While U.S. officials are cheering the inability of the Russian military to quickly conquer Ukraine, ironically it is also a big nightmare for them. That’s because an essential part of their strategy is to present Russia as a new (and old) big, scary official enemy of the United States, one that can be used to justify ever-increasing budgets for the U.S. national-security establishment and its ever-growing army of voracious contractors that have become dependent on feeding from the public, taxpayer-funded trough.
In other words, the idea is to inculcate the old Cold War fear within the American people that “The Russians Are Coming!”—after they first take over Eastern Europe and Western Europe, South America, Central America, and Mexico. Oh, I almost forgot Cuba too! And then they’ll come and get us, take over the reins of the federal government, and bring communism to America’s socialist public-school system.
This process necessarily entails demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He’s the new Saddam!,” the U.S. mainstream press and American statists are exclaiming! Well, okay, they’re not saying exactly that. They are saying that Putin is the new Hitler. But hey, let’s not forget, they were also saying that Saddam was the new Hitler. So, if Saddam was the new Hitler and Putin is the new Hitler, then isn’t that the same thing as saying Putin is the new Saddam?
As I point out in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story (available for purchase at Amazon), a national-security state always needs official enemies (or big crises, or both), but with one caveat: they have be big, scary ones. If they are little ones, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro, Americans don’t get as scared, in which case it makes it more difficult to get Congress to keep increasing the amount of taxpayer largess flooding into the coffers of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
It’s easy to forget how Saddam became a big, scary official enemy of the United States, one who was used to scare Americans to death for more than a decade. From 1947 to 1989, the official bugaboo was “godless communism” and Russia. Well, okay, it was actually the Soviet Union, but Russia was the principal member and the driving force of the Soviet Union. In fact, the reason that the U.S. government was converted in 1947 from a limited-government republic to a national-security state form of government was that there was supposedly an international communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia — yes, the same Russia that is now, once again, a big official enemy of the United States and being used, once again, to justify ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess flooding into the national-security trough.
Once the Soviet Union unilaterally declared an end to the Cold War in 1989, the U.S. national-security establishment needed a new official enemy. Enter Saddam Hussein. For more than a decade — 1990 to 2003 — there was a U.S. obsession and deep fear of Saddam. “Saddam is coming to get us!” U.S. officials cried. “He’s going to unleash weapons of mass destruction on us.”
The propaganda was relentless, going on day after day for more than ten years. Americans were going nuts. The propaganda even got to one of our supporters here at FFF. He telephoned me one day and exclaimed, “Why don’t we just invade Iraq today and take him out?” He had to wait until the 9/11 attacks for that to happen.
An irony that many Americans have long forgotten is that during the previous decade — the 1980s — Saddam was an official friend of the Pentagon and the CIA. In fact, he was such a good friend that the U.S. was furnishing him with biological and chemical weapons so that he could use them to kill Iranians.
Obviously, there is a double irony here, given the situation in Ukraine. Today, the Russians are accusing the U.S. government of having a chemical and biological weapons program in Ukraine. President Biden is denying that, in turn accusing Russia of planning to employ chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine.
For its part, the mainstream press is rallying to President Biden, exclaiming that it is inconceivable that the U.S. government would do something that evil. The idea is that our national-security establishment is good while the Russian national-security establishment is bad.
But then, how do they explain the biological and chemical weapons that the U.S. was providing Saddam during the 1980s when he was an official friend of the Pentagon and the CIA? Take a look at this list of articles that I compiled in 2003 under the title, “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction?” Some of the links are now dead but a sufficient number of them are still active to establish that, yes, the United States was delivering biological and chemical agents to the U.S. government’s official friend and ally Saddam Hussein (who later was converted into “a new Hitler”) so that he could use them to kill Iranians.
Why Iranians? Because the Iranian people had had the audacity in 1979 to oust from power the brutal pro-U.S. dictator, the Shah of Iran, that the CIA had installed into power in 1953 in the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy. The CIA and the Pentagon never forgave the Iranian people for doing that, which is why they wanted Saddam to have biological and chemical weapons to kill Iranians. It’s also why they continue to enforce a brutal system of sanctions against the Iranian people today.
What will U.S. officials do if Russia is unable to quickly conquer Ukraine? How will they continue to scare the American people with their official-enemy racket int order to justify their ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess? Well, I suppose there is always Red China. The communists are always a good scary standby to rely on. Maybe even Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam. But not Venezuela because U.S. officials are currently in the process of converting Maduro from the ranks of official enemy to the ranks of official friend.