Gisteren
op The American Conservative een artikel van Robert W. Merry, waarin hij
schrijft over eerdere false flag operaties en andere manipulaties die
tot oorlog dan wel oorlogsdeelname van de VS hebben geleid.

Je had
al begrepen dat Merry dit artikel schreef n.a.v. de beschuldigingen
aan het adres van Iran over het aanvallen van olietankers en het
neerhalen van een VS drone.

Met 5
voorbeelden geeft Merry aan dat de VS in een aantal gevallen
onterecht in een oorlog verwikkelde raakte. Daarbij noemt Merry ook
WOII, echter het was bijna onmogelijk dat de VS uit deze oorlog kon
blijven, daar ook het beheersen van olievoorraden (in de grond) deel uitmaakte van
deze oorlog, echter de manier waarop e.e.a. gebeurde is welhaast ongelofelijk……

Lies
They Told Us: A Long History of Being Manipulated Into War

Before
we retaliate over drone and oil tanker attacks, take a look at all
the times we’ve been duped.

By ROBERT
W. MERRY • June
21, 2019

“It
is the assessment of the U.S. government that Iran is responsible for
today’s attacks in the Gulf of Oman” Credit: @SecPompeo

Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo says there’s no question that Iran initiated
the recent attacks on those two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. The
evidence, he says, is “indisputable” and “unmistakable.”
President Donald Trump weighs in with the same degree of certainty.
“Well, Iran did do it,” he told Fox News.

Maybe.
But our past is screaming at us: don’t buy it; you can’t trust
your leaders when war fever sets in and war prospects are on the
rise. Consider the history surrounding the run-ups to the Mexican
War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Iraq war. Lies,
misrepresentations, and manipulations abound in all those episodes.

As
for those tankers, where’s the evidence? True, the U.S. Central
Command trotted out a video that appears to show unidentified people
in a small boat removing something from the side of a tanker—an
unexploded mine, we are told by U.S. officials, who assert this
constitutes proof of Iran’s complicity. As Trump puts it, “And
you know they did it because you saw the boat.”

But
that’s pretty thin stuff. The Germans and Japanese made that clear
when they requested stronger evidence than that grainy video released
by the Pentagon.

Now
comes Politico with a piece saying the Trump
administration has been making the case “in public and private”
that no new congressional authorization would be necessary to go to
war with Iran. They could simply rely on the 2001 authorization
against Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on American soil.

Leave
aside for the moment the ominous threat this poses to the
constitutional precept that Congress is the repository of the
nation’s warmaking power. It also would preclude a congressional
debate on the matter, depriving the nation of an opportunity to
assess the facts before hostilities actually begin. The following
historical episodes reveal the importance of getting those facts
established before the country goes to war.

James
K. Polk and the Mexican War: Contrary to allegations that
have dogged the 11th president for nearly 180 years, it isn’t quite
true to say that he lied. But he did declare to the nation that
Mexico had “spilled American blood on the American soil.” The
problem is that it wasn’t, strictly speaking, American soil. That
territory had been under dispute between Mexico and Texas during the
time of Texas independence, and America inherited that dispute when
it acquired Texas through annexation in 1845. So it could be argued
that Polk was merely expressing his view that that disputed territory
actually belonged to the United States, just as Texas had always
insisted that it belonged to Texas.

But
such niceties of language shrouded the fact that, if there was no
other way for America to acquire what is now the Southwest and
California, then Polk wanted a war with Mexico. And he maneuvered
events with a clear intent to force the issue, much as Pompeo seems
to be doing now.

Polk
sent an army into the disputed territory and planted it directly
across the Rio Grande from the dusty little Mexican town of
Matamoros, where a large number of Mexican troops were stationed.
This was highly incendiary, and it inevitably led to a skirmish in
which 11 American soldiers were killed and another 50 or so captured.
Polk promptly sent a message to Congress saying the United States and
Mexico were in a state of war and calling for a congressional war
declaration.

South
Carolina’s Senator John C. Calhoun, among others, would have none
of it. This skirmish, he said, was a “mere local conflict, not
authorized by either government,” and it was “monstrous” to
blow it up into a doctrine that “every American is [now] an enemy
of every Mexican.” But American blood had been spilled, and the
country was riled. The final Senate vote was 40 to 2, with Calhoun
refusing to answer the roll call. The previous House vote was 173 to
14.

There
is plenty of documentary evidence, including Polk’s own diary, that
the president wanted that war and that, by maneuvering his troops in
such a way as to render bloodshed all but inevitable, he manipulated
public opinion. Indeed, even before the skirmish on the Rio Grande,
he was preparing to ask Congress for a war declaration.

Woodrow
Wilson and World War I: There can be no doubt that Wilson
was reelected president in 1916 (with just 49.2 percent of the vote)
on his stated resolve to keep America out of Europe’s Great War.
But it was all phony, as he’d always hankered to get America onto
the world stage. It wasn’t easy keeping the United States out of
the war through the election season, given delicate neutrality issues
forced upon the U.S. by both Britain and Germany. Britain imposed a
blockade designed to thwart all trade to Germany and the Central
Powers and to ”starve the whole population—men, women, and
children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission,” as
Britain’s pugnacious First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, brazenly
declared.

Wilson
initially sought to wend his way through this neutrality thicket,
rendered all the more difficult after Germany initiated submarine
attacks designed to stop munitions shipments to Britain and
counteract the blockade. But ultimately he favored the UK and took
actions he knew would draw America into the war. He not only observed
the British blockade but also allowed armed British merchant ships
entry to U.S. ports, which in turn fostered a flow of American
munitions to the Allied Powers. At the same time, Wilson declared
that Germany would be held to a “strict accountability” for any
American loss of life or property from German submarine attacks
designed to enforce the neutrality that Wilson was flouting. This
policy, he added, would apply even if affected Americans were
traveling or working on British or French ships. After all, he
declared, Americans had the “right” to travel on any vessels they
wanted, even in wartime.

Wilson’s
secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, warned the president that
he faced a stark choice: either adopt a more evenhanded approach or
accept the inevitability of war. Bryan ultimately resigned over the
issue, and he turned out to be right. A desperate Germany, suffering
horrendously under Churchill’s starvation policy, initiated
unrestricted submarine warfare against ships carrying goods to
Britain or France. Wilson promptly asked for a congressional
declaration of war—and got it.

Franklin
Roosevelt and World War II: When Europe was once again
thrust into a dark conflict after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland
in September 1939, FDR almost desperately wished to take America in.
But the country, still stung by the bitter fruits of Wilson’s
previous intervention, didn’t want to enter the fray. “I am
almost literally walking on eggs,” Roosevelt wrote to a foreign
official, explaining the precarious perch between his own powerful
conviction and the public’s aversion to war. “I am at the moment
saying nothing, seeing nothing, and hearing nothing.”

But
this wasn’t quite true. He was applying his stealth and wiles in
every way possible to help Britain and nudge his country to war. He
passed diplomatic secrets to friendly reporters to help the cause. He
initiated secret depth charge attacks on German submarines in the
North Atlantic. As Robert Shjogan writes in his book Hard
Bargain, FDR almost certainly violated the prevailing Neutrality
Acts by making destroyers available to Britain—an action that in
another time and political climate could have been impeachable. And
he maneuvered Japan into a position of near desperation in an effort
to force a confrontation. That he knew what he was doing is evidenced
by the fact that he initiated planning for the removal of Japanese
Americans from the West Coast even before Pearl Harbor, as John
Toland reveals in his 1982 book Infamy. Shogan writes
that FDR didn’t hesitate “to twist the law, flout the
Constitution, hoodwink the public, and distort the political
process.”

Lyndon
Johnson and the Vietnam war: On August 2, 1964, North
Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin.
This could not have surprised those in the know inside the U.S.
government. The Maddox had been providing logistical and electronic
surveillance support to South Vietnamese forces engaged in raiding
parties on North Vietnamese soil. Two days later, when it seemed
another attack on the Maddox had ensued, President Johnson snapped
into action. He asked for a congressional resolution authorizing him
to counter such raids with military action as needed. This allowed
Johnson to prosecute what became America’s disastrous seven-year
Vietnam war.

But
that second attack on the Maddox never took place. It seems that rare
weather patterns distorted radar imaging and gave the impression of
multiple hostile ships when none had been in the vicinity.

When
this was ascertained by Navy Captain John Herrick, commander of the
Seventh Fleet destroyer division, he promptly sent a corrective
message to Washington: “Review of action makes many reported
contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects
on radar and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports.
No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation
before any further action taken.”

But
action already had been taken, and Johnson administration officials
weren’t about to turn around and let the opportunity slip. So they
lied. Within days, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara traveled to Capitol Hill to assure lawmakers that the
August 4 “attacks” represented ”open aggression on the high
seas against the United States of America,” as Johnson put it.

In
response to expressions of skepticism by Oregon Senator Wayne Morse,
McNamara declared, “Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not
associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if
there were any…. The Maddox was operating in international waters,
was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over
the world at all times.” As Robert Mann writes in a footnote in A
Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam, “That
statement was, as McNamara knew, false.”

Arkansas
Senator William Fulbright agreed to manage the Tonkin Gulf resolution
on the Senate floor largely because he had faith in Johnson’s
veracity. As Fulbright’s staff chief, Lee Williams, later said, “He
had no reason to believe that he was used as a dupe, if you will, and
that this was a ruse on behalf of Johnson to get the authority that
he needed to conduct a wider war.”

George
W. Bush and the Iraq war: Did Bush lie to the American
people about those weapons of mass destruction that the U.S.
government expected to find in Iraq? Probably not. More likely, Bush
and his people lied to themselves in their zealous efforts to fashion
justifications for overthrowing Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, and
to ensure Middle East peace, protect the U.S. homeland, and preserve
America’s regional influence. But officials have a grave
responsibility to ensure extensive fact finding and sober
deliberation in matters of war and peace. Presidents shouldn’t take
America to war based on an oops. This was reckless behavior for which
the Bush people, including Bush himself, have never been brought to
account.

And
it’s undeniable that the president and many of his top officials
were bent on going to war against Saddam irrespective of the factual
intricacies involved. There’s the rub. That invasion arguably
constitutes the greatest American strategic blunder in at least half
a century, perhaps in the entire postwar period. Those kinds of
decisions require serious due diligence. So if Bush and his people
didn’t know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
they should have. If not malfeasance, it was abject nonfeasance.

The
lesson: beware when our leaders manifest a passion for war. That’s
when it’s time to demand honesty, sobriety, and restraint—and
answers. The burden of proof rests with the war advocates. It doesn’t
mean we shouldn’t go to war, just that when we do, it should be
with our eyes open.

Robert
W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is
the author most recently of President
McKinley: Architect of the American Century.

Related
articles:

Bret
Stephens, Warmonger

Is the White House Plotting an End-Run Around Congress Into Iran?

================================

Nog even het volgende: Merry noemt ook Pearl Harbor, waar intussen bekend is dat de VS op de hoogte was van de komende aanval, maar deze heeft laten gebeuren om zo mee te kunnen doen aan de oorlog in een fiks gebied van de Stille Oceaan.

Hier meer voorbeelden van VS terreur, gefundeerd op leugens, fake news en andere manipulaties:

‘VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII……..‘ Tot het jaar 2000, deze eeuw zijn er intussen meer dan 2,5 miljoen moorden aan toe te voegen, moorden begaan door de VS en de NAVO (waar deze terreurorganisatie onder opperbevel stond en staat van de VS…)….

‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘

‘List of wars involving the United States‘

‘CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi’s beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz………‘

Zie voorts:

‘Bernard Hammelburg rijp voor oorlogshitsclub Atlantic Council: Al Qaida opereert vanuit Iran‘

‘VS chanteert de wereld: geen olie import uit Iran, anders……..‘

”‘False flag terror’ bestaat wel degelijk: bekentenissen en feiten over heel smerige zaken……….‘

‘VS plant een bombardement op een Iraanse kerncentrale, verkennende VS drone neergeschoten‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht)

‘VS heeft stok ‘gevonden’ om oorlog tegen Iran te beginnen: Iran zou tankers hebben aangevallen‘

‘Twee olietankers aangevallen in Golf van Oman: VS oorlogsbodem in de buurt‘

Wat betreft 9/11 zie:

‘De rol van Israël en de VS in de 9/11 aanslagen op het WTC‘ (zie ook de links naar andere 9/11 artikelen in dat bericht)

Arcering in geel toegevoegd op 16 juli 2019.