Don’t be fooled by Antony Blinken’s crocodile tears
JVL Introduction
This article predates the UN Security Council’s vote for a ceasefire. The suspicion voiced in it is as relevant as ever.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, urges us not to be fooled by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s apparent sympathy for Palestinian victims of Israel’s war on Gaza.
He may well care about them, but not enough to break with “the United States’ enduring bipartisan tradition of paying lip service to human rights, international law, and democracy, all while supporting oppressive regimes loyal to its geopolitical interests.”
Henry Kissinger developed the craft of duplicity in the seventies and eighties. Blinken, argues Kenney-Shawa, is finetuning it.
RK
This article was originally published by the Nation on Fri 22 Mar 2024. Read the original here.
Don’t be fooled by Antony Blinken’s crocodile tears
The secretary of state is very good at projecting empathy about the horror in Gaza. But his actions speak much louder than his words.
Loading article text…
I marvel at the fact that there are still people who believe that the US stands for either justice and/or freedom. As Chomsky has shown, every post US WW11 American president would be indictable if the Nuremberg principles were to be applied.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc&list=PL8PCAjP2QuKBkfwvfdnkRQzhRqs9H8EB0&index=5
This rather old video ends with Clinton. What a field day Noam would have had with the presidents that followed!
As for that embodiment of evil, Henry Kissinger, this is what he had to say about the US enabled overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
What always mystifies me is that, despite apparently large scale articulate dissent in the US, we still get the Reds v Blues circus every fourth year. Why isn’t it possible to form some sort of meaningful opposition? At least the Americans demonstrate freedom of speech.
The obvious answer is money, but there must be more too it than that.
Perhaps Americans are totally obsessed by circuses. The notion of ‘manufacturing consent’ can’t really explain the phenomenon.
It says a lot about ‘democracy’ if the answer to the world’s problems is a choice between Biden and Trump!
To me, Blinken seemed to be Biden’s delegate who became increasingly aware – while clocking up thousands of air miles and weeks of frustration – that the US approach had nothing he could sell to ANY of the parties.
When that happens in normal negotiating situations, you change your approach or you withdraw from the negotiations. Blinken did neither.
Was that because NOTHING Blinken reported and recommended to Biden had any effect on Biden’s rigid thinking? Or was it because Blinken couldn’t allow himself to learn from what he heard and saw; nor to report it to his “boss”?