The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
4 - Taking on China
What
seems to really be driving the CIA’s militarization of U.S. policy
in Africa is China’s growing influence on the continent. As Steve
Bannon put it in an interview with the Economist in August, “Let’s
go screw up One Belt One Road.”
China
is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known
as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and
intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10
years or so, the United States “pick up some small crappy little
country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean
business.”
China
is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the
CIA’s job would be to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese
trade and investment, and to make African governments increasingly
dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned
and endlessly regenerated by U.S.-led “counterterrorism”
operations.
Neither
Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build
more prosperous or viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let
alone to benefit their people. They both know very well what Richard
Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America’s
unprecedented investment in weapons, war and CIA covert operations
are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy
infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the
desperate survivors to poverty and displacement.
As
long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats
for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the
United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of
the world’s wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the
storms they unleash on others.
But
if that is the only “significant national objective” driving
these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of
Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop
the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already
damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and
foreigners alike.
Douglas
Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other
American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program
in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized
Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which
he brings Fletcher Prouty’s analysis right up to the present day,
describing the CIA’s role in our current wars and the many ways it
infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.
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