Exclusive: After the British report exposing
falsehoods to justify invading Iraq in 2003, a new U.K. inquiry found similar
misconduct in the 2011 attack on Libya, but no lessons are learned for the
West’s new propaganda about Russia, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
A British
parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been
apparent from the start in 2011 – and was to some of us –
that the West’s military intervention to “protect” civilians in Benghazi was a
cover for what became another disastrous “regime change” operation.
The report from the U.K.’s Foreign Affairs Committee
confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human
rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed
the “humanitarian” mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed
Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.
President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David
Cameron talk at the G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, June 17, 2013.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The report’s significance is that it shows how little was
learned from the Iraq War fiasco in which George W. Bush’s administration hyped
and falsified intelligence to justify invading Iraq and killing its leader,
Saddam Hussein. In both cases, U.K. leaders tagged along and the West’s
mainstream news media mostly served as unprofessional propaganda conduits, not
as diligent watchdogs for the public.
Today, we are seeing an even more dangerous repetition of
this pattern: demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, destabilizing the
Russian economy and pressing for “regime change” in Moscow. Amid the latest
propaganda orgy against Putin, virtually no one in the mainstream is exercising
any restraint or finding any cautionary lessons from the Iraqi and Libyan
examples.
Yet, with Russia, the risks are orders of magnitude greater
than even the cases of Iraq and Libya – and one might toss in the messy “regime
change” projects in Ukraine and Syria. The prospect of political chaos in
Moscow – with extremists battling for power and control of the nuclear codes –
should finally inject some sense of responsibility in the West’s politicians
and media, but doesn’t.
When it comes to Putin and Russia, it’s the same ole
hyperbole and falsehood that so disinformed the public regarding the “threats”
from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Just as President George W. Bush
deceptively painted Hussein’s supposed WMD as a danger to Americans and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dishonestly portrayed Gaddafi as
“genocidal,” U.S. officials and pundits are depicting Putin as some cartoonish
villain or some new Hitler.
And, just as The New York Times, Washington Post and other
mainstream media outlets amplified the Iraq and Libyan propaganda to the
American people – rather than questioning and challenging it – these supposedly
journalistic entities are performing the same function regarding Russia. The
chief difference is that now we’re talking about the potential for nuclear
annihilation. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Existential Madness of Putin-Bashing.“]
According to the new U.K. report on Libya, Britain’s
military intervention – alongside the U.S. and France – was based on “erroneous
assumptions and an incomplete understanding” of the reality inside Libya, which
included a lack of appreciation about the role of Islamic extremists in
spearheading the opposition to Gaddafi.
In other words, Gaddafi was telling the truth when he
accused the rebels around Benghazi of being penetrated by Islamic terrorists.
The West, including the U.S. news media, took Gaddafi’s vow to wipe out this
element and distorted it into a claim that he intended to slaughter the
region’s civilians, thus stampeding the United Nations Security Council into
approving an operation to protect them.
That mandate was then twisted into an excuse to decimate
Libya’s army and clear the way for anti-Gaddafi rebels to seize the capital of
Tripoli and eventually hunt down, torture and murder Gaddafi……….
(Full text at link below)
A New
Cold War
As with the
fiascos in Iraq and Libya, U.S. policymakers continue to ignore or sideline
American intelligence analysts who possess information that would cast doubt on
the escalation of hostilities with Russia.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, flanked by Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria “Toria” Nuland,
addresses Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in
Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State
Department Photo]
Even as
the Obama administration has charted this new Cold War with Russia over the
past two years – a prospect that could cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars
and carries the risk of thermonuclear war – there has been no National
Intelligence Estimate getting a consensus judgment from America’s 16
intelligence agencies about how real the Russian threat is, according to
intelligence sources.
One source said a key reason why an NIE had not been done
was that U.S. policymakers wanted a more alarmist report than the intelligence
analysts were willing to produce. “They call [the alarm about Russia]
political, not factual,” the source said. “They weren’t going to do one,
period. They can’t lie.”
The source added that the analysts would have to acknowledge
how helpful Putin has been in a number of sensitive and strategic areas, such
as securing Syria’s agreement to surrender its chemical weapons and convincing
Iran to accept tight limits on its nuclear program.
“Israel has nuclear weapons and a crazy leader,” the source
said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If not for Putin, the
guy may have used it [a nuclear bomb] in Iran. He [Putin] calmed things down in
Syria. They [CIA analysts] aren’t that stupid. To tell the truth, you have to
say he [Putin] saved the Middle East a lot of trouble.”
U.S. intelligence analysts also might have had to include
their assessments regarding whether Syrian rebels – not Assad’s military –
deployed sarin gas outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, and whether an element of
the Ukrainian military – not ethnic Russian rebels – shot down Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
Those two propaganda themes
blaming Syria and Russia, respectively, were promoted heavily by mainstream
Western media and various Internet-based information warriors. The two themes
have been central to the Western-backed “regime change” project in Syria and to
the new Cold War with Russia. If U.S. intelligence analysts knocked down
those themes in an NIE, valuable propaganda assets would be exposed and
discredited.
Also, in the wake of the two
British government reports undermining the propaganda that was used to justify
“regime change” in Iraq and Libya, the blow to Western “credibility” if there
were similar admissions about falsehoods regarding Syria and Russia could be
devastating.
Instead, the hope of Official Washington is that the
American public won’t catch on to the pattern of deception and that the people
will continue to ignore the famous warning that President George W. Bush
infamously garbled: “fool me once, shame on … shame on you; fool me – you can’t
get fooled again.”
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can
buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).