[Salon] Blinken's Tour

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

FM: John Whitbeck

Tony Blinken's whistle-stop tour of seven Arab countries is being marketed as an effort to prevent the current "war" from "spreading".

That sounds nice. It isn't.

The U.S. government does not advocate a ceasefire. Indeed, it has prevented the UN Security Council for calling for one, while the State Department has circulated internal warnings against using the terms "de-escalation/ceasefire", "end to violence/bloodshed" and "restoring calm" and the White House press secretary has branded calls for a ceasefire by some progressive members of Congress "repugnant" and "disgraceful".

The U.S. government simply wants to discourage or prevent any other country or group from intervening in support of the Palestinians and thereby complicating Israel's successful perpetration of the genocidal massacre of Gazans which is its publicly proclaimed intention and the Nakba-like mass expulsion of Palestinians which is its widely suspected intention.

The role of the U.S. government, not for the first time, constitutes moral bankruptcy on steroids, and the governments of America's European vassal states, trotting obediently behind their American and Israeli masters, are no better.

In an article published in 2001, I wrote: "The United States would probably give unqualified support to Israel even if it pushed three million Palestinians, live, through a meat-grinder."

I never believed that the Zionist regime would choose that method for achieving a final solution to its "Palestinian problem", but the horrors which we appear destined to witness in the days and weeks ahead will likely come closer than anything we have seen before, and the United States will be just as responsible and just as complicit.