Bled Dry

July 2014

[An Overview of our current Predicament]

“Though the British race will undoubtedly continue to rule the world, it will presently be from the other side of the Atlantic...the genius of our people can exert itself as well on the banks of the Ohio, or the Mississippi, as on the banks of the Thames, and rule the world from the White House at Washington with as much propriety as from the Palace of St. James.”

--The Illustrated London News, Christmas 1849

“We are a part and a great part of Greater Britain, which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet.”

--The New York Times, June 1897

"The Foreign Office is a dreadful place and responsible for much of the world's misery."

--Sir Henry Channon, June 1939

“The main objective in American foreign policy since 1900 has been the preservation of the British Empire.”

--American historian Charles Callan Tansill, 1952

***

We are witnessing the slow-motion collapse of the second Anglo-Saxon imperium in less than a hundred years. There was something called Pax Britannica under the reign of Queen Victoria, a truly amazing transcontinental empire without peer in world history. That era was England's apogee. Then, after the Queen's diamond jubilee in June 1897, England's prospects darkened, at first imperceptibly.

In the immediate aftermath of those two stupendous British Empire wars of the 20th Century--now known as World War I and World War II--both conveniently and entirely blamed on Germany, everything came crashing down. In short order, England was reduced to a near-nullity, due to the collective hubris and fatheadedness of its "elites".

The torch was opportunistically grabbed by the second "Anglo-Saxon" power, in the person of our great white father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his crew of undercover Soviet agents and balmy, starry-eyed Anglophiles.

The upshot was apparent at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in July 1944. It was here that the victors of the second European blood bath sat down to decide what the spoils of war were going to be, and who got what.

England, under the leadership of that unbalanced mountebank, Winston Churchill, was only a nominal victor, a hanger-on, a sideshow. The true victors were Washington, Moscow, world communism and Zionism.

Washington held all the cards outside the communist world, since old Europe and Japan had been left in shambles, obliterated, and partly incinerated by conventional carpet bombing and then the A-Bomb.

The once mighty British Empire of palm and pine was now bankrupt and deflated, thanks to the ill-advised decisions of Churchill and the wholesale folly of Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey before Churchill.

Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, is cited in a New York Times article dated October 26th, 2012, suggesting that anybody who reads the recently-uncovered transcripts of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference would discover the British Empire disintegrating before his eyes.

The same Benn Steil has now written a book, The Battle of Bretton Woods. Tony Barber, the esteemed European editor of the Financial Times, reviewed it in the FT weekend edition of February 9th/10th, 2013. Barber remarks that "...Benn Steil explains how two world wars in 31 years bled Britain dry, leaving it with minimal influence over the new international economic and monetary order established by US policymakers in the mid-1940's."

Ironically, the gentleman representing the US at Bretton Woods was Soviet master spy, Harry Dexter White, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Representing Britain was the celebrity economist, John Maynard Keynes. Alas, the urbane Englishman was reduced to "...the status of an articulate annoyance."

Keynes had warned the Foreign Office not to let the US "...exploit the war as an opportunity for picking the eyes out of the British Empire." But at that point, what choice did John Bull have? None, really. Keynes was living in a vanished dream world of the past. England had self-destructed. The Great Game was over. Jingoistic blind men like Churchill had imploded the British Empire and inadvertently created Little England in its place.

In the same FT article, Barber goes on to review another book on a related topic: "In The Leaderless Economy, Peter Temin and David Vines extend the story that Steil concludes at Bretton Woods, charting the decline and fall of the US-dominated international order that it inaugurated. They contend that the world has not recovered from the banking crisis that erupted in 2008 largely because, unlike in the 1940s, no nation is powerful enough to guide the global economy towards prosperity."

Barber quotes the authors, Professors Temin and Vines: "Like Britain roughly a century earlier, America has become part of the problem, not the solution." It is unclear to me what exactly is being referenced here. The colossal stupidity relating to England's participation in the Great War of August 1914? The disgraceful Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and its ruinous reparations regime? The inability of England to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s? Or finally, British insolvency at the end of the Second World War?

Let's say all four. To be sure, the key to everything, right down to the present moment, remains the Great War of 1914 and its immediate aftermath, which is to say, the Treaty of Versailles. That explication is for another day.

Does the average American realize that he and she are being bled dry by their own "elites" who suffer from a similar myopia and arrogance as those blockheads in Whitehall who gratuitously catapulted England into two world wars? Of course not. How could they? The situation is being kept under wraps by the perpetrators.

Those whose interests are being advanced directly and indirectly by the current state of affairs do not want the music to stop. Why should they blow the whistle on themselves, and stop the game? Instead, they prefer to go with the flow. Everyone in Washington follows the line of least resistance.

Remember the "Peace Dividend"? That was supposed to be America's reward for winning the Cold War back in 1989/1990. The general idea was that resources would be freed up to use on the home front. But something happened to derail the dividend.

What was it? Oh, yes. Saddam Hussein invaded the city-state of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Kuwait used to be a province of Iraq, an artificial British Empire creation. Saddam had misinterpreted the mixed signals sent from his then-ally, America.

Washington had abetted Iraq's bloody war on Iran for nearly a decade to weaken both sides. With Iraq's annexation of Kuwait, Washington was off to the races again. A full-blown crusade was the result.

In the process, half a million Iraqi children were left dead due to a maniacal economic embargo imposed by US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Then, America got hit with the terrorist atrocity of 9/11. Then, a disarmed and starved Iraq was falsely blamed for 9/11. It was targeted for "shock and awe" and overrun as part of the Global War on Terror in 2003.

GWOT was the private agenda war masterminded by the Neocons--the so-called “neoconservatives”--for those useful idiots Dick Cheney & G.W. Bush during the Cheney Regency. That private agenda war continues unabated under Barack “Peace Prize” Obama, who is generally considered to be a “progressive” as well as a man of mystery.

Concurrently, Afghanistan/Pakistan have become a battleground and a hotbed of terrorism. It remains a quagmire for American and NATO troops on the ground, while drones scatter death from the sky.

Meanwhile, as if more headaches and hysteria were needed, Washington policymakers shamelessly repeat the false accusation that Iran is running a nuclear weapons program with the intent to nuke Israel, maybe even America. The lesson is clear. The more a lie is repeated, the sooner it will be believed.

G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama all knew that the accusation of a nuclear-weaponized Iran was bunk. Their own intelligence community told them so in writing. And so did Seymour Hersh in the pages of The New Yorker. No matter. The establishment media does not bark. It is on a tight leash, to which it has become accustomed.

The campaign against Iran is a rerun of Iraq. What could be more obvious? The same formula. The powers-that-be are intent upon destroying Iran, just like they did to Iraq and are doing to Syria. Divide and rule. It is yet another huge U.S. foreign policy scandal staring us in the face.

Finally, just the other day somewhere in Palestine, President Barack "Drone King" Obama fulsomely embraced Theodor Herzl and his acolytes, thereby rationalizing and condoning the dispossession of Palestinians forever. Who noticed? And who in America cares?

True to form, it was the line of least resistance as well as Obama’s ticket to the greatest personal reward now and, most importantly, post-Presidency. Do you think Mr. Peace Prize wants to end up like Jimmy Carter? Of course not. Barack’s templates are those opportunistic profiteers, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

The United States is at war, all right. You can trace it right back to 1898--The Spanish-American War, and to 1917--Woodrow Wilson’s entry into World War I. By Jingo, we are consumed by yet another grandiose crusade for reasons that make no sense for America, and can only be explained as being part of a hidden agenda.

In sum, we are being bled dry just like the British Empire before us. Chalk up a second, global Anglo-Saxon ascendancy wrecked by fatuous politicians without shame or brains. It was your country.

*****

Related: “Ten Years after the Invasion, Did we win the Iraq War?” by Andrew Bacevich, The Washington Post, March 8th, 2013. Excerpt:

“Next year marks the centennial of the conflict once known as the Great War. Germany lost that war. Whether France and Britain can be said to have won in any meaningful sense is another matter. Besides planting the seeds for an even more horrific bloodletting just two decades later, the fighting of 1914-1918 served chiefly to provide expansion-minded British politicians with a pretext for carving up the Ottoman Empire. It proved a fateful move.

“What London wanted from this new Middle East that it nonchalantly cut and pasted was profit and submission; what it got was resentment and resistance, yielding a host of intractable problems that in due time it bequeathed to Washington. In effect, victory in 1918 expanded Britain’s imperial domain only to accelerate its demise, with the United States naively assuming the mantle of imperial responsibility (euphemistically termed “leadership”). Thank you, Perfidious Albion.”

Update: “Her Majesty’s Annual Gothic Horror Movie”--RT, May 9th, 2013.

Update: “The U.S. has spent $8 Trillion protecting the Straits of Hormuz”--OilPrice.com, May 9th, 2013.

Update: “AUMF, Never-ending War, and America’s Instruments of Tyranny”--AntiWar.com, May 16th, 2013.