Extracts from Daniel J Levinson, in Bramson and Goethals, "War", 1968.

Levinson refers to the people of the USA as "American", ignoring most of the nation of the continent of America ias if they do not exist. It was typical of thw time and remains so for many. In these extracts I try to remind people, at the risk of being tedious,  that there are more than just US Americans on that huge continent, even though the Monroe Doctrine calls it the USA's "back yard" They are, in Levinson's terms mere "outgroups".

Levinson extracts...

»[US] American people tend to be relatively unsophisticated about and only partially involved in foreign policy issues.

The [US] American nation as a symbol is glorified and idealised; it is regarded as superior to other nations in all important respects...
Like other forms of ethnocentrism, [nationalism] is based on a rigid and pervasive distinction between ingroups and outgroups. The primary ingroup in this case is the [US] American nation: all other nations are potential outgroups...
Other nations are seen as inferior, envious and threatening. At the worst, they are likely to attack us; at best, they seek alliances only to pursue their own selfish aims and to "play us for a sucker". Ethnocentric ideas about human nature rationalize a belief in the inevitability of war.
"Human nature being what it is and other races being what they are", so the reasoning goes, 'some nation is bound to attack us sooner or later'. Given this "jungle" conception of international relations, our best policy is to be militarily strongest of all nations so that no one will attack us.

Perhaps the two main forms that [US} American nationalism has taken are isolationism and imperialism, though the two often go together. The guiding image of isolationism has been that of "Fortress America"; its aim is a nation which is militarily impregnable and culturally isolated. Imperialism on the other hand, is prepared to make foreign alliances and commitments, and it frequently uses internationalist terminology. Its aim, however, is the kind of "American Century" in which the development and and reconstruction of other nations can proceed only in terms set by us, for our supposed economic and strategic advantage. Isolationism and imperialism sometimes merge into a single approach as the lines of [US] American defence are conceived to to move outward into Europe and Asia as we extend support for all governments, whatever their character, in exchange for military support.

Nationalists and internationalists show characteristic differences in ideology spheres apparently far removed from foreign policy and intergroup relations. Nationalism is associated, for example, with an autocratic orientation toward child-rearing, husband-wife relations, and other aspects of family life. Nationalists are inclined to conceive of the family in hierarchical terms. They regard the husband as properly dominant over the wife, the parents as strong authorities requiring obedience and respect above all from their children. They tend to be moralistic and disciplinarian in their child-rearing methods and to be guided by rigidly conventionalized definitions of masculinity and femininity.
Nationalism is associated with certain patterns of of religious ideology, notably those that may be characterised as fundamentalistic or conventionalistic. In these religious orientations God is regarded as a kind of power figure [father] who rewards the virtuous and punishes the sinful and who can be directly appealed to or ingratiated. Great emphasis is placed on the efficacy of ritual, and the  precepts of ingroup religious authority are taken literally and unquestioningly.

Nationalism appears most commonly within an autocratic approach to the social world. This approach embraces not only the domain of international relations but the individual's views concerning religion, family, politics, and other aspects of social life as well.

The classic description of [US] American character by de Tocqueville, Bryce and others have brought out two sharply contrasting sides. On the one hand they, they find such traits as anxious conformism, emphasis on socially defined success, a tendency to escape into the crowd rather than look within, and emphasis of work over leisure, on quantity over quality, on varied activity rather than deep experience. [On the other hand are some equalitarian traits actually largely appearing within the overall authoritarian condition].«

US Policy in the Middle East and the Rise of Terrorism

Professor Ramadani began his talk saying he would concentrate on two aspects of US policy in the Middle East:
1. the general political aspects
2. the human cost, which has fallen on people in the Middle East from Afganistan to Somalia.

US propaganda escapes these consequences by portraying the events as a series of mistakes for which the US is not responsible because everyone knows they enter into these interventions for the very best of intentions. In fact, they are not mistakes, at all. They may not come out as they would ideally wish but they are nonetheless happy with the results because the true aims are to suit US monopoly capitalism and imperialism:
1. It suits US capitalism because it is the biggest of the world's suppliers of weapons
2. It suits US imperialism because it allows the US and its puppets to control resources that properly belong to other people.
The Western media mainly omit the true reasons or throw them in as disjointed snippets and soundbites which are deliberately confusing, hardly join together to reveal the proper story, and consequently amount to obfuscation and lying. Truth is lost in chaos. Confusion and the prevailing--but weakening--good will towards government and the media.

US interventions go back decades, even to before the War (WWII). President Franklin D Roosevelt declared at that time that defence of Saudi Arabia was part of the defence of the USA--because of its oil! Post WWII, during the Cold War with communism, Saudi Arabia and then Israel became client states of the USA in the Middle East, so defence of both became "defence of the USA", and Saudi Arabia became important in the USA's fight against communism in the Middle East. To that end, US policy was to build a single Islamic state in the Middle East as a bulwark against communism. Thus Saudi Arabia was always influential in the USA's Middle Eastern policy but was always cagey and secretive about its role which has only become evident in public recently.

Of course, the Arab Saudi princes have their own objectives which do not always tally with those of the US, so that the US finds it necessary to tick off the Saudi rulers from time to time, and local nationalist revolutions also gave the Saudi princes some leaway because the US was desperate to keep them under control, and consequently Saudi Arabia and even more so, Israel, found they had increasing independence and even power over the US.

Public opinion in the USA prevented the launching of anti-nationalist actions at the drop of a hat, and so the great imperial power had to rely increasingly on its client states. Yet with the collapse of communism and particularly the USSR, the USA remained the world's only super power, and some in the US hoped for a "peace dividend". But the military industrial complex in the US would hear nothing of it. US rulers sought to flex its muscles on the world stage.

Contrary to agreements with the USSR, which abandoned the Warsaw military pact between the communist countries, the US expanded its own Western military pact, NATO, to incorporate many of the former communist countries, right up to the borders of Russia. Among the Washington political elite, the neocons formulated the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) as its historical opportunity for imperial domination of the whole world, including military dominance and technological dominance. Then came the aggressive administration of G W Bush, which used the tragedy of 9/11 to launch the war to dominate Afghanistan because of its strategic position in central Asia and its valuable mineral resources.

Having set the historic scene, the speaker showed the first of several illustrative videos, first of retired US general Wesley Clark, dated to 2 March, 2007. The video filmed by the US public affairs TV channel, Democracy Now, proved that the US planned to attack 7 countries in the Middle East in 5 years, ending with the conquest of Iran. The trouble about Iran, besides its geographical position, is its independent stance vis-à-vis the US, its revolution of 1979 having kicked out the US puppet king, the Shah of Iran. Consequently, the US foreign agencies like the CIA and others have fomented domestic troubles, ethnic problems and most recently hatred across the West because of the unsupported allegations, from Israel among others, that the Iranians are trying to build nuclear weapons.

The largely neocon administration of G W Bush launched the PNAC with its attack on Iraq, supposedly for its involvement in the 9/11 atrocity, despite knowing that Iraq was not involved but that the Saudis were very much so. A CNN video of the US "shock and awe" murderous bombing of the 5 or 6 million population of Baghdad followed, by way of illustrating the continuing of the conquest project by deliberate paralysis of the people by military terror, and to impress the world by the irresistible might of US power.

Though nominally long over, the war still goes on, not only in the multiply sectarian strife between many different factions including the Daesh (ISIS), financed and empowered largely from Saudi Arabia, but also in the many deaths resulting from the disruption to such essential services as electricity and water supplies, and the deaths still occurring from the callous use by the US of depleted uranium weapons leaving behind radioactive residues with very long half lives. The stories spread in the media that the war was quickly and almost painlessly ended was simply false propaganda--misinformation!

Capitalists cannot adequately take resistance to their colonial ambitions into account. It is a perpetual trait of imperialists that they underestimate or fail to accept the ability of oppressed people to resist their oppressors, and actually the US was bogged down in Iraq without remotely achieving the peace it supposedly desired. The US underestimated the determination of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan they had hoped to subdue and colonise easily.

Of course the US would not give up, so took to the idea of financing a proxy war using regional powers as a replacement for their direct involvement. They subsidised local terrorism, or made use of their regional puppets like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to act on their behalf. Western media made out that terrorism was a blowback against US policy in the Middle East but in fact the US was encouraging it so that they could perpetuate destructive wars against the local nations and their leaders whom the US wanted to subvert in pursuit of its Project for a New American Century. The notion had actually been used in the area initially when the US supported the growth of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, financed by the CIA and Saudi Arabia, to destabilise the Russian backed communist government there. They were to become the Taliban under the control of the Saudi prince, Osama Bin Laden, but the tactic worked because the Russians were forced to withdraw.

Al Qaida was the mysterious name the US and its media used to hide the reality of the terrorists. It stood for all of them and any of them, according to circumstances, and capable therefore of hiding every US planned atrocity as well as those it disavowed, and became singularly useful after the Iraq war. Because the US could not decimate Iraq it turned to the old imperial stand by, divide and rule.

Useful in this respect was the Saudi Arabian royal family and its preferred sect of Islam, Wahhabism, considered by most Moslems not to be Islamic at all because of its predilection for violence. This sadistic mid eighteenth century reactionary Islamic sect was a tool of the Saud family in its conquest of the Arabian peninsula, and subsequent acceptance by the imperialists of the West as the legitimate rulers of the country whence its name Saudi Arabia! Both the family and the Wahhabis remain brutal, the reason why both are happy to persist in chopping off heads--the Saudi kings annually chop off more heads than the better publicised ISIS terrorists whose brutality originates in the Wahhabi mores and traditions of the Saud family. Their brutality and greed are now being illustrated in their unwarranted attacks on the poverty stricken Yemenis, again pleasing their protectors in the USA.

Western media propagate the idea that Islam itself is violent when the people of the Middle East subject to the supposed Islamic Caliphate, themselves largely Moslems, suffer far more than has the West through Wahhabi terrorist attacks. The ISIS terrorists and their foolish followers have regularly blown up mosques full of innocent worshippers and perhaps even more regularly markets frequented often by Shia Moslems whom Wahhabis particularly hate--and the Saud family too--the reason they hate the Iranians, something that suits the US Americans who also hate Iran and Iranians. It is another piece of suspicious evidence that after the Iraq war, the US caught the present leader of the Daesh, Baghdadi, but he was never handed over to the Iraqi government, but instead reappeared as a senior member of ISIS.

In Syria, the intervention began in 2003 not 2011, the date of the supposed "peaceful" demonstration against Assad, when several of the Syrian police were assassinated. The previous 8 years had been spent by the agencies of the USA offering sabotage and generally disruptive activities--purporting to be for more democracy--in an attempt to destabilise the regime. Thus we arrived at the present situation, which, far from being a civil war between good terrorists simply wanting better democracy and reviled Assad supporters, is an attack on the Assad regime's secular state by US, Saudi and Turkish backed Wahhabi fanatics who would impose their own brand of extreme Islam if Assad and the Syrian people were to submit.

In the Middle East generally and Syria particularly, because it was a religiously diverse country, whence the need for the state to be secular (as it is here in the UK), there were usually more than one religious sect but historically they did not fight each other. It is a tribute to the peaceful nature of Islam. Terroristic violence is new to the region.

Two more illustrative videos were shown, one again of General Wesley Clark admitting that the US had the policy of recruiting zealots as local disruptive agents, and one of Vice President Biden admitting that the USA used local proxies, the Saudis and Turks. Biden emphasised that the USA did not supply money or weapons to the terrorists but the local countries did, but this was disingenuous because Turkey was a member of NATO and could hardly have gotten away with unilaterally defying the USA within this alliance. The US therefore approved of the Turkish actions. Moreover the centre of operations in Turkey was populated and controlled by Western and Turkish generals meaning the USA could not have been ignorant of what the Turks were doing.

And, of course, besides the US NATO ally, Turkey, Saudi Arabia was supplying ISIS in Syria and Al Qaida in Iraq and the USA could not stop them. The remaining US Middle Eastern puppet, Israel, was also involved in supporting the terrorist groups in the Golan Heights, part of Syria in fact illegally occupied by Israel and even more illegally used militarily to help the bandit groups--Israeli tanks have been stationed in the Golan Heights--and Netanyahu allows terrorist wounded to be treated there, as two videos illustrated.

A former Mossad chief claimed that the problem Israel had with Syria was not the Syrians but foreign "elements", Hizbollah, the Iranians, and the Russians. The Israeli secret service man did not acknowledge that the terrorists were largely comprised of "foreign elements", mercenaries from a plethora of Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. The Mossad chief claimed that Israel was indifferent to the ruler in Damascus as long as the Syrians were peaceful, and professed that Israel dealt with its enemies humanely! Lastly he boldly said Israel could do in Syria what it could not do elsewhere, presumably help Al Qaida style terrorists.

The US feared, as Henry Kissinger said, the revival of an Iranian Shia empire across the Middle East. For the US ruling elite, a Sunni Caliphate of desperate head chopping Wahhabis was more manageable than a Shia power. ISIS allowed the US to maintain its presence across the whole of the region it claimed for the Caliphate. But the revival of the Iraqi army has allowed the Iraq state to fight back against ISIS in Iraq, and threaten to take back Mosul with Kurdish assistance.

The terrorists there are losing and the US has been keen to ensure there is a corridor from Iraq into Syria to allow the terrorists to transfer from the lost cause of Iraq to one the US still hoped to win against Assad in Syria. Part of the continuing threat to Assad and Syria is the attention the media give to the Russian and Syrian fight to recover Eastern Aleppo, the quarter of the city still left in the hands of Al Qaida in Syria, otherwise known as Al Nusra. Three quarters of the city have already been recaptured by Syria and goes about its business as normally as possible even though it is continuously attacked by mortar shells, hell cannon fire and rockets from the bandits in the Eastern part of the city, something most people in the West are not aware of because it is rarely reported.

In the West, the terrorist occupied part of the city is habitually called simply Aleppo as if the Syrians were bombing the whole city, yet the liberated three quarters has a population of 1.25 millions while it is estimated the East has a population of 200,000, so is far less even than a quarter in terms of population. The Syrians and Russians repeatedly refrain from attacking anyone leaving along the road reserved for escapers, but the terrorists keep doing their best to do the opposite by attacking anyone on the road and attempting to keep it shut.

When the Russians and US Americans agreed a cease fire accepted by Assad,the terrorists refused to accept it, and attacked the peace convoy--which set out from Syrian occupied territory--when it was in terrorist occupied territory. The US supported the claim by the terroristic White Helmet (Western backed NGOs)--which curiously were granted $23 million to operate in the terrorist areas--that the convoy was hit by bombs from some Syrian night raider when there was no sign of bombs but plenty of evidence the trucks had been torched while they were laid up by the side of the road.

The US, who, via John Kerry, had agreed the cease fire on condition that Al Nusra was separated from those the US claimed were not terrorists but freedom fighters then declared they could not separate the two elements, something the Syrians, Russians and even skeptics in the West had always said was impossible, mainly because there were no moderate terrorists, they all took their cues from the fanatic Wahhabis of Al Nusra. So, the USA spoiled their own plan by bombing quite callously Syrian soldiers who had resisted ISIS attacks on the desert town they were defending, killing over 60 of them and letting ISIS take the position they had long desired.

The US said it was a sad mistake! Anyone who believes it is not being serious, any more than anyone imbued with western propaganda can believe that Bashar Al Assad is hated by his own people, yet can retain their loyalty and that of his soldiers throughout the 5 years of Western backed warfare against them. There were and still are some who would have preferred another leader to Assad, but no one now would wish to exchange him for any leader associated with the fanatical groups. Most Syrians are now united against US and Saudi Arabian backed madmen aiming for the Sunni monoculture in the Middle East desired by Western imperialism.

The Israelis naturally back the USA. They are happy with divided Arab states in the Middle East so that they remain the main power there and the only nuclear one! Israeli leaders do whatever suits their and the US's permanent strategies and interests. Not everything can be planned in Washington or Tel Aviv, but objectives are always presented as being "humanitarian" even though they almost always end up being anything but. Of course little of this ever appears regularly in the main stream media, so it is difficult for anyone not ready to take a particular interest in it to get at the truth.

Evidence of the US decision to train ISIS has been given by Lt General Michael Flynn of yet another US agency, the DIA, which was shown again as a video. It appears in a document (Nafeez Ahmed has reviewed it online) publicly available and heavily redacted but clear enough nonetheless, clearer anyway than Flynn's video statement, although he agreed it was tantamount to confessing. The object is to use humanitarian language to confuse opinion about what is willfully being done.

More video evidence showed how truly callous US politicians are, including the famous instance of Madeleine Albright, a US representative to the UN who was also a Secretary of State, brutally admitting that the death of half a million Arab infants and children in Iraq under the Blair/Clinton sanctions regime was "a price worth paying"! It was a price that US Americans were not paying but that one imagines they would have had different views about if they were paying it. It is manifestly not a bit humanitarian to deprive a whole population of necessary medical supplies when they are already being starved of food.

Questioned in Parliament, the UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, claimed impotence because the US had the power to do militarily what it liked--it spent more on war preparations (euphemistically called "defense") than the next 27 most powerful countries. So whatever the policy adopted by the British parliament, in foreign affairs it is obliged to be the US's puppet. And, of course, it does serve some interests of British business especially arms traders. The argument, at root, seems to be that the US would take revenge on the UK if it ever dared to defy the US in its policies of world intervention and its use of NATO for it.

The speaker ended with some brief answers to questions from the audience but had to hurry off to catch his train back. The Frome Stop War Chair, Lara Bility, offered our thanks and mentioned the forthcoming meeting in November and this meeting ended with applause.