required in order to see that the emerging multipolar world is moving away from a toxic hegemon, and here Kerry is found wanting. “I can tell you for certain, most of the world does not lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence”, he said. “They tell me that they worry about what would happen in our absence…we have to remember, engagement and leadership, not retrenchment and isolationism, are the American DNA”.
Meanwhile, all over the world from Dublin to Beijing, little children are rushing into the streets to declare … “the EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES”!