Manufacturing Dissent

Paul Craig Roberts

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the author of many important books. His latest is The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity. Chossudovsky shows that Washington has globalized war while the US president is presented as a global peace-maker, complete with the Nobel Peace Prize. Washington has military deployed in 150 countries, has the world divided up into six US military commands and has a global strike plan that includes space operations. Nuclear weapons are part of the global strike plan and have been elevated for use in a pre-emptive first strike, a dangerous departure from their Cold War role.

America’s militarization includes military armament for local police for use against the domestic population and military coercion of sovereign countries in behalf of US economic imperialism.

One consequence is the likelihood of nuclear war. Another consequence is the criminalization of US foreign policy. War crimes are the result. These are not the war crimes of individual rogue actors but war crimes institutionalized in established guidelines and procedures. “What distinguishes the Bush and Obama administrations,” Chossudovsky writes, “is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention, which sustain ‘the global war on terrorism’ and support the spread of ‘Western democracy.’”

Chossudovsky points out that the ability of US citizens to protest and resist the transformation of their country into a militarist police state is limited. Washington and the compliant foundations now fund the dissent movement in order to control it. He quotes Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman about manufacturing consent. He lets Paul Kivel describe how funding of dissent by the elite results in the co-option of grassroots community leadership. The same thing is happening to environmental organizations. Black Americans also have lost their leaders to the elite’s money and ability to bestow position and emoluments.

Chossudovsky notes that progressive, left-wing, and anti-war groups have endorsed the “war on terror” and uncritically accept the official 9/11 story, which provides the basis for Washington’s wars.

Having accepted the lies, there is no basis for protest. Thus its absence.

As Professor Stephen Cohen has observed, dissent has disappeared from American foreign policy discussion. In place of dissent there is exhortation to more war. A good example is today’s (March 26, 2015) op-ed in the New York Times by neoconservative John R. Bolton, US ambassador to the UN during the George W. Bush regime.

Bolton calls for bombing Iran. Anything short of a military attack on Iran, Bolton says, has “an air of unreality” and will guarantee that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey will also develop nuclear weapons in order to protect themselves from Iran. According to Bolton, the Israeli and American nuclear arsenals are not threatening, but Iran’s would be.

Of course, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but Bolton asserts it anyway. Moreover, Bolton manages to overlook that the agreement being worked out with Iran halts the Iranian enrichment program far below the level necessary for nuclear weapons. Bolton’s belief that Iran would be able to hide a weapons program if permitted to have nuclear energy is unsubstantiated. It is merely an implausible assertion.

The neoconservatives constitute a war lobby. When one war doesn’t work, they want another. They have an ever expanding war list. Remember, the neoconservatives are the ones who promised us a 3-week “cakewalk” Iraq war costing $70 billion and paid for by Iraq oil revenues. After 8 years of war costing a minimum of $3,000 billion paid for by US taxpayers, the US gave up and withdrew. Today jihadists are carving a new country out of parts of Syria and Iraq.

It is now a known fact that the neocon Bush regime’s Iraq war was totally based on lies, just as is every other neocon war and the current drive for war with Russia and Iran. Despite their record of lies and failure, the neocons still control US foreign policy, and neocon Nuland is busy at work fomenting “color revolutions” or coups in the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

Without the support of the New York Times, the neocons could not have got the Iraq War going. Now the New York Times, faithful to the neocons but faithless to the American people, is helping the neocons get a war going with Iran and Russia.

I have friends who are college presidents who still read and believe the New York Times. The wars with Iran and Russia that the New York Times is encouraging will be much more dangerous than the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. Humanity might not survive them.

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In his book Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War Michel Chossudovsky tells us about the interconnection between the Pentagon and US corporations. The book says the US Congress okayed the use of tactical nuclear weapons in non-conventional wars in 2003. According to congressmen it was quite “safe for civilians” (1). 

Indeed military technology moved far ahead after two nuclear bombs were used against Japan, especially in the field of developing nuclear munitions of low and super low yields. Back in 1950s the Davy Crocket “nuclear gun”, the smallest weapon system with the range of to 4.5 km, joined the armed forces’ inventory (2). It was destined to be deployed in great numbers in West Europe to fight back a sudden attack by the Soviet Union.

The US armed forces possess 3400 nuclear munitions of variable yield (about 2000 deployed). An operator dials the required yield depending on the situation (for instance reducing it to strike enemy in the immediate vicinity from US army or navy forces or in the territory or waters of a friendly/allied state). 

Unmanned aerial vehicles can be used as delivery means. The MQ-9 Reaper, that is in the armed forces inventory now, can be armed with up to 14 AGM-114 Hellfire air-surface rockets, each weighing 50 kg. It’s quite possible to use it as delivery means for small nuclear systems. 

In intensive warfare conditions the up-to-date tactical nuclear weapons can create an illusion of their absence on the battlefield in case they are used together with conventional ones. For instance, according to Russian military experts nuclear munitions of new generation were used in Lebanon in 2006 during the operation against the Hezbollah. Back then the Israeli military used so called bunker busters. The soil samples taken from craters had traces of enriched uranium. At the same time it was made precise there was no gamma radiation and isotope of cesium 137 resulting from radioactive decay. The radiation level was high inside the craters but went down approximately by half at the distance of just a few meters away. It’s not excluded the weapons could have been transported to Israel from the USA to be battle tested. 

There is a very important legal aspect. The “pure” thermonuclear munitions are not controlled by any international agreement and formally stand in line with conventional high precision systems, though their destructive power is by far more superior. Experts have not come to common vision of how far the USA and other states have gone in the field of developing “pure” fusion thermonuclear arms. The specialists of one of Russian military research institutes say the new nuclear weapons are beyond legal restrictions of any international agreement on development, tests, proliferation or use of nuclear weapons (3). 

Something like this was said after the September 11, 2001. While investigating the New York twin towers incident some experts from different countries came to conclusion the towers went down (together with the third one that was seldom mentioned in the Trade Center attack report) as a result of small yield thermonuclear explosions (4). The scenario advocates point to seismic shocks on the day of the attack and the fact that some fire fighters and policemen who were at the place of destruction died years after because of cancer.

In the midst of START-3 and European missile defense deployment debates the USA quietly reorganized the Air Force Global Strike Command. Formally the reorganization terminated in December 2011. Now the reshaped command will have the AIR Force strategic forces under its control (5).

Andrew C. Weber, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs said "Some people say we never use nuclear weapons. The truth is we use nuclear weapons every day to keep the world safe…" Of course the verb to use may have a meaning of dealing with. But Peter Eyre, a Middle East consultant, said the US used tactical nuclear weapons at least once in Iraq and a few times in Afghanistan, in Bora Bora mountains (this flagrant violation of the Geneva convention was sanctioned by the US presidents that makes them military criminals (6)). Against this background the reasoning shared by Weber becomes ominous. 

There is an assumption the Air Force Global Strike Command reorganization has a mission to give more “flexibility” to the global use of nuclear weapons throughout the whole world. Once the weapons have been used in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan what stands in the way of using it in some other place?