The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #156620 Message #3692702
Posted By: GUEST,Cynical
09-Mar-15 - 05:07 PM
Thread Name: BS: Who is training ISIS the US Army
Subject: RE: BS: Who is training ISIS the US Army
"I find it impossible to believe that the West did not see the destabilisation which would ensue from their 'liberal interventions.'
Are we really that stupid?
I don't think so, and have become convinced that the destabilisation has been contrived."
As Chomsky points out (beginning at 22:00 in this video for example), the word "stability" has a different meaning in foreign policy dialect (FPD) than it has in standard English. It means "maintenance and expansion of US influence." So sometimes a nation or region has to be de-stabilized in order to promote stability.
At 25:50 in that video he mentions a Foreign Affairs article in which the editor got confused and used both the standard English and the FPD meanings of the word in the same sentence, saying "we had to de-stabilize Chili in order to bring about stability."
He then goes on to explain what "the international community" means in FPD.
At 16:00 he mentions a 1958 National Security Council memo that says US policy is and should be to block democracy in the Middle East. And then he mentions a 2001 Pentagon study which confirmed that and said that's why they hate us.
And I agree that "we" are not stupid, if you're using the FPD meaning of that term, which is "the people who control US foreign policy." If you mean "we" in the standard English sense, i.e. you and me and everyone we know and 99% of the population of western countries, then I disagree.
Whenever policy has a horrifying result, the convention is to accuse the policy-makers of stupidity and of having made a mistake. I think of that as the Keystone Kops theory of foreign policy. When a group has been steadily increasing their sphere of influence for many years in spite of constantly making gross mistakes, at some point you have to question whether they can be called mistakes.