Since the birth of mankind abuse of power or exercise of power from micro to macro level is evident. Whether its a ruling elite of any country using it on their own population or global elites are using it on weaken countries to use them as PAWNS.
Sugar coated pills are immensely available for the commoners of the world in many ways but more widely given via electronic media and if it doesn’t work then they have corrupt leaders of targeted countries to make them swallow. However Noam Chomsky in his own words described it with more horrific articulation. Below is a synopsis of his book FAILED STATES, which is fairly enough to open up readers eyes….
‘Though the concept is recognized to be ‘frustratingly imprecise,’ some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protest their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence.’ (1-2)
‘Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror.’ (2)
‘Half a century ago, in July 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, asking them ‘to set aside’ the strong feelings they have about many issues and to consider themselves ‘only as members of a biological species which has a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.’ The choice facing the world is ‘stark and dreadful and inescapable: shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?’ ’ (3)
Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that the United States was able ‘to exterminate the Indian race…without violating a single great principle or morality in the eyes of the world.’ ’ (4)
‘One clear illustration is Washington’s terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, an uncontroversial case, at least for those who believe that the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council – both of which condemned the United States – have some standing on such matters.’ (5)
‘Bush I pardoned Orlando Bosch, a notorious international terrorist and associate of Posada [terrorist], despite objections by the Justice Department, which urged that he be deported as a treat to national security.’ (6)
‘Recent global polls reveal that France is ‘most widely seen as having a positive influence in the world,’ alongside Europe generally and China , while ‘the countries most widely viewed as having a negative influence are the US and Russia .’ But again there is a simple explanation. The polls just show that the world is wrong.’ (7)
‘Of the countries polled, Mexico is among those ‘most negative’ about the US role in the world.’ (8)
‘They discovered that the world was ‘one word away’ from the use of a nuclear weapon since Nagasaki, as reported by Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive, which helped organize the conference. He was referring to the intervention of a Russian submarine commander, Vasily Arkhpov, who countermanded an order to fire nuclear-armed torpedoes when his vessels were under attack by US destroyers, with consequences that could have been dreadful.’ (8)
‘Steinbruner and Gallagher express hope that the threat the US government is posing to its own population and the world will be countered by a coalition of peace-loving nations – led by China! We have come to a pretty pass when such thoughts are expressed at the heart of the establishment. And what that implies about the state of American democracy – where the issues scarcely even enter the electoral arena or public discussion – is no less shocking and threatening, illustrating the democratic deficit mentioned in the preface. Steinbruner and Gallagher bring upChina because of all the nuclear states it ‘has maintained by far the most restrained pattern of military deployment.’ Furthermore, China has led efforts in the United Nations to preserve outer space for peaceful purposes, in conflict with the United States , which, along with Israel , has barred all moves to prevent an arms race in space.’ (9-10)
‘In 2004, the United States accounted for 95 percent of total global military space expenditures, but others may join if compelled to do so, vastly increasing the risks to everyone. US analysts recognize that current Pentagon programs ‘can be interpreted as a significant move by the United States toward weaponization of space [and that] there seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of Air Force transformation planning,’ developments that ‘are in the long term very likely to have a negative effect on the national security of the United States.’ ’ (12)
‘Former NATO planner Michael MccGwire reminds us that in 1986, recognizing the ‘dreadful logic’ of nuclear weapons, Mikhail Gorbachev called for their total elimination, a proposal that foundered on Reagan’s militarization of space programs (‘Star Wars’).’ (13)
‘Reagan and associates also looked away politely while their Pakistani ally was developing nuclear weapons, annually endorsing the pretense that Pakistan was not doing so.’ (16)
‘The only threat remotely comparable to use of nuclear weapons is the serious danger of environmental catastrophe.’ (16)
‘It is important to stress government. The standard observation that the United States stood almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase ‘Unites States’ excludes its population, which strongly favors the Kyoto pact.’ (18)
‘The NIC [National Intelligence Council] also predicted that, as a result of the invasion, this new globalized network of ‘diffuse Islamic extremist groups’ would spread its operations elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by ‘infidel invaders,’ with Iraq replacing Afghanistan as a training ground.’ (18)
‘This number fell to 61 percent by 2002 and plummeted to 15 percent after the invasion of Iraq, with 80 percent of Indonesians saying they feared an attack by the United States.’ (19)
‘In its review of the London bombings, Britain’s MI5 internal security service concluded that ‘though they have a range of aspirations and ‘causes,’ Iraq is a dominant issue for a range of extremist groups and individuals in the UK and Europe,’ while some who have traveled to Iraq to fight ‘may later return to the UK and consider mounting attacks here.’ ’ (20)
‘Reports by an Israeli think tank and Saudi intelligence concluded that ‘the vast majority’ of foreign fighters in Iraq ‘are not former terrorists’ but ‘became radicalized by the war itself,’ stimulated by the invasion to respond ‘to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from ‘crusaders’ and ‘infidels’ ’ who are mounting ‘an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture.’ A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that ’85 percent of Saudi militants who went to Iraq were not on any government watch list, al-Qaeda members, or terrorist sympathizers’ but were ‘radicalized almost exclusively by the Coalition invasion.’ ’ (20)
‘Between 1980 and 2003, there were 315 suicide attacks worldwide, initially for the most part by the secular Tamil Tigers. Since the US invasion, estimates of suicide bombings in Iraq (where such attacks were virtually unknown before) range as high as 400.’ (21)
‘Robert Pape, who has done the most extensive studies of suicide bombers, writes that ‘Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries,’ as Osama bin laden repeatedly declares.’ (22)
‘In the most extensive scholarly inquiry into Islamic militancy, Fawaz Gerges concludes that after 9/11, ‘the dominant response to Al Qaeda in the Muslim world was very hostile,’ specifically among jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous extremist fringe. Instead of recognizing that opposition to Al Qaeda offered Washington ‘the most effective way to drive a nail into its coffin’ by finding ‘intelligent means to nourish and support the internal forces that were opposed to militant ideologies like the bin Laden network,’ the Bush administration did exactly what bin Laden hoped it would do: resort to violence.’ (22)
‘Unless enemies can be completely crushed, violence tends to engender violence in response.’ (23)
‘In January 2005, Senate majority leader Bill Frist justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that ‘dangerous weapons proliferation must be stopped. Terrorist organizations must be destroyed.’ It is apparently irrelevant that the pretexts have been officially abandoned and that the invasion has increased terrorist threats and accelerated the proliferation of dangerous weapons.’ (25)
‘British Middle East scholar Toby Dodge observed that ‘the documents show…that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity.’ ’ (26)
‘Seeking to provoke Iraq into some action that could be portrayed as a casus belli, London and Washington renewed their bombing of Iraqi targets in May 2002, with a sharp increase in September 2002. In the nine months leading up to the official start of the war in March 2003, US and UK planes flew almost 22,000 sorties, hitting 391 ‘carefully selected targets,’ noted Lieutenant General Michael Mosely, commander of the joint operations.’ (26)
‘By a 2-1 margin, the US population favors an Israel Accountability Act, holding Israel accountable for development of WMDs and human rights abuses in the occupied territories.’ (31)
‘In April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were enforcing the illegal embargo against Cuba.’ (33)
– ‘In order to kidnap a terror suspect in Italy and send him to Egypt for probable torture, the Bush administration disrupted a major inquiry into the suspect’s role in ‘trying to build a terror recruitment network’ and ‘build a jihadist recrtuiment network with tentacles spreading throughout Europe.’ Italian courts indicted thirteen CIA operatives, and Italians are furious.’ (34)
‘A Spanish court issued international arrest warrants and extradition orders for American soldiers accused of killing a Spanish reported in Iraq, along with a Ukranian cameraman. The Spanish court acted ‘after two requests to US authorities for permission to question the soldiers went unanswered, court officials said.’ ’ (34)
‘Gonzales further advised President Bush to effectively rescind the Geneva Conventions, which, despite being ‘the supreme law of the land’ and the foundation of contemporary international law, contained provisions Gonzales determined to be ‘quaint’ and ‘obsolete.’ ’ (40)
‘The United States, ‘in conjunction with key allies’ – presumably the United Kingdom – is running an ‘invisible’ network of prisons and detection centers into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the ‘war on terror’ began,’ writes British journalist and terrorism suspect Jason Burke, including a Soviet-era compound in eastern Europe (Dana Priest). Their fate is unknown but not hard to guess. In addition, unknown numbers of suspects have been sent by ‘rendition’ to countries where torture is virtually guaranteed.’ (41)
‘Reviewing subsequent presidential decisions, Paust finds violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, all war crimes, as well as flagrant violations of the US Constitution.’ (42)
‘The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS requested in March 2002 that the United States ‘take the urgent measures necessary to have the legal status of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay determined by a competent Tribunal,’ meaning the ICRC. Washington dismissed the request on grounds that it has no binding commitment dismissed the request on grounds that it has no binding commitment to accept the commission’s decisions. Perhaps with this in mind, a year later, the OAS for the first time voted to exclude the United States from membership in the Inter-American Commission, ‘a symbolic rebuff – to show our disapproval of US policies,’ a Latin American diplomat in Washington observed.’ (44)
‘There should be no need to waste time on the claim that the Separation Wall is motivated by security concerns. Were that the case, the wall would be built on the Green Line, the wall would be built on the Green Line, the international border recognized by the entire world, with the exception of Israel and the United States.’ (45-46)
‘In November 2004, US occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja . The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval. The attack began with a bombing campaign intended to drive out all but the adult male population; men ages fifteen to forty-five who attempted to flee Falluja were turned back…[One journalist] described the fate of the victims of these bombing attacks in which sometimes whole families, including pregnant women and babies, unable to flee, along with many others, were killed because the attackers who ordered their flight had cordoned off the city, closing the exit roads.’ (46)
‘After several weeks of bombing, the United States began its ground attack in Falluja. It opened with the conquest of the Falluja General Hospital. The front-page story in the New York Timesreported that ‘patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.’ An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. It was presented as a meritorious achievement. ‘The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants:Falluja General Hospital , with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.’ ’ (47)
‘Conflict’ is a common euphemism for US aggression.’ (47)
Some relevant documents passed unmentioned, perhaps because they too are considered quaint and obsolete: for example, the provision of the Geneva Conventions stating that ‘fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.’ Thus the front page of the world’s leading newspaper was cheerfully depicting war crimes.’ (48)
‘The media accounts of the assault were not uniform. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, the most important news channel in the Arab world, was harshly criticized by high US officials for having ‘emphasized civilian casualties’ during the destruction of Falluja. The problem of independent media was later resolved when the channel was kicked out of Iraq in preparation for free elections. Turning beyond the US mainstream, we discover also that ‘Dr. Sami al-Jumaili described how US warplanes bombed the Central Health Center in which he was working,’ killing thirty-five patients and twenty-four staff. His report was confirmed by an Iraqi reporter for Reuters and the BBC, and by Dr. Eiman al-Ani of Falluja General Hospital, who said that the entire health center, which he reached shortly after the attack, had collapsed on the patients. The attacking forces said that the report was ‘unsubstantiated.’ In another gross violation of international humanitarian law, even minimum decency, the US military denied the Iraqi Red Crescent access to Falluja.’ (48-49)
‘The ruined city of 250,000 was now ‘devoid of electricity, running water, schools or commerce,’ under a strict curfew, and ‘conspicuously occupied’ by the invaders who had just demolished it.’ (49)
‘The UN Special Reporter on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, accused US and British troops in Iraq of ‘breaching international law by depriving civilians of food and water in besieged cities as they try to flush out militants’ in Falluja and other cities attacked in subsequent months. US-led forces ‘cut off or restricted food and water to encourage residents to flee before assaults,’ he informed the international press, ‘using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population, [in] flagrant violation,’ of the Geneva Conventions. The US public was largely spared the news.’ (50)
‘The new constitution, the Wall Street Journal notes, has ‘far deeper Islamic underpinnings than Iraq’s last one, a half century ago, which was based on [secular] French civil law,’ and had granted women ‘nearly equal rights’ with men. All of this has now been reversed under the US occupation.’ (51)
‘Additional effects of the invasion include the decline of the median incomes of Iraqis, from $255 in 2003 to about $144 in 2004, as well as ‘significant countrywide shortages of rice, sugar, milk, and infant formula,’ according to the UN World Food Program.’ (53)
‘Acute malnutrition doubled within sixteen months of the occupation of Iraq, to the level of Burundi, well above Haiti or Uganda, a figure that ‘translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from ‘wasting,’ a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.’ ’ (53)
‘In the only poll (to my knowledge) in which [Americans] were asked to estimate the number of Vietnamese deaths, the mean estimate was 100,000, about 5 percent of the official figure.’ (54)
‘The second murderous regime was the US-UK sanctions (for doctrinal reasons, called ‘UN sanctions,’ though it is common knowledge that the UN administered them under US pressure). But these are off the agenda because they may have caused more deaths than ‘all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history,’ two hawkish military specialists estimate, surely hundreds of thousands. Summarizing a rich body of evidence, one of the best-informed American correspondents writes that after ‘the terrible years of the U.N. sanctions…incomes had dropped to one-fifth of pre-war [1990] levels, infant mortality had doubled, and only a majority of Iraqis had access to clean water.’ Furthermore, half of all sewage treatment tanks were still inoperable after having been destroyed along with power supplies by the US and UK bombing in 1991, which ‘unleashed epidemics of typhoid and cholera.’ Education and literacy collapsed, and growing numbers of Iraqis were reduced to ‘a semi-starvation diet,’ showing symptoms ‘usually seen only in famines,’ leading to a tripling of the death rate by 2003, according to UNICEF.’ (56-57)
– ‘The sanctions were bitterly condemned by leading Iraqi opposition figures. Kamil Mahdi wrote that the United States was ‘in effect acting to stain and paralyze all opposition to the present regime’ and had ‘given a discredited and moribund regime a new lease of life.’ ’ (57)
‘It was quickly shown that though there doubtless was UN corruption, most of the missing $20 billion consisted of illegal US-approved sales of oil to its allies Turkey and Jordan. The bulk of illegal transactions, according to the report of Charles A. Duelfer, the top US inspector in Iraq, consisted of ‘government to government agreements’ between Iraq and other countries, primarilyJordan (‘the key to Iraq’s financial survival,’ according to the report) and Turkey. All of these transactions took place outside the UN’s oil-for-food program, and all were authorized by the UN Security Council, that is, by Washington.’ (58)
‘Investigations by the Financial Times found that ‘the Clinton and Bush administrations not only know but told the US Congress that Iraq was smuggling oil to Turkey and Jordan,’ and that they recommended ‘turning a blind eye to it.’ The reason was that the illegal sales were ‘in the ‘national interest,’ ’ since Jordan is an important US client state, and support for Turkey, long a major US base for regional control, promotes ‘security, prosperity and other vital interests.’ ’ (59)
Washington’s abrupt withdrawal from the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations after the World Court ruled against the United States in the cases of fifty-one Mexicans who had been sentenced to death after the United States had violated their right to consult with officials from a Mexican consulate.’ (67)
‘The Vienna Convention was proposed by the United States in 1963 and ratified in 1969. The United States was the first country to invoke it before the World Court, successfully, in its suit against Iraq after the 1979 hostage taking.’ (67-68)
‘Contrary to what others mistakenly believe, it was quite inappropriate for Washington to refuse to pay its UN dues from the Reagan years until 2001, when Washington changed course because it then needed international support… Nor does it matter that the US share of UN dues has always been below a rate that would accurately reflect US economic strength.’ (68)
‘The famed ‘American exceptionalism’ merits some skepticism; the image of righteous exceptionalism appears to be close to universal. Also close to universal is the responsibility of the educated classes to endorse with due solemnity the sincerity of the high-minded principles proclaimed by leaders, on the basis of no evidence apart from their declarations, though it is often conceded that their actions systematically refute their noble visions.’ (105)
‘We then face a puzzling paradox, which is miraculously resolved in the United States by proclaiming a sudden ‘change of course’ – an event that takes place every few years, effacing inappropriate history as we march on to a glorious future. One of its constant themes is the dedication to bring justice and freedom to a suffering world, recently resurrected as the driving passion for ‘democracy promotion’.’ (105)
‘By the end of the millennium, ‘total [US] military and police assistance in the hemisphere exceeded economic and social aid.’ This is a ‘new phenomenon,’ the analysts point out: ‘even at the height f the Cold Ware, economic aid far exceeded military aid.’ Predictably, the policies ‘strengthened military forces at the expense of civilian authorities, …exacerbated human rights problems and generated significant social conflict and even political instability.’ ’ (107)
‘In September 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was about to crumble, Bush I redeclared the ‘war on drugs’ with a huge government-media propaganda campaign. It went into effect right in time to justify the invasion of Panama to kidnap a thug who was convicted in Florida for crimes committed mostly when he was on the CIA payroll – and, incidentally, killing unknown numbers of poor people in the bombarded slums, thousands according to the victims.’ (107)
‘Washington backed the installation of Europe’s first postwar fascist government in Greece in 1967 continuing its support until the dictatorship was overthrown in 1974.’ (116)
‘In 1948, George Kennan, head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, warned that if Indonesia fell under ‘Communism,’ it could be an ‘infection [that] would sweep westward’ through all of South Asia. For such reasons, Kennan held, ‘the problem of Indonesia [is] the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin’ – which had little to do withIndonesia, apart from serving to create misimpressions. The threat of a ‘Communist Indonesia’ was sufficiently severe for the Eisenhower administration to support a military rebellion, primarily out of fear and democracy: what scholarship calls a ‘part of the poor’ was gaining too much political support for comfort. The threat of democracy was not overcome until the 1965 Suharto coup and the huge slaughter that immediately followed, establishing one of the most brutal regimes of the late twentieth century. There was no further concern about democracy, or about awesome human rights violations and war crimes. Suharto remained ‘our kind of guy,’ as the Clinton administration described him.’ (117)
‘Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy railed about ‘internal aggression’ and an ‘assault from the inside…manipulated from the North.’ By the North, they meant the northern half of Vietnam, divided by the United States after it undermined the 1954 international agreement on unification and elections (which, it recognized, would have come out the wrong way).’ (117)
‘The public and internal record until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 reveals no hint of departure from his insistence that the United States must stay the course until victory was achieved over ‘the assault from the inside.’ After the war became highly unpopular in the late 1960s, particularly after the 1968 Vietnamese Tet offensive turned elite sectors against the war, memoirists radically revised their accounts, while they and others produced ‘recollections’ to support the doctrinally more acceptable view that Kennedy and others were secret does. Very secret. There is no credible trace of it in the record.’ (118)
‘The real reasons for the US assault on Indochina are conventional. Washington feared that an independent Vietnam might be a virus infecting others, perhaps even resource-rich Indonesia, and eventually Japan – the ‘superdomino,’ as Asia historian John Dower termed it – to accommodate to an independent Asian mainland, becoming its industrial center.’ (119)
‘The virus was destroyed by demolishing Indochina. The broader region was then inoculated by the establishment of harsh military dictatorships in the countries susceptible to infection.Indonesia was protected by the ‘staggering mass slaughter’ of 1965, a ‘gleam of light in Asia,’ the New York Times exulted. The reaction captured the undisguised Western euphoria over the outcome of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, and the destruction of the only mass-based political party, the Indonesian Communist Party, as the country was opened up to free Western exploitation by crimes that the CIA compared to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.’ (119)
‘During World War II, Joseph Stalin became an ally, the beloved ‘Uncle Joe,’ as Russia first endured and then beat back the Nazi wave. ‘It cannot be overemphasized,’ historian Omer Bartov writes, ‘that however criminal and odious Stalin’s regime surely was, without the Red Army and its horrendous blood sacrifice, the Wehrmacht would not have been defeated and Nazism would have remained a fact in Europe for many generations.’ Roosevelt scholar Warren Kimball concludes that ‘when military assessments pointed out that only the Red Army could achieve a victory over Hitler in a land war, aid to the Soviet Union became a presidential priority’ on the assumption that the Russian army would grind Germany down and keep US soldiers out of a land war.Roosevelt’s strategy was for the United States to be the reserves, he confided privately.’ (121-122)
‘In the early stages of the war, Harry Truman’s view was simple: ‘if we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.’ ’ (122)
– ‘The basic continuity of policy was illustrated again when the Soviet Union collapsed, offering new opportunities along with the need for new misimpressions. The assault on Cuba was intensified, but reframed: it was no longer defense against the Russians, but rather Washington’s sincere dedication to democracy that required strangulation of Cuba and US-based terror.’ (125)
‘Asked why they thought the United States invaded Iraq, 1 percent felt that the goal was to bring democracy and 5 percent that the goal was ‘to assist the Iraqi people’ Most of the rest assumed that the goal was to take control of Iraq’s resources and to reorganize the Middle East in US and Israeli interests.’ (131)
