Foreign Policy in the Final Days of the Trump Administration.
The world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism accuses other countries of sponsoring terrorism.
As the Trump presidency comes to its chaotic demise war hawks within the administration are still working to ensure that American foreign policy remains as brutal, belligerent, and incoherent as possible under a Biden administration.
On Monday the Trump Administration announced that it would be reversing an Obama-era decision to remove Cuba from the United States list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’. A move that will make it more difficult for the incoming Biden Administration to follow through on campaign promises to improve relations with Cuba.
In a tweet following the press conference where the announcement was made outgoing Secretary of State and former director of the CIA Mike Pompeo insisted that “Cuba’s continued support for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere must be stopped.”. However, according to MintPress News in the six years since Obama removed Cuba from the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism “Trump’s State Department could not point to a single act of terror sponsored by Cuba.”
Rather than citing any recent acts of terrorism sponsored by Cuba in his explanation as to why they were being placed back onto the list of U.S. state sponsors of terrorism, Secretary of State Pompeo insisted that Cuba was supporting the National Liberation Army (ELN), the second-largest guerilla group in Colombia. This allegation stems from Cuba’s “role in attempting to bring peace to the long-simmering conflict in Colombia.” because “ELN negotiators arrived Cuba in 2018 for peace talks with the Colombian government”, MintPress said.
In 2019 these peace talks fell apart after the National Liberation Army set off a car bomb in Bogota that killed 22 people. As a result, Colombia requested that Cuba extradite the ELN negotiators who were participating in peace talks in Cuba, but Cuba has refused to extradite them “because the Colombian government will not honor the previous government’s commitment to guaranteeing the negotiators freedom upon returning home”. As a result, Secretary of State Pompeo is accusing Cuba of supporting terrorism for simply upholding their side of an attempted peace deal.
In a less specific statement, Pompeo insisted that Cuba was supporting “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”, but the facts show that any Cuban influence in the Western Hemisphere has been the exact opposite of “malign”. Since the Cuban revolution in 1959 the country has sent an army of doctors to “disaster sites and disease outbreaks around the world in the name of solidarity.”
Over the course of the last decade, Cuba has sent their army of doctors and other medical professionals to fight cholera in Hati and Ebola in West Africa, according to a report by NBC. That report also explains that since the start of the coronavirus pandemic Cuba has sent their army of medical professionals to help nearly 40 countries respond to one of the worst public health crises in the world.
Cuba has never bombed another country. Meanwhile, statistics show that drone strikes carried out by the United States kill civilians an estimated 90% of the time. Also, the United States uses Al Qaeda as a proxy force in Syria, and Obama openly talked about training ISIL forces in Iraq while he was President. Who’s the state sponsor of terrorism though?
After hypocritically declaring Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism the Trump Administration also designated Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization, on top of adding additional sanctions against the country that’s already experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet.
The move comes as a major blow to an already struggling nation due to the fact humanitarian groups won’t be able to access areas in Yemen controlled by the Houthi’s since they’re now regarded as a terrorist group. As a result, these humanitarian groups won’t be able to provide essential assistance to 70% of Yemen’s population who reside in areas controlled by the Houthi rebels.
Humanitarian groups have voiced concern over the potential that their work to provide assistance to Yemeni’s residing in areas controlled by the Houthis could now be criminalized by the United States. Designating the Houthi’s as a terrorist group opens the door for the U.S. to sanction any individual or entity that does business with groups that the U.S. designates as “terrorists”. According to the group Refugees International:
“The Trump Administration’s decision to designate the Houthi movement in Yemen as a Foreign Terrorist Organization is both reckless and destructive…Coming just days before Trump leaves office, the designation will complicate diplomatic efforts to end the war in Yemen and will disrupt relief efforts for the worlds worst humanitarian crisis…it is difficult to imagine a more irresponsible decision.”
The unfortunate reality in the United States has assisted Saudi Arabia in bombarding Yemen with airstrikes by selling them billions of dollars worth of weapons and offering them intelligence assistance. According to MintPress News:
“In 2017, the Trump Administration announced that it had signed a deal to sell $350 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia alone. In addition to the weaponry, the U.S. has trained much of the Saudi armed forces, providing essential military infrastructure and logistical support, and even refueling Saudi bombers in the air and supplying targeting guidance on the ground.”
According to a report by Oxfam International, the U.S. backed Saudi-led coalition has carried out about one airstrike every ten days throughout the Yemen war. Oxfam’s Yemen Data Project found that these airstrikes targeted hospitals, health clinics, and water sources. Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey has said:
“Vital infrastructure like hospitals, clinics, water tanks and wells have consistently been in the cross hairs throughout this conflict. Their damage and destruction make Yemen even more vulnerable to diseases like COVID and cholera…Lives aren’t just lost when the bombs fall but also during the weeks, months or years it takes for hospitals and wells to be rebuilt.”
Targeting civilian infrastructure like this is a blatant war crime and a violation of international law. Also, according to a report by Mwatana for Human Rights:
“From January 1 to December 31, 2020, Mwatana for Human Rights documented about 1020 incidents of harm to civilians and civilian objects in Yemen in which more than 900 civilians were killed and injured,”
In reality, as the United States is accusing the Houthi’s of being a terrorist organization, but the U.S. and their allies are actually the ones inflicting the most terror on the Yemeni people.
Last but not least, in an attempt to escalate tensions with Iran to make it more difficult for the incoming Biden administration to potentially re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, outgoing Secretary of State and former director of the CIA Mike Pompeo insisted that “al Qaeda has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.” during an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
This announcement was made just hours after the outgoing Secretary of State met with Mossad chief Yossi Cohen while Israeli jets assisted by U.S. intelligence carried out air-strikes against targets in eastern Syria, killing an estimated 57 people. Secretary of State Pompeo endorsed the air-strikes saying “the warplanes were striking warehouses filled with Iranian weapons.” MintPress News said.
According to reporting by MintPress, during his press conference, Pompeo exclaimed that “Iran is the new Afghanistan” and that “We ignore this Iran-al-Qaeda nexus at our own peril…We must confront it. Indeed, we must defeat it.”
This is the same nonsensical line that the Bush administration attempted to push on the public in the aftermath of 9/11 to try to get the American public on board with going to war with Iran. The only good thing about the ruling class recycling this same old propaganda is that it’s easy to disprove.
There are no bigger enemies in the Middle East than the Shiite state of Iran and the Wahabi terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS that are sponsored by the Sunni state of Saudi Arabia. Saying that Shiite Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda are working together would essentially be like saying that the Jews were working with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Iran was already fighting with Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when 9/11 happened, and they were the first country in the Middle East to offer the United States assistance in fighting Al Qaeda after they attacked the U.S. on September 11th.
Besides, Iran has been a key ally in the fight against ISIS throughout the Middle East. Iran’s fight against terrorism was headed by Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Unfortunately, he was assassinated on January third of last year during a U.S. airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport while on his way to a regional peace negotiation. The head of American Studies at the University of Tehran, Mohammad Marandi, told Al Jazeera that “Soleimani’s role in helping defeat ISIL made him a ‘national hero’ and a ‘martyr’ among the Iranian people and other Middle Eastern countries. If it wasn’t for people like him, [we] would have seen black flags flying the region.”
In fact, Pompeo’s claim that Iran is now Al Qaeda’s “home base” has even been refuted by the United States government’s own officials. According to former U.S. envoy Brett McGurk, Al Qaeda’s actual home base in Syria’s Idlib province is held by what the United States describes as moderate rebels. Idlib province is described as “the largest Al Qaeda haven since 9/11”, according to McGurk. Despite this fact, independent journalist Aaron Mate has reported that the United States has coordinated with the moderate rebels to help arm and train al Qaeda and offshoot extremist groups like al Nusra so they can establish themselves in Syria.
According to an article by the LA Times, U.S. officials have continually refused to comment on the CIA’s assistance programs for moderate rebels, and the vetting process used to decide who qualifies to receive U.S. weaponry has not been made public. However, the State Department has admitted that “we are aware that some moderate opposition groups have coordinated tactically with Nusra out of necessity…”. The New York Times has even said, “…American backed fighters could advance only by working with the Nusra Front, which the United States lists as a terrorist group,”. So it looks like the countries that are actually assisting terrorists aren’t Iran, but the United States and their allies in the Middle East.
According to the group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), annual reports from the National Counter-Terrorism Center indicate that the vast majority of terrorist attacks since 2001 have been carried out by “Sunni extremists” that follow the Wahabbi-Salafi ideology that’s held in common by ISIS and al Qaeda. FAIR has explained that Saudi Arabia spends huge sums of money to export this extremist ideology throughout the Middle East, while “Iranian/Shia terrorism isn’t even a category in US counter-terrorism reporting, and is a much smaller threat than domestic white nationalist terrorist attacks.” Regardless of this fact, Iran is on the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism while Saudi Arabia is not.
This is a result of the co-dependent relationship that has formed between the United States and Saudi Arabia, along with the fact that corporate media in the United States conveniently avoids defining terrorism for the American public because “a consistent definition would undermine the conventional usage” of terrorism according to the group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. FAIR explains that if the United States consistently defined terrorism as “deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes” that would “rule out roadside bombs hitting US military patrols, and rule in Saudi Arabia’s US-backed bombing of Yemeni civilians.” According to Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:
“Even on the debates own terms, there’s a much stronger case that the US rather than Iran is actually the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. A country that supported bringing ‘the terrors of the earth’ to Cuba to sabotage its revolutionary government, and funded terrorist Contra groups in Nicaragua with cash gained from selling weapons to Iran, as well as providing the groundwork for al Qaeda and ISIS to emerge has no credibility to designate any other state as a terrorist organization.”
The group has explained that by presenting any use of force against American military forces and their allies as terrorism, corporate media in the United States has essentially “buried the crucial distinction between terrorism and armed resistance,”. This media consensus in the United States can be seen the clearest when looking at how corporate media covers, or doesn’t cover, acts of violence committed by the United States and their allies that would qualify as acts of terrorism, compared to how they cover armed resistance groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels when they’re simply fighting back against illegal occupations of their countries. According to Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:
“If Iran is a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ because it provides support to ‘Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza’ then does the U.S. providing cash, weapons and surveillance for Israel’s state terrorism against Palestinians qualify the U.S. as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’? According to B’Tselem’s figures from 2000 all the way through the end of 2019, while Palestinian militants have killed a total of 301 Israeli civilians, Israeli security forces have killed 5,279 Palestinians who did not take part in hostilities, or were killed during the course of targeted killings (which are illegal under international law).
Likewise, if Iran is considered a state sponsor of terrorism because it provides material support to Hezbollah, what does that say about U.S. support for Israel, whose illegal occupation of southern Lebanon prompted Hezbollah’s rise?…According to Human Rights Watch, the 2006 Lebanon War resulted in the deaths of just 43 Israeli civilians from Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocket attacks, and around 900 Lebanese civilians deaths from Israeli airstrikes.”
The reality is that the ruling class in the United States has subjected the American public to massive amounts of propaganda for decades when it comes to the area of foreign policy. From the Gulf of Tonkin and other cold war era lies meant to escalate tensions with the Soviet Union, to allegations of WMD’s and babies being thrown out of incubators by Saddam’s evil forces, to the more recent allegations that al Qaeda is working with Iran and the Cubans and Houthi’s are sponsoring terrorism, the American people have had this propaganda pushed upon them by the United States ruling class for their entire lives. This propaganda has been pushed on the public in an attempt to brainwash them into viewing any anti-imperial resistance towards United States hegemony on the global stage as “aggressive and illegitimate”, while unquestionably supporting the bipartisan establishments desired foreign policy goals because “U.S. media tend to consider the imperial violence committed by the US and its allies to be righteous and inherently defensive by default,” according to the group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
As the American ruling class swiftly rebukes Trump for inciting a white nationalist mob to break into the capital on January 6th in an attempted coup to stop the electoral college’s certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential election, they’re standing idly by as forces within the Trump administration paved the way for more intelligent and violent coups to be incited by the incoming Biden administration. Only these coups will occur abroad and they’ll have the support of the people who truly pull the strings behind the American empire.
To find out more about the United States’ involvement in sponsoring terrorism around the world and how the U.S. ruling class has brainwashed the American public into accepting their narrative for the hypocritical war on terror, read The Bull-Moose Note article “A Brief History of September 11th.”