American Foreign Policy
For
Dummies
This article was written in the backdrop of the illegal invasion
of Iraq by the United States.
Freedom™ kills more people than cancer. Here is a survival
guide to people outside the United States.
- We have a huge arms industry.
We need to keep them in business.
That is why WE ARE CONTINUOUSLY AT WAR WITH SOMEONE.
When there are no enemies, we invent them.
- If you have any common sense, you cannot be our friend. You are
anti-American.
- Britain is our best friend. Replace your foreign ministry with a
fax machine and you can be a best friend too.
- Over 90% of our propaganda consists of lies. The rest consists of
the words "international community."
- "International community" means United States, Britain and the
Republic of Vanuatu.
- "Coalition" is another big word we use. It means United States,
Britain and... and... and... Wait, we will get back to you on that.
- Like the Nazis, we like to repeat the same lies again and again
until our audience accepts it as truth.
- Sometimes, we get others do our dirty work. Plausible deniability
can take care of bad publicity most of the time. Besides, history
favours the victors.
- Soft Power Lesson #1: We have saved more Europeans from Nazi occupation
in Hollywood films than the Soviet Union did for real.
- Soft Power Lesson #2: More people have been inspired by Karl Marx
than all American thinkers combined. But, that's not a big problem.
So long as the rest of the world follows our lead in news coverage,
everything's fine.
Free Press or Fake Press?
Fake pictures of actors provided by
Reuters
to news organizations all over the world about the Russian
intervention in Georgia. Russia bombed Georgia after the latter
shelled the breakaway province
of South Ossetia. The pictures can be identified as staged
shots only when they are seen together. Most news outlets
would published only one of those pictures.
- Soft Power Lesson #3: Even the tiniest poorest nations in Africa buy
oil with hard currency. When United States, the superpower, shops for
oil, all it has to do is print more paper - counterfeit portraits of our
dead presidents a.k.a. the U.S. Dollar. (See the article
Lose The Dollar.)
- In bilateral and multilateral negotiations with us, a
give-and-take policy must be followed.
You give and give and give... And, we take and take and take...
Always.
- The USA may have been called a capitalist paradise or a land of gold.
But, when our big sophisticated multinational companies come to your
Third World country to do business there, they want
- soveriegn guarantees to back every investment
- guaranteed profits written into the contract, which would no
sane Western goverment would even involve itself with and which no
Third World country can bear
- protection from risks associated with business
- cheap credit from local FIs (Financial Institutions) to fund
their "investments"
- precedence for promoter shareholders over creditors, in case their
loss-making operations and assets have to be sold
- If your country has any oil, then you don't have to call us;
we will call you - as "friends," "allies", "sponsors of terrorism", and
"proliferators of WMD." Choose your pick. Our ultimate aim is to
liberate your oil.
- Lack of freedom, democracy, and human rights will become a problem if we don't have access to your oil. This is why oil monarchies in the Middle East are our friends while countries like Sudan are not.
- Even if your country has no resources to exploit or markets to flood, we will want to build a base there to harass your more resource-rich neighbours.
- BTW, we have troops stationed in over 120 countries. If you are a country, then we may already have a base there.
- Problem being touted as solutions? Well, that's the hallmark of the U.S. military.
- We have no problem supporting dictators - Pinochet, Pol Pot, Suharto, etc.
But, you have to remember that we treat our friends worse than our enemies - Saddam, Noriega, etc... but still we urge you to be nice to us.
- We had no problem with communism, except that they did not let us exploit their markets and resources.
- We had no problem with Nazism, except when we were attacked by their allies.
Even after the war, we helped former Nazi collaborators in Europe get back to power just so that popular communist parties were defeated.
- We had no problem with Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism.
In fact, we invented it to trouble the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and further in Central Asia.
However, Islamic terrorism has come back to haunt us.
Big opportunists that we are, we have used this misfortune to strike at Iraq, bringing billions of dollars to war profiteers, such as contract companies (Bechtel, Halliburton), arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing), and of course oil companies.
- In Latin America, our Ambassador will be the de facto leader.
Our companies will be the prime beneficiaries of the government.
- People in Latin America don't know how to handle democracy.
So, we will take care of everything - preparing electoral rolls, conducting opinion polls, campaining, monitoring, the actual elections and most importantly counting of votes.
- If you elect leftist regimes to power, then we will ruin your economy by cutting off all foreign aid and prevent investors from other countries from doing business in your country.
We will raise rightist militias, who will start trafficking drugs to United States and Europe under our full protection, buy weapons from abroad and then indulge in an shameless orgy of violence, terror and mass murder.
Nothing is beneath us.
We've torched schools, hospitals and churches to make leftists look bad.
If we can get a rightist regime in place, then our death squads or secret
services will maintain the peace.
- Being a democracy does not mean you are safe.
Your politicians can be in power only if they serve our interests; not yours.
Else, our ambassador in your country will bring together disparate opposition parties and make them rally behind a single candidate (Viktor Yushchenko, Shalikvashili).
Of course, we will be bribing these traitors with loads of money, sometimes spending even billions to bring about regime change, as in Ukraine.
- If we anyone asks why we are funding politicians in foreign countries, we will say it is to "promote democracy" and justify it as a "noble cause." The idea that democracy is by the people, for the people and of the people has no meaning to us.
- If you act like we tell you to, it is an obvious sign of your being
"democratic." Our media will use terms such as "pro-West" and even
"liberal" to describe you. If you act like you have a mind of your own,
then we will label your government as "anti-democratic" and allege that
you came to power only through "election fraud." Our media will
characterise your government as a "hardline regime."
- If we cannot use military power to bring down you, there is always
"people power" or "youth power" (as demonstrated in Ukraine, Georgia, and
Lebanon) to the rescue. Of course, youth power and people power that bring
our "colour revolutions" cost a lot of money - which is why we have NGOs,
USAID, Freedom House, etc. With our paid supporters making a public
nuisance at key city intersections and causing traffic jams, duly elected
governments have no option to step down and have a new election
scheduled.
- If it looks like our guy's gonna lose, then election monitors/exit
pollsters/journalists (many of whom were trained and paid by us) will cry
foul. If our guy does indeed win (by fair means or foul), the elections
will be deemed "free."
- "People power" is an American-owned brand.
If anyone (say like the leftist Obrador in Mexico) uses it without our
permission, we will ignore it and so will our media - and that means -
the world will ignore it. Sometimes, if it is simply impossible to ignore
these protests, our propaganda organ (Voice of America) will whine, saying
that "people are growing tired of the protests."
- For our oil & gas companies, big countries pose a problem.
Their leaders can be notoriously fickle and can put huge investments at
risk. Smaller countries, particularly those that can be persuaded to
secede from bigger ones, are easier to bully and offer our companies an
early mover advantage. Newly formed countries (East Timor, Kosovo, Serbia,
etc.) are financially weak and their politicians are always anxious to
please us.
- But if in a country we thought we had secured a particular region
wants to break free, then obviously different rules will apply. In
Trans-Dneister in Georgia for example, ethnic Russians have conducted a
plebiscite to break free and join Russia. It is ridiculuous and we will
never recognise it. The BTC pipeline passes through the region and we
don't want jeopardise anything.
Bottomline
The Komodo dragon is a strange sort of carnivore.
Basically, it is a carrion eater i.e. it eats dead animals.
Of course, there is nothing strange about an animal eating carrion.
What is strange about the Komodo dragon is how it finds its meal when supplies provided by Nature go low.
First, the dragon sneaks up on a live animal such as deer or buffalo when it is busy grazing and bites it.
The bitten animal almost always runs away but in a few days its dies and the dragon has a meal ready.
How does this happen?
As mentioned earlier, the Komodo dragon eats dead animals (in various stages of decay).
Being very poor at table manners, pieces of its meal remain stuck on its serrated jaws and rots there for weeks together.
As a result, the dragon's saliva contains a lethal cocktail of deadly bacteria.
And, it drools a lot.
So, when the dragon bites an animal, its victim dies in a few days of septicemia.
Neat, huh?
No?
Ruined your appetite? Well, American foreign policy ruins entire nations.
Further Reading
- Inside the US's Regime-Change School: An Iranian woman invited to a Dubai hotel for "training" relates her experience.
- The Secret Financial Network Behind "Wizard" George Soros - by William Engdahl
- American Aid: Who Gets It and Why: "Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid ($3 billion every year), not sub-Saharan Africa. The budget cuts and the austerity measures that plague domestic spending do not bother aid to Israel. Americans are apparently second-class citizens. The next big recipients of aid money are Arab neighbours of Israel (whose leaders get it as protection money so they won't invade Israel or give in to Islamists, democratic or otherwise."
- Darlings of the West - I: "Reza Pahlavi, son of the late but widely despised former Shah of Iran, has been adopted by the U.S. government as the head of a future democratic regime that is expected to be put in place in Iran after overthrowing the mullahs. However, by "democratic regime" they don't mean Reza Pahlavi will have to contest elections. No, that would put an effective test of his popularlity. The American government is afraid of real democracy. Their guy doesn't stand a chance. Pahlavi will return only as a monarch - an uncontested ruler in perpetuity. Big Oil hates uncertainity..."
- Darlings of the West - II: "In the 12 months following the strategy session, U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's catchphrase... "
- Darlings of the West - III: "British Petroleum (BP) Chairman Lord Browne would have been right if we did not have things like the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. This project is evidence to the fact that Big Oil can leverage funds that exist beyond their balance sheets. Why else would the U.S. government pour billions of dollars of American taxpayer's money setting the stage for a largely British project in which American companies have only marginal investments?
- Darlings of the West - IV: "Had he been an American, Mikhail Khodorkovsky would have been rightly called names such as thief, money-launderer, fraudster, and thug. But, since he is in Russia, Western media worships as a symbol of the struggle for freedom and democracy in Putin's Russia."
- Democracy In Ukraine - By The (American) People?: "U.S. Congressman Ron E. Paul: How did this one-sided US funding in Ukraine come about? While I am afraid we may have seen only the tip of the iceberg, one part that we do know thus far is that the US government, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), which is administered by the US-based Freedom House. PAUCI then sent US Government funds to numerous Ukrainian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This would be bad enough and would in itself constitute meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. But, what is worse is that many of these grantee organizations in Ukraine are blatantly in favor of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko."
- 'People Power' is US-Owned Brand? - by Mark Amond: The U.S. and the Western media back protest over controversial elections when it suits them, but are silent over those in Mexico.
This article was first published in July 2006.
