JORGE MAJFUDT-Rex intelligence: the myopic logic of business

Jorge Majfud, 13/8/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

On 25th February 2021, USAmerican President Joe Biden ordered a military strike along the border between Syria and Iraq (on the Syrian side, of course, to not anger the authorities or media from the Iraqi protectorate) in retaliation to the attacks by a pro-Irani militia in the Iraqi city of Erbil. As expected, this action did not make the front pages of any big Western media outlet, all under the 19th-century slogan of “we were attacked for no reason, and we had to defend ourselves”.

 A story as old as time itself. Now is not the time to review the indigenous genocide on this continent, a genocide never called by its name. We will just pick out a recent incident from 22nd August 2008, during the Barack Obama presidency. After the bombing of Azizabad in Afghanistan, USAmerican military officials (including Oliver North, convicted and pardoned for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair in the ‘80s) reported that everything had gone according to plan, that the village had greeted them with applause, that a Taliban leader had been killed and that the collateral damage was minimal. Minimal. This is the sense of value of other’s lives. What they did not report at the time is that tens of people had died, including 60 children.

In a less-publicised article for future historians, on 25th February, the New York Times reported the words of the USAmerican government regarding its latest bombing campaign, according to whom “this proportionate military response was conducted together with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners”. Just like since the 19th century, the Anglo-Saxon government assumes, now without mentioning it, special global intervention rights to re-establish God’s order and profitable business. As the United States Democratic Review from New York published in 1858, in its article “Mexico’s destiny”, “this type of people does not know how to be free, and they will never know under they are educated by American democracy. For this reason, the master will govern them until, one day, they learn how to govern themselves… Providence obliges us to take control of that country… We are not going to take control of Mexico out of our own self-interest; this would be a joke that would be impossible to believe. No, we are going to take control Mexico for its own benefit, to help the eight million poor Mexicans who suffer due to despotism, anarchy and barbarism”.

Nine years earlier, Chicago’s Springfield diary analysed the offence committed by Mexicans of having gifted tax-free land to USAmerican citizens in Texas while ordering them, through ‘barbaric’ laws, to free their slaves: “our compatriots had the right to visit Mexico under the sacred right to trade”. The freedom of the masters of the land to the freedom of the market and the sacred right to private property. Nothing has changed, only the settings and the technological landscape due to the simple and inevitable progression of humanity since the turn of the millennium.

Now, neither the New York Times nor the Biden government mention that only one USAmerican was killed in the pro-Irani militia attacks. Similarly, they omit that in the retaliation, exemplary and proportional, 17 innocent natives were left to die under the rubble. In the glorious USAmerican constitution of 1787, a Black person was worth three fifths of a White person (of course, Black people were not for sale; this was merely for the electoral calculations in which the Black population did not vote). In the most recent bombings, the ratio is set at 17:1. Does anyone know the victims’ names? What would have happened if the Mexican or Chinese army had killed 17 USAmericans within the country’s borders? This racist arrogance, masked by infinite layers of linguistic gymnastics, by the fatigue and anaesthesia of regularity, is every bit as alive today as it was during the period of slavery and colonial barbarism.

Nothing different occurred or is occurring in Afghanistan. Yes, the Taliban are a disgrace. However, before trying to explain the world’s ills using the existence of the “bad guys” (this simplification of the USAmerican mentality, itself simplified), we have to ask ourselves why these bad guys exist. Are they not in fact a creation of the “good guys”? Are the “good guys” not every bit as bad as the bad guys, but instead they are White, rich and successful?

In Taliban’s case, they are a creation of London, Washington and the CIA when in the ‘70s and ‘80s they proposed overthrowing the socialist government of the writer Nur Muhammad Taraki. The secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, presided over by a short list of left-wing intellectuals, barely survived between 1978 to 1992, when it was destroyed by the Taliban. Where Muhammad Taraki and his successors had fought to establish the equal rights of women (just as another Arab socialist in 1956, Gamal Nasser in Egypt), the Taliban would head down another path, the destination set at 1,000 years in the past.

This is but the same old story of various other secular states in the Middle East. To remember one of the most traumatic examples, in 1953, the CIA destroyed the secular, democratic republic in Iran, imposing the dictatorship of the Shah to preserve British Petroleum and USAmerican oil extraction interests. This would eventually lead to the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and even more millions of dollars and a years-long media narrative to combat the regime of the Ayatollahs.

A year after the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, Washington and the CIA did the same thing in Guatemala. In fact, the plan was “we will turn Guatemala into another Iran”. The democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, was forced to seek refuge in the Mexican embassy and then (just like the doctor Ernesto Guevara) to flee to the country, leaving behind a Guatemala which would go on to suffer 40 years of massacres paid with the price of 200,000 dead Guatemalans. In the ‘80s in Afghanistan, the CIA organised and lent its support to Mujahadeen rebels against the socialist government. The Mujahadeen became the Taliban, while some formed part of Al Qaeda.

The most powerful intelligence agency in the world has stood out for just about everything other than intelligence. After each of the billions of dollars that their secretive inventions cost, further billions promptly followed to combat the demons summoned by these patriots.

Now that Washington has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, many cities have begun falling into the hands of the Taliban. After 20 years and 85 billion dollars invested into the country’s army, it is unable to halt the advance of a group of medieval fanatics. As per usual, the men and women of war in the USAmerica think that they can resolve everything with bombs and millions of dollars. Like always, they are wrong. Or perhaps, instead of being wrong, this is just a case of the war economics denounced by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961.

Meanwhile, the fanatics on the ‘good’ side continue to drone on about “the fight for freedom and democracy”, the very same fight and the very same words used by the pro-slavery Anglo-Saxons during the 19th century.