Who is Really In Control of the United States?

TND Guest Contributor: Martin Berger |

In all 239 years of America’s existence, it has resisted waging war on other states for only 20 years. Sometimes it seems that the American government simply cannot contain the urge to go to war with some other poor state.

According to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, over the last year the world saw 40 armed conflicts in 27 different locations, and even if 39 can be labeled as “civil wars”, in 13 of them one of the parties received support from external forces. You’ve guessed it right, those “external forces” are more often than not the United States and its allies. Today the United States is directly involved in four military conflicts, while in a handful of other conflicts the fingerprints of Washington can be easily detected. The country that has suffered from American aggression the most is Syria – since the death toll in this Arab state has exceeded the mark of 240,000 people, which means that this conflict has claimed more lives than all the other 39 conflicts on Earth combined.

As it follows from a recent letter by US President Barack Obama to the President pro tempore of the United States Senate Orrin Hatch that was made public, more than 16,750 American commandos are deployed today by the Pentagon in 12 warzones across the world. Additionally, according to the US Ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute, there’s more than 60,000 American soldiers deployed in Europe today.

In an attempt to secure so-called “American hegemony” with bayonets, Washington has been wasting one third of all military spending in the world on expensive weapons, instead of spending this money on the social needs of the American people in a bid to improve their living conditions.

To justify the excessive military spending by the White House, despite the fact that the person that resides in it is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in a desperate attempt to get even more funds allocated to the every greedy military giant, the United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called for a new ground operation in Iraq and Syria. Moreover, he knows exactly who will go to Iraq, it will be “the storied 101st Airborne Division,” as Carter wrote in an article published in Politico. The soldiers of this division previously fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, took part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then until 2006 were based in Mosul.

It should be recalled that Barack Obama along with a number of other officials have repeatedly claimed that the US is not going to get involved in a new large-scale ground war, therefore there will be “no boots on the ground in Syria.” And during the address to the nation on December 7, Obama stated that “spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately will weaken us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam; it’s the lesson of Iraq”, yet it doesn’t seem that this lesson will be heeded any time soon.

However, Ashton Carter’s recent statement clearly shows us who’s boss in Washington, since it’s the arms manufacturing giants that have the final say on everything in today’s America, they are “pulling the strings”, leaving the role of an obedient puppet for whoever is sitting as US President. The statement made by the Secretary of Defense is particularly curious if one is to remember that in accordance with the US Constitution he’s not the commander of the US Armed Forces, in fact, the President is entrusted with this duty. And therefore it was Obama’s call to announce a major change of tactics in the fight against ISIL, unless, of course, he is just a puppet controlled by hidden puppeteers.

If you want to know who these puppeteers are, you won’t be looking for long. Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been pretty vocal in criticizing Obama’s strategy in the Middle East, calling for an all-out assault on Syria. Last November those Senators claimed that the US should triple its military forces in Iraq along with sending a similar number of troops to Syria. Graham went as far as offering a plan for the invasion of Syria, according to which up to 100,000 troops of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey were to be supported by roughly 10,000 American soldiers. Joint interventions of US and Arab troops in Syria have been proposed before, especially by John McCain, who enjoys close ties with Saudi officials that he uses to profit from via military contracts between the US and Saudi Arabia.

The hidden puppeteers are not simply convinced that they enjoy full control over the White House but over the world as well. They have created their own coalition against ISIL, carrying out military operations on the territories of sovereign states without any form of consent, in violation of Article 51 of the UN Charter which clearly prohibits such courses of action without the decision of the UN Security Council. And it is unlikely these “strong-willed” US officials would care to obtain the consent of Iraq or Syria to launch a new military assault on them, assuming also that the UN and its Security Council are useless relics to be easily ignored.

Therefore, Americans and the international community should not be supporting the new lawless adventure of the US military puppeteers, and instead support the call of the news portal AlterNet: «There has to be a point where the painfully dull process of peace is more desirable than belligerently bombing the hell out of other countries. Where we build instead of annihilate—negotiate instead of obliterate. Where politicians boast about the wars they’ve ended instead of the never-ending ones they’ve started. And most importantly we opt not to destabilize yet another region creating more fertile ground for groups like ISIS to thrive. “

As for those warmongers in the United States, Britain, and among submissive American allies that are responsible for armed conflicts, chaos, poverty and hunger, they should eventually be punished by an impartial court, that would be established by the international community.

Martin Berger is a Czech-based freelance journalist and analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.

This work was published at the New Eastern Outlook and is reprinted with permission.