Root Canal

Jan 04, 2024

UPDATE: On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

The conflict between Israel and Palestinian armed group Hamas has affected more regions apart from the Gaza Strip and the Red Sea, as the latest airstrike launched by the Israeli military on Beirut, capital of Lebanon, killed a senior leader of Hamas, leading to more people expressing concerns about the escalation of the conflict.

Australia joined the US-led invasion of Iraq, one of the most contentious decisions of John Howard’s prime ministership, without a formal cabinet submission setting out a full analysis of the risks.

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US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

The more wars, of course, the more business.

The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.

The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).

In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.

There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.

In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.

The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.

The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.

The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.

From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.

It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.

This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.

The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.

When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.

It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.

Murder escalates conflict, spillovers

Cross-border assassination shows Israel has no intention on cease-fire

By Yang Sheng

Chinese analysts said on Wednesday the attack shows that Israel does not care about breaching the borders of other sovereign countries to launch air strikes, and it does not want to negotiate with Hamas for a cease-fire at all. It has also ignored concerns from the US about conflict escalation in the direction of Lebanon.

Israel is looking for a way out of the current conflict but eliminating Hamas in Gaza is extremely difficult, so to eliminate senior Hamas leaders responsible for the October 7 attack could be a feasible plan. Therefore, in the next step, the military operation in Gaza might reduce and attacks that aim to kill Hamas leaders in other countries would increase, said experts.

Conflict escalation

Saleh al-Arouri, the second-in-command of Hamas's political office, was killed in Dahieh, a densely populated stronghold of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant and political group. A spokesperson for Hezbollah told The Washington Post that the attack involved a drone armed with three rockets, and pinned the blame on Israel.

Hamas announced a freeze on cease-fire negotiations with Israel after Arouri was killed on Tuesday evening, a Palestinian source told the Xinhua News Agency.

"We have informed the brothers in Qatar and Egypt of the freezing of negotiations," the source said on condition of anonymity. Qatar and Egypt have been mediating a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
The source also said that Hamas, at war with Israel, rejected any talks about reaching a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip amid escalated Israeli aggression and "assassination schemes" against Palestinian leaders.

Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati issued a statement late Tuesday condemning the attack, calling it a "new Israeli crime," the Turkish Anadolu Agency reported.

Lebanon intends to file an urgent complaint with the UN Security Council against Israel in light of the attack, the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement. Lebanon has previously lodged several complaints against Israel at the UN Security Council, including cases related to targeting journalists in southern Lebanon and the occupying border towns.

The incident once again proves that Israel and Hamas show no intention, and have no condition, to end their conflict, and even more unfortunately, the US is playing a role in the tolerance for the killings in Gaza, experts said.

Wang Jin, an associate professor at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwest University in Xi'an, told the Global Times on Wednesday that "many senior leaders of Hamas are not based in Gaza, but in other countries like Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Qatar. After the attack in Beirut, more similar operations might occur in the region."

Some observers said the US will receive more pressure in the aftermath of the Beirut attack from Arab countries, because the more Washington tolerates Israel continuing its war and uses the US' veto power to stop UN Security Council cease-fire resolutions, the more Arab countries will come under the risk of Israel attacks or assassinations.

Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, posted on his X account that the attack in Beirut "shows once more that as time has passed and Biden has refused to push for a cease-fire, we are getting closer and closer to a full war in the region."

Complex situation

The Wall Street Journal on December 23, 2023, reported that US President Joe Biden had urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt a preemptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon days after October 7, warning that such an attack could spark a wider regional war.

The Biden administration does not want to see a regional escalation as it will receive extra pressure and will risk losing control of the Middle East affairs, but it does not mean that Israel would listen. The latest airstrike in Beirut that brought anger from Lebanon proves that Israel just takes action while ignoring concerns from the US, analysts said.

"The attack in Beirut will add more turbulence to the region, but it doesn't necessarily mean Israel is ready to escalate the conflict to Lebanon, and other countries in the region have neither the intention nor condition to get involved in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas," Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean Rim at Zhejiang International Studies University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

For Hamas, in the short term, it might lose its military strength to some extent, but it will maintain its existence in the region as a resistance group with political influence among the public. It is also extremely difficult for Israel to eliminate Hamas in the region, Ma noted.

"A possible and feasible way for Israel to end this conflict is to eliminate a group of senior leaders of Hamas inside and outside Gaza who were related to the October 7 attack, then it would be able to declare 'victory' to its people and end this brutal and costly war," said Wang of Northwest University.

The death toll from Israel's war on Gaza now stands at 22,313 Palestinians, the health ministry in Gaza says. At least 57,296 Palestinians have been wounded, Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday. Thousands more are trapped under the rubble of their homes and are presumed dead.

Australia’s war on Iraq

Cabinet papers from 2003 show there was no formal submission before decision was taken to join US-led ‘coalition of the willing’.

By Daniel Hurst

Cabinet papers published by the National Archives on Monday show the full cabinet signed off on the decision on 18 March 2003 based on “oral reports by the prime minister”.

The record of the cabinet’s decision contains no mention of any doubt about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued possession of weapons of mass destruction. This key justification for the war fell away after months of failed searches after the invasion.

“The cabinet further noted that Australia’s goal in participating in any military enforcement action would be disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the document said.

A month earlier, Howard told parliament: “The Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons.”

But a comprehensive US report later concluded that Iraq had destroyed its last weapons of mass destruction more than a decade before the March 2003 invasion and its capacity to build new ones had been dwindling for years.

Australia’s preparedness to join the “coalition of the willing” assembled by the then US president, George W Bush, and backed by the UK prime minister, Tony Blair, was highly controversial at the time.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Australian cities in February 2003 – a month before the formal decision – to protest against the Iraq war.

A future MP, Andrew Wilkie, resigned from the Office of National Assessments in protest on 11 March 2003. When Howard announced the government’s decision one week later, the then Labor leader, Simon Crean, said it was “a black day for Australia”.

Many of the government’s key strategic calls appear to have been made by the cabinet’s secretive national security committee (NSC), whose records have not been released.

But the cabinet documents show that Howard took the matter to his full cabinet for endorsement on 18 March 2003. This occurred without detailed paperwork.

“There was no submission to cabinet on costs, benefits and implications of Australia’s entry into the war,” associate professor David Lee from the University of NSW Canberra wrote in an essay on the 2003 cabinet papers.

“This was notwithstanding the fact that the Iraq commitment was, in Howard’s words, ‘the most controversial foreign policy decision taken by my government in the almost 12 years it held office’. This indicates that cabinet’s national security committee was the locus of decision-making on the war.”

Howard later wrote in his book Lazarus Rising: “The NSC had been meeting regularly on Iraq, but I wanted full cabinet endorsement of a final decision to commit to the invasion.”

The six-page cabinet minute from 18 March 2003 said Howard briefed his ministers on his “extensive discussions over a period of time” with Bush and Blair “concerning the disarmament of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and the possible use of force against Iraq if it failed to disarm”.

Howard told the cabinet he had received a call from Bush earlier the same day to formally request “that Australia participate in military action by a coalition to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction”.

Bush told Howard the US would issue a “final ultimatum” to Iraq very soon. Within two days, the war was in full swing.

Ministers “noted an oral briefing” from the then chief of the ADF, Peter Cosgrove, and chief of the air force, Angus Houston, about the readiness of the Australian forces already “pre-deployed” to the Middle East.

This briefing apparently included “possible risks of military action in Iraq, including the risks to Iraqi and other civilians and to the various elements of the contingent as well as the scope for risk mitigation” – but the details are not recorded in the cabinet minute.

Ministers relied on a number of past UN security council resolutions as providing, in the words of the cabinet minute, “clear authority for the use of force against Iraq”.

But Crean and other critics argued Australia should only act if the UN security council passed a new resolution specifically authorising military action.

The UN’s then secretary general, Kofi Annan, would later describe the US-led war on Iraq as “not in conformity with the UN charter” and “illegal” under international law.

Howard’s cabinet backed the rationale that Iraq’s behaviour “weakens the global prohibitions on the spread of weapons of mass destruction, with the potential to damage gravely Australia’s security”.

Robert Hill, the defence minister at the time, recalled that the likelihood of a US military operation had been building since late 2002.

“We weren’t formally asked to participate until the last moment, but we sensed the likelihood that we would be asked, and we obviously were doing a lot of work on what that would mean and what would be the appropriate Australian contribution,” Hill said in an interview on the release of the cabinet papers.

He said he believed the government made the right decision “on the information that was available at the time”. He said Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction in the past and the issue was “whether he’d gotten rid of them”.

Asked whether it was now clear the decision was flawed, Hill said: “Now we know he didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction. Well, that would have been a different information base from which to make a decision.”

On Monday the acting Greens leader, Nick McKim, will denounce the Iraq war as “one of the worst foreign policy disasters in Australian history” and will call on the government to reform war powers.

McKim will say preventing governments from deploying the ADF to overseas conflicts without a binding vote of parliament will ensure no Australian prime minister can “repeat a mistake like Iraq without basic democratic oversight”.

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