American Think Tank Policy: Not FOR or BY the People

by Phillip Butler, via RT.com: 

The world seems more volatile, dangerous, and chaotic than it was even a year ago. The smoldering embers of a potential holocaust are nearly everywhere. With the America-EU-Russia divide, potential EU-Russia integration has been rethought by the West.

In this report I will show one major reason for this course reversal. I will also illustrate in so doing, that the policy forgers in America, are nothing like the rest of us.

I watched the other day, some Russians burning an American flag. Then a few hours later, I saw students in America burning an effigy of Vladimir Putin. The events worried me greatly. I realized that our patience is wearing thin, that our feelings are now raw. Americans, Europeans, and Russians alike, grow weary of insult and injury perpetrated by leaders who seem to know nothing of us at all. Instead of citizens blaming one another, perhaps Americans and Russians can hold accountable the real perpetrators of today’s East-West crisis.

To begin let me quote from the great American historian, author, and anti-war activist Howard Zinn who said:

“There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.”

In 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski was then President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. He and other great thinkers in Washington devised strategies that created for the Soviets, a world strategic emergency just like the one we see today in Ukraine. The Soviet Union, baited into invading Afghanistan, got mired in 10 years of useless conflict. As for Zbigniew Brzezinski now, he is pointedly unapologetic that his theories have been deployed in bringing down regimes, and forging American strategic aims, for better or for worse. Brzezinski, along with other key figures like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, and myriad disciples, they sit seemingly everlasting, like stone statues in some Pantheon of American exclusivist control. It is their thinking that has set us all at odds.

Washington’s stinking thinking

There’s a term that Brzezinski and other think tank brains adhere to, it’s a term the Council on Foreign Relations defines, a central strategic idea known as the “Arc of Crisis.” The concept is essentially an American strategy aimed at surrounding Russia, an ongoing and devastatingly negative fight against a convenient and well known foe. Brzezinski is used in this piece as a sort of “poster boy” for all Washington elitist movers and shakers. His books, such as; The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, have become templates for events like the Arab Spring, the resurgent Iraq fiasco, and pointedly the Ukraine crisis. To understand today’s crisis, one has to investigate the players behind the White House.

Back in 1979 Brzezinski and his contemporaries like former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, concocted a plan to bait the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by giving aid to the Mujahedeen. The end result was tens of thousands of Russians and Afghanis dead, millions displaced, and for Brzezinski, he’d created a foreign policy “how to” for dealing with Russia. Back then, as now, Moscow did its best to show the reasons for the invasion, but to no avail. The mainstream media, and PR strategists, they ensured the American people would never believe the Russians.

Brzezinski’s documented intentions in the 1979 affair were to ensure that the Afghanistan intervention; “led to the demoralization and the breakup of the Soviet empire.” And this, he admitted later, was prioritized in his mind as, “at any cost.” However, an unforeseen result of funding the Mujahedeen back then, was the conflict America would have with more familiar modern forms of extremism (see Osama bin Laden), this was “a justified means” to the task of ending the Soviet empire. This is another story though.

Today, Brzezinski’s former pupils, and protégés, his influential think tank comrades, their business interests, they range from his son Ian Brzezinski, to ambassadors, industry titans, CIA and NSA directors, hedge fund capitalists, and yes, US and foreign presidents. Within the ranks of these think tanks we find Barack Obama advisers like Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (former Utah Governor). Interestingly, Huntsman was caught on amateur video in Beijing allegedly lending support for the so-called Jasmine Revolution. As for the administrations they’ve advised, this group of peers has counseled everyone since Richard Nixon.

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