https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/27/the-other-side-of-john-mccain/
As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist
Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near
Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she
attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly
learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”
“I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican
women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?”
Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan
mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the
event next to their personal ‘muj.’”
The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban,
was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.
During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the
North Vietnamese Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian
lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent
torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from the war
with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000,
“I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” After he was criticized
for the racist remark, McCain refused
to apologize. “I was referring to my prison guards,” he said, “and I will
continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of
the beating and torture of my friends.”
‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where
McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)
McCain’s visceral resentment informed his vocal support
for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing contra death squads in Central
America — any proxy group sworn to the destruction of communist governments.
So committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that
in the mid-1980s he had joined the advisory board
of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the
World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of
WACL’s British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974, described the
organization as “a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of
forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an
anti-Semitic international.”
Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as
Jaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the
extermination of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian former dictator
Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon.
Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing “a leadership role
in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true
freedom fighters of our day.”
Being Lauded as a Hero
On the occasion of his death, McCain is being honored in
much the same way — as a patriotic hero and freedom fighter for democracy. A
stream of hagiographies is pouring forth from the Beltway press corps that he described
as his true political base. Among McCain’s most enthusiastic groupies is CNN’s
Jake Tapper, whom he chose as his personal stenographer for a 2000 trip to
Vietnam. When the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Tapper in February, 2000,
“When you’re on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall
under the magical McCain spell?”
“Oh, you can’t. You become like Patty Hearst when the SLA
took her,” Tapper joked in reply.
Ocasio-Cortez: Called McCain ‘an
unparalleled example of human decency.’
But the late senator has also been treated to gratuitous
tributes from an array of prominent liberals, from George Soros to his soft
power-pushing client, Ken Roth, along with three fellow directors of Human Rights Watch and “democratic socialist” celebrity
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who hailed McCain as “an
unparalleled example of human decency.” Rep. John Lewis, the favorite civil
rights symbol of the Beltway political class, weighed in as well to
memorialize McCain as a “warrior for peace.”
If the paeans to McCain by this diverse cast of political
climbers and Davos denizens seemed detached from reality, that’s because they
perfectly reflected the elite view of American military interventions as akin
to a game of chess, and the millions of dead left in the wake of the West’s
unprovoked aggression as mere statistics.
There were few figures in recent American life who
dedicated themselves so personally to the perpetuation of war and empire as
McCain. But in Washington, the most defining aspect of his career was
studiously overlooked, or waved away as the trivial idiosyncrasy of a noble
servant who nonetheless deserved everyone’s reverence.
McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention
of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and
assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it
came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to
another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.
In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda
as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.
While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for
arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a
campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers
dry up on his grave.
American media may have sought to bury this legacy with
the senator’s body, but it is what much of the outside world will remember him
for.
‘They are Not al-Qaeda’
McCain with Abdelhakim Belhaj,
leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a former Al Qaeda affiliate.
When a violent insurgency swept through Libya in 2011,
McCain parachuted into the country to meet with leaders of the main insurgent
outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), battling the government of
Moamar Gaddafi. His goal was to make kosher this band of hardline Islamists in
the eyes of the Obama administration, which was considering a military intervention
at the time.
What happened next is well documented, though it is
scarcely discussed by a Washington political class that depended on the
Benghazi charade to deflect from the real scandal of Libya’s societal
destruction. Gaddafi’s motorcade was attacked by NATO jets, enabling a band of LIFG fighters to capture him, sodomize him with a
bayonet, then murder him and leave his body to rot in a butcher shop in Misrata while rebel fanboys snapped
cellphone selfies of his fetid corpse.
A slaughter of
Black citizens of Libya by the racist sectarian
militias recruited by McCain immediately followed the killing of the
pan-African leader. ISIS took over Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte while Belhaj’s
militia took control of Tripoli, and a war of the warlords began. Just as Gaddafi
had warned, the ruined
country became a staging ground for migrant smugglers on the Mediterranean,
fueling the rise of the far-right across Europe and enabling the return of slavery to Africa.
Many might describe Libya as a failed state, but it also
represents a successful realization of the vision McCain and his allies have
advanced on the global stage.
Following the NATO-orchestrated murder of Libya’s leader,
McCain tweeted, “Qaddafi on his
way out, Bashar al Assad is next.”
McCain’s Syrian Boondoggle
Like Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and
was suddenly confronted with a Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once
again, McCain made it his personal duty to market Islamist insurgents to
America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders of the civil
rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful DC-based Syria-American
operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a consultant to the Libyan
Transitional Council during the run-up to the NATO invasion.
In May 2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal
trip across the Syrian border and meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli
millionaire named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts between the Syrian
opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed to have “financed the
opposition group which took senator John McCain to visit war-torn Syria.”
“This could be like his Benghazi moment,” Moustafa
remarked excitedly in a scene from a documentary, “Red Lines,” that
depicted his efforts for regime change. “[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came
back, we bombed.”
During his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of
CIA-backed insurgents and blessed their struggle. “The senator wanted to assure
the Free Syrian Army that the American people support their cry for freedom,
support their revolution,” Moustafa said in an interview with CNN. McCain’s
office promptly released a photo showing the senator posing beside a beaming
Moustafa and two grim-looking gunmen.
Days later, the men were named
by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour and Abu Ibrahim. Both had
been implicated in the kidnapping a year prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were
identified by one of the survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S.
the targets of mockery from
Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly critical
reports from across the media spectrum. At a town hall in Arizona, McCain was berated by
constituents, including Jumana Hadid, a Syrian Christian woman who warned that
the sectarian militants he had cozied up to threatened her community with
genocide.
McCain with then-FSA commander
Salam Idriss, right, and an insurgent, left, later exposed for kidnapping Shia
pilgrims.
But McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he
introduced another shady young
operative into his interventionist theater. Named Elizabeth
O’Bagy, she was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, an arms
industry-funded think tank directed by Kimberly Kagan of the neoconservative
Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O’Bagy was consulting for Moustafa at his Syrian
Emergency Task Force, a clear conflict of interest that her top Senate patron
was well aware of. Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal
editorial by O’Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as
predominately “moderate,” and potentially Western-friendly.
Days later, O’Bagy was exposed
for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As soon as the humiliated Kagan fired
O’Bagy, the academic fraudster took another pass through the Beltway’s
revolving door, striding into the halls of Congress as McCain’s newest foreign
policy aide.
McCain ultimately failed to see the Islamist
“revolutionaries” he glad handled take control of Damascus. Syria’s government
held on thanks to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and Moscow, but not
before a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the
worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there were other
intrigues seeking his attention, and new bands of fanatical rogues in need of
his blessing. Months after his Syrian boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned
his attention to Ukraine, then in the throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S.
and EU-funded soft power NGO’s.
Coddling the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine
On December 14, 2013, McCain materialized in Kiev for a meeting with
Oleh Tyanhbok, an unreconstructed fascist who had emerged as a
top opposition leader. Tyanhbok had co-founded the fascist Social-National Party, a far-right political outfit that touted itself as the “last
hope of the white race, of humankind as such.” No fan of Jews, he had complained
that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” had taken control of his country, and had been
photographed throwing up a sieg heil Nazi salute during a speech.
None of this apparently mattered to McCain. Nor did the
scene of Right Sector neo-Nazis filling up
Kiev’s Maidan Square while he appeared on stage to egg them on.
“Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make
Ukraine better!” McCain proclaimed to cheering throngs while Tyanhbok stood by
his side. The only issue that mattered to him at the time was the refusal of
Ukraine’s elected president to sign a European Union austerity plan, opting
instead for an economic deal with Moscow.
McCain met with Social-National
Party co-founder Oleh Tyanhbok.
McCain was so committed to replacing an independent-minded
government with a NATO vassal that he even mulled a military assault on Kiev.
“I do not see a military option and that is tragic,” McCain lamented in an
interview about the crisis. Fortunately for him, regime change arrived soon
after his appearance on the Maidan, and Tyanhbok’s allies rushed in to fill the
void.
By the end of the year, the Ukrainian military had become
bogged down in a bloody trench war with pro-Russian, anti-coup separatists in
the country’s east. A militia affiliated with the new government in Kiev called
Dnipro-1 was accused
by Amnesty International observers of blocking humanitarian aid into a
separatist-held area, including food and clothing for the war torn population.
Six months later, McCain appeared
at Dnipro-1’s training base alongside Sen.’s Tom Cotton and John Barasso. “The
people of my country are proud of your fight and your courage,” McCain told an
assembly of soldiers from the militia. When he completed his remarks, the
fighters belted out a World War II-era salute made famous by Ukrainian Nazi
collaborators: “Glory to Ukraine!”
Today, far-right nationalists occupy key posts in
Ukraine’s pro-Western government. The speaker of its parliament is Andriy Parubiy,
a co-founder with Tyanhbok of the Social-National Party and leader of the
movement to honor World World Two-era Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera.
On the cover of his 1998 manifesto, “View From The Right,” Parubiy appeared in
a Nazi-style brown shirt with a pistol strapped to his waist. In June 2017,
McCain and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan welcomed Parubiy
on Capitol Hill for what McCain called a “good meeting.” It was a shot in the
arm for the fascist forces sweeping across Ukraine.
McCain with Dnipro-1 militants on
June 20, 2015
The past months in Ukraine have seen a state sponsored
neo-Nazi militia called C14 carrying out a pogromist rampage against Ukraine’s
Roma population, the country’s parliament erecting an exhibition
honoring Nazi collaborators, and the Ukrainian military formally approving
the pro-Nazi “Glory to Ukraine” greeting as its own official salute.
Ukraine is now the sick man of Europe, a perpetual aid
case bogged down in an endless war in its east. In a testament to the country’s
demise since its so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” the deeply unpopular
President Petro Poroshenko has promised White House National Security Advisor
John Bolton that his country — once a plentiful source of coal on par with
Pennsylvania — will now purchase
coal from the U.S. Once again, a regime change operation that
generated a failing, fascistic state stands as one of McCain’s greatest
triumphs.
McCain’s history conjures up memory of one of the most
inflammatory statements by Sarah Palin, another cretinous fanatic he foisted
onto the world stage. During a characteristically rambling stump speech in
October 2008, Palin accused
Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” The line was dismissed as
ridiculous and borderline slander, as it should have been. But looking back at
McCain’s career, the accusation seems richly ironic.
By any objective standard, it was McCain who had palled
around with terrorists, and who wrested as much resources as he could from the
American taxpayer to maximize their mayhem. Here’s hoping that the societies
shattered by McCain’s proxies will someday rest in peace.
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