16 January 2018

The United States: Addicted to special forces

Al Jazeera English

The Special Operations forces of the United States - currently 70,000-strong and thus larger than the regular militaries of many sizable countries - occupy a very special place in US national mythology. 
According to TIME Magazine, Special Ops "heroes" are the "planet's most skillful soldiers" and "toughest warriors" - operating in their very own "secret world". 
Newsweek hails them as "dead accurate, lethal and all-but-silent. They are the military's elite - highly trained badasses armed with bullets and brains in equal measure".
The obsequious glorification of "badass" warriors is of course hardly surprising, given that US society has been inculcated to view international relations as a sort of video game in which the US gets points for blowing things up.
More surprising, perhaps, are the dimensions of the oh-so-secretive world.
In a recent dispatch, investigative journalist and author Nick Turse reveals that Special Operations forces were active in no fewer than 149 countries in 2017 - meaning that the "secret world" has managed to encompass 75 percent of the globe.
This record high is courtesy of US President Donald Trump, that self-appointed "very stable genius" who is now building on the special forces frenzy fuelled by his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush.  READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

05 January 2018

How Western media got it wrong on Iran protests

Middle East Eye

Ever since scattered protests broke out in Iran last week, US President Donald Trump has taken time out of his busy schedule of threatening North Korea with nuclear annihilation to bombard Twitter with his eloquent assessments of "Iran, the Number One State of Sponsored Terror".
The gist of the Trumpian analysis is this: "The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The US is watching!"
Never mind the ongoing huge pro-government demonstrations in Iran, or the fact that, if we want to talk about food, the US happens to be currently backing the forcible starvation of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (two entities that apparently don't require much "watching").
As usual, the dutiful Western media has laboured to uphold an appropriately reductionist view of Iran, a country that has long been in US crosshairs for its insistence on challenging imperial designs on the region.
In a 30 December dispatch for the Jadaliyya website, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, an Oxford-based historian of modern Iran, notes the speed at which concerned Western observers gleefully glom onto any peep of public discontent in the Islamic Republic:
"Within the space of some 24 hours [from the start of the protests], nearly every mainstream Western media outlet has inclined to assimilate legitimate expressions of socio-economic distress and demands for greater governmental accountability into a question of 'regime change'."
Iranian protests against unemployment and other legitimate internal grievances, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi continues, are almost inevitably depicted in terms of “a fundamental question of legitimacy about the system; which in turn can only be solved when said system is swept away in its entirety". READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.