if you were in control is this where you'd spend your taxes?

We working folk have no choice but to pay our taxes. And, sorry to
say, we have no control over where it is spent. If we did, human
services, public education and health care for all would be funded far
more than efforts to prop up despots in the world's dictatorships.
The following article is lengthy, and you might want to skip through
it, but it gives a sense of why we Americans are falling behind other
nations in the dispensation of human services.
Carl Jarvis
****

Glenn Greenwald
November 21 2018, 10:01 a.m.
The Intercept

Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a statement proclaiming that,
notwithstanding the anger toward the Saudi Crown Prince over the
gruesome murder of journalist
Jamal Khashoggi, "the United States intends to remain a steadfast
partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel
and all other
partners in the region." To justify his decision, Trump cited the fact
that "Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world"
and claimed
that "of the $450 billion [the Saudis plan to spend with U.S.
companies], $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military
equipment from Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors."

This statement instantly and predictably produced pompous
denunciations pretending that Trump's posture was a deviation from, a
grievous violation of,
long-standing U.S. values and foreign policy rather than what it
actually and obviously is: a perfect example – perhaps stated a little
more bluntly and
candidly than usual – of how the U.S. has conducted itself in the
world since at least the end of World War II.

The reaction was so intense because the fairy tale about the U.S.
standing up for freedom and human rights in the world is one of the
most pervasive and
powerful prongs of western propaganda, the one relied upon by U.S.
political and media elites to convince not just the U.S. population
but also themselves
of their own righteousness, even as they spend decades lavishing the
world's worst tyrants and despots with weapons, money, intelligence
and diplomatic
protection to carry out atrocities of historic proportions.

After all, if you have worked in high-level foreign policy positions
in Washington, or at the think thanks and academic institutions that
support those
policies, or in the corporate media outlets that venerate those who
rise to the top of those precincts (and which increasingly hire those
security state
officials as news analysts), how do you justify to yourself that
you're still a good person even though you arm, prop up, empower and
enable the world's
worst monsters, genocides, and tyrannies?

Simple: by pretending that you don't do any of that, that such acts
are contrary to your system of values, that you actually work to
oppose rather than
protect such atrocities, that you're a warrior and crusader for
democracy, freedom and human rights around the world.

That's the lie that you have to tell yourself: so that you can look in
the mirror without instantly feeling revulsion, so that you can show
your face in
decent society without suffering the scorn and ostracization that your
actions merit, so that you can convince the population over which you
have ruled
that the bombs you drop and the weapons with which you flood the world
are actually designed to help and protect people rather than slaughter
and oppress
them.

That's why it was so necessary – to the point of being more like a
physical reflex than a conscious choice – to react to Trump's Saudi
statement with contrived
anger and shock rather than admitting the truth that he was just
candidly acknowledging the core tenets of U.S. foreign policy for
decades. The people
who lied to the public and to themselves by pretending that Trump did
something aberrational rather than completely normal were engaged in
an act of self-preservation
as much as propagandistic deceit, though both motives were heavily at play.

The New York Times Editorial Page, as it so often does, topped the
charts with pretentious, scripted moral outrage. "President Trump
confirmed the harshest
caricatures drawn by America's most cynical critics on Tuesday when he
portrayed its central objectives in the world as panting after money
and narrow
self-interest," bellowed the paper, as though this view of U.S.
motives is some sort of jaded fiction invented by America-haters
rather than the only honest,
rational description of the country's despot-embracing posture in the
world during the lifespan of any human being alive today.

The paper's editorial writers were particularly shocked that "the
statement reflected Mr. Trump's view that all relationships are
transactional, and that
moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive
understanding of American national interests." To believe – or pretend
to believe
– that it is Mr. Trump who pioneered the view that the U.S. is willing
and eager to sanction murder and savagery by the regimes with which it
is most closely
aligned as long as such barbarism serves U.S interests signifies a
historical ignorance and/or a willingness to lie to one's own readers
so profound that
no human language is capable of expressing the depths of those
delusions. Has the New York Times Editorial Page ever heard of Henry
Kissinger?

So extensive is the active, constant and enthusiastic support by the
U.S. for the world's worst monsters and atrocities that
comprehensively citing them
all, in order to prove the ahistorical deceit of yesterday's reaction
to Trump's statement, would require a multi-volume book, not a mere
article. But
the examples are so vivid and clear that citing just a few will
suffice to make the point indisputable.

In April of this year, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the dictator of
Guatemala during the 1980s, died. The New York Times obituary, noting
that he had been convicted
of genocide for "trying to exterminate the Ixil ethnic group, a Mayan
Indian community whose villages were wiped out by his forces,"
explained that "in
the panoply of commanders who turned much of Central America into a
killing field in the 1980s, General Ríos Montt was one of the most
murderous." The
obituary added: "In his first five months in power, according to
Amnesty International, soldiers killed more than 10,000 peasants."

The genocide-committing General Rios Montt was a favorite of President
Ronald Reagan, one of the closest figures the U.S. has to a secular
saint, after
whom many monuments and national institutions are still named. Reagan
not only armed and funded Rios Montt but heaped praise on him far more
gushing than
anything Trump or Jared Kushner has said about the Saudi Crown Prince.
The Washington Post's Lou Cannon reported in 1982 that "on Air Force
One returning
to Andrews Air Force Base [from South America], [Reagan] said Rios
Montt had been getting 'a bum rap' and 'is totally dedicated to
democracy in Guatemala.'"

At a press conference standing next to the mass murderer, Reagan
hailed him as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment," who
really "wants to
improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social
justice." What about all those unfortunate acts of mass slaughter
against Guatemalan
peasants? That, said President Reagan, was justified, or at least
understandable, because the General was "faced with a challenge from
guerrillas armed
and supported from those outside Guatemala."

Trump's emphasis yesterday on the Saudis' value in opposing Iran
provoked particular anger. That anger is extremely odd given that the
iconic and notorious
photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein took
place in 1983, when Rumsfeld was dispatched to Baghdad to provide arms
and other weapons
to the Iraqi regime in order to help them fight Iran.

This trip, Al Jazeera noted when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all
happened while "Iraq was at war with Iran and was using chemical
weapons. Human rights
abuses were practised on large sections of the Iraqi population." The
U.S. nonetheless "renewed the hand of friendship [with Saddam] through
the special
envoy Rumsfeld" because "Washington wanted Iraq's friendship to stymie
Iran" – exactly the rationale cited yesterday by Trump for continuing
friendly relations
with Riyadh (The Saudis "have been a great ally in our very important
fight against Iran," said Trump).

As for the Saudis themselves, they have long been committing
atrocities on par with and far worse than the Khashoggi killing both
within their borders
and outside, and their partnership with U.S. Presidents has only
flourished. As the Saudis beheaded dissidents and created the planet's
worst humanitarian
crisis by slaughtering Yemeni civilians without mercy or restraint,
President Obama not only authorized the sale of a record amount of
weapons to Saudi
tyrants, but also cut short his visit to India, the world's largest
democracy, where he was delivering lectures about the paramount
importance of human
rights and civic freedoms, in order to travel to Riyadh to meet with
top U.S. leaders from both political parties to pay homage to the
murderous Saudi
King who had just died (only in the last month of his presidency, with
an eye toward his legacy, did Obama restrict some arms to the Saudis
after allowing
those weapons to freely flow for eighteen months during the
destruction of Yemen).

UK Prime Minister David Cameron – perhaps Obama's only worthy
competitor when it came to simultaneously delivering preening speeches
about human rights
while arming the world's worst human rights abusers – actually ordered
UK flags flown at half-mast in honor of the noble Saudi despot. All of
this took
place at roughly the same time that Obama dispatched his top
officials, including his Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to pay homage
to the rulers of Bahrain
after they and the Saudis crushed a citizen uprising seeking greater freedoms.

In 2012, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa came to
Washington – fresh off of massacring his own citizens seeking greater
freedoms – and,
in the words of Foreign Policy, "he left with hands full of gifts from
the U.S. State Department, which announced new arms sales to Bahrain
today." How
did the Obama administration justify all of this? By invoking exactly
the same rationale Trump cited yesterday for his ongoing support of
the Saudis: that
although the U.S. did not approve of such upsetting violence, its
"national security interests" compelled its ongoing support. From
Foreign Policy (italics
added):

The crown prince's son just graduated from American University, where
the Bahraini ruling family recently shelled out millions for a new
building at AU's
School of International Service. But while he was in town, the crown
prince met with a slew of senior U.S. officials and congressional
leaders, including
Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
John Kerry, Senate
Armed Services Committee ranking Republican John McCain, as well as
several other Washington VIPs.

On Friday afternoon, the State Department announced it was moving
forward on a host of sales to the Bahraini Defense Forces, the
Bahraini National Guard,
and the Bahraini Coast Guard. The State Department said the decision
to move forward with the sales was made solely in the interest of U.S.
national security,
but outside experts see the move as meant to strengthen the crown
prince in his struggle inside the ruling family.

"We've made this decision, I want to emphasize, on national security
grounds," a senior administration official told reporters on a Friday
conference call.
"We've made this decision mindful of the fact that there remain a
number of serious, unresolved human rights issues in Bahrain, which we
expect the government
of Bahrain to address."

In 2011, Americans gathered around their TV sets to cheer the
inspiring Egyptian protesters gathering in Tahir Square to demand the
ouster of the brutal
Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak. Most TV announcers neglected to remind
excited American viewers that Mubarak had managed to remain in power
for so long
because their own government had propped him up with weapons, money
and intelligence. As Mona Eltahawy put it in the New York Times last
year: "Five American
administrations, Democratic and Republican, supported the Mubarak regime."

But in case anyone was confused about the U.S. posture toward this
incomparably heinous Egyptian dictator, Hillary Clinton stepped
forward to remind everyone
of how U.S. officials have long viewed such tyrants. When asked in an
interview about how her own State Department had documented Egypt's
record of severe,
relentless human rights abuses and whether this might affect her
friendship with its rulers, Secretary Clinton gushed: "I really
consider President and
Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often
here in Egypt and in the United States."

How can anyone pretend that Trump's praise for the Saudis is some kind
of aberration when Hillary Clinton literally heralded one of the
planet's most murderous
and violent despots as a personal friend of her family? A Washington
Post Editorial at the time proclaimed that "Clinton continues to
devalue and undermine
the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy" and that "she
appears oblivious to how offensive such statements are to the millions
of Egyptians
who loathe Mr. Mubarak's oppressive government and blame the United
States for propping it up."

But this just shows the repetitive, dreary game U.S. elites have been
playing for decades. Newspaper editorialists and think tank scholars
pretend that
the U.S. stands opposed to tyranny and despotism and feigns surprise
each time U.S. officials lend their support, weaponry and praise to
those same tyrants
and despots.

And lest anyone try to distinguish Trump's statement yesterday on the
ground that it was false – that it covered up for bad acts of despotic
allies by
refusing to admit the Crown Prince's guilt for Khashoggi's murder –
let us recall when Clinton's successor as Secretary of State, John
Kerry, defended
Mubarak's successor, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, by denying that he had
implemented "a coup" when he overthrew Egypt's elected President in
2013. Instead,
proclaimed Kerry, the Sisi-led Egyptian generals, by removing the
elected leader, were simply attempting to "restore democracy" – the
exact same lie told
by the New York Times Editorial Page when right-wing Venezuelan
generals in 2002 removed that country's elected President, Hugo
Chávez, only for that paper
to hail that coup as a restoration of democracy.

In 2015, as the human rights abuses of the Sisi regime worsened even
further, the New York Times reported: "with the United States worried
about militants
in Sinai and Libya who have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State,
American officials also signaled that they would not let their
concerns with human
rights stand in the way of increased security cooperation with Egypt."

Sound familiar? It should: it's exactly the rationale Trump invoked
yesterday to justify ongoing support for the Saudis. In 2015, the
Egyptian dictatorship
– as it was murdering dissidents en masse – openly celebrated the flow
of U.S. weapons to the regime:

None of this recent, ugly history – and this is only a tiny excerpt of
it (excluding, just to name a few examples, U.S. support for the 20th
Century's
greatest monsters from Indonesia's Suharto to death squads in El
Salvador and U.S. killing of its own citizens to U.S. support for
Israeli occupation and
apartheid) – justifies what Trump did on Tuesday. But what it does do
is give the lie to the flamboyant claims that Trump has somehow
vandalized and degraded
U.S. values and U.S. foreign policy rather than what he actually did:
upheld their core tenets and explained them to the public with great
candor and clarity.

This episode also exposes one of the great scams of the Trump era. The
very same people who have devoted their careers to supporting
despotism, empowering
tyranny, cheering on atrocities, and justifying U.S. imperialism are
masquerading as the exact opposite of what they are in order to pave
their path back
to power where they can continue to pursue all of the destructive and
amoral policies they now so grotesquely pretend to oppose.

Anyone who objects to exposure of this deceit – anyone who invokes
empty clichés such as "whataboutism" or "hypocrisy is the tribute vice
pays to virtue"
in order to enable this scam to go undetected – has no business
staking moral claim to any values of truth or freedom. People who
demand that this deceit
go unnoticed are revealing themselves as what they are: purely
situational opponents of tyranny and murder who pretend to hold such
values only when doing
so undermines their domestic political opponents and enables their
political allies to be restored to power where they can continue the
same policies of
murder, tyranny-support and atrocity-enabling that they have spent
decades defending.

If you want to denounce Trump's indifference to Saudi atrocities on
moral, ethical or geo-political grounds – and I find them
objectionable on all of those
grounds – by all means do so. But pretending that he's done something
that is at odds with U.S. values or the actions of prior leaders or
prevailing foreign
policy orthodoxies is not just deceitful but destructive.

It ensures that these very same policies will endure: by dishonestly
pretending that they are unique to Trump, rather than the hallmarks of
the same people
now being applauded because they are denouncing Trump's actions in
such a blatantly false voice, all to mask the fact that they did the
same, and worse,
when they commanded the levers of American power.