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Sportswashing: A masterstroke of foreign influence operations (Video)

Sportswashing: A masterstroke of foreign influence operations (Video)

While you are thinking about your favorite teams and stars you are not thinking about Saudi Arabia's crimes and human rights record.

Analysis | Washington Politics
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Sportswashing is the next frontier of foreign influence in the United States. Authoritarian regimes are investing billions of dollars in the sports that Americans love — from the NBA to WWE, UFC, and, the PGA Tour.

In many cases these investments come with strings attached. Foreign powers aren’t just trying to make money, they’re hoping to launder their reputations and censor their would-be critics in the U.S. This can have potentially dire consequences for Washington foreign policy, given that many of these regimes seek to pull the agenda in a decidedly unrestrained direction via U.S. military entanglements.

(Video production by Khody Akhavi)


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Analysis | Washington Politics
Arlington cemetery
Top photo credit: Autumn time in Arlington National cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington DC. (Shutterstock/Orhan Cam)

America First? For DC swamp, it's always 'War First'

Military Industrial Complex

The Washington establishment’s long war against reality has led our country into one disastrous foreign intervention after another.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, and now potentially Venezuela, the formula is always the same. They tell us that a country is a threat to America, or more broadly, a threat to American democratic principles. Thus, they say the mission to topple a foreign government is a noble quest to protect security at home while spreading freedom and prosperity to foreign lands. The warmongers will even insist it’s not a choice, but that it’s imperative to wage war.

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Trump Maduro Cheney
Top image credit: Brian Jason, StringerAL, Joseph Sohm via shutterstock.com

Dick Cheney's ghost has a playbook for war in Venezuela

Latin America

Former Vice President Richard Cheney, who died a few days ago at the age of 84, gave a speech to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 in which the most noteworthy line was, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

The speech was essentially the kickoff of the intense campaign by the George W. Bush administration to sell a war in Iraq, which it would launch the following March. The campaign had to be intense, because it was selling a war of aggression — the first major offensive war that the United States would initiate in over a century. That war will forever be a major part of Cheney’s legacy.

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Panama invasion 1989
Top photo credit: One of approximately 100 Panamanian demonstrators in favor of the Vatican handing over General Noriega to the US, waves a Panamanian and US flag. December 28, 1989 REUTERS/Zoraida Diaz

Invading Panama and deposing Noriega in 1989 was easy, right?

Latin America

On Dec. 20, 1989, the U.S. military launched “Operation Just Cause” in Panama. The target: dictator, drug trafficker, and former CIA informant Manuel Noriega.

Citing the protection of U.S. citizens living in Panama, the lack of democracy, and illegal drug flows, the George H.W. Bush administration said Noriega must go. Within days of the invasion, he was captured, bound up and sent back to the United States to face racketeering and drug trafficking charges. U.S. forces fought on in Panama for several weeks before mopping up the operation and handing the keys back to a new president, Noriega opposition leader Guillermo Endar, who international observers said had won the 1989 election that Noriega later annulled. He was sworn in with the help of U.S. forces hours after the invasion.

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