The recent agreement between Turkey and the United States to cooperate against the Islamic State in Syria brings to mind the sociologist C. Wright Mills’ description of those who make American foreign policy as “crackpot realists”: realists about advancing their careers, crackpots about the policies they pursue.
America might not be the indispensable nation it thinks it is, but it is proving to be the insouciant nation–over and over again.
“How do these crackpots come up with this stuff?”
For Neo-con, Shock Doctrine-loving, Disaster Capitalists, there IS no business like the war business. And so they profit by spreading it… inured to the human and ecological suffering their inhuman policies spread and promote.
The crackpots come up with this stuff the very same way Adolph Eichmann came up with his mind-numb stuff, as Hannah Arendt so memorably reminded us with her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and as the Israeli nazis and the US nazis refuse to even try imagining. After all, today’s nazis refuse to even consider just how richly nazified they have become and continue becoming, dragging the world along behind them, Wall Street, Tel Aviv, and Bonn leading the charge.
Okay, sometimes they allow London and Paris in the discussion. And even when they need symbolic cover for something, like the mess they have made of Syria, they pretentiously invite Beijing & Moscow to the table.
Mere semantics and symbolic ruses, every one of those exercises in pretentious symbolic gestures.
Neither China nor Russia could ask for a more self-destructive enemy, especially given this enemy’s morbid pretence of having national borders here and there.
So now the US has reduced itself politically to the twin wingnuts: the Wall Street party’s wignuts who see no border problems and the party’s wingnuts who see only border problems, border problems everywhere…, perhaps nowhere more prominant border problems than at the edges of every woman’s body where they must invade to defend their lunacies.
The libertarian-socialist Kurdish communities of northern Syria are the Spanish republicans and Catalonian freedom fighters of our day. If I was younger I’d be organizing an Abraham Lincoln brigade to join them in their fight.
A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.
Lysander Spooner
Washington recognized Turkey’s “right to self-defense.”
Read, “As long as Turkey can afford F-16’s and related munitions, we do not care who they bomb”
Putin Issues Ultimatum to Turkey: Stop Supporting ISIS or Face Break in Diplomatic Relations.
Last year John McCain and Lindesy Graham called for directly arming the Kurds. In June Democratic senators Joni Ernst and Barbara Boxer proposed an amendment to the defense bill calling for that very policy: arm the Kurds in their fight against ISIS. That measure was defeated at the behest of Obama and his natural allies led by Sen. McConnell. It is obvious that the betrayal of the Kurds was very much in line with what Obama and his allies wanted, and probably part of an understanding with the Turks. Thus far, I have not heard any outcry from McCain and others who only months ago were so strongly on the side of the Kurds.
The Kurds, like the Houthis in Yemen, were among the few who who would stand and fight against the Al Queda/ISIS fanatics. Now both are being bombed by U.S. allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Draw your own conclusions.
