“But you can see the current situation: People love everything except paradise and divine reward and they fear everything except God’s anger and punishment.” Ayatullah Dastghaib Shirazi.
By all appearances, the Washington regime has no fear of anger and punishment by the Almighty or anyone else for that matter. Guided by a defective moral compass that no longer points (and perhaps never pointed) in the direction of truth and is leading the country astray, the U.S. continues to spread chaos and wreak havoc throughout the Middle East. America’s assassination drones are just the latest means being used to achieve its geopolitical agenda of imperial expansion in the energy-rich regions while blatantly disregarding the needs and desires of the people living there.
What has happened to the United States that presents itself to the rest of the world as the quintessence and staunch defender of human rights and justice? Where are the lofty moral values the country purports to revere, defend and unilaterally enforce upon others? Considering its history of slavery and genocide of its Native peoples, one must ask did the United States really ever possess them? Professor Morris Davis, former Executive Director and Counsel of the Crimes of War Education Project asks, “Does the United States have the integrity to lead by example, or has the government engaging in torture become as accepted as a government official lying when the truth is inconvenient?” Consider some of America’s current immoral activities.
The U.S. is fomenting a sectarian civil war in Syria along Sunni-Shi’a-Alawi lines aided by extremist insurgent groups with funding channeled through the Saudis, the corrupt custodians of the Kaaba. Finnian Cunningham of Global Research writes, “In truth, the Western powers and their Arab/Israeli/Turkish proxies have been inflaming violence in Syria with callous disregard for human rights and democracy, with the immediate goal of achieving pliable regime change in Damascus and ultimately likewise in its regional ally, Tehran”. The violence now is spilling over into Lebanon where Tripoli appears to have become a Salafi logistics center.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, apparently without inquiring into the wishes of the Syrian people, shrieks, “Assad must go!” “We are united in support of the Syrian people and in our absolute resolve to see the end of the Assad regime,” she remarked in a meeting with opposition leaders in Paris in July 2012. And in pursuit of that goal, America and its misguided axis of imperial allies--Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar--are actively arming all insurgent groups willing to support Washington’s wars, including former arch enemy Al-Qa’ida! If Madame Secretary is acting in the best interests of the Syrian people, then instead of arming Salafi extremist gangs, why does she not support calls to end the bloodshed and bring the disputing parties to the negotiating table?
And if there is anyone in the State department who, due to distorted reasoning and flawed logic, and despite all evidence to the contrary, truly believes the U.S. is supporting rebels fighting for “democracy” on behalf of the Syrian people, one must ask why, then, is America not supporting similar democratic movements in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Yemen? No, in these countries, the U.S. has supported and continues to support brutal, dictatorial regimes that bow compliantly to the wishes of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis of aggression and hence can crush any opposition with full U.S. blessing.
What of the Palestinians who have suffered under an ongoing occupation in the West Bank and a relentless siege in Gaza while America does not simply look the other way, it actually funds the occupying government’s lethal weaponry? I see no effort to fund and arm members of the Palestinian Resistance who are valiantly fighting against the continuing seizure of their native lands, but the foreign military aid of billions of U.S. dollars--$103.6 billion since 1949-- continues to flow to the Zionist colonizers.
Like the oppressed people of Palestine, Iran has also been under siege by America and its Western “partners” in international crime ever since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Shaking off years of domination and subjugation by the Washington-Tel Aviv Axis, the Iranian people exercised their right of self-determination and instituted an Islamic form of government, which has survived successfully to this day, much to the chagrin of and despite relentless efforts by the U.S. to effect regime change. Iran has suffered from U.S.-sponsored and funded terrorism, from Washington’s unilateral economic sanctions to attacks on her top scientists and research facilities.
Professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh writes, “It is no secret that the ultimate goal of the policy of regime change in the Middle East is to replace the Iranian government with a ‘client regime’ similar to most other regimes in the region.” And how depraved has the U.S. been in pursuit of this goal? The U.S. has funded and trained the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the terrorist organization that found nuclear weapons design documents, which the Zionist spy entity Mossad most likely created, on a stolen allegedly Iranian laptop. The U.S./Israeli allegations that Iran has a nuclear weapons program are based on these concocted documents allegedly found by the MEK.
Likewise, the people of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are subjected to an ever-expanding assassination drone warfare program in order to be protected from the menace of American-induced “terrorism” caused by 30 years of ill-conceived U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan. As Secretary Clinton herself admitted, “Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago”. Washington’s drone wars are currently being propagated in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and many other countries.
What has happened to America’s moral compass that it points toward immoral and illegal assassination drone warfare? According to one unnamed U.S. official, “Killing wanted militants is simply ‘easier’ than capturing them”. Another former U.S. intelligence official admitted, “Everyone has fallen in love with them”. Incredibly, others claim that President Obama chose assassination drone warfare in the Muslim world as a means to bolster America’s image, which was so badly damaged by Bush’s policies of torture and indefinite imprisonment. Imagine that! The U.S. president seems to think assassination drone warfare can improve America’s image! This is absolutely ludicrous.
Consider the moral environment of the assassination drone pilot. Living in a corrupt culture that condones frequent divorce, fornication, homosexual marriage, prostitution and alcohol; a society that has been “pornographized”, as some social scientists say, the drone pilot is ill-equipped to make the life-and-death moral decisions that are required on a daily basis as he plies his deadly trade. Sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned office in an ergonomically designed chair in front of large, colorful computer monitors, he searches for targets while being constantly bombarded by “intel” that must be processed and analyzed. When called upon to kill, just as if he were playing a violent video game, the pilot presses the trigger button on his plastic joystick and unleashes the drone’s lethal payload of missiles, engaging and annihilating the target, which most likely was an innocent group of defenseless civilians. Upon conclusion of his “stressful” shift, the drone pilot climbs into an air-conditioned luxury car and drives home, perhaps stopping on the way for an alcoholic drink at a bar with his fellow defenders of American values. “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” admitted one drone pilot. “I have a duty, and I execute the duty.” What a distortion of moral values!
Perhaps Americans have been polluted by the corruption and immorality of their leaders. Consider the recent examples of debauchery by American Presidents: Clinton’s marital infidelity to his wife and current Secretary of State, Nixon’s abuse of executive power in the Watergate affair, Reagan’s support of death squads in Central America, Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin fabrication, just to name a few. “More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie,” declared Father Miguel D’Escoto, a Catholic priest and former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister in the Sandinista administration.
The epidemic of gun violence is also symptomatic of the moral pollution of American society. America’s love affair with guns and violence reflect a society that is gripped by fear, fanned by corporate interests, not only of imaginary external enemies but of each other as well. Frequent mass shootings occur which are inevitably characterized as isolated incidents executed by mentally disturbed whites, since naturally, if such events were perpetrated by people of color, they would be deemed terrorist attacks. After each shooting incident, such as the recent one in Aurora, Colorado, gun sales skyrocket, something that, of course, profits the ruling elite who are heavily invested in the arms trade. Such is the result of a society whose leaders are beholden to the corporate weapons industry to finance their political campaigns and faithfully serve their masters.
According to a respected homeless services organization in the State of Colorado, there are some 3.5 million homeless people in the United States. If the immoral, corporate-serving U.S. leaders would find the moral fortitude to purchase a home for each one of these unfortunate individuals, the cost assuming $200,000 per home would be $700 billion--equivalent to what the U.S. allocates to its worldwide wars each year! Consider what social and economic benefits such a massive housing program would bring to the American people; instead of war and austerity there would be housing and jobs for all.
None of the above are actions of a moral, rightly guided nation; these are all the acts of a nation that abides by the law of the jungle: a nation that believes might makes right and realpolitik governs international relations. No, the U.S. has lost its moral direction, if it ever had one, for its moral compass is broken or requires adjustment for declination away from morality and justice. And without proper moral direction, the U.S. has become a gargantuan global goliath, wantonly gobbling up others’ resources and killing with imperial impunity in their pursuit.
"Be flexible without being weak, be strong without being violent." - Imam Ali (a.s.)
Tehran Times
2012-08-29
Yuram Abdullah Weiler is a freelance writer and political critic who has written many articles on the Middle East and U.S. policy. A former engineer with a background in mathematics and a convert to Islam, he currently is a columnist and online editor for Tehran Times International Daily Newspaper
