News & Views No. 12 Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 4 mins.)
“The President and I will not hesitate to take necessary action to defend the United States, our troops and our interests. There is no higher priority.”
“While we do not seek to escalate conflict in the region, we are committed and fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect our people and our facilities.”
Those were the reported words of USA Defence (sic) Secretary Lloyd Austin to the mass media after US President Biden announced an air strike against a sovereign country,1 Syria on three sites on Tuesday, killing people.
Austin’s words, though lightly coded are quite revealing. Rereading slightly, they will not hesitate to take action they consider necessary to defend (or to further) the imperialist strategic and economic interests of the United States or their imperialist troops.
While they do not wish to – and recognise the dangers – if they escalate conflict in the region, they are committed and fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect their interests and their imperialist facilities.
The logic is purely that of imperialism and colonialism: They take an economic or strategic interest in an area, place their troops there and then, if those troops are resisted, they have the ‘right’ to strike back (the same “right of defence” claimed by the European zionist settler Israel).
The reporting throws up a whole smokescreen then, hiding the scarcely disguised real meaning of those words and going on to provide a heavily-propagandised “context and background” to the incident. However, let’s reorganise it a little for greater accuracy:
Thousands of US imperialist troops are in occupied Iraq repressing resistance along with training the country’s forces and combating remnants of the Islamic State group, as well as hundreds in sovereign state Syria.
They were in Syria partly combatting Islamic State and partly engaged in trying to overthrow the Assad regime to install their own puppet.
“There is no higher priority”
This is another very revealing statement. Saving the human race from catastrophic collapse of civilisation? Not a priority and in fact the US is a major contributor to global warming. Ending the suffering of the Palestinians? Not a priority. Avoiding the danger of world war? Not a priority either.
Even for the US internally, resolving their social, economic and political crises? No, not a priority. What IS a priority for the leaders of the US financial-industrial-military complex is increasing their profits and protecting their imperialist gains across the globe.
The latest attack on US troops follows months of escalating threats and actions against American forces in the region since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, which sparked the devastating war in Gaza, the report says.
But if the “attack on Israel on October 7th … “sparked the … war in Gaza”, what “sparked” the Palestinian attack? What has “sparked” every act of Palestinian resistance back through the periodic Israeli genocidal bombing campaigns right back to the colonisation of Palestinian land?
And the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians as the State of Israel was being created?
But not only are the Palestinians to blame, apparently but so also is Iran – anybody except the imperialist actions of the USA and the genocidal acts of the Zionist settler state!
The US has blamed Iran, which has funded and trained Hamas, for the rising violence by a network of proxy groups across the region, including attacks by Yemen’s Houthis against commercial and military vessels thorough a critical shipping choke point in the Red Sea.
Yes, a strategically vulnerable geographical area overlooked by Western imperialism!
The clashes put the government of Iraqi prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in a delicate position – yes, since he is running a coalition government of parties in part supported by Iran but overall a puppet of and under occupation of western imperialism.
It is a difficult circus act to ride two horses and in a statement on Tuesday, Mr Sudani (Premier of the puppet government) condemned both the militia attack in Irbil and the US response. Mr Sudani said some of those injured in the strikes were civilians.
Ah, civilians – who cares about them? Oh but remember the screams of outrage that the Palestinian operation on October 7th had “attacked Israeli civilians”? Before and since then, the Israeli Zionist state has amply demonstrated how much it cares for civilians, as have its imperialist supporters.
Available statistics show that in the current Israeli war on Gaza and on the West Bank, the Israeli state has killed 20,424 Palestinians, of which over one-third were women and children or, in other words, indisputably civilians. With thousands more buried under rubble.
And no doubt a huge proportion of the adult males, apart from the paramedics, doctors, writers and reporters killed by Israel were also civilians. And the killing goes on, in addition now to starvation.
Instead of passively swallowing the imperialist propaganda in the mainstream western media – or raging at it – it is sometimes useful to reorganise its sentences to reflect something closer to reality, the reality of imperialism in our world and to resistance against it.
End.
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Footnote
1The point with mentioning “a sovereign country” is that the USA and other imperialist states make much of those words when action is taken against a state it favours but, as their practice shows repeatedly, they have no difficulty with attacking or even invading sovereign countries that go sufficiently against the imperialist states’ interests.
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