Jihadi democrats ready for their close-up

Jihadi democrats ready for their close-up
By Pepe Escobar – 1 March, 2012 – Asia Times

Such a pity that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t make the 2012 Oscars. La Clinton would stand a good chance of upstaging even tweet-exploding Angelina Jolie’s right leg – that force of nature now all over the net, landing on the moon and even invading Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. [1]

The Empress of Libya (“We came, we saw, he died”) did try hard, including a photo op for the BBC, where she finally admitted that the US is fighting side by side with al-Qaeda to unleash regime change in Syria. [2]

Well, old Cold War fox and former Russian prime minister (under vodka junkie Boris Yeltsin) Yevgeny Primakov actually beat her to the punch on Russia’s Rossiya channel – adding that no one could seriously believe that regime change in Syria could lead to democracy.

Yet when Clinton mentions “a very dangerous set of actors in the region” who “are on our terrorist list” she is just, once again, plugging the notoriously profitable Pentagon/Central Intelligence Agency /State Department franchise of Resident Evil – whose instalments, among others, include mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, mujahideen in Bosnia in the 1990s and, recently, Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) stalwarts.

Global war on terror (GWOT)? This is sooo George W Bush Dumb and Dumber era. As certified blockbusters go, The Invasion of the Regime Change al-Qaeda Democrats is the real deal.

The Muppet show
The Empress of Libya sometimes displays a Meg Ryan-esque inability of staying close to the script. In her BBC promo, she insisted on the official narrative; the “people of Syria” are under “relentless attack” from “government forces”. At the same time she incites “security forces” to go for regime change. So what’s the story; the killers suddenly become democrats? Why not? That’s a classic Hollywood plot twist.

Meanwhile, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland could give Octavia Spencer a run for her money as best supporting actress. Nuland – married to uber-neocon Robert Kagan – blasted Syria’s referendum on the grounds that this “ridiculous proposal” put forward by Bashar al-Assad coincided with “the guns and the tanks and the artillery … still firing into Homs and Hama and cities all over the country”.

Nuland seems to have conveniently forgotten that that’s exactly what the US had been doing when promoting “free” elections in both Iraq and Afghanistan – with the helpful addition of electoral forces such as killer drones, F-16s, Apache helicopters and compliant corporate media shills reciting the Pentagon script. …more