Shifting The Blame For Terrorism

June 6, 2017 in Columnists, News by RBN Staff


Source: Institute for Political Economy | Paul Craig Roberts

Brzezinski’s death is being used to shift blame for terrorism from Bush/Blair/Neocons/Israel to Brzezinski. See for example, and

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.

In my account of Brzezinski, I noted the important difference between a Cold Warrior and a Neoconservative. 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?