"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
Michael Parenti
America and Her Allies in the News by C. K. Michaelson of Some Assembly Required
On the world stage full of purported leaders who are dangerous fools, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a special place. He charged the EU several billion dollars to let the EU force hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees into concentration camps in Anatolia, then upped the ante and said there would be no deal unless Turks were allowed visa-free travel throughout the EU. He also wants journalists who “disrespect him” jailed, and comedians who make fun of him extradited to Ankara for appropriate punishment - a condition that Angela Merkel found reasonable. Meanwhile his troops are gunning down women and children (suspected of being Kurds) fleeing Syria as Erdoğan pursues his genocidal war against the Kurds while trying to pretend that the slaughter of half a million or more Armenians a hundred years ago never happened. All with US President Obama – who has committed a few war crimes himself – pretends that the Armenians committed suicide...
Amusingly, the US now claims that it had understated the number of collaterally damaged dead civilians in US air strikes in Iraq and Syria, and that there had actually been 42. This does not, obviously, include the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded civilians previously collaterally inflicted on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya...
The circus over the – gasp! - Saudi involvement in, planning of and financing of both Ossma Ben Laden and the 9/11 attackers is hard to understand. (That some of the 9/11 hijackers lived with an FBI informant prior to the attack is not being much mentioned.) It has been obvious to all since the day of the attacks the the Saudis were deeply involved. That's what is in the 28 pages totally removed from the 9/11 report. Ask any of the members of the commission who produced it. On top of that there is not the “Document 17” which includes documentary evidence of the direct invoolvement of the Saudi Embassy in Washington DC in the tragedy. And Seymour Hersh's report that the Saudi government paid Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars to hide Ben Laden seems to be another solid piece of reporting that will be ignored.
Why does the US continue to submit meekly to the Saudis? It is not the oil – we seem to have plenty. It is not their usefulness as an ally, they are scorpions in the bed. What to the Saudis have? Money. And a lot of blackmail material in the form of past dirty deeds and in the form of $800 billion in treasury notes that they use to threaten Obama.
