EMPIRE OF CHAOS

COUNTRIES

PAGE 5

IRAN

"Iran suffered a million battle casualties in its eight-year war with Iraq that started in 1980. This gruesome war was instigated by the US, Britain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Iran's new popular Islamic government."

The Saker/unz.com, 2018

"With the Mossadegh overthrow in Iran, the United States served notice that it was not a country to be trusted, not the defender of democracy we portrayed ourselves to be, and that our aim was not to help the Third World. We simply wanted to control resources."

John Perkins in his book "The Secret History of the American Empire"

"Iran is being targeted as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil financial hegemony and global control."

"The U.S. overthrew the democratically elected premier Mohammed Mossadeq and his government in Iran in 1953. In doing so, the United States intervened to rescue the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company."

Peter Dale Scott

IRAQ

"The United States and its officials aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of conduct from August 6, 1990 until this date to impose, maintain and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large US military presence in the region, and dominion and control over its people and resources including oil.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its [former] Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against the population of Iraq.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions."

International Court On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council, Madrid, November 1996

"American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds... I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses... During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium."

James Gilligan, United States Marine Corps, 2008

"The [Iraq] sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention... For more than ten years the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives."

Professor Thomas Nagy

"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. Americans and their British puppets have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East."

British playwright Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Lecture

"One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America's crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq's professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime on a grand scale."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2009

"The United States never intended to rebuild Iraq. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage."

Gen. William McCoy, Army Corps of Engineers

"Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death."

Howard Zinn

"The assault on Fallujah, Iraq, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called "exemplary" or "collective" punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal."

Tom Eley, WSWS, 2010

"It is estimated that 2.38 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003, as a result of the criminal American and British invasion of Iraq. However, that is not the upper number given, which could reach as high as 3.4 million."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"During the 1990s Bill Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the 'no fly zones'. At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media."

John Pilger

"Nothing we had seen or read could have prepared us for this particular form of devastation. The recent conflict in Iraq has wrought near apocalyptic results on the economic infrastructure of what had been a rather urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous.
Iraq imported about 70 per cent of everything. The UN sanctions regime stopped the import of spare parts to maintain the supply of electricity, water and telephones. Dialysis patients died for lack of machine maintenance. Burns units had no rehydration salts, painkillers or antiseptics. Under the 'dual use' paragraph, operating theatres were denied disinfectants because, according to the UN, they could theoretically be used in chemical-weapons manufacture. Additives for water purification fell into the same category. Almost anything that came out of an Iraqi tap soon became lethal.
Within a year, childhood mortality spiralled. 'Baseline mortality for the under-five population rose from 43.2 to 128.5 per thousand,' an independent report concluded. Near-eradicated diseases such as polio, cholera and typhoid returned. Marasmus and kwashiorkor - grotesque wasting diseases associated with starvation - made an appearance. Cancers soared, linked to the depleted uranium weapons used in the 1991 bombardment. The import of cancer drugs was prohibited - the 'dual use' paragraph again. An embargo imposed to force Iraq out of Kuwait quietly strangled a nation where half the population was estimated to be aged under 16."

Special Rapporteur to the UN Martti Ahtisaari, 2005

"Famine threatens four million people in sanctions-hit Iraq - one fifth of the population... The human situation is deteriorating. Living conditions are precarious and are at pre-famine level for at least four million people ... The deterioration in nutritional status of children is reflected in the significant increase of child mortality, which has risen nearly fivefold since 1990."

UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report on the effect of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, September 1995

"Sanctions closed down the entire Iraqi economy and devastated the people. Iraqi families could not buy food or medicine or school books or basic household commodities. Children starved and died. Literacy was wiped out in a single generation. The future of the country was ravaged in all parts. It was deliberate cruelty and a mockery of the humanitarian principles embodied by the United Nations."

Susan Lindauer in her book "Extreme Prejudice"

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it."

Noam Chomsky

"If a private individual were to intentionally kill innocent children, most everyone would recognize that as the epitome of evil. Yet, rarely is there an U.S. op-ed or an editorial commenting on the evil of killing Iraqi children with the sanctions that the U.S. government enforced for more than 10 years.
... During the decade Iraqi children were dying, from U.S. sanctions year after year, there were few op-eds and editorials in the U.S. mainstream press pointing out the evil in killing innocent children. It's almost as if the deaths of those children were considered to be no big deal, especially since the killings were part of an ongoing sanctions policy, which has become a well-established part of U.S. foreign policy. The notion was that killing children by sanctions was different from lining them up against a wall and shooting them or exploding a bombing within their midst.
... The sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s continued killing Iraqi children all the way through 2003, when the U.S. military, using the 9/11 attacks to garner support, invaded Iraq to achieve the regime change that the sanctions - and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children - had failed to achieve. That regime-change invasion has resulted in another million or so dead people, including children, not to mention the number injured, maimed, tortured, assassinated, executed, or exiled or who have had their homes or businesses destroyed."

Jacob G. Hornberger, 2017

"Iraq's post invasion (2003-2007) excess under five mortality has been estimated at over one million. In Afghanistan, post invasion, at 1.9 million (2001-2007)."

Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, 2008

"The Israelis are skillful at exploiting Arab rivalries and turning Arab against Arab. The Kurdish tribes, for example, inhabit the mountains of northern Iraq. Every month, a secret Israeli envoy slips into the mountains from the Iranian side to deliver $50,000 to Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa al Barzani. The subsidy insures Kurdish hostility against Iraq, whose government is militantly anti-Israel."

Jack Anderson, 1972

"There was no one left to kill in Iraq."

General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath
Operation Desert Storm, 2003

"This was an insane war [Iraq] that brought us low economically, morally. ..We went to war against a guy [Saddam Hussein] who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. It was a total pretext. It's inexplicable, and there you go to Cheney, there you go to Bush, there you go to the Jewish neo-cons who wanted to remake the world."

journalist Carl Bernstein, speaking before a roundtable at MSNBC in 2012 about the Iraq War

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. "

Paul Wolfowitz, U. S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2003

"Most people look at Vietnam and Iraq as defeats. But the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, they're doing it in a very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they're making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they're successes from an economic standpoint"

John Perkins

"The United States and its 'coalition' allies attacked Iraq in 1991. Up to a quarter of a million people were killed or died during and immediately after the attack. As a direct result, child mortality in Iraq doubled.
More than 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes, and Iraq's electricity, water, sewage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure have been 'substantially destroyed', producing 'conditions for famine and epidemics'."

John Pilger

"Oil was not the only motivation for the American invasion and occupation [of Iraq] , but the other goals have already been achieved -- eliminating Saddam Hussein for Israel's sake, canceling the Iraqi use of the euro in place of the dollar for oil transactions, expansion of the empire in the Middle East with new bases.
American oil companies have been busy under the occupation, and even before the US invasion, preparing for a major exploitation of Iraq's huge oil reserves. Chevron, ExxonMobil and others are all set to go. Four years of preparation are coming to a head now. Iraq's new national petroleum law -- written in a place called Washington, DC -- is about to be implemented. It will establish agreements with foreign oil companies, privatizing much of Iraq's oil reserves under exceedingly lucrative terms. Security will be the only problem, protecting the oil companies' investments in a lawless country. For that they need the American military close by."

William Blum, 2006

"Kuwaiti oil minister Sheikh Saud Nasir al-Sabah's daughter was the Kuwaiti woman who had told the U.S. Congress in October 1990 that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies from their incubators. Her shocking testimony had been a major factor in getting U.S. popular support for Operation Desert Storm. That incident was later exposed as a PR stunt."

F. William Engdahl

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that."

former Vice President Dick Cheney, on Fox News, June, 1, 2009

"Before the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was a rapidly developing country, with free education, ample electricity, modernized agriculture, and a robust middle class. According to the World Health Organization, 93 percent of the population had access to health care. The devastation of the Gulf War and the sanctions that preceded and sustained such devastation changed all that."

Joy Gordon, Harpers, 2002

"During the Gulf War of 1991 the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems."

Chalmers Johnson

"The allied bombardment had had a "near apocalyptic impact" on Iraq and had transformed the country into a "pre-industrial age nation," which "had been until January a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society."

a UN inspection team, in William Blum's book "Killing Hope"

"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.
An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon.
In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist, in 1982 article for World Zionist Organization

ISRAEL

"Estimates of the Israeli nuclear arsenal range from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of about 500. A staple of the Israeli nuclear arsenal are "neutron bombs," miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long term radiation - in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact."

Michel Chossudovsky

"We have this powerful Israeli lobby, and the people who finance them are a very wealthy, highly influential group of people who happen to be Jewish. They've accumulated this power and wealth, and we are now in a position where we effectively have an elite few who can dictate our foreign policy. It's a foreign policy that's trying to advance the interests of another country - Israel.
... The ruling Jewish elites in America - big powerful Jewish elites with literally billions of dollars in their control - are using that influence because of their desire to advance the state of Israel. These people do not care how many American kids get butchered in Iraq. They do not care. This is of absolutely no concern to them. They are fully ready to get us into a war against Iran, against Syria. They know that American kids will be cannon fodder, and their kids won't be."

Michael Collins Piper

"Israel is simply a fiefdom of the Rothschilds - they created it, they own it, they control it, and they have used that little sliver of land in the Middle East to be the point of conflict with so many other countries."

David Icke, 2016

"Fourteen percent of Israel's industrial labor force is employed in its arms industry. If the armed forces are included, the number rises to 25 percent According to the latest CIA estimates, Israel is the fifth largest exporter of arms in the world, up from its seventh place ranking in 1980. Israel remains the largest supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America."

Clarence Lusane

"By what means has America (and the entire West) been brought to the state that no public man aspires to office, or editor feels secure at his desk, until he has brought out his prayer-mat and prostrated himself to Zion? How have presidents and prime ministers been led to compete for the approval of this faction like bridesmaids for the bride's bouquet? Why do leading men suffer themselves to be paraded at hundred-dollar-a-plate banquets for Zion, or to be herded on to Zionist platforms to receive "plaques" for services rendered?
The power of money and the prospect of votes have demonstrably been potent lures, but in my judgment by far the strongest weapon is this power to control published information; to lay stress on what a faction wants and to exclude from it all that the faction dislikes, and so to be able to give any selected person a "good" or a "bad" press."

Douglas Reed in his book "The Controversy of Zion" - published in the 1950s

"There cannot be the slightest doubt that a state of mind very much like that of Israel now prevails among American Jews. There is a fanatical certainty abroad that there is only one truth and that Israel is the sole custodian of it. No distinction is made between the Jews of the world and Israel, and not even between the Israeli government and Israel. Israeli statesmen and their policies are assumed to be inviolate and above criticism. There is a frightening intolerance of opinions differing from those of the majority, a complete disregard of reason, and a yielding to the emotions of a stampeding herd."

"For the most part, Israel is the subcontractor for American arms to the 'Third World'. There is no terrible regime - Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile during the time of the colonels, Burma, Taiwan, Zaire, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone - there is not one that does not have a major military connection to Israel. So, Israel is a key member of the American empire."

Edward S. Herman

"We have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes."

Ali Abunimah, 2008

"Estimates of the Israeli nuclear arsenal range from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of about 500. Whatever the number, there is little doubt that Israeli nukes are among the world's most sophisticated, largely designed for "war fighting" in the Middle East. A staple of the Israeli nuclear arsenal are "neutron bombs," miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long term radiation - in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact."

Michel Chossudovsky, 2012

"Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. - somewhere around 80% - is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made foreign policy difficult for our government."

Senator J. William Fulbright told CBS Face the Nation on April 15, 1973

"Critically thinking Israelis, a negligible minority, already know the pattern: no matter how extreme our new prime minister is, it won't take more than a couple of months for the media to portray him as the sane, moderate, and pragmatic leader of the political center."

Ran HaCohen, 2009

"Israel is expected to eventually join the European Union. The E.U.'s enlargement is tied into the process of NATO expansion. Israel and the E.U. will both manage, from an economic and political standpoint, the western outer periphery of the "Arc of Instability" under the framework of a Mediterranean Union."

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, 2008

"The Israelis have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance - these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people."

John Pilger

"The U.S.-NATO-Israel axis constitutes the most powerful military alliance in world history. America's allies are the NATO member states, NATO associate member States and partners under the Istanbul Initiative (including Israel), the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Partnership for Peace, and various other bilateral agreements (New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, Mongolia, Singapore). All in all, the U.S.-NATO-Israel military axis includes more than fifty countries."

Michel Chossudovsky in the book "The Global Economic Crisis"

"The real reason why American politicians are so deferential to Israel is the political power of the Israel lobby. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. It is not a single, unified movement with a central leadership, and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that "controls" U.S. foreign policy. It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel's case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state.
The Israel lobby is the antithesis of a cabal or conspiracy; it operates out in the open and proudly advertises its own clout. In its basic operations, the Israel lobby is no different from interest groups like the farm lobby, steel and textile workers, and a host of ethnic lobbies, although the groups and individuals who comprise the Israel lobby are in an unusually favorable position to influence U.S. foreign policy. What sets it apart, in short, is its extraordinary effectiveness."

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 2007

"The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a Thought Police. It is designed to prevent anyone from saying anything critical about the state of Israel, unless it's approved by the ADL in advance. Anyone who even dares to mention the fact that the Israelis have immense power in this country is considered anti-Semitic. So that's what the ADL is. It is a Thought Police."

Michael Collins Piper

"There cannot be the slightest doubt that a state of mind very much like that of Israel now prevails among American Jews. There is a fanatical certainty abroad that there is only one truth and that Israel is the sole custodian of it. No distinction is made between the Jews of the world and Israel, and not even between the Israeli government and Israel. Israeli statesmen and their policies are assumed to be inviolate and above criticism. There is a frightening intolerance of opinions differing from those of the majority, a complete disregard of reason, and a yielding to the emotions of a stampeding herd."

William Zukerman, Jewish Newsletter, 1955

"The Israeli system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua."

Israeli columnist Uri Avner

"Political Zionism is an agency of Big Business. It is being used by Jewish and Christian financiers in the United States and Great Britain, to make Jews believe that Palestine will be ruled by a descendant of King David who will ultimately rule the world. What delusion! It will lead to war between Arabs and Jews and eventually to war between Muslims and non-Muslims. That will be the turning point of history."

Henry H. Klein, 1947

"In the 1860s, the British-Israelite movement was initiated from within Freemasonry.
Its goal was to establish a Jewish-Masonic state in the Turkish province of Palestine... Initially, British Jewish Masonic families like the Rothschilds and Montefiores provided the capital to build the infrastructure for the anticipated wave of immigration. However, luring the Jews to Israel was proving difficult.
They liked European life too much to abandon it. So Europe was to be turned into a nightmare for the Jews."

Barry Chamish

"The U.S.-NATO-Israel axis constitutes the most powerful military alliance in world history. America's allies are the NATO member states, NATO associate member States and partners under the Istanbul Initiative (including Israel), the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Partnership for Peace, and various other bilateral agreements (New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, Mongolia, Singapore). All in all, the U.S.-NATO-Israel military axis includes more than fifty countries."

Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall

"We have this powerful Israeli lobby, and the people who finance them are a very wealthy, highly influential group of people who happen to be Jewish. They've accumulated this power and wealth, and we are now in a position where we effectively have an elite few who can dictate our foreign policy. It's a foreign policy that's trying to advance the interests of another country - Israel.
... The ruling Jewish elites in America - big powerful Jewish elites with literally billions of dollars in their control - are using that influence because of their desire to advance the state of Israel. These people do not care how many American kids get butchered in Iraq. They do not care. This is of absolutely no concern to them. They are fully ready to get us into a war against Iran, against Syria. They know that American kids will be cannon fodder, and their kids won't be."

Michael Collins Piper

"After World War II, Jews rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lipset and Raab [Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews arid the New American Scene (Cambridge: 1995)], per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews; sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics are Jewish, as are 20 percent of professors at major universities; and 40 percent partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington."

Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab in Norman G. Finkelstein's book "The Holocaust Industry"

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