This is how Ronald Reagan famously qualified the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is no more. But, there is a new Evil Empire: the United States. The world lives under the threat of an evil empire ever since the Bolsheviks Revolution of 1917, except for a brief pause between December 1991 and February 1992 when the Pentagon told the world it will no longer tolerate any challenge to the United States' world hegemony. A George W. Bush's aid (Karl Rove) expressed this new reality best when he said: "we are an empire now , and when we act, we create our own reality". This is when the descent to hell began. How will it end?
The United States killed three million people in Vietnam, fighting a war the Pentagon knew was useless. It killed 655,000 people in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, according to the British medical journal, The Lancet. Saddam Hussein had no "weapons of mass destruction". Yet, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Secretary of State, spoke of "a mushroom cloud going up over an American city" to convince Americans that the threat was real and the invasion justified. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, said that the safety of the United States was worth the death of a half million Iraqi children. Libya was destroyed in 2011. Under Mohammad Gaddafi, admittedly an unsavory character, it had a revenue per capita superior to that of the Middle East and North Africa. Since his death, it has fallen by a half, according to the IMF World Economic Outlook database. Yemen is a human disaster. Iran is next on the list. The economic cost of those wars is astronomical: $2 trillion, not to mention the human cost but, as they say in the United States, "the deaths are over there". These wars do not stand the test of reason.
On September 5 th , the New York Times published an anonymous opinion criticizing Donald Trump. It might be the last straw aimed at breaking the President's back. Supposedly written by a Trump administration official, it stigmatizes his amorality and erratic behavior, fearing for the "health of our republic", but reassures the reader: "there are adults in the room". While making a vow to the contrary, it is a clear disguised call for impeachment. Donald Trump does not belong in the White House. That much is clear. He is unpredictable, unprepared for the task and has made numerous blunders. Why did the Americans vote for him? Could it be because of the failures of his predecessors' policies? The policies the Washington elite implemented from 1992 onward when it felt the time had come for the United States to rule the world because it is its Manifest Destiny? Trump is right to make peace with North Korea -- a country flattened out by American bombs -- and to engage Putin -- the most powerful nuclear power along with the United States. This anonymous opinion makes no sense. Far from advocating a change in policy, it subliminally promotes a continuation of the policies of the past -- the very policies which brought Trump to the White House. Paul Craig Roberts, Ronald Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, believes it's a forgery. So does Diana Johnstone. They might be right. The New York Times is an avowed opponent of the President.
This event is crowning, so to speak, an anti-Trump campaign which began before his election. Robert Mueller, former CIA director, and special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to inquire about the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, has yet to find one piece of evidence nearly a year and a half after the inquiry began. A House Committee concluded there was no interference. Yet, the crusade continues as demonstrated by the invectives thrown at Donald Trump after his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. John Brennan, former CIA director, talked about treasonous behavior. Doesn't he know that Barack Obama wished to "reset" the relationship with Russia in a peaceful manner? The recent John McCain's death which was used to slander Trump, shows how low the Beltway has fallen. In truth, McCain's eulogy is an insult to US Navy officers and sailors, as well as to Vietnam prisoners of war, not to mention the survivors and refugees of the Middle East wars of the last seventeen years. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, slanders and calumnies do not serve the United States. They certainly do not serve the truth. What has become of the United States?
In his latest book ("The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? "), David Ray Griffin retraces the origins and nature of the American Empire. If nothing is done to reverse the hegemonic policies of 1992 onward, the end-game will be "a managed democracy" in the United States, or an economic depression of apocalyptic dimension, or both. It could also turn into a nuclear war scenario, if Russian generals, tired of being humiliated by the United States, threaten to react with all of Russia's military might. Face with near certain death, the cocky boyish Washington elite will cry uncle to preserve its life.
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