Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a \u201crules-based international order\u201d?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s grimly laughable, but the nation\u2019s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.<\/p>\n
The framing was typical when the New York Times\u00a0printed<\/a>\u00a0this sentence at the top of the Friday front page: \u201cThe United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.\u201d<\/p>\n So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action — taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed — rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.<\/p>\n On Thursday, President Biden issued a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0that sounded righteous enough, saying \u201cthese strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.\u201d He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel\u2019s\u00a0murderous siege<\/a>\u00a0of Gaza. In the\u00a0words<\/a>\u00a0of CNN, they \u201ccould be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel\u2019s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, as Common Dreams\u00a0reported<\/a>, Houthi forces \u201cbegan launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel\u2019s Gaza onslaught.\u201d And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute\u00a0pointed out<\/a>, \u201cthe Houthis have declared that they will stop\u201d attacking ships in the Red Sea \u201cif Israel stops\u201d its mass killing in Gaza.<\/p>\n But that would require genuine diplomacy — not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee\u2019s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee\u2019s chief of staff.)<\/p>\n Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a \u201crules-based international order.\u201d During a 2022\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity \u201cto manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.\u201d Two months ago, he\u00a0declar<\/a>ed<\/u>\u00a0that G7 nations were united for \u201ca rules-based international order.\u201d<\/p>\n But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he\u00a0defended<\/a>\u00a0that country despite\u00a0abundant evidence of genocidal warfare<\/a>, claiming that \u201cthe charge of genocide is meritless.\u201d<\/p>\n The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to\u00a0massively arm<\/a>\u00a0the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that — several weeks into the slaughter — he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners \u201cstand united in our condemnation of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel\u2019s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of\u00a0doublethink<\/a>\u00a0in George Orwell\u2019s novel\u00a01984<\/em>: \u201cTo know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .\u201d<\/p>\n After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly\u00a0spoke up<\/a>\u00a0against Biden\u2019s end-run around Congress, flagrantly\u00a0violating the Constitution<\/a>\u00a0by going to war on his own say-so. Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: \u201cA president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a \u201crules-based international order\u201d is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.<\/p>\n The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.<\/p>\n \n The post With Attack on Yemen, the U.S. is Shameless: \u201cWe Make the Rules, We Break the Rules\u201d<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a \u201crules-based international order\u201d? It\u2019s grimly laughable, but the nation\u2019s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort. The framing More<\/a><\/p>\n The post With Attack on Yemen, the U.S. is Shameless: \u201cWe Make the Rules, We Break the Rules\u201d<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1441354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441355,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441354\/revisions\/1441355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1441354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1441354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1441354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}