US strategy in the Middle East

U.S. Drops Bombs; EU Gets Refugees & Blame. This Is Insane

Eric Zuesse

Strategic Culture

7 September, 2015

Starting in 2011 in Libya, the United States dropped bombs on Libya in order to replace its pro-Russian dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. The EU is now tearing itself apart with guilt-feelings at European nations’ responses to the refugee-crisis that was caused by this American bombing-campaign in Libya, and then by the one in Syria.

Europe has also received refugees from the American-sponsored bombing-campaign in eastern Ukraine (the bombing-campaign that the 2014 American-installed anti-Russian Ukrainian government calls an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation,’ or ‘ATO,’ which labels the residents in that pro-Russian area — where the residents reject the February 2014 U.S. coup — as ‘Terrorists’ and thus as being suitable to be bombed, and even firebombed). 

And yet, despite these millions of U.S.-caused refugees into Europe, European nations still permit U.S. troops to remain stationed on European soil decades after the entire reason for NATO’s very existence (which was protection of Europe against a communist invasion from the east) ended. (The Soviet Union’s equivalent Warsaw Pact had dissolved and ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself did — yet NATO continued on, and constantly touts ‘the Russian threat,’ just as it did the Soviet threat, as if there were no change when communism collapsed, as if the ideological reason for the Cold War had been fake all along. 

There is no justification whatsoever for «the New Cold War».) Russia is now responding to this new American-created hostility of Europeans against Russia, by its matching this newly transformed now anti-Russian NATO’s war-games against Russia, with similar Russian defensive maneuvers to prepare for an increasingly possible NATO invasion into Russia. 

So: the current refugee-crisis was, in fact, caused by America’s continuing obsession to destroy Russia — an obsession that the EU goes along with, and now suffers greatly from, not only because of loss of their Russian trading-partner, but because of the influx into Europe of millions of refugees that were caused by this New Cold War. This crisis was not caused by Russia’s defensive measures against an increasingly aggressive NATO. It was caused by U.S. aggressions, which the EU continues to endorse.

Let’s go back to the very beginning of the current crisis:

The great investigative journalist Christof Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013 at his nsnbc news site, «Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria», and he opened: «Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry». (The U.S. has been allied with the Saudi royal family since 1945.) Lehmann discussed the chemical-weapons attack «in the Eastern Ghouta Suburb of Damascus on 21 August 2013,» which attack U.S. President Barack Obama was citing as his reason for planning to bomb to bring down Syria’s pro-Russian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, whom Obama was blaming for the chemical attack. 

However, much like another great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh subsequently reported (using different sources) in the London Review of Books on 17 April 2014, Lehmann’s even-earlier investigation found that the U.S. had set up the chemical attack, and that it was actually carried out by Islamic jihadists that the U.S. itself was supplying in Syria, through Turkey. Lehmann reported: 

After the defeat of the predominantly Qatar-backed Muslim Brotherhood and Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces, which were reinforced by Libyans in June and July 2012, the U.S.-Saudi Axis was strengthened. Uncooperative Qatari-led brigades which rejected the new command structure had to be removed. The influx of Salafi-Wahhabbi fighters to Syria was documented by the International Crisis Group in their report titled «Tentative Jihad». 

Hersh’s report added to Lehmann’s, a powerful confirmation by British intelligence, which found that the source of the chemical-weapons attack couldn’t possibly have been Assad’s forces. However, the Brits, of course, didn’t publicly expose Obama’s lie; after all, just as Tony Blair had been George W. Bush’s «lap dog» in Iraq and Afghanistan, David Cameron is Obama’s lap dog in Syria and Libya.

The Libyan campaign turned Libya into a failed state, just as the Syrian campaign is doing (and as the Ukrainian campaign is also trending), and Europe is now getting the resulting refugees.

The great investigative journalist John Pilger provided the best summary description of the horrific and intentional catastrophe that Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton perpetrated upon the Libyan people. For example: «In 2011, NATO launched 9,700 ‘strike sorties’ against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’». These were international war-crimes, which will never be prosecuted. Hillary Clinton expressed merry pride («We came, we saw, he died! (Laughs)») regarding what she and Obama did in killing Gaddafi, no matter how many people’s lives were destroyed in the process. Europe is reaping America’s whirlwind.

I have elsewhere explained how all three of these bombing-campaigns are part of an attempt by the Obama Administration and the Saudi royal family, to transfer away from Russia, and toward the Saudi and other Arabic royal families, Europe’s main supply-source for oil and gas.

Perhaps some EU leader will be able to explain why all EU nations don’t just kick out NATO and ally with Russia, so as to put a stop to Islamic jihad, which is funded by the royal families of the Arabic oil states, and also so as to put an end to the sources of these flows of refugees, and also to put a start to, and become a part of, the emerging Eur-Asian economic giant which will finally eclipse the corrupt declining American empire, and perhaps bring it to an end — bring to an end the world’s biggest single threat to peace, and the world’s biggest single sponsor of endless wars. 

Or are EU’s leaders instead in America’s pay? Why else, for example, would Angela Merkel’s Germany in 2012 have been providing spying-assistance to the jihadist rebels in Syria? (Merkel’s spies were at the same time spying against Sahra Wagenecht and other members of the Bundestag who opposed Merkel’s anti-Russian policies). That just makes Germany’s own leader, Merkel, complicit in helping to cause the surge of Syrians who are trying to find safe haven in Germany and other European countries. (And, this way, EU leaders can then blame the rise of the far-right opposition to that influx, as if they themselves had opposed, instead of helped to cause — as they had — this influx.) The sheer corruption behind this could be incalculable. But, surely, the hypocrisy behind it is intolerable. 

Why, then, do European voters accept it? (For example, why isn’t someone like Wagenecht leading Germany?) Why are U.S. lap-dogs, such as Merkel, in power? Why aren’t they repudiated? The public suffer much from them. Europe is being destroyed by them — by U.S. agents. 

Do Europeans not know what is happening and why? Attaining freedom from the U.S. yoke is not nationalism; it is not right-wing: it is patriotism; it is progress, not regress. It is looking forward, not backward. It is serving the people whom one claims to represent. It is real democracy. America is no longer the nation of the Marshall Plan. That nation, sadly, has been replaced: a new group took it over, and their obsession is empire. Or, as President Obama himself has arrogantly said: «The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation». He promised to keep it that way: «That has been true for the century passed [he misspelt ‘past’ [[somebody at the White House didn’t even know the difference between ‘past’ and ‘passed’]] and it will be true for the century to come». (At least he wasn’t predicting a Thousand-Year Reich. He’s not yet quite that bad.) 

He was saying that the U.S. empire must continue for at least another century. Do the people of Europe really find that acceptable, especially now that they can see where it is heading them? Real compassion for those refugees would demand getting the U.S. out of the EU. And ending NATO. Why are there not enormous public displays in the EU against America, instead of against the refugees, etc.? Do Europeans really think that the nation of the Marshall Plan still exists? If so, they are wrong. Very wrong.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity