THE US corporate broadcaster NBC tells us that the US military carried out what a Pentagon official called “defensive” air strikes in Iraq and Syria on Sunday.

According to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby, the air strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq.

Kirby said that President Joe Biden, who authorised the strikes, “directed further military action to disrupt and deter” attacks on US facilities and personnel in Iraq.

NBC News tacked on to the end of its report a note that the Iraqi military condemned the US attacks.

So far, so routine, in the daily functioning of the empire.

Meanwhile, across two continents and an ocean, we hear from Bloomberg Business News that a Chilean communist of Palestinian heritage is the front-runner in the race to become president.

Unbundle these news items and we have the distinct signs that the language of imperialist domination has a diminishing capacity to describe real-life processes.

We might ask how are the people of the US defended by missile strikes against Iraqi citizens?

How is the international order — supposedly grounded in respect for the sovereignty of states — to remain inviolate when US occupation troops are stationed in Iraq in the face of a clear decision by the Iraqi parliament that they should leave?

And how can we reconcile the assertion that US troops are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government when that government’s military authorities contest the legitimacy of the US actions?

Just a week ago, and with a marked lack of irony, the US Bureau of Industry and Security, its Office of Export Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation commandeered a clutch of Iranian news websites, accusing them of “spreading disinformation.”

The actions of the US are the actions of a lawless state, one which sets itself above the formal conventions which supposedly shape international relations, and feels able to act with extra-territorial impunity.

There are times when Bloomberg, which has pretensions to be the authoritative news source of investors, is compelled by reality to report that reality.

And when it records that the communist Daniel Jadue’s “sharp criticisms” of Chile’s persistent inequality are raising alarm among executives who fear he could undo the business-friendly framework that Pinochet created, it is sending a clear signal to the money men that things are on the move in (North) America’s backyard.

The malign US presence in the Middle East is grounded in its partnership arrangements with Israel and the Arab autocracies of the region and was justified to the US public by the September 11 2001 al-Qaida attack on New York’s Twin Towers and on the Pentagon.

Its similarly malign record in Latin America also hinges on the day September 11, but in 1973, when a US-backed coup overthrew the government of the socialist president Salvador Allende, ushered in decades of brutal repression and extra-judicial murder carried out by US-trained military, and turned Chile into a test bed for the neoliberal economics and privatisation which is the economic orthodoxy everywhere when capital rules.

The constitution that the Chilean dictator Pinochet imposed and which underpinned the dictatorship of capital has been repudiated by the Chilean people in a democratic vote which heralds a new age of progressive politics.

We see here the settling of the people’s account with capital and with a US imperialism with which British capital is complicit.

No capitalist investor, and none of our politicians, Tory or Labour, who justified it or lied for it, can be confident that a similar settling of accounts in the Middle East can be forever deferred.