President Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By H.L.D. Mahindapala
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jan 14 2021 (IPS)

Democracy is fragile. It is more fragile that the window panes of the Congress that were smashed by the mob unleashed by President Donald Trump. It is the ultimate symbol of the desecration of American democracy.

The world watched in horror as the misinformed, misguided, politically driven mob went berserk destroying not so much the material that stood in their way but the fundamental values of the holiest shrine of democracy that came crumbling down with not a single guardian of the law in sight to stop it.

It was a sad spectacle. A delusional Trump, who refused to accept the grim realities facing him, tried every trick in the book to retain power which he had lost. The voters told him to go. The courts told him to go – 62 times, sometimes by judges appointed by him.

The states which he tried to bully told him to go. Some of his best friends and advisers told him to go. He didn’t budge. He believed fanatically in his narrative that his victory was stolen by Biden. His perennial penchant to wallow in his own lies was pathological.

When all his legal and political tactics failed, he tried violence. He instigated the mob and told them to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue because “we can never get back our country with weakness”. His legal side-kick, Rudy Giuliani, told the crowd that there should be a “trial by combat”.

The veiled messages were quite transparent. Like Hitler, Trump made use of the democratic processes and democratic institutions to undermine the very foundations of democracy. His power was in manipulating the racist slogan of “Making America Great” which meant reinforcing the power of the White Supremacists.

He was aided and abetted by the Right-wing racist media, particularly the media run by “Uncle Rupey” Murdoch – a favoured guest at Mar-a-Lago club owned by Trump. His media lackeys at Fox News – Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson etc.,– have been blind devotees of Trumpism. They white-washed and justified every move made by Trump, even the violence unleashed at the Congress.

Buoyed by the adulation of his followers (72 million voted for him) he once told a campaign rally : “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I would not lose voters.” His meteoric rise cast a spell on America. His White nationalism swept across America, from coast to coast, making him a folk hero.

He rose to be the new symbol of America. The grassroot forces were rallying behind him with a fervour not seen before. He resonated with their aspirations and their hates.

So, when the voters turned against him it shattered his own beliefs. He had vested so much of faith in his own powers that he refused to face the reality. He began with a bang.

His idiosyncratic style that mesmerised the base of the Republican Party made him the most formidable force overnight. The message went along with it with his brash style. Together they galvanised the broader base of White America. He created a new political culture with his incessant tweets, political messages, aimed at creating (successfully!) an alternative reality.

The traditional conservatives who ruled the Republican Party lost their grip. He became the Republic Party and the stalwarts fell in line behind him. The power he acquired overnight was intoxicating and also toxic. Trumpism was the ideology worshipped by his Republican and non-Republican loyalists.

He became law unto himself and he believed, quite seriously, that he was “the chosen one”, the messiah sent to save America and the world. He believed in his mystical power to overcome all obstacles, including Corona virus which he did thanks to the specialist services of the military hospital.

His garish theatrics on the international stage too enhanced his stature at the base. He was relying solely on his base. All what he did was mainly to impress and consolidate his base and he believed that he was invincible as long as the base was with him. He became a one-man band. It as the college-educated, sophisticated urban voters that rejected him.

In the end, the big man was brought down by a small bug : Coronovid-19. He lost his glamour with each death. Lost in the myths of his own invincible powers – he referred constantly to whatever he did as the greatest in history — he thought he could ride over the pandemic by dismissing it lightly as another kind of flu.

But the menacing virus caught up with him and made him pay for his idiocy. His anti-science, anti-minorities, anti-climate change, anti-internationalism, pro-authoritarian regimes were a medley of policies that he could sell to his base with applause. But the educated class was running away from him. The rural areas stuck with him in the last election. But the sophisticates revolted.

All told, he found himself drifting away too far from the mainstream. The more he drifted away the more he lost touch with reality. He refused to recognise the new realities sprouting under his feet and destabilising him. He fancied that he had the power and the following to go against the will of the people. Like all authoritarian figures he was hoping to rewrite history in his own fashion. But after going along with him initially, after taking a few steps with him for a short while, history turned against him.

In the end he brought down the great Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and reduced it to zilch. He did a Ranil Wickremesinghe. He lost the Presidency. He lost the House. And he lost the Senate. He lost even his most loyal aide who stood by him throughout his troubled reign, Mike Pence, the Vice-president.

He was stepping out too far from the traditional, acceptable framework that held America together. Most of all, he divided the formidable Right-wing of America. Brining the Right-wing under his leadership will be the biggest headache for the Republicans.

His success or failure in the opposition will depend on his ability to unite the Right-wing forces under his wing. After the failure of his attempted “coup” it is doubtful whether he could rally the Right around him. He lost his spell in the debacle at the Congress. He can never live it down. It will haunt him for the rest of his days.

He has alienated practically everyone except, perhaps, his family. Today he is a lonely man nursing his emotional wounds. His only escape route is to blame everyone else for his fall, created by his own self-destructive strategies.

But it is too early to write him off. He will not walk out of the White House as a dead man. He still has some clout in his base. In his own way, he has radicalised American politics. He has injected a new strain of hate into the liberal political culture of America. It is just not his version of Munroism trying to make America Great in isolation from within.

His inward-looking view is not mere navel gazing. He has touched and livened the raw nerve of America that was buried deep in its culture. He represents that side of America which is brash, rash, garish, loud, vigorous, inward-looking, narrow-minded and ready to break through all obstacles even if it means doing it the crude way.

In a sense – and without meaning to demean the genius of Walt Whitman – he represents the athletic, energetic, confident power of Whitmanasque America that was ready to break through all obstacles in its predatory explorations of conquering the wild west, destroying civilisations, devastating the pristine glory of untouched nature and polluting every inch of land, lakes and loftiness filled with pure air in its virgin state.

He had no idea of the other side of America : the tender, sensitive, caring, cultured, quiet world of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Thoreau. He was the farthest away from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath – the great American classic that idealised the socialist society. Donald Trump stood only for one man: Donald Trump. America has never seen the likes of him ever before. And it is not likely to see another one soon. But he leaves behind a menacing legacy: he has sown the seeds of American fascism to grow in the declining years ahead.

America after Trump will trend towards more violence. It can be a dangerous place as seen by Trump’s behaviour of encouraging the mob to march down Pennsylvanian Avenue. Trumpism is the first manifestation of all the organised crudities of the red-necked White Supremacists which have deep roots in America.

The rise of Trumpism has been the triumph of Right-wing proto-fascists who have been struggling underground to capture power within the liberal framework of the great democratic laboratory of the world. It exploits of the political and social fears of this deep layer of American society.

The promise of making America Great has been a marketable euphemism to enthrone the power of the White Supremacists. The power Trumpism lies in this hidden agenda.

Trump is the personification of all the crudities of this sub-layer of the American political culture. He is the absolute opposite of Barack Obama, the refined, cultured, symbol of finesse that has given a shine to the best in the American political tradition.

The way he and his family conducted themselves in the White House was comparable to the aristocratic Kennedys who raised a new wave of hope to America and the world. After Obama the fall of America into the hands of Trump is like the fall of Adam into the disastrous temptations of the Snake in the Garden of Eden. Adam also fell when he became a Trump – “a pussy-grabbing” rake.

Is he an aberration? Yes and no. He is an aberration because he is the first of his kind. But America has the potential to produce many more Trumps. He must be considered as a pathfinder for the deep roots of American authoritarianism that has been lying untapped all these years.

He is the maverick who dared to come up from outside and take over the establishment giving respectability and acceptability to the hidden roots of American authoritarianism that was waiting for a leader. He has captured the minds of rural base and psychologically terrorized the American Right, including the elite in the Republican Party leaders.

Mick Romney and the late John Cain are two leading Republican who had the guts to challenge him. But the rest are hedging their bets. They are scared that with his political clout in the Republican base he could tip the scales in their electorates with his approval or disapproval at the next election.

He will still remain as a force — but a divisive force in the Right. Of course, there is a chance that he will be the first president of America to go to jail. The string of charges is so numerous that under the law of averages he is bound to be convicted on at least one of them, according to legal experts.

This will be his biggest nightmare. But the Right-wing of America will not let him die. His legacy that came from the embedded right-wing extremists will go underground and pose a serious threat to Joe Biden. He has the backing of the heavily armed Oath Keepers, Proud Boys who have vowed to fight if Trump loses. He has also dodged condemning the KKK, neo-Nazis, anti-semitic, anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-gay and the minorities who are favoured by the liberal left. They are his backbone.

He will survive in their hearts and minds and will mobilise their forces to bring him back in 2025, if they can. With his political clout in the base, he still could influence the outcome of Congress and Senate electoral results. So, even the Right-wing establishment will be in a dilemma not knowing how to handle him.

But hold on for a minute. I must add the latest news. The 5 a.m. news (Saturday morning) says that Twitter has chopped off Trump’s right hand. For the first time Twitter has permanently – I repeat permanently – suspended his account “due to risk of further incitement of violence.” This could paralyse – at least temporarily – Trump who claims that he has a following of 88 million twitters.

He has relied on it so much that he had dismissed the mainstream media as irrelevant. He called them the “fake news” and ridiculed them because he could dish out his narrative to his loyal followers through Twitter. Now he is faced with a communication problem. His success depended solely on manipulating the news.

Along with Twitter Facebook and Instagram he ran his own news programs. Now all three have cut him off. His lies gained currency mainly through Twitter. Furthermore, twittering has been his main job when he is not watching television, or playing golf. Now he is a loner, well and truly.

On top of this big blow comes the news that the Republicans are breaking ranks to attack him. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has openly called for the resignation of the President. Lindsay Graham, one of his loyal followers, stood on the floor of the Senate, after the mob attack, and said : “It’s over. The election is over. It’s over.” If Sen. Graham thought the issue was over he was wrong. Trump’s angry loyalists mobbed him at the airport and shouted: ”Traitor! Traitor!”

The worst is the move from both sides of the House to impeach Trump. He has set another precedent of being the first President to be impeached twice. Evidence of the President inciting the mob to unleash violence too is mounting. Sen. Mike Lee has recorded that at 2.26 p.m. when the mob was running berserk Trump had asked him to object to the certification of the electoral votes.

Even at that critical moment he was obsessed with the overturning of the election result. Legal experts say that, in the middle of the biggest security threat to the Congress, he was not concerned as the Commander-in-Chief about the security and law and order of the nation but his own fortunes.

The task before Joe Biden is monumental. America is a patient dying at the new rate of 20,000 a week now. That is the latest figure for the first week of January. Trump, the Grim Reaper, is the first President who leaves behind a legacy of burying the second highest number of Americans since the Civil War which claimed 600,000 victims. Trump has passed 300,000 mark.

Mercifully, he has agreed to depart peacefully after desecrating the sacred political temple enshrined in the American Constitution – the Holy Bible that guides America.

The last gamble of Trump was to resort to violence. That backfired on him. Even the Republican ranks, who were lukewarm, were shocked by the physical threat that endangered their lives inside the Congress. Hopefully, he will depart without causing any havoc between now and Janaury 20 – the inauguration day.

Joe Biden has his job cut out for him. He has to heal, repair, patch up, bandage, operate, and keep America in a nursing home until she recovers fully. To do that, he may have to go for a New Deal of the Rooseveltian type. Hopefully he may not have the need to sack the Supreme Court which obstructed Roosevelt’s deal to serve the people.

Fortunately, Trump, with his swagger and bluster in the last rally in Georgia, removed the main political obstruction that was in Biden’s path when the Republicans lost the two Senate seats. Biden now has the presidency and both houses of Congress in his hands though the razor thin margin is still dicey.

In the post -Corvid-19 phase, the American mood will be amenable to accept Rooseveltian “socialism”. Lifting the victims of the pandemic and poverty will strike a chord in the heart of America. Law-makers from both sides of the Congress will find it difficult, morally and politically, to say no the urgent needs of victims of Trump.

Trump will continue to make the headlines. Biden will have to look after the breadlines.

Initially there won’t be much of an opposition from the Right-wing which is discredited. Their fear-mongering with cries of “communism” and “socialism” will not have the same impact as that of McCarthy – another lying Goebbels. The post-Corvid-19 phase needs compassion not fear. Biden is expected to walk in the footsteps of Obama, particularly in healthcare.

The pandemic has created the right political climate for restoring the Obama care program. Biden has all the tools necessary to lift America from the depths of Trumpist disasters. He can’t lose because he has no other path to follow other than the compassionate route to recovery.

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Excerpt:

By H.L.D. Mahindapala
MELBOURNE, Apr 26 2019 (IPS)

The history of terrorism in Sri Lanka reveals a clear pattern. The first to take up arms in the post-Independent era were the misguided Sinhala youth. They were educated youth desperately running in search of a quick solution to establish their classless paradise. Their violence did not take them anywhere.

The Tamil youth were the second to take up arms. Most of their cadres too consisted of educated Tamil youth running in search of a speedy route to establish their mono-ethnic paradise. At the end of a three-decade war they sank to the bottom of the Nandikadal Lagoon.

Now the Muslim youth have bombed their way into the global headlines. They shot into the limelight on the morning of Easter Sunday taking everyone by surprise. Unlike the two preceding terrorist groups the local Muslim terrorists who carried backpacks loaded with explosives seems to be dummies carrying out the orders and agenda of a hidden hand directing them from abroad.

H.L.D. Mahindapala

To begin with they were echoing the imported hate politics fed to them by the extremist local agents running fragmented jihadist cells. Nor have they produced a calculated, well-defined ideology against the state, like the other two terrorist organisations, arguing that it should be destroyed and replaced with their political models.

However, it is known that the preachers in their cells and madrassas have been indoctrinating the youth with violent interpretations of the Koran with the aim of converting Sri Lanka into an Islamic Caliphate. That constitutes a part of the larger agenda of ISIS, without any local content in it.

Running through all three violent movements of the youth is a manufactured ideology tailored to radicalise and convert them into violent politics as the solution to their indoctrinated, imagined and real problems.

The Sinhala youth took to Marxists revolutionary ideology reduced to five lectures. The Tamil youth took to the ideology of the Saivite Jaffna Vellala supremacists to create Eelam – the paradise of mono-ethnic extremism. And the Muslim youth seems to have jumped into a similar ideology believing that they could achieve their Islamic salvation at the end of violence.

If history is any guide then the preceding two violent movements point to a bitter end. Like the other two preceding terrorist groups the Muslim terrorists too are doomed to end up achieving nothing. Besides, the odds are tilted heavily against the Muslim terrorists, both internationally and locally.

They have begun with a big bang which had echoed round the world. That is about all they could achieve: making big noises if they are to continue down this path of violence. Whether they have the capacity to sustain the violence of the Easter Massacre on a mass scale for a prolong period is questionable.

Based more on the historical evidence of the past two youth revolts than on the skimpy details available on the Muslim youth, my conclusion is quite simple: neither the prevailing hostile international climate against every kind of Muslim violence, nor the national ethos of a thriving and conservative Muslim trading community dependent on peace and stability, is conducive for the Muslim youth to sustain their campaign of violence for long.

Besides the wobbly Yahapalanaya Sri Lankan government, which was going softly– softly on rising Muslim radicalisation and violence– has at last woken up to the grim and destabilising realities that had blown their tops off. It is the magnitude of the simultaneous explosions hitting three points of the compass – east, west and the immediate north – that shook the foundations of Sri Lankan establishment

The Easter Sunday blast is likely to change – at least in the short run — the conventional image of the Muslims. They were seen as the more emancipated and liberal Muslims not committed to radical Islam. But after the East Sunday Massacre it is likely that they will be bundled with the rest of the ideologically driven Muslim fanatics abroad committed to irrational violence.

The latest Reuter’s report which reveals the ISIS hand behind the Easter Massacre can only reinforce the image of being ruthless religious fanatics.

Radicalisation takes sense and sensibility out of the minds of the impatient youth looking for instant solutions. And politicised religion is packed with hate. Both are incendiary forces that can drive the impulsive youth into insane fits of violence.

Of course, the initial blast that shook Easter Sunday was massive and impressive. The (1) precision timing that went off like clockwork, (2) the gigantic scale of the blasts hitting targets in east, west and the near north simultaneously,(3) the selected targets of Christian Churches and hotels packed with Western tourists (4) the organisation capacity to piece together the various arms of the military-style operation that exploded on Easter Sunday (5) the blind faith of the suicide bombers that walked the lethal distance to their fatal end and that of 350 other victims, point clearly to hidden brains beyond the borders of the local Muslims.

There is, no doubt, that the suicide bombers were on a political mission. But what was it? Also, terrorist acts are executed to convey a political message. What is the message behind the biggest ever terrorist operation on Sri Lanka soil?

This explosion which hit like a bolt from the blue makes no sense in the Sri Lankan context. Apart from sporadic tensions – some of which have been caused by National Thowheeth Jamaat (NTJ) – the Sinhala-Muslim relations had not stretched to breaking point to provoke an attack of this magnitude.

Mainstream Muslim politics was for co-existence without resorting to extremist violence. Interventions at the highest levels from both sides have succeeded in snuffing out any communal conflagration and containing the violence.

In fact, Muslim leaders have been complaining to the authorities that the NTJ is a serious threat to their lives too. Nor has there been a mass following for Islamic extremism either at the top or at the bottom layers of Muslim society.

As of now Muslim violence has been confined to a minority. But it is a minority that has crept up, sedulously and surreptitiously, to parts of the higher layers of the Muslim hierarchy. If allowed to go unchecked it can become the majority.

The description of this group given by Ruwan Wijewardene, State Minister of Defence, is revealing and alarming, to say the least. He said: “What I can also say about this group of suicide bombers is that most of them were well-educated and come from middle or upper middle class, so they are financially independent and their families are quite stable financially. That is a worrying factor in this. Some of them studied in other countries, they hold degrees and were quite well-educated people.”

This explains the background and the potential threat to the future but not the cause behind the stunning Easter Sunday massacre. Invariably political protests and violence target the state. But the Muslim suicide bombers did not target the state per se.

They went straight to two non-state, non-Sinhala-Buddhist targets: 1. Christian churches packed with Easter Sunday devotees and 2. hotels packed with Western holiday-makers lining up for their Sunday breakfast. Both targets were selected to make global headlines in the Christian West.

Any harm to the Christian worshippers inside churches in one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar and Western holiday-makers would instinctively tug the heart strings and the conscience of the West.

It is the selection of these two targets that do not make sense. Why should local suicide bombers target the Churches and the hotels when their grievances are supposed to be against the Sinhala-Buddhists with whom they have been having some sporadic sparring in recent times?

Besides, none of these two institutions has rubbed against the local Muslims. So why did the strategists behind Operation Easter Massacre target the Churches and the hotels? Isn’t the message coded in these two targets?

It is at this point that Ruwan Wijewardene’s explanation gains credibility. He said that the targets were chosen as retaliation for the massacre of the Muslims at Christchurch by the Australian white-supremacist Brenton Hanson Terrant. But is the local Muslim that concerned about what happened in far-away New Zealand to blow up Churches and hotels? No.

But the vindictive politics of their masters in the failed Islamic State, pursuing anti-American, anti-Christian agenda, are bent on targeting the sacred symbols of the West. Since the Sri Lankan Muslims are committed ideologically to follow the political line laid down by their Islamic masters abroad, they became the latest suicidal messengers of death to the West. They even went as far as imitating their counterparts abroad by videoing their martyrdom, a la the jihadists in the Middle East.

Second, the Easter Massacre was to deliver a political message to Donald Trump. He was boasting that the ISIS is dead. On the morning of Easter Sunday, they told him that they are still alive and kicking. The ideology behind the Easter Massacre is clearly expressed in the two main targets allied to Western interests. It also contains a direct message to Trumpian braggadocio and arrogance.

They picked Sri Lanka because it was fast turning into a base for American expansion in the Indian Ocean. The signals radiated by the bombs have already hit the American radar. They have now cancelled the joint naval exercises scheduled to be held in the east.

Like all terrorists they have picked the most iconic targets for maximum impact in the minds of the West. Targeting them selectively on one of the holiest days of the Christian world delivers an unambiguous political message to the West saying: If we can’t get you in the West we can get you in soft spots prepared by incompetent, complacent and back-biting rulers in the East who, incidentally, are cozying up to the West.

The tattered remnants standing as sad ruins of churches and hotels and the 350 victims debunk the usual fiction spun by some local political pundits who continue to blame the Sinhala-Buddhists. Their spin is to white-wash the Muslim terrorists saying that the suicide bombers were on a mission to get even with the Sinhala-Buddhists for sporadic attacks that had occurred in recent time.

This line of attack on the Sinhala-Buddhist runs against the evidence of the bloody ruins staring in their face. If the Easter Massacre was to teach the Sinhala-Buddhist a lesson why did they attack the Christian Churches and hotels packed with Westerners? This is the most notable facet of the Easter Sunday attack.

The suicide bombers skipped the Sinhala-Buddhists, they skipped the Hindu Tamils and they went straight for the Christians in churches and the Westerners holidaying in hotels.

If the Easter Sunday massacre was to send a clear message to the West then the international and local agents have succeeded beyond their expectations. This initial message is now reverberating globally. It says un-mistakeably that the Jihadist power, packed with religious fanaticism, has found a new base to attack the West. But what is going to be their next step? Will they turn inward and intensify their attacks against the other religionists?

Violence of any sort will not take the Muslim terrorist anywhere. If the other two varieties of terrorism (Sinhala and Tamil youth) failed to win against the state what are the chances of the Muslim variety winning?

The state is sufficiently prepared and experienced now to meet challenges of terrorists having beaten the world’s deadliest terrorist, the LTTE. Most of all, it has the tacit support of the majority of the Muslims in the mainstream.

ISIS and its local agents have had some beginners luck by taking the state by surprise. But the chances of Muslim terrorists becoming a formidable challenge to the state are very remote. Besides, before they take on the state they will have to grab power from the established Muslim hierarchy. They will also have to combat the anti-Muslim counter-terror forces of the West and also India.

The upshot of the Easter Massacre has been to increase and reinforce Islamophobia. Until Easter Sunday the Muslims in the democratic mainstream have been a formidable force negotiating craftily behind the scene, with both main parties, bargaining with the non-violent votes.

But the exploding bombs have devastated their image and reduced the power of bargaining with both major parties. They cannot be seen to be honeymooning, or playing footsy with the Muslims after the backlash of Easter Sunday sweeping the nation. The government, in particular, will have to face the charge of putting Bodu Bala Sena in jail and letting NTJ run amok without any restraint.

The state is now in a favourable political climate to crack down on Muslim extremism with hardly any pressure from international or national interventionists. Besides, the Muslim terrorists can never reach the militarised power of the Tamil Tigers and challenge the state to yield to their demands, whatever they may be. Of the three varieties of terrorism the Muslims will be the weakest, purely on demographic counts.

When the dust settles down, the democratic state of Sri Lanka will rise again triumphantly, hoping that the last remaining Indian Tamil youth will not decide to go the way of the other three failed terrorists

Excerpt:

The events unraveling in the Middle East have proved that the vaunted “Arab Spring” has turned into a searing summer of wildfires exploding unpredictably in diverse Islamic fronts without competent firemen to hose down the unmanageable conflagration.

It confirms that Washington has lost its grip on managing and/or directing global politics according to its agenda.The world is lurching from crisis to crisis because U.S.-led interventions are making bad situations worse.

Global events spinning out of its control is another sign of declining U.S. power. Its shrinking power has manifested in two main ways.

On the one hand, the U.S. has lost its way in the flowery rhetoric of President Obama. His grandstanding speech at Cairo University has ended in producing two extremes in Egypt : 1. the democracy of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Mohammed Morsi and 2. the military coup that overthrew the Morsi government elected by Egyptians.

Both situations have placed Washington in a dilemma: it could  not act against  the democratically elected government of Morsi nor could it act against the illegal  coup of Gen. Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Action against Morsi would have been condemned as betraying Washington’s commitment to democratic principles.

And action against Sisi would have been against U.S. self-interests. Its power and options are so limited that it is left watching while Egypt slides into virtual chaos.

On the other hand, and more damagingly, the U.S. is sinking in a bottomless debt hole running into trillions, inhibiting its power to act as  freely as it did in its hegemonic days.

In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that the Iraqi war has cost three trillion dollars. Quoting Prof. Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard University, it said that “if anything, it [that number] is too low”.

Mark Thompson of Time reported that the real cost of the war on terror, since 9/11 ( including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) is five trillion dollars. And counting.

A report by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International Studies put the total deaths “at an “extremely conservative estimate” to be 225,000 with 365,000 wounded.

These grim statistics lead to the ineluctable  question: after investing human capital, money and material, what has the U.S. got in return – other than an incurable cancer eating into its body politic?

Its advertised role in Iraq was to restore democracy and stabilise the divided nation. The strategy was to train and equip an Iraqi force to take on the responsibilities after the U.S. leaves Iraq.

According to estimates, the U.S. invested 25 billion dollars in building up the Iraqi forces alone. But when the armed forces of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) / Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) attacked Mosul and Tikrit the American-trained Iraqi soldiers shed their military uniforms and fled.

Having withdrawn earlier, President Obama is dithering  not knowing whether to send troops again or not. Unable to face the reality of the total failure of U.S. policy, President Obama and the State Department are blaming Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister who was handpicked and planted in Baghdad by Washington as their man.

It’s Vietnam all over again.

Planting a Shiite Prime Minister in the midst of Sunnis is like planting a Roman Catholic Din Diem in a majority Buddhist country, assuming that he was the answer to the deteriorating situation in Vietnam.

But the U.S. cure was worse  than the Vietnamese disease. In the end CIA moved in swiftly to assassinate him because their solution proved to the problem.

With a few exceptions, the failure of Big  Powers to fix internal affairs of other troubled nations has been a recurring feature. Big Powers assume that they know the answer and when their interventions fail they blame the victims of their misguided meddlesome politics.

Right now Washington is blaming Maliki for the rise ISIS forces advancing  towards Baghdad.

In the Middle East, in particular, the interventions had undoubtedly exacerbated the ground situation, leading to a post-interventionist period of chaos.

Eventually, the burden of restoring  normalcy falls in the laps of local regimes taking over from the foreign interventionists.

The legacy of the failed policies of the interventionists gathers a momentum of its own, adding to the burdens of the victims of interventionists.

The unbearable part of the post-interventionist period is the callous disregard of the interventionists for the consequences they leave behind.

At this point they disown total responsibility and gang up to accuse the victims of their follies, as if they had no hand in it. They pretend as if they have been the misunderstood do-gooders who were not allowed to fulfill their constructive role.

This is the ruse they adopt in the post-interventionist phase to absolve themselves and divert attention away from their responsibilities arising from misguided roles. They come in on the principle  of Responsibility to Protect.

When they leave there is none to take on the “Responsibility for the Destruction and Chaos” they leave behind. Overnight they turn into Pontius Pilates passing  the buck to victims of their destruction.

This washing  of  hands, coupled with the tactic of blaming their victims, is absolutely hypocritical and counterproductive for their own domestic stability and that of the world at large.

Washington’s prescriptions for global cures are no better than the blankets offered to the Native American Indians – the blankets were infected with smallpox to wipe out the helpless Indians.

These days they don’t offer infected blankets to their helpless victims. These days they send drones to wipe out those human beings they don’t like. It’s the same old death-dealing policy of human extermination but with different tools.

The world is lurching  from crisis to crisis because the U.S.-led interventions are making bad situations worse.

*H.L.D. Mahindapala is a senior Sri Lankan journalist residing in Australia.