The UK\u2019s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world\u2019s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK \u2013 whoever is prime minister \u2013 is never going to say \u201cno\u201d to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.<\/p>\n
Ideological alchemy<\/strong><\/p>\n Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies \u2013 for our own Eurasias and Eastasias<\/a> \u2013 becomes clearer.<\/p>\n Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and \u201cterrorist\u201d recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today\u2019s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.<\/p>\n Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans \u2013 men, women and children \u2013 more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel\u2019s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.<\/p>\n Quite how opportunistic \u2013 and divorced from reality \u2013 the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria\u2019s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.<\/p>\n During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a\u00a0secret meeting<\/a>\u00a0between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n My latest: Pompeo\u2019s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are \u2018antisemitic\u2019 marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https:\/\/t.co\/0fLC8TKnzm<\/a><\/p>\n — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 24, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind \u2013 nebulous \u201cterrorism\u201d \u2013 is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, \u201cterrorism\u201d against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.<\/p>\n But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine\u2019s presentation of itself as a \u201cdefence\u201d industry. The UK\u2019s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson\u2019s \u00a316 billion rise in spending on the UK\u2019s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.<\/p>\n Crushed or tamed<\/strong><\/p>\n Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.<\/p>\n Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump \u2013 helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate \u201cscandal\u201d \u2013 not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.<\/p>\n First, Trump\u2019s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from\u00a0most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to<\/em> prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as \u201cintervention\u201d intended to help women and people of colour.<\/p>\n <span But Trump\u2019s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger \u2013 in our newly interconnected, digital world \u2013 of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the \u201cshining city on the hill\u201d, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath.<\/p>\n Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak \u2013 at least as far as the general public was concerned \u2013 occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder<\/em>, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western \u201chumanitarianism\u201d might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing \u201cdemocracy\u201d.<\/p>\n <span The threat posed by Assange\u2019s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.<\/p>\n Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of \u201cjournalism\u201d and \u201cespionage\u201d, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.<\/p>\n My latest: Julian Assange was on the front line of a war to remake journalism as a true check on the runaway power of government. Journalists had a chance to ally with him. Instead they served him up as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters https:\/\/t.co\/oF2nPOix49<\/a><\/p>\n — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 2, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Dress rehearsal for a coup<\/strong><\/p>\n An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain\u2019s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.<\/p>\n Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK\u2019s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.<\/p>\n <span As a BBC documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced<\/a> the very real prospect of enforced \u201cregime change\u201d,\u00a0coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson\u2019s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a \u201cdress rehearsal\u201d for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.<\/p>\n \u2018Mutiny\u2019 by the army<\/strong><\/p>\n Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the \u201cdefence\u201d establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine\u2019s attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.<\/p>\n By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.<\/p>\n He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel\u2019s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party \u2013 and claims he was undermining \u201cnational security\u201d \u2013 Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the \u201cdefence\u201d establishment for the UK\u2019s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn\u2019s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK\u2019s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.<\/p>\n In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned,\u00a0Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn\u2019s own MPs \u2013 still loyal to Blairism \u2013 sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times<\/em> newspaper soon offered a platform to\u00a0an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.<\/p>\n Weeks after Corbyn\u2019s election as Labour leader, the general warned<\/a> that the\u00a0army would take \u201cdirect action\u201d using \u201cwhatever means possible, fair or foul\u201d to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be \u201cmutiny\u201d, he said. \u201cThe Army just wouldn\u2019t stand for it.\u201d<\/p>\n My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https:\/\/t.co\/2u0Vyo0qLU<\/a><\/p>\n — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump\u2019s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to \u201crun the gauntlet\u201d as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.<\/p>\n In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added<\/a>: \u201cYou should know, we won\u2019t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It\u2019s too risky and too important and too hard once it\u2019s already happened.\u201d<\/p>\n This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: \u201cWe lied, we cheated, we stole. It\u2019s \u2013 it was like \u2013 we had entire training courses.\u201d<\/p>\n \n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Dp8LaklW4AA3lmr-e1606601149548.jpeg\")
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