US Lawmaker REVEALS How MIC Wrecks World, Syria, and the USA | Dennis Kucinich

## The Costs of Trying to Bomb the World to Peace The central lesson emerging from the recent conversation with Dennis Kucinich is blunt and consequential: using military force as the primary instrument of foreign policy produces catastrophe, not stability. Kucinich’s account reframes familiar tragedies — Iraq, Libya, Syria — not as unfortunate byproducts of well-intentioned interventions, but as systemic outcomes of a policy paradigm that sees weapons and regime change as solutions. The phrase “you can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace” recurs in the exchange less as rhetoric than as a diagnostic of a foreign policy that has normalized violence and allowed lethal consequences to metastasize across entire regions. This assertion is not abstract. Kucinich points to concrete human and fiscal costs: the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and combatants, the displacement of millions, and trillions of dollars expended. More than accounting for harm, the critique emphasizes how military interventions reorder the political and social life of targeted countries in ways that make later stabilization or reconciliation nearly impossible. When the instruments of policy are bombs, drones, and covert funding for armed groups, the political landscape that emerges is dominated by force, fragmentation, and cycles of revenge — a reality painfully visible in contemporary Syria. ## Manufactured Regime Change and Syria’s Collapse A core thread of the discussion is the argument that Syria’s disintegration was neither accidental nor organic but the product of sustained external pressure and an explicit strategy of regime change. Kucinich traces this trajectory through successive administrations and strategic doctrines rooted in the early 1990s, arguing that ideas like the so-called “Clean Break” doctrine helped create a political milieu in which overthrowing hostile or inconvenient governments became a policy objective rather than a last resort. The Syrian case, as described, illustrates how that objective was implemented through a mix of covert action, proxy forces, and diplomatic maneuvering. Kucinich recounts multiple trips to Syria where he observed a civic identity transcending sectarian divisions — Syrians self-identifying above religious categories — and contrasts that lived reality with the post-intervention landscape now dominated by Salafist militias and sectarian purges. The horror of mass, point-blank executions of Alawites and Christians, filmed and circulated, is presented as the foreseeable endgame of a strategy that financed, trained, and armed groups to topple the state. Across this telling runs a critical implication: when external actors prioritize regime change over the preservation of civil order and human rights, they take responsibility for the downstream chaos. ## Media, False Flags, and the Manufacture of Consent The conversation also interrogates how public narratives are constructed to justify intervention. Kucinich’s critique of mainstream media is not a blanket dismissal but a pointed claim that major outlets frequently function as “spear carriers” for government foreign policy, repeating administration lines that serve to mobilize public support for military ventures. He evokes Iraq as the paradigmatic case: the repetition of claims about weapons of mass destruction, unverified associations with terrorism, and emotive framing that closed off critical scrutiny — all culminating in a catastrophic war. Linked to this is the problem of plausible “false flag” events and the eagerness of political elites and media to accept simple narratives that legitimize force. Kucinich stops short of asserting specific culpability for every alleged incident, but he insists on the necessity of rigorous proof before endorsing military responses. The lesson is procedural: democratic societies require an informed and skeptical public sphere, one that holds power to account rather than reflexively amplifying claims that lead to war. In environments where intelligence is compartmentalized and policymaking opaque, the risk is not only erroneous interventions but the erosion of democratic oversight. ## The Military-Industrial Complex and the Global Arms Market The conversation situates Syria and similar tragedies within a broader political economy: a military-industrial complex that profits from persistent insecurity. Kucinich echoes a long-standing worry about incentives in foreign policy-making — that there are institutional and commercial beneficiaries of conflict that skew decisions toward continued militarization. The United States, he notes, has become the world’s largest arms exporter, with economic interests entwined with strategic doctrine. This alignment between profit and strategy has two pernicious effects. First, it normalizes the use of force even where alternatives exist by making war a market for goods and services. Second, it sustains alliances and policies that privilege stability for suppliers over justice for victims. When weapons flow with few strings attached, and procurement cycles favor continued conflict, the international system tilts toward permanent preparedness and away from disarmament, diplomacy, or development. The conversation implies that addressing the root causes of violence requires more than ad hoc humanitarian responses; it needs structural changes to remove profit as a driver of policy. ## The U.S.-Israel-Saudi Nexus and Energy Geopolitics Another strand of analysis highlights how alliance politics and energy interests shape choices about where and when to intervene. Kucinich points to the intersection of the U.S. relationship with Israel and access to Middle Eastern oil as explanatory variables for policy patterns. Historical moments such as the alleged influence of “Clean Break” ideas on American decision-making, and the repeated association of U.S. strategic aims with Israeli security priorities, are offered as evidence that U.S. policy is often co-produced by partner-state preferences and domestic lobbies. At the same time, the conversation underscores a realist tack: energy security is an immutable fact of international politics. Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance has insulated it from the kind of moral scrutiny applied to other regimes, creating a double standard that fuels resentment and incoherence in U.S. foreign policy. Kucinich neither absolves domestic interest groups nor denies geostrategic concerns; instead he insists that moral clarity—opposing genocide, demanding accountability—must cut across tactical alliances. That insistence places democratic responsibility back at the center: friendship with a state does not confer impunity for grave human-rights violations. ## Toward Neutrality, Accountability, and Peaceful Tools What flows from these analyses is an argument for a different civic and policy posture: one that privileges neutrality, rigorous oversight, and non-military tools for conflict resolution. Kucinich’s political record — leading congressional opposition to the Iraq War and advocating for hearings and documents — is invoked as a model of how legislators can exercise skeptical stewardship. If bombing is a poor instrument for achieving peace, then investment in diplomacy, multilateral mechanisms, reconstruction, and legal accountability must replace militarized templates. Practically, this means reconfiguring how decisions about intervention are made: strengthening congressional oversight of covert action, demanding transparent intelligence assessments, conditioning arms transfers on human-rights compliance, and reorienting foreign-assistance programs toward governance and social infrastructure rather than toward militarized proxies. It also requires a public willing to absorb inconvenient truths and resist the simplistic emotional appeals that too often precede war. Kucinich’s appeal is moral and strategic: to protect human dignity and to prevent

How MIC Wrecks World | Dennis Kucinich For a decade the US and western media pretended to be greatly concerned about poor Syrian civilians being slaughtered by their government. Last week, 1000s of Syrians were killed point blank in mass executions by the new Al-Qaeda terrorist regime that took over the state in a Turkey-backed coup de force. And the West remains silent and complicit in this very predictable humanitarian catastrophe. Why does the USA and its European satellites still engage in sich horrible manufactured catastrophes? To get first-hand insights, I’m talking today to Dennis Kucinich a former mayor of his native Cleveland, Ohio, and a Member of the US House of Representatives, where he served from 1997 - 2013. Mr. Kucinich also ran for the US presidency in 2004 and 2008 and he has been one of the rare consistent voices against US warfare, opposing the Iraq war and later even flying to Syria together with then congress woman Tulsi Gabbard to understand the plight of the country first hand. He recently wrote an article on his Substack about the manufactured tragedy in Syria: https://open. substack.com/pub/kucinichreport/p/the-genesis-of-sectarian-violence #M3 You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb the world to peace. And we have been trying to bomb the world to peace. That is part and parcel of the virus which has infiltrated our body politic, spawned by a military-industrial complex that makes tremendous amounts of money. The manufacture and use of the instruments of war against anybody—they don't care who we use it against as long as we're using it. We're not only using it, but we're also the largest exporter of arms to the world. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Dennis Kucinich, a former mayor of his native Cleveland, Ohio, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 1997 until 2013. Mr. Kucinich also ran for the U.S. presidency in 2004 and 2008 and has been one of the rare consistent voices against U.S. warfare, opposing the Iraq War, and later even flying to Syria together with then-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to understand the plight of the country firsthand. He recently wrote an article on his Substack about the manufactured tragedy in Syria, and that's what we want to discuss today. So, Mr. Kucinich, welcome. #M3 Thank you very much, Pascal. I'm glad to join you on your Neutrality Studies series, and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you. #M2 -- 1 of 10 -- Well, thank you for taking the time on a Saturday afternoon. We are speaking here on my March 16, your March 15. And we've seen unfolding horrible, horrible things last week in Syria with the mass killing of Alawites and Christians and other denominations, the point-blank executions. You wrote on your Substack about the history of that and about the U.S. involvement in really destroying Syria. Could you maybe give us a rundown of this involvement and how you see things having unfolded? #M3 Well, there are a couple of milestones here. One is the beginning of the Netanyahu administration in Israel. There was a platform ostensibly adopted for him called "Clean Break." The Clean Break was a departure from previous Israeli governments that worked to create peace through a program of land for peace. The Clean Break strategy essentially said we're going to break from all of that and take a more hard-nosed approach, which eventually mutated into what is going on in Israel today with respect to Gaza and the West Bank. The United States comes into it with a number of the people who drafted the Clean Break strategy for Israel going into the Bush administration, and they were in key positions to draft policy that would help with the implementation of a Clean Break strategy. So over a period of time, you had the United States going all the way through to the Obama administration looking for ways to overthrow the government of Syria. And it culminated, of course, with last year, when an organization that was basically started with U.S. funds ended up taking over Damascus and declaring itself in charge of Syria. And that organization is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, the same people who in the United States flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One of the hijacked planes ended up crashing in a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers fought with the hijackers to try to avoid it hitting another important site in America. So the U.S. funded terrorists. And that's something that's pretty hard for people in the U.S. to wrap their heads around. How in the world could that happen? But it happened because of a strategy to overthrow the government of Syria at all costs. In my dozen trips to Syria, most of them with my wife and one with Representative Tulsi Gabbard, we found out that the people of Syria loved the concept of Syria. They were not sectarian in their expression of who they were. They would all describe themselves as Syrians, whether Christians, Muslims, or Jews. They all expressed love for Syria. The idea of Syria was the overriding expression of people who lived there, which was very interesting because sectarianism was taboo. And now Syria is taken over by Salafists who, last week, their death squads killed over 1,500 people, both Alawites and Christians, as part of a purge of people who had a different religion that departed from this rigid orthodoxy. #M2 The media in the West has been quite a substantial part of this operation to change the government in Syria for good and actually tear the country apart. A big part of the past was to remind everybody -- 2 of 10 -- constantly that Mr. Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, a claim which was always denied by the Assad government and which was rejected. We should be heavily critical, especially with this report from the OPCW. But now we have at least 1,500, most likely more, people executed, and it's even documented on video. The media in the West reports this as an unfortunate outcome of resistance groups against the current government, and security forces are now implementing security measures, which then actually result in people getting caught in the crossfire. How do you perceive the way that this tragedy has been reported on over the last 10, 12 years? #M3 Well, it's not unusual for the major media in the United States to be spear carriers for the government on foreign policy. I mean, you know, the Iraq war, which I led the effort against in the United States Congress. I led 125 members of Congress to vote against it. The Iraq war was predicated on total lies. But the media kept repeating them over and over with the administration and being a mouthpiece or a spear carrier for the administration. The idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which they were going to use against the United States—any serious analysis of it would be laughable, except what's not laughable is a million innocent Iraqis died as a result of this. Five thousand or so American soldiers gave their lives. They served honorably, but the people who sent them weren't honorable. And the cost to the American taxpayers was, depending on who you talk to, as much as $5 trillion. So it is, unfortunately, the media is used by the government often to just feed lies to the people. And the people have limited ability to weigh different things. There's always some kind of horrific matter that's brought to the public, and the public gets excited and says, well, let's go get them. This happens constantly. I would say that one of those things is the alleged gas attack in Syria. You know, there's another narrative that suggests it could have been a false flag. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not an apologist for the Assad government or my government. I'm interested in the truth. And even, you know, even if that were true, well, it's also true that long before that, we were paying people to go into Syria to throw out the government. Now, again, if there was a gas attack against the people and it was caused by Assad, I, you know, I oppose that heartily. But I'm not sure that's what happened. And so it is not uncommon for false flags to be created that would draw a country into a conflict. It happened in World War I with the Lusitania. It happened in the war against Vietnam that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution resulted in. You know, there's too many... It's happened in Iraq. There's too many examples of countries being drawn into conflict based on prevarication, premeditated lies that drum up emotional feelings among people, and then they say, well, go get them. I don't subscribe to that approach towards governance. I want to see the facts. I want to see proof. And when I didn't see it in Iraq, I raised the issue and I gave the document to every member of Congress. You know, we're coming up on an anniversary of Iraq, the anniversary of the attack on -- 3 of 10 -- Iraq in 2003. And I said back in 2002, there's nothing that proves that Iraq had anything to do with 9 /11, with al-Qaeda's role in 9/11, or with the anthrax attack on our capital. Iraq didn't have the intention or the capability of attacking the United States, didn't have the vaunted weapons of mass destruction. It was all about an attempt, as part of a bigger plan, to just capsize a country in the Middle East, grab its oil resources, and so we go on. And so you have Iraq, Libya, Syria, and people who were trying to drum up an attack on Iran. Common sense, if you really get into the study of what happened, just discounts all of the ideological pretenses that draw people into conflict. #M2 But, you know, one of the people on the street, we would expect that, OK, it is difficult for us to assess what is really happening in world politics. But people like the President of the United States and congressmen like you have access to much more information, to intelligence. You would actually know what's going on. While you were in Congress, were you able to trust the common case and the information that you got? Did you have access to more information, or are Congress people just as reliant on the general media as we little people are? #M3 The short answer is yes, that's right, they do. Now, in the case of the Obama administration, President Obama issued a presidential finding that made regime change in Syria the government policy. And then there was a series of things that happened, and billions and billions of dollars were spent to finance, train, and equip rebels who would topple the Assad regime. But essentially, the CIA had that franchise, and the CIA ran it. When President Obama decided, you know, maybe we need to take a different approach, he sent John Kerry to meet with the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov. They came up with an agreement to stop the fighting in Syria, but the CIA didn't want that. The day after the agreement, there was an attack on a Syrian barracks, and 200 soldiers were killed, or 100 soldiers were killed. #M2 U.S. attack. #M3 U.S. attack. And that ended any agreement and hope for agreement. So this just kept going on and on, and the money kept going in. And so now you had a government that I'm sure some people found repulsive. The Assad regime ruled with a pretty tight fist, which became tighter as people tried to overthrow it. You could understand that. But it was one where people had freedom of religion. They were able to worship in any way they wanted to. And now it's... now it's utter chaos. -- 4 of 10 -- #M2 The country has fallen apart, and it is ruled by different factions and different external powers: Turkey in the north, the U.S. in the east, Al-Qaeda in the center. Israel has taken part of it. The question to me is not whether the Assad government was good or bad. The question to me is how and why does the U.S. pick some governments that it likes? I mean, the Saudi Arabian government still beheads 40 to 60 people every year, their own dissidents. Now