Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Brzezinski’s death is being used to shift blame for terrorism from Bush/Blair/Neocons/Israel to Brzezinski. See for example, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-story-of-zbigniew-brzezinski-that-the-media-isnt-telling/5593085 and http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-geopolitical-grand-chessmaster-the-legacy-of-zbigniew-brzezinski/5593298
The main effect of these articles is to create another hate figure. The Western world, like Big Brother’s world in Orwell’s book, 1984, cannot do without hate figures.
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In my account of Brzezinski, I noted the important difference between a Cold Warrior and a Neoconservative. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/06/02/zbigniew-brzezinski-paul-craig-roberts/ A Cold Warrior was faced with handling the Soviet Threat. There were different approaches to dealing with this threat and disagreements among Cold Warriors. Brzezinski opposed the right-wing policy of “rollback,” that is, the use of force or the threat of force to force the Soviet Union to change its policies and to give up its advances. Brzezinski believed that America’s strength was its reputation as a liberal democracy and that the US government should use ideas, such as human rights and international law, as its principal weapons in the Cold War.
The Neoconservatives were boosted to power by the Soviet collapse which removed all constraint on US unilateralism and made the US the Uni-power. The neocons are advocates of using this power to achieve US world hegemony. This is different from Brzezinski’s idea of US primacy. Primacy is not the same as hegemony. Primacy does not mean that there are no other powers or that all other countries answer to Washington. Primacy is determined by who has the most standing, the most influence. For Brzezinski, it was better that the US had primacy than for the Russians to have primacy.
Essentially, Brzezinski’s life as a Cold Warrior ended with the Soviet collapse. But it is difficult for a prominant strategic policymaker to recede into the woodwork. Brzezinski could not stay relevant without a Russian threat. In latter works, such as The Grand Chessboard published in 1997 six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski focuses on preventing a Russian resurgence by achieving US inroads into Eurasia that would confine Russia to its post-Soviet size. His purpose was to prevent the possibility of a Russian comeback on the world stage as a rival for primacy.
The Grand Chessboard made him appear to some to be a neoconservative of sorts. But this was not the case. He opposed the neoconservative 2003 invasion of Iraq. He damned the neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush as a catastrophe that severely damaged America’s reputation, and he expressed his contempt for Tony Blair, the UK PM who helped Bush rig the excuse for the invasion.
The notion that Brzezinski is the creater of terrorism because the Carter administration armed the mujahideen in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is absurd. The mujahideen were not terrorists. They were Muslims fighting Soviet invaders. The Taliban are not terrorists. They are fighting for an Islamic state in Afghanistan. It was the US invasion of Afghanistan that initiated the American conflict with the Taliban.
Brzezinski did not invade, attack, or kill any Muslims. But the Neoconservatives using Bush, Blair, and NATO have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing, maiming, and displacing millions of Muslims. It is extraordinary how little terrorism this massive crime against Muslims has caused. All of the terrorism is the terrorism of the Western alliance against Muslims in seven countries.
According to the Israelis, Palestinians have been terrorizing innocent Jews since the 1940s. If true, all to no effect as Palestine literally no longer exists. Indeed, Palestine is now a ghetto routinely terrorized by Israel. Did Brzezinski cause this also?
Your Taliban is not much different than ISIS.
“Bush/Blair/Neocons/Israel” Now if that doesn’t just sum it all up!
I just fucking love PCR! I love him so much that imina insert insouciance into every sentence starting with this one.
Z.
Notice he never mentioned Zionists, even though all of them are Zionist.
The name that cannot be named.
Every actor in favor of foreign intervention is to be reviled. Including Brzezinski. Fuck him and his progeny.
Brzezinski was a polack. Polacks hate Russians.
In her younger days I would have liked to do that to at least one of his progeny.
When my 1971 book, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, which had circulated clandestinely inside the Economic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in mimeographed form for years, was republished in 1990 with an introduction by University of California, Berkeley, Professor Aaron Wildavsky, Brzezinski, along with Robert Conquest and two members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, provided cover endorsements for my book. Brzezinski wrote: “Professor Roberts’ explanation of Soviet economic development is timely, and it fills a noticeable void in the existing literature. The book is beneficial reading for experts and non-experts alike who wish to understand the theoretical Marxian framework within which the Soviet economy grew and declined.”
So I guess if you endorse his book, PCR gives you a free pass. Unfair assessment? Maybe. But somewhat suspicious, nonetheless. Brzezinski was was up to his eyeballs shaping American foreign policy. In his administrative duties and behind the scenes. A “poor man’s” Kissinger, if you will. To split hairs and say the Taliban aren’t like Al Qaeda, and the Cold Warriors are different than neoconservatives begs the question: Have any of these groups been a help or hindrance to U.S foreign policy?