General Wesley Clark retired four-star general who was the supreme allied commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. He said an unnamed Pentagon official, just after the September 11th attacks, talked about a memo that said the U.S. planned to take out seven countries in five years, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.
Noam Chomsky talking:
The goal of U.S. policy for decades has been to control and dominate those countries. But the Bush administration was more extreme. They thought they could actually just, as they put it, “take ’em out” and forcefully impose our own regimes—not that that would be anything new. There’s a long list of similar cases, going back to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954. There was an assault against—major assault against Indonesia in 1958, an effort to strip away the outer islands where the resources are, and—because they were concerned about too much independence in Indonesia. That failed. Invasion of Cuba failed. The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years. The U.S. supported the Mobutu dictatorship. Now it’s maybe the worst place in the world. And on right through, case after case. This is standard U.S. policy. The Bush administration went beyond. They were more extreme in their goals and their actions. And they had to pull back, because that was just beyond U.S. capacity.
Iraq—the Iraq War was a very serious defeat for the United States, unlike the Vietnam War. In the case of Indochina, it’s called defeat, but that only means that the U.S. did not achieve its maximal objectives. It did achieve its major objectives, as McGeorge Bundy well understood. It had prevented a Vietnam from moving on a path of independent development, which might have had this contagious effect that Kissinger was concerned with. As it was put at the time, one rotten apple may spoil the barrel, meaning just what Arthur Schlesinger and others said. If you allow independent taking matters into your own hand in one place and it works, others will try to emulate it, system will erode—a standard principle for systems of power. The godfather of the Mafia understands it perfectly well. In the Mafia system, if some small storekeeper decides not to pay protection money, the money may not mean anything to the godfather, but he’s not going to let him get away with it. And, in fact, he’s not just going to go in and send his goons to get the money; he’s also going to beat him to a pulp, because others have to understand that disobedience is not tolerated. In international affairs, that’s called “credibility.” The bombing of Kosovo, Wesley Clark’s bombing of Kosovo, was the same. After other—there were pretexts, but they collapsed, and the final one, as Tony Blair and George Bush said, was we have to maintain the credibility of NATO. NATO had issued edicts, and we must ensure that they’re obeyed. And NATO, of course, does not mean Norway; it means the United States.
the first 9/11, the one in Chile, which was a much worse attack, by any dimension. But the one here was very significant. It was a major terrorist act, thousands of people killed. It’s the first time since the War of 1812 that U.S. territory had been attacked. The United States has had remarkable security, and this, therefore, was—aside from the horrible atrocity—a very significant, historical event. And it changed attitudes and policies in the United States quite considerably. In reaction to this, the government was able to ram through laws, PATRIOT Act, others, that sharply constrained civil liberties. It was able to provide pretext for invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, destruction of Iraq. The consequences have spread through the region. And it provides—it’s the basis for Obama’s massive terrorist war, the drone wars, the most extreme terrorist campaign that’s underway now, maybe most extreme in history. And the justification for it is the same: the second 9/11, 9/11/2001. So, yes, it’s had enormous effects on the society, on its—on attitudes, on policies. Many victims throughout the world can testify to that.
Syria right now is plunging into suicide. If the negotiations options that Lakhdar Brahimi and Russia and others have been pressing, if that doesn’t work, Syria is moving towards a kind of very bloody partition. It’s likely that the Kurdish areas, which already are semi-independent, will move towards further independence, probably link up with Iraqi Kurdistan, adjacent to them, maybe make some arrangements with Turkey—those are already in process—and the rest of Syria, what remains, will be divided between a bloody, murderous Assad regime and a collection of rebel groups of varying kinds, ranging from secular democratic to murderous, brutal terrorists. That looks like the outcome for Syria.
There is another part of Syria which is not talked about. It’s occupied by Israel and annexed by Israel. It’s the Golan Heights, annexed in violation of explicit Security Council orders not to annex it. Their credibility doesn’t matter, because Israel is an ally. So that’s another part of Syria.
That brings us to Israel-Palestine. Just a couple of days ago, Secretary Kerry, Secretary of State Kerry, appealed to the European Union to continue to support illegal, criminal Israeli settlement projects in the West Bank—wasn’t put in those words, but the way it was put is that Europe had taken the quite appropriate step of trying to draw back from support for Israeli operations in the illegal settlements—incidentally, that the settlements are illegal is not even in question. That’s been determined by the highest authorities—the Security Council of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. In fact, up until the Reagan administration, the U.S. also called them illegal. Reagan changed that to “an obstacle to peace,” and Obama has weakened it still further to “not helpful to peace.” But the U.S. is virtually alone in this. The rest of the world accepts the judgment of the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, that the settlements are illegal, not just the expansion of the settlements but the settlements themselves. And Europe had pulled back from support for the settlements, and Kerry called on Europe not to do that, because the pretext was that this would interfere with the so-called peace negotiations that he’s set up, which are a total farce. I mean, the peace negotiations are carried out under preconditions, U.S.-imposed preconditions, which virtually guarantee failure. There are two basic preconditions.
One precondition is that the U.S. run them. The U.S. is a participant, not neutral. The other is that Israeli expansion of settlements must continue. No peace negotiations can continue under those conditions.
— source democracynow.org