Manufacturing Dissent

By Paul Craig Roberts

March 27, 2015 “ICH ” –
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.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators
Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure
of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West

and How
America Was Lost
.