“The Muslim terrorist apparatus was created by US intelligence as a political weapon” – National security adviser to the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” – Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

Corporate propaganda is flying so thick and fast lately it’s dizzying just keeping up with it. For regular readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, Vladimir Putin is the new Fuhrer of American Nazism, while Kim Jong Un is the secret architect of a newly revamped Syrian ‘chemical weapons program’. Chinese hackers are suspected responsible for recent collisions involving American war ships, Venezuela has become an international pariah under the corrupt leadership of bus driver-cum-dictator Nicolas Maduro, and Russia is accused of trying to ‘redraw international borders’. Meanwhile troop deployment to Afghanistan has doubled and the mission of America’s 16 year long war has been re-defined from ‘nation building’ to simply ‘killing terrorists’.

While J. Robert Oppenheimer’s gift to humanity may have placed the prospect of great power war officially off the table, so too it seems is the zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. With the recent departure of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and key Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, the US administration is now firmly under military control and US military presence is escalating across multiple theatres. A $600bn defence budget representing an 18% increase in military spending was passed in July, approved by 60% of house Democrats. The latter tidbit is by the way of course – it makes little difference on which side of the aisle you sit in American politics. The US barely wears a fig leaf of democracy. The dismissal of the fraud case brought against the DNC for stealing the presidential nomination from Sanders last year is ample evidence of this. Leaders are chosen over cigars in back rooms. It’s been that way since the uniquely underqualified Harry Truman secured the Democratic vice presidential nomination ahead of Henry Wallace in 1944, long before the advent of the internet or so-called ‘Russian hackers’.

The elephant and the ass are equal in every way that matters, especially so since the fall of the Soviet Union. Western liberal democracy didn’t win the Cold War; fascism did. The end of dialectical materialism was the death knell for democracy. Flip a coin: Identitarian-environmentalism or conservative-libertarianism. If you’re lucky you might score a small victory for women’s equality, as long as those women don’t happen live in North Africa or Central Asia, or anywhere else the United States of Amnesia claims the sovereign right to bomb with impunity. The US has but one political party. It is the party of war, owned and controlled by finance.

“The rich and powerful piss on us and the media tells us it’s raining”, so the saying goes. But it doesn’t take much to draw back the curtain and see the real machinations at work, most of which are really quite transparent.

Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Summers, Jacob Rothschild and James Woolsey are just a few of the familiar names who sit on the board of Genie Energy, a company intent on drilling for oil and gas in the Golan Heights, internationally recognised as Syrian territory under the Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920, and illegally occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967. Let’s look at that list again. A former US vice president, the chairman and CEO of the world’s second-largest media conglomerate, a former head of US treasury, a former energy secretary, a former CIA director and one of the world’s richest and most powerful investment bankers all decide they want a slice of Syria’s energy reserves, and the next thing you know we are fighting a humanitarian war against an army of darkness led by Skelator, who mercilessly slaughters millions of his own faithful followers by bombing them with depleted uranium missiles dipped in pigs blood. Oh wait…

Syria is just the latest manoeuvre in a long game which began with the Dulles brothers’ ouster of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Annexing the Middle East’s energy reserves has been the number one priority of the national security state since it came to power under the presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower. While the Golan may be something of a soft target, the ongoing siege of Deir ez-Zor and nearby Raqqa supported by Kurdish SDF forces clearly indicates Washington’s desire to occupy and control Syria’s oil-rich north eastern provinces. To this end we are assured to hear further reports of attacks on civilians by government forces.

Of course these false claims are nothing new. Ubiquitous mention should also go to Saddam’s WMD, which might have been found had UN weapons inspectors bothered to look under the Bushes. Excuse the terrible joke but sometimes you have to either laugh or cry. “Mistakes were made” we are told. “We went to war based on faulty ‘intelligence’.” No, we went to war based on a DELIBERATE LIE. The US military presence in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 comprised 191 camps, 174 forward bases and 74 combat outposts. How is it then that ISIS headchoppers were able to take over 70% of the country? The question is rhetorical. The War on Terror is nothing less than a call for bellum romanum, all-out war without restraint as the Romans practiced against groups they considered barbarians. Depicting the enemy as sub-human savages feeds directly into the neocons ‘clash of civilisations’ wet dream.

Since I’m apparently in the mood for labouring the point, perhaps we could take a moment here to revisit the events which kicked off America’s longest war. That is unless anyone reading this is foolish enough to believe that the project of depopulating and recolonising the Middle East has anything to do with fighting extremism…

Let’s skip the detailed compendium of facts and analysis supported by 2000 plus architects and engineers and 200 plus senior government and military officials and just consider the question of cui bono.

In September 2000, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think-tank released a report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in which it was stated that

“the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a NEW PEARL HARBOR.”

Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC’s founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Cheney has since stated that 9/11 achieved the goals of PNAC and was his “highest moment in office”. Cheney’s company Haliburton would net $39.5 billion from contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Leaving aside the mountain of evidence casting doubt on the official narrative in which 19 Saudi hijackers armed with box cutters managed to pull off the crime of the century in the world’s most jealously guarded airspace, even if we concede that 9/11 was the work of an al Qaeda terror cell, we are still faced with the awkward fact that al Qaeda is incontrovertibly a tool of US intelligence, funded by its Saudi allies.

Listen to Herman Goring invoke Plato’s idea of the noble lie at his Nuremberg trial:

“Of course, the people do not want war. But it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

To its target audience, the US portrays its mission in the world as safeguarding globalisation and promoting democracy in countries which are ‘disconnected from the global economy’. To those who’ve read more widely than JK Rowling and Dr Seuss, it’s called practicing imperialism. To be fair when we speak of imperium we don’t refer to the US alone. Suffice it to say capital has no borders, and the current class of financial elites aren’t patriotic to any nation state. If the crimes of 9/11 and the human suffering which followed are to be laid at the feet of governments and their intelligence apparatuses – and who else would have the resources to pull off something on this scale – the suspect list would have to include not just the usual US spook agencies, but British, Israeli and French intelligence agencies, all of which had issued ‘warnings’ prior to the events.

Those still in denial may like to consider this question. Is there not a single a common denominator in the last 70 years of international armed conflict? Have US and NATO fingerprints not been left at the scene of almost every genocide? Rome conquered the world in ‘self-defence’, according to the historian Livy – a trope which we see repeated in the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Nowadays the premise is more likely to be R2P, genocide thinly veiled as humanitarian intervention. How long will we accept the lies of empire to justify its wars of aggression? They lied about Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, they lied about Afghanistan, they lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Syria, and now they are lying about North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Russia, China and Pakistan.