tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80317132024-02-20T21:28:47.903-08:00The War Around Usantiwar peace politics warWolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.comBlogger3267125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-14350024982590559012014-08-04T13:31:00.000-07:002014-08-04T13:31:10.043-07:00Malaysian Airlines MH370 and MH17. A Criminolgist Questions: What are the Probabilities? Is It A Mere Coincidence? By Jason KissnerFor months after the vanishing of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was brought down by a surface-to air missile. Western Mainstream Media (MSM)-hastened on very the basis of very thin evidence joined with the refusal to even mention other evidence to even mention other evidence -to attribute blame to the "appropriate" party, which in the case of flight 17 happens to be Vladimir Putin. Careful observers of the mainstream media processes are well aware that this sort of thing is what we are to expect, and undoubtedly helps explain the very low level of trust place in MSM institutions. Here, of course with the leave of figures such as Anderson Cooper and Barack Obama, we are going to do some of our own thinking about, and analysis of, certain key pieces of evidence. In so doing, we should not be surprised if we arrive from at conclusions different from that which our Ruling Class masters would have us believe. First, let's present the currently prevailing theory as to that which our Ruling Class masters would have us believe. First, let's present the currently prevailing theory as to what happened. K.T. Mc.Farland national security analyst at Fox, presents "three possible scenarios" pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the three "'possible scenarios" pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the three "possible scenarios"pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the three "possible scenarious" pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the three "possible scenarios scenarios" pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the "three possible scenarios" pertaining to the attribution of responsibility. Of the three possible scensarios McFarland presents (and one wonders exactly what scenarious what <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-53447557832713989782014-06-10T11:06:00.001-07:002014-06-10T11:06:06.795-07:00The Normandy Landing and World War II: The Lies Grow More Audacious by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5474"><em>f
there were any doubts that Western “leaders” live in a fantasy
make-believe world constructed out of their own lies, the G-7 meeting
and 70th anniversary celebration of the Normandy landing dispelled the
doubts. </em><br />
</span>
<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5472">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5471">The
howlers issuing from these occasions are enough to split your sides.
Obama and his lap dog Cameron described the Normandy landing on June 6,
1944, as “the greatest liberation force that the world has ever known”
and took all the credit for the US and Britain for the defeat of
Hitler. No mention was made of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, which
for three years prior to the Normandy landing had been fighting and
defeating the Wehrmacht. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Author Dr. Paul Craig Roberts</span><br />
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5474"><em><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/paulcroberts3.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5386076" height="114" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/paulcroberts3.jpg" title="paulcroberts" width="79" /></a></em></span><br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5469">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5468">The
Germans lost World War II at the Battle of Stalingrad, which was fought
from August 23, 1942 until February 2, 1943, when most of the remnants
of the powerful German Sixth Army surrendered, including 22 generals. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5464">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5465">Nineteen
months previously the largest invasion force ever assembled on planet
earth invaded Russia across a one thousand mile front. Three million
crack German troops;</span><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5463"> 7,500 artillery units, 19 panzer divisions with 3,000 tanks, and 2,500 aircraft rolled across Russia for 14 months. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5461">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5460">By
June 1944, three years later, very little of this force was left. The
Red Army had chewed it up. When the so-called “allies” (a term which
apparently excludes Russia) landed in France, there was little to resist
them. The best forces remaining to Hitler were on the Russian front,
which collapsed day by day as the Red Army approached Berlin.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5399">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5398">The
Red Army won the war with Germany. The Americans and the British showed
up after the Wehrmacht was exhausted and in tatters and could offer
little resistance. Joseph Stalin believed that Washington and London
stayed out of the war until the last minute and left Russia with the
burden of defeating Germany.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5485">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5484">Hollywood
and popular writers have, of course, buried the facts. Americans have
all sorts of movies, such as “A Bridge Too Far,” that portray
insignificant events, however heroic, as turning points in the war.
Nevertheless, the facts are clear. The war was won on the Eastern front
by Russia. Hollywood’s movies are fun, but they are nonsense. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5488">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5487">Russia
is again on the outs with “the world community,” because Obama’s plan
to seize Ukraine and to evict Russia from its Black Sea base in Crimea
has come a cropper. Crimea has been a part of Russia for as long as the
US has existed. Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, stuck Crimea into the
Ukrainian Socialist Republic in 1954 when Russia and Ukraine were part
of the same country. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5490">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5489">When
the Washington-imposed stooge government in Kiev recently declared that
it was abolishing the use of the Russian language and arresting
Ukrainians who had dual Russian citizenship and began tearing down
Russian war memorials consecrated to the liberation of Ukraine from the
Nazis, the people in Crimea used the ballot box to disassociate from
Washington’s stooge government in Kiev, first voting their independence
and then voting for reunification with their mother country.</span></div>
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5491">Washington, and the other
G-7 countries following Washington’s orders, described this Crimean act
of self-determination, which is exactly comparable to the act of
self-determination declared by Britain’s American colonies, to be a case
of “Russian invasion and annexation.” Similar efforts to disassociate
from Kiev are underway in</span> other former Russian territories that today comprise eastern and southern Ukraine.<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5494">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5493">Washington
has equated self-determination in eastern and southern Ukraine with
“terrorism” and has encouraged its stooge in Kiev to use military
violence against protesting civilians. The reason for branding
separatists “terrorists” is to make it OK to kill them.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5497">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5496">It
is extraordinary to any learned person that the President of the United
States and the titular heads of state of the Western European countries
would publicly declare such blatant lies to the world. The world has
historians. The world has peoples whose knowledge vastly exceeds that
of the “mainstream media,” a.k.a., the Ministry of Propaganda, or, as
Gerald Celente brands them, “the presstitutes.” Whatever name we use,
the Western media is a collection of well paid whores.They lie for
money, dinner party invitations, and speaking invitations with large
honorariums and book contracts with large advances.<br />
</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5498">
I know. They tried to recruit me.</div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5500">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5499">Notice
how narrowly Washington defines “the world community.” The “world
community” consists of the Group of 7. That’s it. Seven countries make
up the “world community.” The “world community” consists of six white
countries and Washington’s puppet state of Japan. The “world community”
is the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. The
other 190 countries are not part of Washington’s “world community.” In
the neocon doctrine, they are not even part of humanity. </span></div>
The “world community” doesn’t have the population of single excluded
countries, such as China or India. I haven’t done the calculation, but
probably the land mass of Russia itself exceeds the land mass of the
“world community.”<br />
So, what is this “world community?”<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5504">
The “world community” is the
assemblage of US vassal states. Britain, France, and Germany were
important on the 20th century scene. Their histories are studied in
universities. The populations had a decent standard of living, although
not for all citizens. Their past is the reason for their present
importance.</div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5506">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5505">In
effect, these countries were propelled forward by history, or by the
history important to the West. Japan, being an appendage of Washington,
has tried to become “western.” It is extraordinary how such a proud,
war-like people became nothing.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5507">
As I have finally stopped
laughing at the presumed non-role of Russia in the defeat of Hitler,
let’s return to the G-7 meeting. The Big Happening of this meeting was
Russia’s exclusion and the shrinkage of the G-8 to the G-7.</div>
This was the first time in 17 years that Russia was not allowed to participate in the meeting of which Russia is a member. Why?<br />
Russia is being punished. Russia is being isolated from the 7
countries that the White House Fool thinks constitute “the world
community.”<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5512">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5511">Obama
is angry that his National Security Council and the morons he appointed
to the State Department and UN were so poorly educated that they did
not know that much of the Ukraine consists of former Russian provinces
inhabited by Russians. These ignorant Obama-appointed morons thought
that they could grab Crimea, evict Russia, and leave Russia without
access to the Mediterranean, thus unable to hold on to its naval base in
Tartus, Syria, the easier for Washington to invade Syria. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5514">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5513">Crimea
has been part of Russia since Russia completed the reconquest from the
Tartars. I remember the Tarter, or Tater, ethnics from my visit to
Tamerlane the Great’s (Timur as he was also known) tomb in Samarkand 53
years ago. Today Tamerlane’s city is refurbished as a tourist site. 53
years ago it was a desolate place in ruins, overgrown with trees growing
out of the tops of the minarets.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5517">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5516">As
Obama’s plan to seize Ukraine failed, like every one of his other plans
has failed, Washington’s spokesmen for the vested private interests
have seized on the opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia and to
restart the Cold War. Obama and his Group of 7 puppets or vassals used
the occasion to threaten Russia with real sanctions, in place of the
present propaganda sanctions that have no effect. According to Obama
and his British lap dog, Putin must somehow prevent the Russian
populations of eastern and southern Ukraine from protesting their
subservience to a neo-fascist government in Kiev backed by Washington,
or else. </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5520">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5519">Putin
is supposed to embrace the Oligarch, a former minister of the
government that Washington overthrew, put in office by a fake vote in
which turnout was a small percent of the population. Putin is supposed
to kiss this corrupt Oligarch on both cheeks, pay Ukraine’s natural gas
bills and forgive its debts. In addition, Russia is supposed to
repudiate the Crimean people, evict them from their re-unity with Russia
and hand them over to the neo-Nazi Right Sector to be eliminated as
retribution for Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany, for whom some
Western Ukrainians fought. In exchange, Washington and NATO will put
anti-ballistic missile bases on Ukraine’s border with Russia in order to
protect Europe from nonexistent Iranian nuclear ICBMs.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5521">
This is supposed to be a win-win deal for Russia.</div>
The Obama regime used its well-paid NGOs in Ukraine to overthrow an
elected, democratic government, a government no more corrupt than those
in Western or Eastern Europe or Washington.<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5565">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5564">The
political morons who have England, France, Germany, and Italy in their
hands are wagging their fists at Russia, warning of more, this time
real, sanctions. Do these morons really want their energy supplies cut
off? There is no prospect, despite the propagandistic claims, of
Washington supplying the energy on which Germany industry depends and on
which Europeans depend so that they do not freeze in the winter.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5562">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5561">Sanctions
on Russia will wreck Europe and have little, if any, effect on Russia.
Russia is already moving, with China and the BRICS, outside the dollar
payments mechanism. </span></div>
As the demand for dollars drops, the dollar’s exchange value will
drop. Initially, Washington will be able to force its vassals to
support the dollar, but eventually this will become impossible.<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5558">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5557">What
the White House Fool, the neoconized National Security Council, the
presstitute media, and subservient Congress are doing is to support and
uphold the policies based on hubris and arrogance that are leading the
US into the abyss.<br />
</span></div>
An abyss is like a black hole. You don’t get out.<br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5551">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5550">Washington’s
lies are so blatant and transparent that Washington is destroying its
own credibility. Consider the NSA spying. Documents released by
Snowden and Greenwald make it completely clear that Washington spies not
only on government leaders and ordinary people but also on foreign
businesses in order to advance US commercial and financial interests.
That the US steals Chinese business secrets is not in doubt. So what
does Washington do? Washington not only denies what the documents prove
but turns the charge around and indicts five Chinese generals for
spying on US corporations.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5548">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5547">The only purpose of these indictments hyped by the US attorney general is propaganda.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5542">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5545">The
indictments are otherwise totally meaningless, not merely false. China
is not about to turn over five Chinese generals to the liars in
Washington. For the presstitute media </span><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5541">the story is a way to move the NSA’s spying out of the spotlight. China is substituted for the NSA as the guilty party.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5523">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5543">Why doesn’t China, Brazil, Germany and every other country issue arrest warrants for</span><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5522">
NSA’s top officials, for Obama, and for the members of the
congressional oversight committee? Why do other countries always allow
Washington to control the explanation with propaganda first strikes?</span></div>
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5524">Americans are very
susceptible to propaganda. They seem to have a special taste for it.
Consider the hate whipped up against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier
just released by the Taliban in a prisoner exchange with the US. The
hatred and bloodlust that the presstitute media have whipped up against
Bergdahl has caused his hometown to cancel the celebration of his
release. The press engineered hatred of Bergdahl has spilled over into
threats against Hailey, Idaho.<br />
</span><br />
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5528">
<span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5527">What
is the basis for the attacks on Bergdahl? Apparently, the answer is
that Bergdahl, like pro-football star Pat Tillman who turned down a $3.6
million contract to join the Army Rangers and go to defend freedom in
Afghanistan, came down with a case of doubts about the war. Originally
Pat Tillman’s death was attributed to his heroic action and enemy fire.
Then it emerged that Tillman was a victim of “friendly fire.” Many
concluded that he was murdered, because the government did not want a
sports hero speaking out about the war. As Bergdahl is off the
battlefield, he has to be murdered in the press–like Russia, China,
Iran, Putin, Assad, Crimeans, and the Russian-speaking population in
Ukraine.<br />
</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1402145081613_5530">
In America hate and the cultivation of hate is alive and well. But not a single moral virtue is.</div>
<div class="nr_related_placeholder" data-permalink="http://<a href=">
www.globalresearch.ca/the-normandy-landing-and-world-war-ii-the-lies-grow-more-audacious/5386028"
data-title="The Normandy Landing and World War II: The Lies Grow More
Audacious"></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-31874340979579209482014-06-06T09:52:00.003-07:002014-06-06T09:52:49.857-07:00Marking D-Day's 70th Anniversary - Return To Normandy by Greg Keller (Associate Press)<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-8934145839421854742014-05-01T15:09:00.001-07:002014-05-01T15:09:08.714-07:00MH370: Evidence Suggests a Naval Intelligence / Israeli False Flag Operation was Exposed Before Execution of an Attack By Keith Maart<h1 align="center" style="text-align: left;">
<b>MH370: Evidence Suggests a Naval Intelligence / Israeli </b></h1>
<br />
<h1 align="center" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #888888;"><b>False Flag Operation was Exposed Before Execution of an Attack</b></span></h1>
<br />
<h2>
By Keith Maart</h2>
<br />
<strong>On March 26, 2014, investigative journalist Chris Bollyn
broke what has probably been the most important story to date on the
missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370). With the befuddled and
clueless mainstream media (MSM) parroting what the government was
telling them and some theorizing anything from black holes to alien
abduction, Bollyn reported that there was a Malaysian Airlines Boeing
777 identical to MH370 which had been stored in a hangar in Tel Aviv
since November 2013.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[1]</a>
For those knowledgeable of Israel’s long history of false flag attacks,
the implications of such a long shot “coincidence” were alarming and
frightening.</strong><br />
In October 2013 a Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based company, GA Telesis
(“GAT”), acquired a 15-year-old Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 (“GAT’s
Malaysian 777”) from Kuwaiti-based ALAFCO Leasing (lessor to Malaysian
Airlines). GAT’s Malaysian 777 was flown to the relatively small and
seasonal Tarbes Lourdes Airport in France’s Pyrenees mountains around
October 4, 2013.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[2]</a>
This movement of the plane coincidently occurred a week after President
Obama announced that the US would seek diplomatic solutions with Iran
regarding its nuclear program. While the plane was at Tarbes Lourdes,
the Malaysian Airlines name on the plane was apparently painted over,
although the signatory red and blue stripes on the fuselage remained.<br />
The actual sale and transfer of the plane to GAT appears to have
occurred on October 21, 2013, as a new registration number in GA
Telesis’ name was obtained at this time.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[3]</a>
Although GAT’s primary business is the scrapping and subsequent parts
sales of planes, the fact that they re-registered this plane suggests
that they probably did not intend to scrap it. Although GAT usually
issues press releases when they acquire jumbo jets and state their
intentions for the planes, no GAT press release was issued for this
plane. In addition, no other information was found discussing this
significant jet sale or GAT’s intended use of the plane.<br />
A scrapping of this plane would be questionable for a couple of
reasons. Firstly, in August 2012, Malaysian Airlines stated it had no
plans to retire or add any Boeing 777s to its fleet.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[4]</a>
Secondly, Telesis was ostensibly planning on scrapping an expensive jet
that still had another 10+ years of expected average life remaining.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[5]</a> Indeed, two other Boeing jets that Telesis announced it was dismantling in July 2013 were about 22 and 27 years old.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[6]</a>
Moreover, holding an expensive jumbo jet in storage for about 6 months
and not doing anything with it does not make any economic sense.<br />
Around November 4, 2013, GAT’s Malaysian 777 was flown to Ben Gurion
Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, and reportedly has been there ever since.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[7]</a>
On April 2, 2014, this author contacted Rebecca Longo, the Vice
President of Aircraft Systems Group at GA Telesis, and asked her if GAT
had a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 sitting in Israel. Ms. Longo
confirmed that the jet was in Israel and awaiting disassembly. When I
asked Ms. Longo why the plane was in Israel and why they would scrap
such a young plane, she suggested that I talk to the CEO of GAT, Abdol
Moabery. This author tried to call Abdol Moabery several times during
the week of April 21, 2014, but he never replied.<br />
<i>Clarifying Note: A GAT press release of July 10, 2013, stated that
another apparent Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 had begun to be
disassembled by GAT in the USA.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title=""><b>[8]</b></a>
The alleged serial number of this plane was MSN 24818, while the serial
number of the plane purchased in October 2013 was MSN 24816. However,
various public records do not show that plane 24818 was ever transferred
from Malaysian Airlines to GAT.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title=""><b>[9]</b></a>
Besides GAT’s press release, no other information was found that
confirms GAT acquired this plane. Thus, the Malaysian Airlines 777
mentioned in GAT’s July 2013 press release (24818) does not appear to be
the one acquired in October 2013 and discussed above (24816). Flight
MH370’s serial number was MSN 24820.</i><br />
<b>Evidence Suggests GA Telesis is an Apparent Front Company in an Attempted False Flag Operation </b><br />
Abdol Moabery is the founder and CEO of GA Telesis. He started the
company in early 2002 at the age of 34 after apparently just 7
questionable years in the aviation business.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[10]</a>
I say “questionable” because all that is known about Moabery before he
founded GAT is contained in a few sentences of a brief autobiography
that can be found in several places on the internet.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[11]</a>
There are many open questions about Moabery’s past and evidence
suggests he may be associated with US Naval Intelligence and that GAT is
an intelligence front company. Coincidently, Moabery and the Israeli
Vice Chairman of a GAT subsidiary that can retrofit planes, Aviv Tzur,
where aviation executives in the immediate area where 3 of the 4 alleged
9/11 hijacker cells were located.<br />
According to Moabery’s internet biography, before starting GAT, he
served in the U.S Navy and Navy Reserves, was Director of Marketing and
Sales at C-S Aviation Services, and was then Executive Vice President of
Aviation Systems International. Moabery does not provide the dates for
his navy service and prior two jobs and provides very little additional
information about them.<br />
No information was found on Moabery’s naval career, including what
units he served in and how long he served. However, background checks
showed that Moabery lived in Jacksonville, FL, and Warrenton, VA.
Jacksonville hosts a large and strategic US Naval Air Station and an
intelligence unit called the US Navy Information Dominance Corps (NIDC).
NIDC includes enlisted and civilian professionals who possess skills in
information-intensive fields. It also receives extensive training in
information, intelligence, counter-intelligence, networks, and space,
and its mission is to deliver full-spectrum cyber information warfare
and intelligence training to achieve decision superiority.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[12]</a><br />
Moabery’s potential involvement in NIDC (including as a reservist) or
other military intelligence units would be somewhat hypothetical if not
for the fact he also apparently lived in Warrenton, VA. Warrenton
houses the Warrenton Training Center (WTC) which is a large classified
government communication complex that has served many roles, most
notably as a CIA signals intelligence facility, numbers station, and
communications laboratory. WTC also has a communications and signals
intelligence training school for various federal agencies including the
CIA, NSA, Department of Defense and Department of State.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[13]</a>
Since Moabery does not disclose anything about his navy career, a
possible military intelligence background cannot be discounted.<br />
An April 25, 2014 GAT press release states that they hired Dale
Karraker as new Director of Government and Defense Programs.
Coincidently, Karraker began his career as Cryptologic Technician for
the US Navy and most recently Country Manager for a gas turbine company
(Chromalloy, Inc.) in Saudi Arabia.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[14]</a>
A Navy Cryptologic Technician performs a wide range of tasks in support
of the national intelligence-gathering with an emphasis on cryptology
and signal intelligence and generally maintains security clearance.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[15]</a> Given Moabery’s apparent station in Warrenton, he may have had a similar Navy intelligence background as Karraker.<br />
Moabery’s first listed job as Director of Marketing and Sales of C-S
Aviation appears to be a huge leap of responsibility given his previous
navy experience and questionable college education.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[16]</a>
C-S Aviation is a George Soros Company, and Moabery was allegedly
responsible for the sales and marketing of a fleet of commercial
aircraft. Moabery’s next job was EVP of Aviation Systems International
(Boca Raton, Florida), where his responsibilities allegedly included
oversight and management of all operations. ASI was a privately held
company that was in involved in the jet scrapping and parts supply
business and went bankrupt in 2004. This author found no evidence
confirming that Moabery worked for either of the aforementioned
companies.<br />
Oddly, the only company besides GAT where Moabery’s name came up in
an internet search is one that he does not list on his internet
biography. Per a January 2008 <i>New York Times </i>article, Moabery
invited ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to invest in and promote a
closely-held start-up company (Skywatch LLC) that Moabery was a partner
in along with Raytheon, a large US military contractor. Moabery tried
soliciting Giuliani to Skywatch more than two years earlier, and
according to the <i>Times</i>, Moabery left the company in December 2006
but remained a shareholder in its parent company. Skywatch’s main
product was the Eagle-300, an electronic monitoring device to detect
illegal aliens at border fences.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[17]</a> The full extent of Moabery’s relationship with Raytheon is not known, just like many things in his alleged professional life.<br />
GAT is a privately held company and it is not known who all of its
owners are or who supplied the money to start the company in 2002. With
apparently 7 years work experience, it is unlikely that Moabery had the
equity funds or the experience to obtain bank financing for his new
business. GAT’s primary business of jumbo jet scrapping and parts supply
(“parts out business”) is a capital intensive business that would
require relatively substantial start-up money and bank financing. Being
privately held, GAT does not report its financial results and it is not
known what units generate the most business. GAT reports about a half
dozen different divisions and one of GAT’s groups is its Defense and
Government Systems Division.<br />
There is little public information relating to GAT’s government and
defense contracts but GAT lists on its website a half-dozen military
aircraft that it supports and states that its defense division provides
security and surveillance products and consulting and partnering
services. GAT allegedly provides plane maintenance services for defense
and government customers and in April 2013 entered into several
agreements with Boeing Defense Services for inventory management on
several planes Boeing provides to the military.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[18]</a> The full extent of GAT’s and Moabery’s military relationships is unknown.<br />
In 2011, GAT acquired assets and certain liabilities of Ultimate
Aircraft Composites (UAC), a Florida based Israeli-run company that
specializes in the repair of aircraft. Per a GAT press release in
January 2011, UAC is capable of supporting the repair and manufacture of
a plane’s structural and composite components including flight control
services and nacelle systems (parts separate from fuselage, including
engines, fuel system, etc). UAC had several contracts for the repair of
structural military components for various government and military
agencies. Per GAT, “The addition of military component capability to our
existing range of commercial and regional aircraft will allow us to
complete the circle of complex composite and structural repair
services.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[19]</a> Given UAC’s Israeli management, there is a likelihood that UAC had contracts with the Israeli government.<br />
UAC was merged into a GAT subsidiary named GA Telesis Composite
Repair Group and several of UAC’s Israeli executives became officers and
board members of GAT’s new subsidiary. UAC’s Chief Executive Officer,
Aviv Tzur, was made Executive Chairman and is one of three board members
of GAT’s Composite Group. Tzur is Chairman of the Florida Region
Israeli-American Chamber of Commerce and Chris Bollyn confirmed that
Tzur and other officers and board members of GAT’s Composite Group are
Israeli citizens.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[20]</a>
When Bollyn spoke to Tzur and told him that people who answered the
phone at GAT’s Composite Group did not know who he was, Tzur told Bollyn
that only the guys at the top would know about his position with the
company.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[21]</a><br />
Last but not least, there appears to be a relatively significant
disconnect between GAT’s alleged operations and what some public records
show. GAT’s press releases over the last several years suggest that
they have scrapped about two dozen planes.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[22]</a>
However, Planespotters fleet history shows that GAT has only scrapped
one plane and has sold the overwhelming majority of planes that it has
acquired.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[23]</a>
This discrepancy could indicate a front company whose operations are
not what they state. Coincidently, GAT usually provides a quarterly
summary of its acquisitions and operations within two to three months
after each quarter but a summary for the fourth quarter of 2013 has not
been provided nearly 4 months later.<br />
Both GAT and Abdol Moabery have a number of appearances and
characteristics of fronts for US intelligence, and Aviv Tzur’s addition
to the company in 2011 provides a clear connection to the Israeli
government and military. Without these individuals and institutions
providing evidence and answers to the many critical questions about
them, their possible involvement in what appears to be an exposed false
flag operation cannot be ignored.<br />
<b>MH370 Apparently Flown to Diego Garcia: Navy Intelligence’s Part in the Exposed False Flag Operation</b><br />
Despite weak, questionable, and conflicting evidence, the general
consensus in the MSM is that MH370 appears to have followed a primarily
southerly route and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean (over
1000 km SW of Perth, Australia) after running out of fuel. This theory
is primarily based on the alleged satellite data of a British satellite
telecommunications company named Inmarsat. There are significant
questions about the reliability of Inmarsat’s findings, not the least of
which is that no other satellite data has confirmed them and that the
company has extensive military contracts. No evidence from any source
has been found to confirm Inmarsat’s findings.<br />
The investigation into MH370’s disappearance has been filled with
incompetence, cover-ups, and disinformation. The scope of this paper is
not to rebut the loads of questionable and conflicting evidence, but to
show that the evidence suggests that the plane was probably flown to a
strategic US naval and satellite communication facility in the central
Indian Ocean. On a small island named Diego Garcia, 450 miles from the
Maldives, there is a US naval base with a runway that can accommodate
jumbo jets. There is nothing else on Diego Garcia except for the US Navy
base and its satellite communications facility.<br />
Around sunrise at 6:15 AM on March 8, 2014 (9:15 AM Malaysia time),
several residents on the Maldives island of Huvadhoo reported seeing a
very low-flying jumbo jet. The residents provided good detail and
described the aircraft as white with red stripes, which is very similar
to the colors of MH370. According to some residents, the plane was
flying so low they could see the doors on the plane. The residents
stated that they sometimes see small seaplanes around the island, but
this was the first time they ever saw a jumbo jet. People were coming
out of their houses to see what was causing the tremendous noise. The
eyewitnesses say that the airplane was traveling in a southeast
direction toward Addu, the last and most southern island in the
Maldives.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[24]</a><br />
There are several important facts and observations that need to be made at this point:<br />
<ul>
<li>Huvadhoo residents would have been the first (the sighting happened
around sunrise) and last to see the plane before it reached Diego
Garcia, which is mainly south of Huvadhoo. Although there was one more
Maldives island (Addu Island, about 50 miles straight south of Huvadhoo)
before Diego Garcia, the plane was reportedly traveling in a southeast
direction apparently in order to miss Addu Island.</li>
<li>If the plane was flying so low that some people could see the
plane’s doors and it was very loud, then it was probably flying no more
than 500 feet above sea level. At this flying height, the plane was
flying low enough to avoid conventional radar.</li>
<li>The time the plane was spotted was about 8.5 hours from take-off and
it had flown roughly 2,200 miles, averaging approximately 250 miles per
hour. (From Kuala Lumpur to the original destination of Beijing was
2,700 miles.) Although the plane had more drag at the lower altitude and
would have gotten worse fuel mileage, the much slower than normal speed
would have compensated for the greater air resistance.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[25]</a></li>
<li>From the point where the plane was spotted, there was another 500
miles to Diego Garcia, or approximately two hours at its then current
speed.</li>
</ul>
The day after the sightings were reported in the Maldives media, the
acting Malaysian transport minister stated that the Maldives reports
were “not true,” based on a conversation between the heads of Malaysia’s
and Maldives’ Defense Forces. Maldives National Defence Force stated
there was no trace that MH370 had been picked up on their radar.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[26]</a>
Of course not, the plane was apparently flying at around 500 feet and
all other tracking devices have been intentionally turned off. The
finding of the sightings being “not true” implies that the residents
deliberately lied and no evidence or support was provided for this fact.
Indeed, if the residents who spotted the plane were found to be
intentionally lying in one of the most high profile international
investigations in years, then it would likely be a crime and there’s no
evidence they were charged with one. What would be the eyewitnesses
motivation to tell such an alleged blatant lie?<br />
As reported in the MSM, the head pilot of MH370, Capt. Zaharie Ahmed
Shah, had a “sophisticated” self-built flight simulator in his house.
Despite the FBI lying that they found nothing unusual on the simulator,
several MSM organizations reported that Shah had Diego Garcia programmed
into his simulator which suggests that he practiced flights to that
remote island.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[27]</a>
As a glance at Google Maps reveals, the closest easily-sighted amount
of land to a direct path between the last-known location of MH370 and
Diego Garcia is the Maldives, so it would make sense (especially if fuel
was tight and navigation was uncertain) to aim for the Maldives en
route to Diego Garcia.<br />
A major Malaysian news organization reported that investigators found
that Diego Garcia and its runway was among the top-five locations
programmed in Shah’s simulator, along with Male, Maldives.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[28]</a>
The only thing on Diego Garcia is the US Navy and commercial flights do
not go to Diego Garcia. Given that Shah appears to have flown the plane
at about 500 feet above sea level, practicing on a simulator would have
been very helpful.<br />
Diego Garcia is owned by the British government and is leased to the
US government. US navy operations on the island include a large ship and
submarine base, an air base, a communications and “space tracking”
facility, and a logistics anchorage for regional operations, including
for the Middle East. Diego Garcia was used as the launching pad for US
bombers in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and as a logistics supply
hub.<br />
Diego Garcia also happens to be the place where the US has several
hundred “bunker-buster” bombs stored in event of a possible attack on
Iran. The Scotland Herald reported in 2010 that a Florida-based shipping
company (Superior Maritime Services) entered into a contract with the
US government to ship 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or
underground structures.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[29]</a>
Thus, Diego Garcia might well be a logical staging area for a false
flag operation against Iran. Coincidentally, Superior Maritime Services
does lots of military work and is located in the same Florida County
(Broward) as GA Telesis.<br />
With the bunker buster bombs stored at Diego Garcia, it’s probable
that there is an Israeli presence there that is involved in the planning
and preparation of a possible attack on Iran. It’s likely that there
has been military coordination between the US and Israel and it would
make sense that Diego Garcia would be used given its state of the art
satellite systems (to identify Iran’s potential nuclear sites) and its
probable use as a launch pad for possible bombing strikes against Iran.<br />
Another significant unanswered question is why didn’t Diego Garcia’s
sophisticated satellite systems pick up any data on MH370 given it
allegedly flew within about one thousand miles of the base and allegedly
crashed about 2,000 miles from Diego Garcia. There’s speculation that
US military and intelligence did have the means to monitor MH370’s
flight. Diego Garcia’s satellite systems would almost certainly have had
the capability to pick up the same “pings” that Inmarsat’s satellite
allegedly picked up.<br />
<b>The Feeble Framing of Iran and the Exposed “Plan A” of the Attempted False Flag Operation</b><br />
For about the last decade, Israel and US neocon hawks have been
trying to convince the world that Iran is six months away from producing
a nuclear bomb, and the dire consequences if they’re not stopped.
Israel’s cited source for this evidence is their vaunted intelligence
services which have been proven wrong time and time again. Realizing
that President Obama and the rest of the world is sick and tired of
their “crying wolf,” Israel and certain neocon related elements within
the US military and intelligence apparatus are clearly getting desperate
for action which now appears to be in the form of a joint false flag
operation to implicate Iran.<br />
The Iranian connection to MH370 was established quickly when two
Iranian men were found to have boarded the flight using stolen
passports. Although many American MSM organizations have floated the
theory that the Iranian men could have been party to a terrorism plot,
most MSM organizations have not promoted it as likely theory. However,
Fox News and its owner Rupert Murdoch have been aggressively promoting
this theory along with the Israeli mainstream media. These false flag
actors are clearly trying to set the stage that Iran is most likely
behind MH370’s disappearance and that they are probably going to use the
plane in some sort of terrorism attack.<br />
One of the first signs that the fix was in on Iran, is when the UK
Daily Mail noticed the obviously photoshopped picture of the two Iranian
passengers on Flight MH370. The March 24, 2014, Daily Mail pointed out
that both Iranian men had the exact same green pants, brown shoes, and
leg positions in their photos.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[30]</a>
In a very strange excuse, the Malaysian police said the image of one
man had been accidently placed on top of the other when they were
photocopied. MH370’s pilot’s apparent complicity in the diversion of the
plane to Diego Garcia and the flagrant errors and cover-ups attempted
by the Malaysian government may indicate certain individuals in Malaysia
may have been recruited into the likely US/Israeli covert operation.<br />
There are several different ways that a false flag attack involving
two identical Malaysian Airlines 777’s could have been undertaken, but
now that the plan has been exposed we will probably never know what was
actually being planned. However, one possible scenario is that GAT’s
Malaysian 777 in Tel Aviv was undergoing retrofitting for the operation
that probably included such things as automated flight systems,
Iranian/Russian parts, explosives, etc. The Malaysian Airlines name
would be painted back on the plane and it would be used in another
9/11-type attack. MH370 would be disassembled at Diego Garcia and
identifying parts would be placed at the crash site of the substitute
plane suggesting that it was indeed MH370 and that the Iranians had
retrofitted it for the operation.<br />
Naval intelligence’s fingerprints are all over MH370’s disappearance,
from it’s likely flight path to Diego Garcia to Abdol Moabery’s
possible involvement in the Navy Intelligence. The fact that GAT had an
identical Malaysian Airlines 777 sitting in a hangar in Tel Aviv is
another long shot coincidence that is too hard to ignore. US and Israeli
intelligence do not think inside the box and they were apparently up to
some of their old tricks in the case of MH370. With hundreds of one-ton
bunker buster bombs sitting in Diego Garcia dying to be used, the
temptation of using them and attacking the second most significant oil
rich country in the world was apparently too much for the US military
and Israel to resist. Now that Plan A has been foiled, we’ll now have to
wait awhile to see what Plan B has in store.<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div>
<b>References and Endnotes</b><br />
[1] Chris Bollyn, “<a href="http://www.bollyn.com/home/#article_14613" target="_blank">Are the Israelis Planning Another 9-11 Using the Missing Boeing 777?</a>” ChrisBollyn.com, Updated March 30, 2014<br />
</div>
<div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[2]</a> <a href="http://www.planespotters.net/Production_List/Boeing/777/28416,N105GT-GA-Telesis-php" target="_blank">N105GT GA Telesis Boeing 777-2H6(ER) MSN 24816</a>, Planespotters.net<br />
Planespotters.net is an aviation internet site that tracks jet
ownership and movement. The plane sale was probably under contract
between GAT and ALAFCO when the plane was flown to France around October
4, 2013.<br />
</div>
<div>
[3] Ibid.<br />
</div>
<div>
[4] <a href="http://sunnaero.blogspot.com/2012/08/malaysia-airlines-boeing-777.html" target="_blank">Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777</a>, Sunn Aero, Sunnaero.blogspot.com, August 2012.<br />
</div>
<div>
[5] Helen Jiang, “<a href="http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/aircraft_economic_life_whitepaper.pdf" target="_blank">Key Findings on Airplane Economic Life</a>,” Boeing, March, 2013.<br />
</div>
<div>
The subject paper concluded that the average useful life of a Boeing jet is 27 years.<br />
[6] A July 2013 GAT press release noted that a Boeing 757 and Boeing
767 were being scrapped at that time and the ages of these planes were
approximately 22 and 27 years (see Endnote 8 for Press Release). The
evidence of age at scrapping is as follows:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.planespotters.net/Production_List/Boeing/757/25276,N542UA-United-Airlines.php" target="_blank">Boeing 757 MSN</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.planespotters.net/Production_List/Boeing/767/22326,N325AA-American-Airlines.php" target="_blank">Boeing 767 MSN</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
[7] N105GT GA Telesis Boeing 777-2H6(ER) MSN 24816, Planespotters.net, Ibid.<br />
</div>
<div>
[8]<a href="http://www.gatelesis.com/ga-telesis-disassembles-boeing-777-200er-767-200er-and-757-200er/" target="_blank"> GA Telesis Press Release</a>, July 10, 2013<br />
</div>
<div>
[9]<a href="http://www.planespotters.net/Production_List/Boeing/777/24818,9M-MRK-Malaysia_Airlines.php" target="_blank"> Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-2H6(ER) MSN 24818</a>, Planespotters.net<br />
</div>
<div>
[10] Moabery does not include a college education on most of his
internet biographies, however, a 2011 article in a local Florida
newspaper stated that Moabery graduated from Florida Atlantic University
in 1994 (degree and major were not stated). Moabery turned 27 that year
and he started GAT when he was 34, suggesting that he worked about
seven years before founding the company.<br />
</div>
<div>
[11] Biography of Abdol Moabery, <a href="http://business.fau.edu/news-events/news-details/index.aspx?nid=4" target="_blank">Florida Atlantic University Fall 2011 Executive Forum Lecture Series</a><br />
Other biographies of Abdol Moabery can be found on various websites.
However, they are all similar to this biography except for minor
variations.<br />
</div>
<div>
[12]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Dominance_Corps" target="_blank"> US Navy Information Dominance Corps</a>, Wikipedia.com<br />
</div>
<div>
Although NIDC was formerly started in 2009, the predecessor
operations and functions were most likely in existence before that time.<br />
[13] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrenton_Training-Center" target="_blank">Warrenton Training Center</a>, Wikipedia.com<br />
</div>
<div>
[14] GA Telesis Press Release, <a href="http://www.gatelesis.com/ga-telesis-announces-dale-karraker-as-director-of-government-and-defense-programs/" target="_blank">GA Telesis Announces Dale Karraker as Director of Government and Defense Programs</a>, April 25, 2014.<br />
</div>
<div>
[15] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptologic_technician" target="_blank">Cryptologic Technician</a>, Wikipedia.org<br />
</div>
<div>
[16] See Endnote 10<br />
</div>
<div>
[17] Russ Buettner, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/politics/18fence.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Giuliani Had Ties to Company Trying to Sell Border Technology</a>,” The New York Times, January 18, 2008<br />
</div>
<div>
[18]<a href="http://www.gatelesis%20.com/ga-telesis-awarded-boeing-defense-services-agreements/" target="_blank"> GA Telesis Awarded Several Boeing Defense Service Agreements</a>, GA Telesis Press Release, April 17, 2013<br />
</div>
<div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[19]</a> <a href="http://www.gatelesis.com/ga-telesis-acquires-additional-composite-mro-facility-and-re-brands-it-as-ga-telesis-composite-repair-group/" target="_blank">GA
Telesis Acquires Additional Composite MRO Facility and Re-brands it as
GA Telesis Composite Repair Group, GA Telesis Press Release</a>, January 29, 2013.<br />
</div>
<div>
[20]<a href="http://www.iacc-fl.org/Leadership.html" target="_blank"> Israeli-American Chamber of Commerce</a> – Florida Region. Officers.<br />
</div>
<div>
[21] Chris Bollyn, “<a href="http://www.bollyn.com/why-does-israel-have/" target="_blank">Why is a Twin of the Missing MH370 in a Hangar in Israel?</a>” Chrisbollyn.com, April 18, 2014<br />
</div>
<div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[22]</a><a href="http://www.gatelesis.com/category/press/" target="_blank"> GA Telesis Press Releases,</a> GA Teleisis Website<br />
</div>
<div>
[23] <a href="http://www.planespotters.net/Airline/GA-Telesis" target="_blank">GA Telesis Fleet Details and History</a>, Planespotters.net<br />
</div>
<div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" title="">[24]</a> Farah Ahmed and Ahmed Naif, “<a href="http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062" target="_blank">Maldives Island Residents Report Sighting of Low Flying Jet</a>,” Haveeru Daily, March 18, 2014.<br />
</div>
<div>
[25] Kuala Lumpur to Diego Garcia is approximately 2,000 miles, but additional mileage was assumed.<br />
</div>
<div>
[26] “<a href="http://news.asiaone.com/news/asia/missing-mh370-maldives-probe-reports-possible-mh370-sighting" target="_blank">Missing MH370: Maldives Probe Reports of Possible MH370 Sightings,</a>” Asiaone.com, March 19, 2014<br />
</div>
<div>
[27] “<a href="http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1114188" target="_blank">Flight MH370 Facts</a>,” CNN News, March 20, 2014<br />
</div>
<div>
[28] “<a href="http://english.astroawani.com/news/show/mh370-diego-garcia-runway-found-in-captain-zaharies-flight-simulator-32034" target="_blank">MH370: Diego Garcia Runway Found in Captain Zaharie’s Flight Simulator</a>,’ Astro Awani , March 18, 2014<br />
</div>
<div>
[29] Rob Edwards, “<a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/final-destination-iran-1.1013151" target="_blank">Final Destination Iran?</a>”, The Scotland Herald, March 15, 2010<br />
</div>
[30] Ian Drury and Candace Sutton, ‘<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587554/Did-somebody-doctor-photo-men-took-Flight-MH370-Fears-cover-amid-claims-pictures-passengers-set-legs.html" target="_blank">Why did Somebody Doctor Photo of Men Who Took Flight MH370</a>” The Daily Mail (UK), March 23, 2014.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-37621697789217411462014-03-27T11:11:00.002-07:002014-03-27T11:11:47.792-07:00Why There Will Be War in Ukraine By Sergei Markov by Global Research NewsThe current crisis is not about Crimea. It is about the rights
of Russian-speakers throughout Ukraine whom the Kremlin wants to protect
from violence and discrimination. Russia does not want a military
intervention in Crimea and does not want to take Crimea from Ukraine.<br />
There is a political solution to this crisis.<br />
First, create a coalition government in Kiev composed of all parties,
including those from the east and south of the country. The current
government is dominated by anti-Russian extremists from western Ukraine.<br />
Second, Ukraine needs to draft a democratic constitution that has
guarantees for Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population that would grant
official status to the Russian language and establish the principle
of federalism.<br />
Third, presidential and parliamentary elections must be held soon.
Independent election observers must play an active role in ensuring that
the elections are free and fair. There is a real danger that they will
be manipulated by the neo-Nazi militants who de facto seized power in a
coup.<br />
If these democratic and peaceful solutions to the crisis in Ukraine
are rejected by the opposition forces that have seized power in Kiev, I
am afraid that Russia will have no other choice but to revert
to military means. If the junta leaders want to avoid war, they need
to adopt Moscow’s peaceful and democratic proposals and adhere to them.<br />
Those currently in power in Kiev are carrying out a political
strategy that is not so much pro-European as it is anti-Russian, as
evidenced by the surprisingly heavy-handed tactics the U.S. and European
Union have employed in Ukraine. In the end, a minority executed
a violent coup that removed the democratically elected and legitimate
president of Ukraine.<br />
The Kremlin believes that the current Ukrainian leadership will
manipulate the elections planned for May 25 to install a single leader
or coalition government functioning much as former Georgian President
Mikheil Saakashvili did in Tbilisi. A ”Ukrainian Saakashvili” will
unleash an even more repressive campaign of intimidation against
Russian-speakers, one that over several years would stoke anti-Russia
hysteria among the general population.<br />
After that, Kiev may evict Russia’s Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol
and purge Crimea of any Russian influence. Ukraine could easily become
a radicalized, anti-Russian state, at which point Kiev will fabricate
a pretext to justify taking subversive action against Moscow. This looks
especially likely considering that ruling coalition members from the
neo-fascist Svoboda and Right Sector parties have already made
territorial claims against Russia. They could easily send their army
of activists to Russia to join local separatists and foment rebellion
in the North Caucasus and other unstable regions in Russia. In addition,
Russia’s opposition movement will surely want to use the successful
experience and technology of the Euromaidan protests and, with the help
and financial support of the West, try to carry out their own revolution
in Moscow. The goal: to remove President Vladimir Putin from power
and install a puppet leadership that will sell Russia’s strategic
interests out to the West in the same way former President Boris Yeltsin
did in the 1990s.<br />
The official census puts the Russian minority in Ukraine at 16
percent of the total population, although that number was falsified.
The actual number is closer to 25 percent. Surveys indicate that 45
percent of the country’s population speak Russian at home, 45 percent
speak Ukrainian and 10 percent speak both languages. In the most recent
Gallup survey, when asked in which language they would like to be
polled, 83 percent of respondents chose Russian. Taking into account
the rural population in western and central Ukraine, about 75 percent
of the people, probably speak Russian. Of that 75 percent, only about 10
percent are those in Kiev and a few other major cities who supported
the protests. This means that only 35 percent of the population are
attempting to impose its will on the remaining 65 percent, using
a violent coup to achieve their goals.<br />
Putin made the right decision: He did not to wait for that attack
and took preventative measures. Many in the West say the Kremlin’s
reactions were paranoiac, but Germany’s Jews also thought the same
of leaving the country in 1934. Most of them chose to believe they were
safe and remained in Germany even after Hitler came to power.
The infamous Kristallnacht took place five years later, one of the first
early chapters in the “Final Solution.” Similarly, just four years
remain until Russia’s presidential election in 2018, and there is
a strong risk that subversive forces within and outside Russia will try
to overthrow Putin, in part using their new foothold in Ukraine.<br />
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
<em>If the extremists who seized power
in Kiev do not accept Russia’s democratic proposals, Russia will likely
be forced to revert to military means to solve the crisis in Ukraine.</em></div>
Will there be war in Ukraine? I am afraid so. After all,
the extremists who seized power in Kiev want to see a bloodbath. Only
fear for their own lives might stop them from inciting such a conflict.
Russia is prepared to move its forces into southern and eastern Ukraine
if repressive measures are used against the Russian-speaking population
or if a military intervention occurs. Russia will not annex Crimea. It
has enough territory already. At the same time, however, it will also
not stand by passively while Russophobic and neo-Nazi gangs hold
the people of Crimea, Kharkiv and Donetsk at their mercy.<br />
<div class="articlebottom">
<div class="vtext">
<em><strong>Sergei Markov</strong> is director of the Institute of Political Studies.</em><br />
Copyright Moscow Times 2014<br />
</div>
</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-34512181060996815392014-03-27T11:03:00.005-07:002014-03-27T11:03:21.873-07:00Crimea: Putin’s Triumph. Now the Confrontation Moves East to “New Russia” By Israel Shamir<div id="article">
<h1 class="article-title">
Crimea: Putin’s Triumph. Now the Confrontation Moves East to “New Russia”</h1>
<div class="author">
By <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/israel-shamir" title="Posts by Israel Shamir">Israel Shamir</a></div>
<div class="grDate">
Global Research, March 21, 2014</div>
<div class="url">
Url of this article:<br /><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/crimea-putins-triumph-now-the-confrontation-moves-east-to-new-russia/5374710">http://www.globalresearch.ca/crimea-putins-triumph-now-the-confrontation-moves-east-to-new-russia/5374710</a></div>
<div class="article-content">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><em>Nobody expected events to
move on with such a breath-taking speed. The Russians took their time;
they sat on the fence and watched while the Brown storm-troopers
conquered Kiev, and they watched while Mrs Victoria Nuland of the State
Department and her pal Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) slapped each other’s backs and
congratulated themselves on their quick victory. </em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><em>They watched when President
Yanukovych escaped to Russia to save his skin. They watched when the
Brown bands moved eastwards to threaten the Russian-speaking South East.
They patiently listened while Mme Timoshenko, fresh out of jail, swore
to void treaties with Russia and to expel the Russian Black Sea Fleet
from its main harbour in Sevastopol. </em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><em>They paid no heed when the
new government appointed oligarchs to rule Eastern provinces. Nor did
they react when children in Ukrainian schools were ordered to sing “Hang
a Russian on a thick branch” and the oligarch-governor’s deputy <a href="https://www.facebook.com/borys.filatov/posts/603173516431216">promised to hang</a> dissatisfied Russians of the East as soon as Crimea is pacified. While these fateful events unravelled, Putin kept silence.</em> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">He is a cool cucumber, Mr Putin.
Everybody, including this writer, thought he was too nonchalant about
Ukraine’s collapse. He waited patiently. The Russians made a few slow
and hesitant, almost stealthy moves. The marines Russia had based in
Crimea by virtue of an international agreement (just as the US has
marines in Bahrain) secured Crimea’s airports and roadblocks, provided
necessary support to the volunteers of the Crimean militia (called
Self-Defence Forces), but remained under cover. The Crimean parliament
asserted its autonomy and promised a plebiscite in a month time. And all
of a sudden things started to move real fast!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The poll was moved up to Sunday,
March 16. Even before it could take place, the Crimean Parliament
declared Crimea’s independence. The poll’s results were spectacular: 96%
of the votes were <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for</em>
joining Russia; the level of participation was unusually high – over
84%. Not only ethnic Russians, but ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars voted
for reunification with Russia as well. A symmetrical poll in Russia
showed over 90% popular support for reunification with Crimea, despite
liberals’ fear-mongering (“this will be too costly, the sanctions will
destroy Russian economy, the US will bomb Moscow”, they said). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Even then, the majority of
experts and talking heads expected the situation to remain suspended for
a long while. Some thought Putin would eventually recognise Crimean
independence, while stalling on final status, as he did with Ossetia and
Abkhazia after the August 2008 war with Tbilisi. Others, especially
Russian liberals, were convinced Putin would surrender Crimea in order
to save Russian assets in the Ukraine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">But Putin justified the Russian
proverb: the Russians take time to saddle their horses, but they ride
awfully fast. He recognised Crimea’s independence on Monday, before the
ink on the poll’s results dried.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
next day, on Tuesday, he gathered all of Russia’s senior statesmen and
parliamentarians in the biggest, most glorious and elegant St George
state hall in the Kremlin, lavishly restored to its Imperial glory, and
declared Russia’s acceptance of Crimea’s reunification bid. Immediately
after his speech, the treaty between Crimea and Russia was signed, and
the peninsula reverted to Russia as it was before 1954, when Communist
Party leader Khrushchev passed it to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">This was an event of supreme
elation for the gathered politicians and for people at home watching it
live on their tellies. The vast St George Hall applauded Putin as never
before, almost as loudly and intensely as the US <a href="http://www.jinsa.org/jinsa-reports/prime-minister-netanyahu-us-congress">Congress had applauded</a>
Netanyahu. The Russians felt immense pride: they still remember the
stinging defeat of 1991, when their country was taken apart. Regaining
Crimea was a wonderful reverse for them. There were public festivities
in honour of this reunification all over Russia and especially in joyous
Crimea. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Historians have compared the
event with the restoration of Russian sovereignty over Crimea in 1870,
almost twenty years after the Crimean War had ended with Russia’s
defeat, when severe limitations on Russian rights in Crimea were imposed
by victorious France and Britain. Now the Black Sea Fleet will be able
to develop and sail freely again, enabling it to defend Syria in the
next round. Though Ukrainians ran down the naval facilities and turned
the most advanced submarine harbour of Balaclava into shambles, the
potential is there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Besides the pleasure of getting
this lost bit of land back, there was the additional joy of outwitting
the adversary. The American neocons arranged the coup in Ukraine and
sent the unhappy country crashing down, but the first tangible fruit of
this break up went to Russia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">A new Jewish joke was coined at that time: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Israeli President Peres asks the Russian President:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB">Vladimir, are you of Jewish ancestry?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB">Putin: What makes you think so, Shimon?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB">Peres: You made the US pay five billion dollars to deliver Crimea to Russia. Even for a Jew, that is audacious!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Five billion dollars is a
reference to Victoria Nuland’s admission of having spent that much for
democratisation (read: destabilisation) of the Ukraine. President Putin
snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and US hegemony suffered a
set-back.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The Russians enjoyed <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2581882/US-v-Russia-clash-diplomats-Americas-ambassador-UN-berates-Russian-counterpart-saying-country-stood-actions-wrong.html">the sight</a>
of their UN representative Vitaly Churkin coping with a near-assault by
Samantha Power. The Irish-born US rep came close to bodily attacking
the elderly grey-headed Russian diplomat telling him that “Russia was
defeated (presumably in 1991 – ISH) and should bear the consequences…
Russia is blackmailing the US with its nuclear weapons,” while Churkin
asked her to keep her hands off him and stop foaming at the mouth. This
was not the first hostile encounter between these twain: a month ago,
Samantha entertained a Pussy Riot duo, and Churkin said she should join
the group and embark on a concert tour.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The US Neocons’ role in the Kiev coup was clarified by two independent exposures. Wonderful Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/page4/how_cold_war-hungry_neocons_stage_managed_liz_wahls_resignation_20140319">showed</a>
that the anti-Russian campaign of recent months (gay protests, Wahl
affair, etc.) was organised by the Zionist Neocon PNAC (now renamed FPI)
led by Mr Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria “Fuck EC” Nuland. It seems
that the Neocons are hell-bent to undermine Russia by all means, while
the Europeans are much more flexible. (True, the US troops are still
stationed in Europe, and the old continent is not as free to act as it
might like).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The second exposé was <a href="http://www.kp.ru/daily/26208/3093561/">an interview with Alexander Yakimenko</a>, the head of Ukrainian Secret Services (SBU) who had escaped to Russia like his president. Yakimenko accused <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Andriy
Parubiy, the present security czar, of making a deal with the
Americans. On American instructions, he delivered weapons and brought
snipers who killed some 70 persons within few hours. They killed the
riot police and the protesters as well.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The
US Neocon-led conspiracy in Kiev was aimed against the European attempt
to reach a compromise with President Yanukovych, said the SBU chief.
They almost agreed on all points, but Ms Nuland wanted to derail the
agreement, and so she did – with the help of a few snipers. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">These snipers were used again in Crimea: a sniper shot and killed a Ukrainian soldier. When the Crimean</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> self-defence</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">
forces began their pursuit, the sniper shot at them, killed one and
wounded one. It is the same pattern: snipers are used to provoke
response and hopefully to jump-start a shootout.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Novorossia</span></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">While Crimea was a walkover, the
Russians are far from being home and dry. Now, the confrontation moved
to the Eastern and South-Eastern provinces of mainland Ukraine, called
Novorossia (New Russia) before the Communist Revolution of 1917.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his later years </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">predicted
that Ukraine’s undoing would come from its being overburdened by
industrial provinces that never belonged to the Ukraine before Lenin, –
by Russian-speaking Novorossia. This prediction is likely to be
fulfilled.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Who
fights whom over there? It is a great error to consider the conflict a
tribal one, between Russians and Ukrainians. Good old Pat Buchanan made
this error saying that</span><span lang="EN-GB"> “Vladimir Putin is a
blood-and-soil, altar-and-throne ethno-nationalist who sees himself as
Protector of Russia and looks on Russians abroad the way Israelis look
upon Jews abroad, as people whose security is his legitimate
concern.” Nothing could be farther away from truth: perhaps only the
outlandish claim that Putin is keen on restoring the Russian Empire can
compete.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Putin is not an empire-builder
at all (to great regret of Russia’s communists and nationalists). Even
his quick takeover of Crimea was an action forced upon him by the
strong-willed people of Crimea and by the brazen aggression of the Kiev
regime. I have it on a good authority that Putin hoped he would not have
to make this decision. But when he decided he acted.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The ethno-nationalist assertion
of Buchanan is even more misleading. Ethno-nationalists of Russia are
Putin’s enemies; they support the Ukrainian ethno-nationalists and march
together with Jewish liberals on Moscow street demos. Ethno-nationalism
is as foreign to Russians as it is foreign to the English. You can
expect to meet a Welsh or Scots nationalist, but an English nationalist
is an unnatural rarity. Even the English Defence League was set up by a
Zionist Jew. Likewise, you can find a Ukrainian or a Belarusian or a
Cossack nationalist, but practically never a Russian one. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Putin is a proponent and advocate of non-nationalist Russian world. What is the Russian world?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Russian World</span></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Russians populate their own vast
universe embracing many ethnic units of various background, from
Mongols and Karels to Jews and Tatars. Until 1991, they populated an
even greater land mass (called the Soviet Union, and before that, the
Russian Empire) where Russian was the <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lingua franca</em>
and the language of daily usage for majority of citizens. Russians
could amass this huge empire because they did not discriminate and did
not hog the blanket. Russians are amazingly non-tribal, to an extent
unknown in smaller East European countries, but similar to other great
Eastern Imperial nations, the Han Chinese and the Turks before the
advent of Young Turks and Ataturk. The Russians did not assimilate but
partly acculturated their neighbours for whom Russian language and
culture became the gateway to the world. The Russians protected and
supported local cultures, as well, at their expense, for they enjoy this
diversity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Before 1991, the Russians
promoted a universalist humanist world-view; nationalism was practically
banned, and first of all, Russian nationalism. No one was persecuted or
discriminated because of his ethnic origin (yes, Jews complained, but
they always complain). There was some positive discrimination in the
Soviet republics, for instance a Tajik would have priority to study
medicine in the Tajik republic, before a Russian or a Jew; and he would
be able to move faster up the ladder in the Party and politics. Still
the gap was small.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">After 1991, this universalist
world-view was challenged by a parochial and ethno-nationalist one in
all ex-Soviet republics save Russia and Belarus. Though Russia ceased to
be Soviet, it retained its universalism. In the republics, people of
Russian culture were severely discriminated against, often fired from
their working places, in worst cases they were expelled or killed.
Millions of Russians, natives of the republics, became refugees;
together with them, millions of non-Russians who preferred Russian
universalist culture to “their own” nationalist and parochial one fled
to Russia. That is why modern Russia has millions of Azeris, Armenians,
Georgians, Tajiks, Latvians and of smaller ethnic groups from the
republics. Still, despite discrimination, millions of Russians and
people of Russian culture remained in the republics, where their
ancestors lived for generations, and the Russian language became a
common ground for all non-nationalist forces.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">If one wants to compare with
Israel, as Pat Buchanan did, it is the republics, such as Ukraine,
Georgia, Uzbekistan, Estonia do follow Israeli model of discriminating
and persecuting their “ethnic minorities”, while Russia follows the West
European model of equality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">France vs Occitania</span></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">In order to understand the
Russia-Ukraine problem, compare it with France. Imagine it divided into
North and South France, the North retaining the name of France, while
the South of France calling itself “Occitania”, and its people
“Occitans”, their language “Occitan”. The government of Occitania would
force the people to speak Provençal, learn Frederic Mistral’s poems by
rote and teach children to hate the French, who had devastated their
beautiful land in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220. France would just
gnash its teeth. Now imagine that after twenty years, the power in
Occitania were violently seized by some romantic southern fascists who
were keen to eradicate “800 years of Frank domination” and intend to
discriminate against people who prefer to speak the language of Victor
Hugo and Albert Camus. Eventually France would be forced to intervene
and defend francophones, at least in order to stem the refugee influx.
Probably the Southern francophones of Marseilles and Toulon would
support the North against “their own” government, though they are not
migrants from Normandy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Putin defends all
Russian-speakers, all ethnic minorities, such as Gagauz or Abkhaz, not
only ethnic Russians. He defends the Russian World, all those
russophones who want and need his protection. This Russian World
definitely includes many, perhaps majority of people in the Ukraine,
ethnic Russians, Jews, small ethnic groups and ethnic Ukrainians, in
Novorossia and in Kiev.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Indeed Russian world was and is
attractive. The Jews were happy to forget their schtetl and Yiddish;
their best poets Pasternak and Brodsky wrote in Russian and considered
themselves Russian. Still, some minor poets used Yiddish for their
self-expression. The Ukrainians, as well, used Russian for literature,
though they spoke their dialect at home for long time. Nikolai Gogol,
the great Russian writer of Ukrainian origin, wrote Russian, and he was
dead set against literary usage of the Ukrainian dialect. There were a
few minor Romantic figures who used the dialect for creative art, like
Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Solzhenitsyn</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">
wrote: “Even ethnic-Ukrainians do not use and do not know Ukrainian. In
order to promote its use, the Ukrainian government bans Russian
schools, forbids Russian TV, even librarians are not allowed to speak
Russian with their readers. This anti-Russian position of Ukraine is
exactly what the US wants in order to weaken Russia.“</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Putin in his speech on Crimea stressed that he wants to secure the Russian world – everywhere in the Ukraine. In</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> Novorossia </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">the need </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">is </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">acute</span><span lang="EN-GB">,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">
for there are daily confrontations between the people and the gangs
sent by the Kiev regime. While Putin does not yet want (as opposed to
Solzhenitsyn and against general Russian feeling) </span><span lang="EN-GB">to
take over Novorossia, he may be forced to it, as he was in Crimea.
There is a way to avoid this major shift: the Ukraine must rejoin the
Russian world. While keeping its independence, Ukraine must grant full
equality to its Russian language speakers. They should be able to have
Russian-language schools, newspapers, TV, be entitled to use Russian
everywhere. Anti-Russian propaganda must cease. And fantasies of joining
NATO, too.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">This is not an extraordinary
demand: Latinos in the US are allowed to use Spanish. In Europe,
equality of languages and cultures is a <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sine qua non</em>.
Only in the ex-Soviet republics are these rights trampled – not only in
Ukraine, but in the Baltic republics as well. For twenty years, Russia
made do with weak objections, when Russian-speakers (the majority of
them are not ethnic Russians) in the Baltic states were discriminated
against. This is likely to change. Lithuania and Latvia have already
paid for their anti-Russian position by losing their profitable transit
trade with Russia. Ukraine is much more important for Russia. Unless the
present regime is able to change (not very likely), this illegitimate
regime will be changed by people of Ukraine, and Russia will use R2P
against the criminal elements in power. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The majority of people of
Ukraine would probably agree with Putin, irrespective of their
ethnicity. Indeed, in the Crimean referendum, Ukrainians and Tatars
voted <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">en masse</em> together
with Russians. This is a positive sign: there will be no ethnic strife
in the Ukraine’s East, despite US efforts to the contrary. The decision
time is coming up fast: some experts presume that by end of May the
Ukrainian crisis will be behind us.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footer">
Copyright © 2014 Global Research</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-38420691485839280342014-03-27T11:01:00.000-07:002014-03-27T11:01:38.498-07:00By Prof Michel Chossudovsky "Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine”<div id="article">
<h1 class="article-title">
Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine”</h1>
<div class="author">
By <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/michel-chossudovsky" title="Posts by Prof Michel Chossudovsky">Prof Michel Chossudovsky</a></div>
<div class="grDate">
Global Research, March 24, 2014</div>
<div class="url">
Url of this article:<br /><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/regime-change-in-ukraine-and-the-imfs-bitter-economic-medicine/5374877">http://www.globalresearch.ca/regime-change-in-ukraine-and-the-imfs-bitter-economic-medicine/5374877</a></div>
<div class="article-content">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Interim Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk meets President Obama at White House, March 2014 (White House photo)</span><br />
<em>In the days following the Ukraine coup d’Etat of February 23,
leading to the ousting of a duly elected president, Wall Street and the
IMF–in liaison with the US Treasury and the European Commission in
Brussels– had already set the stage for the outright takeover of
Ukraine’s monetary system. The EuroMaidan protests leading up to “regime
change” and the formation of an interim government were followed by
purges within key ministries and government bodies.</em><br />
The Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) <strong>Ihor Sorkin</strong> was fired on February 25th and replaced by a new governor: <strong>Stepan Kubiv</strong>.[right]<br />
<em style="font-style: normal;">Stepan Kubiv is </em>a member of Parliament of the Rightist Batkivshchyna “Fatherland” faction in the Rada led by the acting Prime Minister <strong>Arseny Yatsenyuk</strong>
(founded by Yulia Tymoshenko in March 1999). He previously headed
Kredbank, a Ukrainian financial institution largely owned by EU capital,
with some 130 branches throughout Ukraine. <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-27/ukraine-central-bank-promises-liquidity-local-banks-one-condition"> Ukraine Central Bank Promises Liquidity To Local Banks, With One Condition, <em style="font-style: normal;"></em></a><em style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/kubiv.jpg"><img alt="" class=" wp-image-5374898 alignright" height="160" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/kubiv-300x200.jpg" title="kubiv" width="240" /></a></em>Zero Hedge, February 27, 2014).<br />
Kubic is no ordinary bank executive. He was one of the first field “commandants” of the EuroMaidan riots alongside <em style="font-style: normal;"> <strong>Andriy Parubiy</strong> co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) and <strong>Dimitry Yarosh,</strong> leader of the Right Sector Brown Shirts, which now has the status of a political party. </em><br />
<em style="font-style: normal;"></em>Kubiv was in the Maidan square
addressing protesters on February 18, at the very moment when armed
Right Sector thugs under the helm of<strong> Dmitry Yarosh</strong> were raiding the parliament building.<br />
<img alt="" class="wp-image-5374878 alignleft" height="185" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Shlapak-Aleksandr-Vitalievich_origin.png" title="Shlapak-Aleksandr-Vitalievich_origin" width="185" />A
few days later, upon the establishment of the interim government,
Stepan Kubiv was put in charge of negotiations with Wall Street and the
IMF.<br />
The new Minister of Finance <strong>Aleksandr Shlapak</strong> [left] is a political crony of <strong>Viktor Yushchenko</strong>
–a long-time protegé of the IMF who was spearheaded into the presidency
following the 2004 “Colored Revolution”. Shlapak held key positions in
the office of the presidency under Yushchenko as well as at the National
Bank of Ukraine (NBU). In 2010, upon Yushchenko’s defeat, Aleksandr
Shlapak joined <span class="body">a shadowy Bermuda based offshore
financial outfit IMG International Ltd (IMG), holding the position of
Vice President. Based in Hamilton, Bermuda, IMG specialises in “captive
insurance management”, reinsurance and “risk transfer.” </span><br />
Minister of Finance <strong>Aleksandr Shlapak </strong> works in close liaison with <strong> Pavlo Sheremeto</strong>,
the newly appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade, who
upon his appointment called for “deregulation, fully fledged and across
the board”, requiring –as demanded in previous negotiations by the IMF–
the outright elimination of subsidies on fuel, energy and basic food
staples.<br />
<span class="body">Another key appointment is that of<strong> Ihor Shvaika </strong>[right], a member of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, to the position of </span>Minister of Agrarian Policy <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shvaika.png"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-5374895 alignright" height="200" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shvaika.png" title="shvaika" width="160" /></a>and
Food. Headed by an avowed follower of World War II Nazi collaborator
Stepan Bandera [see image below], this ministry not only oversees the
agricultural sector, it also decides on issues pertaining to subsidies
and the prices of basic food staples. <span class="body"> </span><br />
The new Cabinet has stated that the country is prepared for socially
“painful” but necessary reforms. In December 2013, a 20 billion dollar
deal with the IMF had already been contemplated alongside the
controversial EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Yanukovych decided to
turn it down.<br />
One of the requirements of the IMF was that “<strong>household subsidies for gas be reduced once again by 50%”. </strong><br />
<blockquote>
<strong>“Other onerous IMF requirements included cuts to
pensions, government employment, and the privatization (read: let
western corporations purchase) of government assets and property.</strong>
It is therefore likely that the most recent IMF deal currently in
negotiation, will include once again major reductions in gas subsidies,
cuts in pensions, immediate government job cuts, as well as other
reductions in social spending programs in the Ukraine.” (<a href="http://voiceofrussia.com/uk/news/2014_03_21/Ukraines-economic-crisis-Who-benefits-Who-pays-2562/">voice of russia.com</a> March 21, 2014)</blockquote>
<strong>Economic Surrender: Unconditional Acceptance of IMF Demands by Western Puppet Government<br />
</strong><br />
Shortly after his instatement, the interim (puppet) prime minister <strong>Arseny Yatsenyuk</strong> casually dismissed the need to negotiate with the IMF. Prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a draft agreement, <span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bandera.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-5374896 alignleft" height="187" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bandera.jpg" title="bandera" width="269" /></a></span>Yatsenyuk
had already called for an unconditional acceptance of the IMF package:
“We have no other choice but to accept the IMF offer”.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[Neo Nazi Svoboda Party glorify World War II Nazi Collaborator Stepan Bandera]</span><br />
Yatsenyk intimated that Ukraine will “accept whatever offer the IMF and the EU made” (<a href="http://voiceofrussia.com/uk/news/2014_03_21/Ukraines-economic-crisis-Who-benefits-Who-pays-2562/">voice of russia.com</a> March 21, 2014)<br />
In surrendering to the IMF, Yatsenyuk was fully aware that the
proposed reforms would brutally impoverish millions of people, including
those who protested in Maidan.<br />
The actual timeframe for the implementation of the IMF’s “shock
therapy” has not yet been firmly established. In all likelihood, the
regime will attempt to delay the more ruthless social impacts of the
macroeconomic reforms until after the May 25 presidential elections
(assuming that these elections will take place).<br />
The text of the IMF agreement is likely to be detailed and specific,
particularly with regard to State assets earmarked for privatization.<br />
Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice, according to Bloomberg are among
key individuals in the US who are acting (in a non-official capacity)
in tandem with the IMF, the Kiev government, in consultation with the
White House and the US Congress.<br />
<strong>The IMF Mission to Kiev<br />
</strong><br />
Immediately upon the instatement of the new Finance Minister and NBU
governor, a request was submitted to the IMF’s Managing director<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lagardeatdavos-2013.jpg"><img alt="" class="wp-image-5374893 alignright" height="170" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/lagardeatdavos-2013.jpg" title="lagardeatdavos 2013" width="256" /></a>. An IMF fact finding mission headed by the Director of the IMF’s European Department Rez Moghadam was rushed to Kiev:<br />
<blockquote>
“I am positively impressed with the authorities’
determination, sense of responsibility and commitment to an agenda of
economic reform and transparency. The IMF stands ready to help the
people of Ukraine and support the authorities’ economic program.” <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2014/pr1487.htm">Press Release: Statement by IMF European Department Director Reza Moghadam on his Visit to Ukraine</a></blockquote>
A week later, on March 12,<strong> Christine Lagarde</strong>, met
the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk at IMF
headquarters in Washington. Lagarde reaffirmed the IMF’s commitment:<br />
<blockquote>
“[to putting Ukraine back] on the path of sound economic
governance and sustainable growth, while protecting the vulnerable in
society. … We are keen to help Ukraine on its path to economic stability
and prosperity.”(<a href="http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2014/pr1493.htm">Press Release: Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Ukraine</a></blockquote>
The above statement is wrought with hypocrisy. In practice, the IMF
does not wield “sound economic governance” nor does it protect the
vulnerable. It impoverishes entire populations, while providing
“prosperity” to a small corrupt and subservient political and economic
elite.<br />
IMF “economic medicine” while contributing to the enrichment of a
social minority, invariably triggers economic instability and mass
poverty, while providing a “social safety net” to the external
creditors. To sell its reform package, the IMF relies on media
propaganda as well as persistent statements by “economic experts” and
financial analysts which provide authority to the IMF’s macroeconomic
reforms.<br />
The unspoken objective behind IMF interventionism is to destabilize
sovereign governments and literally break up entire national economies.
This is achieved through the manipulation of key macroeconomic policy
instruments as well as the outright rigging of financial markets,
including the foreign exchange market.<br />
To reach its unspoken goals, the IMF-World Bank –often in
consultation with the US Treasury and the State Department–, will exert
control over key appointments including the Minister of Finance, the
Central Bank governor as well as senior officials in charge of the
country’s privatization program. These key appointments will require the
(unofficial) approval of the “Washington Consensus” prior to the
conduct of negotiations pertaining to a multibillion IMF bailout
agreement.<br />
Beneath the rhetoric, in the real World of money and credit, the IMF has several related operational objectives:<br />
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
1) to facilitate the collection of debt
servicing obligations, while ensuring that the country remains indebted
and under the control of its external creditors.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
2) to exert on behalf of the country’s
external creditors full control over the country’s monetary policy, its
fiscal and budgetary structures,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
3) to revamp social programs, labor laws, minimum wage legislation, in accordance with the interests of Western capital</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
4) to deregulate foreign trade and investment policies, including financial services and intellectual property rights,</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
5) to implement the privatization of key sectors of the economy through the sale of public assets to foreign corporations.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
6) to facilitate the takeover by foreign
capital (including mergers and acquisitions) of selected privately owned
Ukrainian corporations.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
7) to ensure the deregulation of the foreign exchange market.</div>
<a href="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/the-globalization-of-poverty-and-the-new-world-order/"><img alt="original" class="alignright" height="261" src="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/images/278/GOP%20.jpg?196,196,3893497223" width="170" /></a>While the privatization program ensures the transfer of State assets into the hands of foreign investors, t<strong>he
IMF program also includes provisions geared towards the destabilization
of the country’s privately owned business conglomerates.</strong> A
concurrent “break up” plan entitled “spin-off” as well as a “bankruptcy
program” are often implemented with a view to triggering the
liquidation, closing down or restructuring of a large number of
nationally owned private and public enterprises.<br />
The “spin off” procedure –which was imposed on South Korea under the
December 1997 IMF bailout agreement– required the break up of several of
Korea’s powerful chaebols (business conglomerates) into smaller
corporations, many of which were then taken over by US, EU and Japanese
capital.. Sizeable banking interests as well highly profitable
components of Korea’s high tech industrial base were transferred or sold
off at rock bottom prices to Western capital. (Michel Chossudovsky, <a href="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/the-globalization-of-poverty-and-the-new-world-order/">The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order</a>, Global Research, Montreal, 2003, Chapter 22).<br />
These staged bankruptcy programs ultimately seek to destroy national
capitalism. In the case of Ukraine, they would selectively target the
business interests of the oligarchs, opening the door for the takeover
of a sizeable portion of Ukraine’s private sector by EU and US
corporations. The conditionalities contained in the IMF agreement would
be coordinated with those contained in the controversial EU-Ukraine
Association agreement, which the Yanukovych government refused to sign.<br />
<strong>Ukraine’s Spiraling External Debt</strong><br />
Ukraine’s external debt is of the order of $140 billion.<br />
In consultations with the US Treasury and the EU, the IMF aid package is to be of the order of 15 billion dollars. <strong>Ukraine’s outstanding short-term debt is of the order of $65 billion, more than four times the amount promised by the IMF.</strong><br />
The Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves have literally dried up. In February, <span class="term" id="TMB" style="text-decoration: none;" title="Click to highlight this term (1)."> according to the NUB, Ukraine’s</span>
foreign-currency reserves were of the order of a meagre US$13.7
billion, its Special Drawing Rights with the IMF were of the order of
US$16.1 million, its <span class="term" id="TMB" style="text-decoration: none;" title="Click to highlight this term (2)."> gold reserves US$</span>1.81 billion. <strong>There
were unconfirmed reports that Ukraine’s gold had been confiscated and
airlifted to New York, for “safe-keeping” under the custody of the New
York Federal Reserve Bank.</strong><br />
Under the bailout, the IMF –acting on behalf of Ukraine’s US and EU
creditors– lends money to Ukraine which is already earmarked for debt
repayment. The money is transferred to the creditors. <strong>The loan is “fictitious money”. Not one dollar of this money will enter Ukraine.</strong><br />
The package is not intended to support economic growth. Quite the opposite:<strong>
Its main purpose is to collect the outstanding short term debt, while
precipitating the destabilization of Ukraine’s economy and financial
system.</strong><br />
The fundamental principle of usury is that the creditor comes to the
rescue of the debtor: “I cannot pay my debts, No problem my son, I will
lend you the money and with the money I lend you, you will pay me back”.<br />
<blockquote>
The rescue rope thrown to Kiev by the IMF and the
European Union is in reality a ball and chain. Ukraine’s external debt,
as documented by the World Bank, increased tenfold in ten years and
exceeds 135 billion dollars. In interests alone, Ukraine must pay about
4.5 billion dollars a year. The new loans will only serve to increase
the external debt thus obliging Kiev to “liberalize” its economy even
more, by selling to corporations what remains to be privatized.<strong class="title"> <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-the-imf-and-economic-warfare/5374564"> <span style="text-decoration: none;">Ukraine, IMF “Shock Treatment” and Economic Warfare</span></a></strong> <em class="date">By <span class="author"> <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/manlio-dinucci" title="Posts by Manlio Dinucci"> Manlio Dinucci</a></span>, Global Research, March 21, 2014 </em></blockquote>
Under the IMF loan agreement, the money will not enter the country,
It will be used to trigger the repayment of outstanding debt servicing
obligations to EU and US creditors. In this regard, according to the
Bank for International Settlements (BIS)”European banks have more than
$23 billion in outstanding loans in Ukraine.” <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/ukraine-facing-financial-instability-but-imf-may-help-soon-a-956353.html"> Ukraine Facing Financial Instability But IMF May Help Soon – Spiegel Online, February 28, 2014 </a><br />
What are the “benefits” of an IMF package to Ukraine?<br />
According to IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde the bailout is
intended to address the issue of poverty and social inequality. In
actuality what it does is to increase the levels of indebtedness, while
essentially handing over the reins of macro-economic reform and monetary
policy to the Bretton Woods Institutions, acting on behalf of Wall
Street.<br />
The bailout agreement will include the imposition of drastic
austerity measures which in all likelihood will trigger further social
chaos and economic dislocation. It’s called “policy based lending”,
namely the granting of money earmarked to reimburse the creditors, in
exchange for the IMF’s “bitter economic medicine” in the form of a menu
of neoliberal policy reforms. “Short-term pain for long term gain” is
the motto of the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions.<br />
Loan “conditionalities” will be imposed –including drastic austerity
measures– -which will serve to impoverish the Ukrainian population
beyond bounds in a country which has been under IMF ministrations for
more than 20 years. While the Maidan movement was manipulated, tens of
thousands of people protested they wanted a new life, because their
standard of living had collapsed as a result of the neoliberal policies
applied by successive governments, including that of president
Yanukovych. Little did they realize that the protest movement supported
by Wall Street, the US State Department and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) was meant to usher in a new phase of economic and
social destruction.<br />
<strong>History of IMF Ministrations in Ukraine</strong><br />
In 1994 under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, an IMF package was imposed on Ukraine. <strong>Viktor Yushchenko</strong>
–who later became president following the 2004 Colored Revolution– had
been appointed head of the newly-formed National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
Yushchenko was praised by the Western financial media as a “daring
reformer”; he was among the main architects of the IMF’s 1994 reforms
which served to destabilize Ukraine’s national economy. When he ran in
the 2004 elections against Yanukovych, he was supported by various
foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He was
Wall Street’s preferred candidate.<br />
Ukraines’ 1994 IMF package was finalized behind closed doors at the
Madrid 50 years anniversary Summit of the Bretton Woods institutions. It
required the Ukrainian government to abandon State controls over the
exchange rate leading to an massive collapse of the currency. Yushchenko
played a key role in negotiating and implementing the 1994 agreement as
well as creating a new Ukrainian national currency, which resulted in a
dramatic plunge in real wages:.<br />
<blockquote>
Yushchenko as Head of the Central Bank was responsible
for deregulating the national currency under the October 1994 “shock
treatment”:<br />
<ul>
<li>The price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent,</li>
<li>electricity prices by 600 percent,</li>
<li>public transportation by 900 percent.</li>
<li>the standard of living tumbled</li>
</ul>
According to the Ukrainian State Statistics Committee, quoted by the IMF, <strong>real wages in 1998 had fallen by more than 75 percent in relation to their 1991 level.</strong>(<a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2003/cr03174.pdf">http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft /scr/2003/cr03174.pdf</a> )<br />
Ironically, the IMF sponsored program was intended to alleviate
inflationary pressures: it consisted in imposing “dollarised” prices on
an impoverished population with earnings below ten dollars a month.<br />
Combined with the abrupt hikes in fuel and energy prices, the lifting of subsidies and the freeze on credit c<strong>ontributed to destroying industry (both public and private) and undermining Ukraine’s breadbasket economy.</strong><br />
In November 1994, World Bank negotiators were sent in to examine the overhaul of Ukraine’s agriculture. <strong>With
trade liberalization (which was part of the economic package), US grain
surpluses and “food aid” were dumped on the domestic market,
contributing to destabilizing one of the World’s largest and most
productive wheat economies, </strong>(e.g. comparable to that of the American Mid West). Michel Chossudovsky <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/imf-sponsored-democracy-in-the-ukraine-2/5360920"> IMF Sponsored “Democracy” in The Ukraine, Global Research</a>, November 28, 2004, emphasis added)</blockquote>
The IMF-World Bank had destroyed Ukraine’s ‘bread basket”.<br />
By 1998, the deregulation of the grain market, the hikes in the price
of fuel and the liberalisation of trade resulted in a decline in the
production of grain by 45 percent in relation to its 1986-90 level. The
collapse in livestock production, poultry and dairy products was even
more dramatic. (See <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2003/cr03174.pdf"> http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2003/cr03174.pdf</a>). <strong>The cumulative decline in GDP resulting from the IMF sponsored reforms was in excess of 60 percent from 1992 to 1995.</strong><br />
<strong>The World Bank: Fake Poverty Alleviation</strong><br />
The World Bank has recently acknowledged that Ukraine is a poor country. (World Bank, <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ukraine/overview"> Ukraine Overview</a>, Washington DC, updated February 17, 2014):<br />
<blockquote>
“Evidence shows Ukraine is facing a health crisis, and
the country needs to make urgent and extensive measures to its health
system to reverse the progressive deterioration of citizens’ health. <strong>Crude adult death rates in Ukraine</strong> are higher than its immediate neighbors, Moldova and Belarus, and among the highest not only in Europe, but also in the world.”</blockquote>
What the report fails to mention is that the Bretton Woods
institutions –through a process of economic engineering– played a
central role in precipitating the post-Soviet collapse of the Ukrainian
economy. The dramatic breakdown of Ukraine’s social programs bears the
fingerprints of the IMF-World Bank austerity measures which included the
deliberate underfunding and dismantling of the Soviet era health care
system.<br />
With regard to agriculture, the World Bank points to Ukraine’s
“tremendous agricultural potential” while failing to acknowledge that<strong> the Ukraine bread-basket was destroyed as part of a US-IMF-World Bank package</strong>.
According to the World Bank: “This potential has not been fully
exploited due to depressed farm incomes and a lack of modernization
within the sector.”<br />
“Depressed farm incomes” are not “the cause” they are the
“consequence” of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Program. In
1994, farm incomes had declined by the order of 80% in relation to 1991,
following the October 1994 IMF program engineered by then NUB governor
Viktor Yushchenko. Immediately following the 1994 IMF reform package,
the World Bank implemented (in 1995) a private sector “seed project”
based on “the liberalization of seed pricing, marketing, and trade”. The
prices of farm inputs increased dramatically leading to a string of
agricultural bankruptcies. <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P009117/agricultural-seed-development-project?lang=en"> Projects : Agricultural Seed Development Project | The World Bank</a>, Washington DC, 1995.<br />
<strong>The IMF’s 2014 “Shock and Awe” Economic Bailout</strong><br />
While the conditions prevailing in Ukraine today are markedly
different to those applied in the 1990s, it should be understood that <strong>the
imposition of a new wave of macro-economic reforms (under strict IMF
policy conditionalities) will serve to impoverish a population which has
already been impoverished. </strong>In other words, the IMF’s 2014
“Shock and Awe” constitutes the “final blow” in a sequence of IMF
interventions spreading over a period of more than 20 years, which have
contributed to destabilizing the national economy and impoverishing
Ukraine’s population.<br />
Preliminary information<strong> </strong>suggests that IMF bailout
will provide an advance of $2-billion in the form of a grant to be
followed by a subsequent loan of $11 billion. The European Investment
Bank (EIB) will provide another 2 billion, for a total package of around
$15 billion.<span id="ctrlcopy"> (See <a href="http://voiceofrussia.com/uk/news/2014_03_21/Ukraines-economic-crisis-Who-benefits-Who-pays-2562/">Voice of Russia, </a>March 21, 2014)</span><strong></strong><br />
<strong>Drastic Austerity Measures</strong><br />
The Kiev government has announced that <strong>the IMF requires a 20% cut in Ukraine`s national budget,</strong>
implying drastic cuts in social programs, coupled with reductions in
the wages of public employees, privatisation and the sale of state
assets. The IMF has also called for a “phase out” of energy subsidies,
and the deregulation of the foreign exchange markets. With unmanageable
debts, the IMF will also impose the sell off and privatisation of major
public assets as well as the takeover of the national banking sector.<br />
The new government pressured by the IMF and World Bank have already
announced that old aged pensions are to be curtailed by 50 %. In a
timely February 21 release, the World Bank had set the guidelines for
old age pension reform in the countries of “Emerging Europe and Central
Asia” including Ukraine. In an utterly twisted logic, <strong> “Protecting the elderly” is carried out by slashing their pension benefits</strong>, according to the World Bank. (World Bank, <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/02/21/changing-demographics-call-for-urgent-pension-reforms-in-europe-and-central-asia"> Significant Pension Reforms Urged in Emerging Europe and Central Asia</a>, Washington Dc, February 21, 2014)<br />
Given the absence of a real government in Kiev, Ukraine’s political
handlers in the Ministry of Finance and the NUB will obey the diktats of
Wall Street: The IMF structural adjustment loan agreement for Ukraine
will be devastating in its social and economic impacts.<br />
<strong>Elimination of Subsidies</strong><br />
Pointing to “market distorted energy subsidies”, price deregulation
has been a longstanding demand from both IMF-World Bank. The price of
energy had been kept relatively low during the Yanukovych government
largely as a result of the bilateral agreement with Russia, which
provided Ukraine with low cost gas in exchange for Naval base lease in
Sebastopol. That agreement is now null and void. It is also worth noting
that the government of Crimea <span id="articleText">has announced that
it would take over ownership of all Ukrainian state companies in
Crimea, including the Black Sea natural gas fields. </span><br />
The Kiev interim government has intimated that Ukraine’s retail gas
prices would have to rise by 40% “as part of economic reforms needed to
unlock loans from the International Monetary Fund”. This announcement
fails to address the mechanics of full fledged deregulation which under
present circumstances could lead to increases in energy prices in excess
of 100 percent.<br />
It is worth recalling, in this regard, that Peru in August 1991 had
set the stage for “shock treatment” increases in energy prices when
gasoline prices in Lima shot up overnight by 2978% (a 30 fold increase).
In 1994 as part of the agreement between the IMF and Leonid Kuchma, the
price of electricity flew up over night by 900 percent.<br />
<strong>“Enhanced Exchange Rate Flexibility”</strong><br />
One of the central components of IMF intervention is the deregulation
of the foreign exchange market. In addition to massive expenditure
cuts, the IMF program requires “enhanced exchange rate flexibility”
namely the removal of all foreign exchange controls. <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=40118.0">Ukraine: Staff Report for the 2012 Article IV Consultation</a>, See also <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12315.pdf"> http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12315.pdf</a>.<br />
Since the outset of the Maidan protest movement in December 2013,
foreign exchange controls were instated with a view to supporting the
hyrvnia and stemming the massive outflow of capital.<br />
The IMF sponsored bailout will literally ransack the foreign
currency reserves held by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Enhanced
exchange rate flexibility under IMF guidance has been endorsed by the
new NBU governor Stepan Kubic. Without virtually no forex reserves,
exchange rate flexibility is financial suicide: it opens the door to
speculative short-selling transactions (modelled on the 1997 Asian
crisis) directed against the Ukraine’s currency, the hrynia.<br />
Institutional speculators, which include major Wall Street and
European Banks as well as hedge funds have already positioned
themselves. Manipulation in the forex markets is undertaken through
derivative trade. Major financial institutions will have detailed inside
information with regard to Central Bank policies which will enable them
to rig the forex market.<br />
Under a flexible exchange rate system, the Central Bank does not
impose restrictions on forex transactions. The Central Bank can however
decide –under advice from the IMF– to counter the speculative onslaught
in the forex market, with a view to maintaining the parity of the
Ukrainian hryvnia. Without the use of exchange controls, this line of
action requires Ukraine’s central bank (in the absence of forex
reserves) to prop up an ailing currency with borrowed money, thereby
contributing to exacerbating the debt crisis.<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[the graph below indicates a decline of the hryvnia against the US $ of more than 20% over a six months period] </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>USD- UA Hryvnia Exchange Rate </strong>(120 days)<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ukraine-USD-UAH.gif"><img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-5374907" height="250" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ukraine-USD-UAH.gif" title="ukraine USD-UAH" width="700" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Source <a href="http://themoneyconverter.com/USD/UAH.aspx">themoneyconverter.com</a></div>
It is worth recalling in this regard that Brazil in November 1998 had
received a precautionary bailout loan from the IMF of the order of 40
billion dollars. One of the conditions of the loan agreement, however,
was the complete deregulation of the forex market. This loan was
intended to assist the Central Banking in maintaining the parity of the
Brazilian real. In practice it spearheaded Brazil into a financial crash
in February 1999.<br />
The Brazilian government had accepted the conditionalities. Marred by
capital flight of the order of 400 million dollars a day, the money
granted under the IMF loan –which was intended to prop up Brazil’s
central banks reserves– was plundered in a matter of months. The IMF
loan agreement to Brasilia enabled the institutional speculators to buy
time. Most of the money under the IMF loan was appropriated in the form
of speculative gains accruing to major financial institutions.<br />
With regard to Ukraine, enhanced exchange flexibility spells
disaster. Contrary to Brazil, the Central Bank has no forex reserves
which would enable it to defend its currency. Where would the NBU get
the borrowed forex reserves? Most of the funds under the proposed IMF-EU
rescue package are already earmarked and could be used to effectively
defend the hrynia against “short-selling” speculative attacks in the
currency markets. The most likely scenario is that the hrynia will
experience a major decline leading to significant hikes in the prices of
essential commodities, including food, fuel and transportation.<br />
Were the Central Bank able to use borrowed reserves to prop up the
hrynia, this borrowed money would be swiftly reappropriated, handed over
to currency speculators on a silver platter. This scenario of propping
up the national currency using borrowed forex reserves (i.e. Brazil in
1998-99) would, however, contribute in the short-term to staving off an
immediate collapse of the standard.<br />
This procedure provides “extra time” to the speculators, who are busy
plundering the Central Bank’s (borrowed) currency reserves. It also
enables the interim government to postpone the worst impacts of the
IMF’s “enhanced exchange rate flexibility” to a later date.<br />
When the borrowed hard currency reserves of the Central Bank run out
–i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the May 25 presidential elections–
the value of hrynia will plunge on the forex market, which in turn will
trigger a dramatic collapse in the standard of living. Coupled with the
demise of bilateral economic relations with Russia pertaining to the
supply of natural gas to Ukraine, energy prices are also slated to
increase dramatically.<br />
<strong>Neoliberalism and neo-Nazi ideology join hands: Repressing the Protest Movement against the IMF</strong><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/dmytroyarosh.jpg"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-5371550 alignright" height="165" src="http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/dmytroyarosh.jpg" title="dmytroyarosh" width="305" /></a><br />
With Svoboda and Right Sector political appointees in charge of
national security and the armed forces, a real grassroots protest
movement directed against the IMF’s deadly macroeconomic reforms, will
in all likelihood be brutally repressed by the Right Sector’s “brown
shirts” and the National Guard paramilitary led by <strong>Dmitri Yarosh</strong>
[left image, center with the microphone], on behalf of Wall Street and
the Washington consensus. In recent developments, Right Sector Dmitry
Yaroch has declared his candidacy in the upcoming presidential
elections. (Popular support for the Yaroch is less than 2%).<br />
<blockquote>
“Russia put Yarosh on an international wanted list and
charged him with inciting terrorism after he urged Chechen terrorist
leader Doku Umarov to launch attacks on Russia over the Ukrainian
conflict. The ultra-nationalist leader has also threatened to destroy
Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory.” (RT, March 22, 2014)</blockquote>
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s State prosecutor who also belongs to the
Neo-Nazi faction, has implemented procedures which prevent the holding
of public rallies and protests directed against the interim government.<br />
<hr />
<h3>
<a href="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/the-globalization-of-poverty-and-the-new-world-order/"><img alt="original" class="alignleft" height="232" src="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/images/278/GOP%20.jpg?196,196,3893497223" width="152" /></a>Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order</h3>
<dl class="details"><dd><strong>Michel Chossudovsky</strong></dd></dl>
<div align="justify" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In
this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international
best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which
feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment,
generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and
undermines the rights of women. </span></div>
<div align="justify" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This
book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued
critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving
financially and economically.</span></div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">In
this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new
introduction — the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine
in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the
demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from
corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.</span><br />
<a href="https://store.globalresearch.ca/store/the-globalization-of-poverty-and-the-new-world-order/"><img alt="" class="aligncenter" src="https://store.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/GOP.jpg" /></a><br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-59336345765997542382014-03-27T10:55:00.001-07:002014-03-27T10:55:13.357-07:00Obama's Speech on Ukraine: Propaganda and Lies <div id="article">
<h1 class="article-title">
Obama’s Speech on Ukraine: Propaganda and Lies</h1>
<div class="author">
By <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/patrick-martin" title="Posts by Patrick Martin">Patrick Martin</a></div>
<div class="grDate">
Global Research, March 27, 2014</div>
<div class="url">
Url of this article:<br /><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-speech-on-ukraine-propaganda-and-lies/5375512">http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-speech-on-ukraine-propaganda-and-lies/5375512</a></div>
<div class="article-content">
<em>The speech delivered by President
Barack Obama in Brussels Wednesday was a call to arms for a US-NATO
confrontation against Russia. With a series of lies and evasions, Obama
presented a world turned upside down in which the US and European
imperialists, who backed the coup in Ukraine spearheaded by fascistic
forces, are the defenders of democracy and peace.</em><br />
There was little in the speech that could convince working people,
either in Europe or the United States, that a policy of open-ended
conflict with Russia was in their interests. That was not the purpose of
the speech, which consisted of one propaganda lie after another,
uttered with the assurance that there would be no serious criticism, let
alone opposition, within the ruling elites of the US and Europe or from
their media mouthpieces.<br />
Obama sought to elaborate the basis for a major turn in US foreign
policy—what one of his foreign policy advisers called a “strategic
pivot” towards confronting Russia, deliberately employing the same term
that the White House has used to describe its systematic anti-China
policy in the Far East.<br />
One aim of this strategy of confrontation is to provide a new
political axis for the US-dominated NATO military structure, which has
visibly frayed in the absence of the old Cold War framework.<br />
Much of the speech was devoted to rehashing long-discredited claims
that American imperialism and its European allies represent democracy,
freedom and the popular will. Obama invoked the conflict between
democratic ideals and the authoritarian view that “order and progress
can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful
sovereign.”<br />
But the words rang rather hollow coming from a president who has
claimed absolute and unreviewable power to order the drone-missile
assassination of anyone he chooses, anywhere in the world, and whose
government asserts the right to collect and store the e-mails, text
messages and telephone calls of the entire human race.<br />
The focus of the speech was an indictment of Russian actions in
Crimea, which was annexed last week after a popular referendum in the
region. “Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks
ago seemed self-evident,” Obama declared, “that in the 21st century,
the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international
law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about
their future.”<br />
Of course, these are precisely the principles that successive US
governments have trampled on: the 1999 US-NATO bombing of Serbia that
resulted in the redrawing of its borders by force and the secession of
Kosovo; the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, in flagrant violation of
international law; and countless instances in which the US tramples on
the rights of “people and nations” to “make their own decisions” when
those decisions come into conflict with the interests of American
imperialism.<br />
The Russian government of President Vladimir Putin has pointed to the
hypocrisy of the US-European outcry over Crimea, citing many of these
examples, and Obama sought to rebut Putin’s arguments by employing the
technique of the big lie.<br />
He rejected any comparison between Crimea and Kosovo, denying that
Kosovo was an example “of the West interfering in the affairs of a
smaller country.” Obama asserted, “NATO only intervened after the people
of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years,”
ignoring the responsibility of the United States and the European
powers, particularly Germany, for fomenting the breakup of Yugoslavia
along ethnic lines. In Kosovo, the US sponsored the gangsters of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, who carried out tit-for-tat atrocities against
the Serb population, and now, in power, persecute the Roma and other
minorities.<br />
“Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an
example of Western hypocrisy,” Obama continued. “Now, it is true that
the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world
but in the United States, as well.”<br />
There was no significant debate or democratic discussion in the
lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. The war was the outcome of a
political conspiracy. The Bush administration went to war on the basis
of brazen lies about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass
destruction and its nonexistent alliance with Al Qaeda. The mass
demonstrations that showed the opposition of millions of Americans, and a
majority of the world’s population, were simply ignored.<br />
After claiming he had opposed the Iraq war, Obama sought to justify
its conduct and outcome, claiming, “even in Iraq, America sought to work
within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s
territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we
ended our war and left Iraq to its people in a fully sovereign Iraqi
state that can make decisions about its own future.”<br />
The truth is that the war in Iraq was the greatest crime—up to
now—committed in the 21st century. More than a million Iraqis lost their
lives as a result of the US invasion and occupation, and Iraq was
destroyed as a functioning society. The Bush administration openly
declared that the Geneva Conventions and international law did not apply
either to the war in Iraq or the previous conquest and occupation of
Afghanistan, a position that the Obama administration continues to
uphold.<br />
Obama seeks to rally the world against the supposed crimes of Russia
in Crimea, in which, as of this writing, two people have been killed
(one Ukrainian soldier and one Russian), while opposing any prosecution
of the American war criminals responsible for the immense bloodbath
visited upon the people of Iraq.<br />
Instead, the US president excused the monumental crimes of his own
government with the statement, “Of course, neither the United States nor
Europe are perfect in adherence to our ideals. Nor do we claim to be
the sole arbiter of what is right or wrong in the world.”<br />
Actually, the US government does claim that role. Administration
after administration has declared the United States to be “the
indispensable nation,” the sole superpower, the country whose
military-intelligence apparatus must be the world’s policeman, and whose
leaders are immune from any accountability for their actions.<br />
Obama’s arguments were no less fraudulent when he addressed the
specifics of the situation in Ukraine. “Yes, we believe in democracy,
with elections that are free and fair, and independent judiciaries and
opposition parties, civil society and uncensored information so that
individuals can make their own choices,” he claimed.<br />
But in Ukraine, the United States and the European Union rode
roughshod over national sovereignty, intervening to foment a coup that
overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, an elected president, and installing in
power not the “choice” of the Ukrainian people, but the choice of
Washington.<br />
This was exposed by the notorious phone calls between State
Department official Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, in
which they discussed the pluses and minuses of various Ukrainian
politicians and made their selection of “Yats”—the newly appointed
stooge prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk—as the best option.<br />
Obama dismissed the charge that the US is backing fascists in Kiev
with a banal reference to his grandfather serving in Patton’s army
fighting the Nazis in World War II, as though this had any significance.
The US government has backed countless fascists and authoritarian
killers since 1945, from Franco in Spain, to the Shah in Iran, to
Pinochet in Chile, to the Egyptian military butchers of today—to name
only a few.<br />
Obama made no mention of Egypt in his speech, maintaining a guilty
silence over the US support for the junta that has just sentenced 529
Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death after a two-day show trial. This
was a deliberate and cynical omission, as Obama referred to democratic
strivings in “Tunis and Tripoli,” but not in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.<br />
Russian charges of US collaboration with fascists in Kiev are true.
US officials have repeatedly met with leaders such as Oleh Tyahnybok,
head of the ultra-right Svoboda party, which is a key component of the
Ukrainian cabinet, as well as officials of the neo-Nazi Right Sector,
which played the role of storm troopers in the fighting to overthrow the
elected government of Ukraine. In all, the US State Department and
other agencies have expended $5 billion to subvert pro-Russian
governments in Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union.<br />
Obama’s speech in Brussels was an attempt to justify a policy towards
Russia that is aggressive, provocative and incalculably dangerous. The
real goal of US actions in this crisis was suggested in the US
president’s sneering reference on Tuesday to Russia as merely a
“regional power.”<br />
This was not, of course, Obama’s language when seeking to enlist
Russian assistance in overthrowing the Assad government in Syria,
browbeating Iran or isolating North Korea. But it has been the goal of
American imperialism ever since the collapse of the USSR to expand its
influence throughout the former Soviet bloc—first in the countries of
Eastern Europe, then in former Soviet republics in the Baltics, the
Caucasus and Central Asia, and now Ukraine.<br />
Russia is to be reduced not merely to the status of “regional power,”
but to a semi-colonial status, dismembered and carved up by the major
imperialist powers. In this context, it is clear that when Obama speaks
of diplomacy, he means the capitulation of the Russian regime to US and
EU demands.<br />
Obama insisted in his speech that Russia’s failure to accept the new
arrangements in Eastern Europe established by American and European
imperialism be met with ever harsher economic sanctions and political
isolation.<br />
In the pursuit of this policy, Washington is turning the regions that
border Russia on the west into an armed camp, creating the conditions
for any spark or provocation to ignite a military conflagration between
nuclear powers. Obama made a point in his speech of invoking Article
Five of the NATO charter, which obliges all NATO member states to come
to the defense of any single member state that comes under
attack—including former East Bloc countries or Soviet republics such as
Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. This was an
implied threat of military force.<br />
The struggle against imperialist militarism and the threat of US-NATO
intervention in the Ukraine crisis requires the independent political
mobilization of the working class on an international basis, uniting
workers of North America, Europe and the former Soviet Union in a common
struggle.<br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-18655797308952203852014-03-27T10:50:00.003-07:002014-03-27T10:50:45.918-07:00Neocons 'Ukraine -Syria -Iran Gambit<br /> <br />
<table class="contentpaneopen">
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<a class="contentpagetitle" href="http://somalilandsun.com/index.php/world/5367-neocons-ukraine-syria-iran-gambit">
Neocons' Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit</a>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<table class="contentpaneopen">
<tbody>
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<td class="createdate" valign="top">
Wednesday, 26 March 2014 14:41 </td>
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Somalilandsun - You might think that policymakers with so many bloody
fiascos on their resumes as the U.S. neocons, including the
catastrophic Iraq War, would admit their incompetence and return home to
sell insurance or maybe work in a fast-food restaurant. Anything but
directing the geopolitical decisions of the world's leading superpower.<br />
But Official Washington's neocons are nothing if not relentless and
resilient. They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they won't
do the honorable thing and disappear. They keep hatching new schemes and
strategies to keep the world stirred up and to keep their vision of
world domination -- and particularly "regime change" in the Middle East
-- alive.<br />
Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving
two nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But -- even if
nuclear weapons don't come into play -- the neocons have succeeded in
estranging U.S. President Barack Obama from Russian President Vladimir
Putin and sabotaging the pair's crucial cooperation on Iran and Syria,
which may have been the point all along.<br />
Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the
chronology of the recent uprising -- and the neocon interest in it --
meshes neatly with neocon fury over Obama and Putin working together to
avert a U.S. military strike against Syria last summer and then
brokering an interim nuclear agreement with Iran last fall that
effectively took a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the table.<br />
Read Complete <a href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/Neocons-Ukraine-Syria-Ira-by-Robert-Parry-Assad_Crisis_Iran_Israel-140319-103.html" target="_blank">Neocons' Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit</a><br />
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy &
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<span class="article_separator"><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-21011818701852638002014-03-14T11:47:00.002-07:002014-03-14T11:47:08.857-07:00No Breakthrough In Talks About Ukraine by Mark Memmott<div class="storytitle">
<h1>
No Breakthrough In Talks About Ukraine</h1>
</div>
<div id="story-meta">
<div class=" linkLocation" id="storybyline">
<div class="bucketwrap byline" id="res290083730">
<div class="byline">
by </div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="dateblock">
<time datetime="2014-03-14"><span class="date">March 14, 2014</span><span class="time"> 8:30 AM</span></time>
</div>
</div>
<div class="storytext storylocation linkLocation" id="storytext">
<div class="bucketwrap image large" id="res290119891">
<div class="imagewrap">
<img alt="Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry before their talks Friday in London. Afterward, they reported no breakthroughs on finding a solution to the crisis in Ukraine." class="img" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/03/14/lavrovkerry142way-8998b2f8bb232091918e1c3193bdfb7e58f652ff-s40-c85.jpg" style="display: block;" title="Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry before their talks Friday in London. Afterward, they reported no breakthroughs on finding a solution to the crisis in Ukraine." />
</div>
<div class="captionwrap">
<div class="caption">
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left,
and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry before their talks Friday in
London. Afterward, they reported no breakthroughs on finding a solution
to the crisis in Ukraine.<br />
</div>
</div>
<span class="creditwrap"><span class="credit">Brendan Smialowski</span>/<span class="rightsnotice">AP</span></span>
</div>
<h6 class="edTag">
This post has been updated.</h6>
<strong>Update at 12:45 ET:</strong>
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry came away from talks Friday in London saying they had not come
any closer to an agreement about how to end the crisis in Ukraine.<br />
Lavrov
told reporters after the two men met that Russia intends to "respect
the choice of the Crimean people" — who will vote Sunday on whether to
join the Russian Federation. That was a sign that Russia may indeed move
to annex the region if Crimeans indicate that's their wish.<br />
Kerry
emerged from their six hours of discussions to say the U.S. and its
European allies remain convinced that any move by the Crimean region to
split from Ukraine would violate that nation's constitution and
international law. He repeated that "there will be costs" for Russia if
it continues to — in the view of the U.S. — interfere in Ukrainian
affairs.<br />
The American diplomat has previously said that the
U.S. and its allies will take "serious steps" on Monday if Crimeans vote
to leave Ukraine and Russia accepts that decision. Those steps would
include economic sanctions.<br />
Lavrov's view: Crimeans' "right of self-determination" should be respected.<br />
Asked
whether Russia, which has sent some forces into Crimea, might take
military action elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, Lavrov said "the Russian
Federation doesn't have any plans to intervene in eastern Ukraine and
couldn't have such plans."<br />
Asked whether he views those words
as an assurance that Russia would not send troops elsewhere in Ukraine,
Kerry said "all of us would like to see actions, not words, that support
the notion that people are moving in the opposite direction and are in
fact diminishing their presence" militarily.<br />
Kerry also said he
does not know whether or not Russia will move to annex Crimea after
Sunday's vote. To do so, he said, "would be against international law."<br />
Kerry
stressed that he believes a solution to the crisis can be reached that
both restores and respects the territorial integrity of Ukraine and
addresses "Russia's legitimate concerns."<br />
<strong>Our original post and an earlier update pick up the story:</strong><br />
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<img alt="Armed men, believed to be Russian troops, walk outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoye, near the Crimean city of Simferopol, on Friday." class="img" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/03/14/troops142way_wide-76b1bebe0576cb03e5b64e792594c86d704f644e-s40-c85.jpg" style="display: block;" title="Armed men, believed to be Russian troops, walk outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoye, near the Crimean city of Simferopol, on Friday." />
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<div class="caption">
Armed men, believed to be Russian troops,
walk outside a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoye, near the Crimean
city of Simferopol, on Friday.<br />
</div>
</div>
<span class="creditwrap"><span class="credit">Vasily Fedosenko </span>/<span class="rightsnotice">Reuters/Landov</span></span>
</div>
While Crimeans prepare to vote Sunday on whether to join the
Russian Federation, Secretary of State John Kerry is in London for talks
with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.<br />
As NPR's Ari Shapiro tells our Newscast Desk, Kerry is looking for a way to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine.<br />
Kerry is expected to warn Lavrov "that the disputed referendum being
held in Crimea in two days and Russia's military intervention there
could trigger concerted U.S. and EU sanctions."<br />
Indeed, as
NPR's Michele Kelemen reported Thursday, Kerry says that if Russia
doesn't help resolve the crisis, "there will be a very serious series of
steps Monday in Europe" and the U.S.<br />
Those steps could include
economic sanctions and additional travel restrictions on any officials
believed to have been responsible for Russian intervention in Ukraine.<br />
<strong>Update at 11:05 a.m. ET. Meeting Begins.</strong><br />
Before
they went behind closed doors at the U.S. ambassador's residence in
London, Kerry and Lavrov spoke to reporters. The State Department .<br />
<blockquote class="edTag">
<div>
<strong>Kerry: </strong>"Good
morning, everybody. [It's] my pleasure to welcome Foreign Minister
Lavrov to Winfield House, the American Embassy residence here in London.
Obviously, we have a lot to talk about. I look forward to the
opportunity to dig into the issues and possibilities that we may be able
to find about how to move forward together to resolve some of the
differences between us. And we look forward, I know, to a good
conversation."<br />
<strong>Lavrov:</strong> (via interpreter)
"Well, I'm also satisfied to have this meeting today. This is a
difficult situation we are in. Many events have happened and a lot of
time has been lost, so now we have to think what can be done. Thank
you."<br />
</div>
</blockquote>
<strong>Our original post picks up the story:</strong><br />
,
NPR's Gregory Warner reported from Crimea about the scene there in
advance of Sunday's vote. He reports having seen dozens of armored
personnel carriers, fuel supply trucks and military satellite systems
near the region's border with the rest of Ukraine.<br />
Gregory
notes that Crimeans will be asked to vote on two questions Sunday:
whether to join the Russian Federation; or whether to stay part of
Ukraine but revert to an earlier constitution that gave them even more
autonomy and the chance for dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship.<br />
, NPR's Peter Kenyon reported about the concerns that Crimea's Tatars have over the pro-Russian sentiment in the region.<br />
Need a refresher on what this crisis is all about?<br />
As we've previously said, Crimea has been the focus of attention as the ripple effects of the protests that led to last month's have spread.<br />
Summing
up the history and importance of Crimea to Russia and Ukraine isn't
possible in just a few sentences, of course. The Parallels blog, though,
has published several posts that contain considerable context:<br />
— <br />
— <br />
— <br />
We've
recapped what set off months of protest in Kiev and ultimately led to
Yanukovych's dismissal by his nation's parliament last month this way:<br />
<blockquote class="edTag">
<div>
"The
protests were sparked in part by the president's rejection of a pending
trade treaty with the European Union and his embrace of more aid from
Russia. Protesters were also drawn into the streets to demonstrate
against government corruption."<br />
</div>
</blockquote>
It was after and headed for the Russian border that troops moved to take control of strategic locations in Crimea.<br />
</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-37950761957740586312014-02-26T12:01:00.000-08:002014-02-26T12:01:15.466-08:00NIKKEI ASIAN REVIEW Malaysia's ethnic tensions rise as its economy declinesKUALA LUMPUR-Robust economic growth has long played a key role in smoothing over tensions between Malay<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-81035138405656177522014-02-01T13:53:00.003-08:002014-02-01T13:53:32.666-08:00The Man Who Came to Dinner By Jaime O'Neill Created Feb 1 2014 - 10:39amOn Oct. 16, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited a man to have
dinner with him in the White House, a social engagement that stirred up a
dark cloud of racist hysteria. The man who came to dinner was Booker T.
Washington. Since Americans seem determined to ignore our history,
there are bound to be readers who will draw a blank when they read that
name, so it's worth mentioning that Booker T. Washington was the most
influential African-American leader of his time, a crusader for civil
rights who, among other things, fought to protect the voting rights of
black males (women of any color did not yet have the right to vote) who
were systematically being blocked from exercising that right. Later
generations of civil rights activists would come to be critical of
Booker T. Washington, finding him insufficiently militant in his view
that gains for black Americans could only be achieved gradually, and
only as "the Negro" proved himself worthy of equality. But Booker T.
Washington was a courageous voice of his time, an era when lynchings
were ubiquitous, racism was endemic and overt, and the Ku Klux Klan was
viewed favorably by most Americans.<br />
Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican in a time when being a Republican
wasn't the shameful thing it is these days, wanted to make a statement
about equality and human dignity by inviting the first ever
African-American to dine with a U.S. President in the "people's house."
The racists went ballistic.<br />
A little jingle, popular with children following that White House
dinner, went like this: "The Statue of Liberty hung her head;/ Columbia
dropped in a swoon,/ The American eagle drooped and died,/<br />
When Teddy dined with the coon."<br />
The Governor of Mississippi, James Vardaman, wrote that the White
House was "so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have
taken refuge in the stable," and added that he was "as much opposed to
Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the cocoanut-headed,
chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning.
Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship."<br />
South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman warned that "the action of
President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our
killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their
place again."<br />
Booker T. Washington, it should be remembered, was born a slave,
living in bondage until he was nine years old. His father was a white
plantation owner who impregnated a slave woman, then had nothing further
to do with the child he'd fathered, a fairly common scenario when some
people owned other people and treated them as property.<br />
We forget this heritage at our peril, especially as we ignore the
parallels between that dinner in the White House a hundred and twelve
years ago, and the undercurrent of racist outrage prompted by the fact
that a black man now occupies that same house. Every day on my Facebook
page, photos of Barack and Michelle Obama pop up, along with a slogan
that reads "Kick Them Out of OUR House."<br />
I get emails daily revealing the racism that fuels so much of the
right wing rage toward Barack Obama, the duly elected leader of the
nation some of them refer to as "the Ubangee," or "Obongo," or "Jungle
Bunny." Many of these comments are accompanied by the idea that the
President of the United States is "not one of us," and that "real
Americans" will soon rise up and take their country back, by violence if
necessary. Many of these same people cheered George Zimmerman for
"standing his ground" against a "thug from the 'hood." Many of these
same people also insists they are not racists, and that it is, in fact,
the people who think they are racists who are the real racists. It's the
kind of thing Sara Palin did when she tweeted, on Martin Luther King's
birthday, that Obama should "stop playing the race card."<br />
Not all people who are vocal in opposition to President Obama are
driven by racism, of course, but far too many are. Racism is part of the
ugliest strain woven into the fabric of this nation, a country founded
on the idea of human equality by men who owned other men and women, a
nation that has struggled with that contradiction as it tried to
reconcile its noblest rhetoric with its most shameful practices. Mostly,
those efforts to justify the unjustifiable were directed toward trying
to prove that black people weren't really people. We even codified that
idea into law when we defined them as 3/5ths human, and we had several
generations of scientists hard at work to support the idea that Negroes
was measurably less than their masters. More than a hundred years after
an American president outraged the nation by inviting a black man to
dinner in the White House for the first time, our struggle to overcome
racism continues. And, in this month dedicated to Black History, there's
no better time for Americans to think about the oldest and most
intractable ailment of our national soul.<br />
_______<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-25342056385523931842013-11-04T08:30:00.001-08:002013-11-04T08:30:05.234-08:00By Tina Dupuy: Iraq Makes Request For Weapons:<strong>No, this is not The Onion. No, this is not a rip-off of The
Onion. This is not satire. This is the plea from Iraq’s Prime Minister,
Minister of the Interior, Minister of Defense and the Minister of
National Security Affairs. All of whom happen to be the same person:
Nouri al-Maliki.</strong><br />
<strong>Iraq is what he describes as a “vibrant democracy” in a New
York Times op-ed in anticipation of a visit to the U.S. and a meeting
with President Obama this week.</strong><br />
<strong>Maliki says he’s fighting terrorism. Al Qaeda is in Iraq
killing the Iraqi people, he explains. “It has been almost two years
since American troops withdrew from Iraq. And despite the terrorist
threats we face, we are not asking for American boots on the ground,” he
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/opinion/international/have-patience-with-us.html?ref=opinion">writes</a>.
“Rather, we urgently want to equip our own forces with the weapons they
need to fight terrorism, including helicopters and other military
aircraft so that we can secure our borders and protect our people. Hard
as it is to believe, Iraq doesn’t have a single fighter jet to protect
its airspace.”</strong><br />
<strong>Now if arming a Middle Eastern country with a solid history
of sectarian violence sounds vaguely familiar and like an acutely bad
idea—it’s because we’ve done it before. In Afghanistan in the ‘80s, we
armed the Mujahedeen to aid their fight against the Soviets. And when we
invaded the country a decade later, we were met with our own weapons.
Poetic.</strong><br />
<strong>Maliki’s op-ed starts off by mentioning terrorism and then
goes into the civil war in Syria. “These mutual interests include
combating terrorism and resolving the conflict in Syria. The war in
Syria has become a magnet that attracts sectarian extremists and
terrorists from various parts of the world and gathers them in our
neighborhood, with many slipping across our all-too-porous borders. We
do not want Syria or Iraq to become bases for Al Qaeda operations, and
neither does the United States.”</strong><br />
<strong>In March, Secretary of State John Kerry went to Baghdad and
discussed with Maliki the daily flights (presumed to be arms) from Iran,
across Iraq, into Syria. These daily deliveries being a lifeline to
Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is most noted for gassing thousands
of Sunnis (including children), and then blaming it on Sunni rebels.</strong><br />
<strong>According to reports, Maliki <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/24/world/la-fg-wn-kerry-maliki-20130324">refuses</a> to stop the flights to Syria, regardless of the request by Kerry.</strong><br />
<strong>When Maliki says, “resolving the conflict in Syria,” that
warrants a follow-up question: whose side are you on? His government has
had a history of helping Iran evade sanctions beyond just the use of
their airspace. David S. Cohen, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary
for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a written <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/world/middleeast/us-says-iraqis-are-helping-iran-skirt-sanctions.html">statement</a>
given to The New York Times last year said Iran “may seek to escape the
force of our financial sanctions through Iraqi financial institutions.”</strong><br />
<strong>If you’ve caught yourself confusing Iran and Iraq, it’s not
just because they’re one letter different. It’s because there’s every
indication they’re in a storied bromance.</strong><br />
<strong>We dropped a trillion dollars to replace an Iraqi dictator
with this Prime Minister/Minister of the Interior/Minister of
Defense/Minister of National Security Affairs guy. A man who spent the
‘80s in exile in Syria and then in Iran under the protection of the
infamous Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.</strong><br />
<strong>Often in cognitive dissonance, after disconfirmation or the
failure of prediction (greeted as liberators, anyone?) there is a
doubling-down phenomenon as described by psychologist Leon Festinger.
Meaning when the evidence doesn’t match up with our hopes, we often just
hope harder. “Rationalization can reduce dissonance somewhat,” wrote
Festinger. We’ve spent the last decade nation-building in what we’d
hoped would at least be a friend in the region.</strong><br />
<strong>It’s not panning out.</strong><br />
<strong>It appears Maliki is at the very least complicit in arming Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in a civil war that has claimed <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/endless-war-endless-suffering.html?hp&rref=opinion">115,000 lives</a>.
This September, 52 Iranian dissidents were slaughtered at Camp Ashraf;
it was carried out by Iraqi forces—armed with American weapons. There
are still seven Iranian exile hostages the European Parliament has
demanded be released, going so far as to threaten ending trade with <a href="http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/ashraf-liberty/14890-european-parliament-calls-on-iraq-to-release-7-iranian-hostages-abducted-from-camp-ashraf">Baghdad</a>.</strong><br />
<strong>You know what could make this worse? Some WMDs.</strong><br />
<strong>What’s a jet fighter or two among frenemies?</strong><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-46022837451242662702013-11-04T06:15:00.001-08:002013-11-04T08:32:25.152-08:00By Shamus Cooke: Is Obama Fundamentally Shifting His Middle East Strategy? <div class="author">
By <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/shamus-cooke" title="Posts by Shamus Cooke">Shamus Cooke</a></div>
<div class="grDate">
Global Research, November 03, 2013</div>
<div class="url">
Url of this article:<br /><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/is-obama-fundamentally-shifting-his-middle-east-strategy/5356651">http://www.globalresearch.ca/is-obama-fundamentally-shifting-his-middle-east-strategy/5356651</a></div>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6177">
<em><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6157">The
Saudis and Israelis are fuming. Obama’s talks with Iran’s new President
Hassan Rouhani point to a possible new direction in U.S.-Middle East
policy. Iran is the regional arch-rival of the Saudis and Israelis, who
for decades have shared the mantle as the main U.S. allies in the Middle
East. </span></em></div>
The Arab Spring has — along with the ascendance of Russia and China —
shifted the geo-political ground of the region, and the U.S. is trying
to maintain a dominant position with a new strategy. This shift, if
successful, has the potential to create a political crisis within the
U.S. government as well as abroad. Israel and Saudi Arabia, for example,
won’t quietly accept a diminished role in the Middle East.<br />
Israel gave a thunderous response to Obama’s Iranian talks last week
by committing its fourth war crime against Syria in the last year, by <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/.premium-1.553965" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">launching a bombing raid against a Syrian military installation</a>. Since
Obama is currently pursuing “Geneva II” peace talks with Syria and
Russia, the timing of the Israeli bombing suggests that Israel is intent
on not being ignored.<br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6159"><br />
The Saudis, too, have fired missiles, though of the diplomatic type,
aimed at the U.S. by refusing a seat at the UN Security Council. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303902404579150011732240016" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6160" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Saudis have also threatened a fundamental break from their long-standing U.S. ally</a>, which in reality means a shift towards Russia and China. </span><br />
There are three main factors that appear to be pushing Obama in a new
Middle East direction: Obama’s political defeat in the Syrian conflict,
the United States’ new ocean of natural (shale) gas, and the new
Egyptian government’s shift away from a long-standing U.S. alliance. The
Middle East is changing fast.<br />
The Syrian conflict exposed the United States’ Middle East strategy
as bankrupt; Obama planned a Bush-like bombing campaign to terrorize
Syria into submission, but backed down at the last minute, due to
immense domestic and international opposition, not to mention the fact
that Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda were certain to come to power
if Obama opened the gates of hell with U.S. missiles. Obama’s last
minute retreat was a historic blow to U.S. foreign policy, along the
lines of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.<br />
By agreeing to the Russian plan of eliminating Syria’s chemical
weapons, Obama admitted humiliating defeat and signaled that the U.S.
was abandoning the proxy war against the Syrian government, the war now
completely dominated by Islamic extremists and foreign jihad fighters;
those who maintain that a legitimate mass “revolution” is still in play
fool only themselves. Furthermore, those who claim that “the Israeli
tail wags the American dog” were again proved wrong when the full force
of Israeli/AIPAC lobbying — to attack Syria — was ultimately ignored.<br />
Obama’s Syria shift also left Saudi Arabia in the lurch, which went
“all in” against Syria by shipping huge amounts of money, arms, and
Saudi nationals to destroy Assad’s Syria, no doubt with immense initial
encouragement from Obama. If a Syrian peace deal is hatched at “Geneva
II” (if in fact it ever happens), it’s certain that any outcome will
make explicit Saudi Arabia’s waning influence in Syria.<br />
Obama is also finally using the new U.S. flood of shale gas as a
political weapon in his Middle East approach. The “natural gas
revolution” threatens to change the face of the global oil/gas industry,
and has energy giants Saudi Arabia and Russia shaking in their
boots. This influx of American gas simply makes the Middle East less
important.<br />
An <a href="http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Business/Middle-East/2013/Oct-19/235029-awash-in-oil-us-reshapes-middle-east-role.ashx#ixzz2jbPijsJT" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interesting Reuters article reports</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
“…surging North American energy production [shale gas]
has brought the United States closer to a long-dreamed “energy
independence” that is reshaping its goals and role in the Middle East.”</blockquote>
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6181">Henry Kissinger, arch-war
criminal and modern architect of the oil-focused U.S. foreign policy,
was quoted in the Reuters article:</span><br />
<blockquote>
“You could not make plans in the Middle East or involving
Middle East crises, without keeping in mind the considerations of the
oil market…but that is now changing substantially with the, I wouldn’t
say ‘self sufficiency’ but narrowing the gap between supply and demand
in North America [shale gas], that is now of huge strategic
consequence.”</blockquote>
Of course, the U.S. is simply not going to leave the Middle East for
the foreseeable future, but Kissinger’s comments make clear that the
U.S. now has more strategic flexibility than it had before, and the
blunt Bush Jr. policy of bombings and invasions has had to give way at
some point to some actual strategy (bombings will of course remain as
“leverage” in peace talks and be re-introduced if talks fail).<br />
Finally, the long-standing strategic U.S. partnership with Egypt is
crumbling before Obama’s eyes. The revolutionary mobilizations against
U.S. ally Muhammad Morsi brought forth a military government that,
according to its public statements and state media, is taking a
staunchly anti-U.S. position. The many analysts who called Morsi’s
ouster a “U.S. coup” should be re-thinking their position, as Morsi was
profoundly more pro-U.S. than his replacement.<br />
The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/world/middleeast/kerrys-trip-will-start-in-egypt-state-media-report.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New York Times reports</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
“Relations between the United States and Egypt,
once-close allies, have grown increasingly strained…Since the military
takeover, Egypt’s generals and their backers have lashed out at the
United States, accusing it of showing favoritism toward Mr. Morsi and
his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood by, among other things,
criticizing the military government’s withering crackdown on Islamists.”</blockquote>
Egypt is also at the center of the U.S.-Saudi Arabia divorce, since
Saudi Arabia is a huge backer of the new Egyptian military regime,
displacing the Qatar-U.S. backed Muslim Brotherhood.<br />
Again from The New York Times:<br />
<blockquote>
“Saudi Arabia, which strongly backs Egypt’s generals, has also rebuked the United States over its Egypt policy.”</blockquote>
Of course Obama still has time to give sufficient military aid and
other bribes to bring Egypt back into the U.S.’ diplomatic orbit, but
for now relations are spoiled.<br />
Why would Obama potentially risk long-standing regional alliances to
make peace with Iran? For one, Iran’s new president is a “reformer,”
which in Iran means that he wants to completely “open up” Iran’s economy
to foreign investors, and Obama sees an ocean of oil that could result
in a sea of cash for U.S corporations and investors.<br />
Iran’s former president, Ahmadinejad, went on a privatization frenzy
that U.S. corporations and investors watched with forlorn eyes, as U.S.
sanctions limited U.S. investments, while corporations from other
nations enriched themselves off Iran’s formerly public assets. But
Ahmadinejad viewed Iranian oil as a sacred cow, which, <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/business/21584355-governments-hopes-attracting-private-investment-may-be-dashed-dreaming-new-golden" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">as the Economist explains</a>,
is set to be butchered and sold by Rouhani to the highest bidder (or at
potentially reduced rates to U.S corporations as part of a peace deal).<br />
If Obama can get his hands on Iranian oil — without having to
physically destroy Iran — he’ll have little problem reducing the
sanctions that have been economically destroying the country.<br />
A peace with Iran will also have other profound regional
implications. Doing business with the United States will push Russia
and China out of the Iranian picture, amounting to a diplomatic coup for
the United States, while Iran will likely be “urged” to cut off support
for the Syrian government and Hezbollah, while making Shia-led Iraq
more amenable to U.S. regional interests.<br />
But achieving this major diplomatic shift will be incredibly
difficult, and maybe impossible. Many U.S. congressmen from both parties
want to maintain the status quo. As Obama initially announced his
warming relations with Iran, Congressmen were preparing to increase the
already-criminal sanctions, no doubt in an attempt to prevent any peace
deal, <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/28/white-house-spars-with-congress-over-new-iran-sanctions/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">causing tension between Obama and Congress</a>.<br />
Israel, too, is just crazy enough to ruin the whole enterprise by
unleashing a reign of terror; the recent attack on Syria may have been
just a warning shot. An Israeli attack on Iran — ostensibly to destroy
its “nuclear capabilities” — would be enough to annihilate any U.S.
diplomatic effort.<br />
Whatever happens ultimately will reflect the power shift occurring
across the Middle East and the re-alignment that has occurred since the
Arab Spring, as well as the rise of China and Russia in the region. For
now the U.S. is attempting to use diplomacy to gain a strategic
advantage in the Middle East, which can very quickly revert to military
actions if its goals of economic dominance aren’t peacefully achieved.<br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6176"><em><strong>Shamus Cooke</strong> is a social worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (<a href="http://www.workerscompass.org/" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1383516386311_6174" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.workerscompass.org</a>). He can be reached at <a href="mailto:shamuscooke@gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">shamuscooke@gmail.com</a></em></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-26562490058587916182013-11-03T14:45:00.003-08:002013-11-03T14:45:43.558-08:00Obama, NSA Spying and the Dangers of Secretive, Authoritarian Government By John W. Whitehead<blockquote>
“The perception here is of a United States where security
has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data
of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances”
built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren
have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing
arguments get no hearing.” – New York Times columnist Roger Cohen</blockquote>
Recent
reports indicating that President Obama was aware of and personally
approved an NSA program that involved spying on the personal
communications of various international leaders, including German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, have once again highlighted the deception and
intransigence of the Obama administration in dealing with the
revelations that the National Security Agency has been acting outside
the bounds of the law, sucking up electronic communications the world
over.<br />
<br />
While this may come as a shock to most Americans, I’ve been writing
about the NSA’s illegal surveillance tactics since the 1980s, which
features prominently in my new book<a href="http://rutherford.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=f6eb78f457b7b82887b643445&id=0324ab607e&e=ba196b0bd3"> A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State</a>.
However, this latest development in the spying saga—that the NSA has
been aiming its surveillance activities at the citizens of allied
countries, including France and Germany—has thrown a kink into the Obama
administration’s attempts at maintaining a cozy relationship with its
foreign allies.<br />
<br />
Specifically, according to comments by an anonymous “high-level” NSA
official to a German newspaper, President Barack Obama personally
approved spying on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These comments
come despite claims made by the White House last week that Obama had no
idea that the NSA had tapped her phone. The NSA has denied the reports
that Obama was personally briefed on the Merkel spying operation in
2010, but did not indicate whether he may have learned about it via
other means.<br />
<br />
According to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA had been
spying on Merkel since 2002, before she was Chancellor and acting as an
opposition leader. The NSA had also allegedly been spying on French and
German citizens, an accusation which prompted both countries to demand
an explanation from the United States about the purpose and reasoning
behind the spying programs. The US spying on German communications was
apparently conducted from the American embassy in Berlin.<br />
<br />
According to another anonymous US official, the United States was
engaged in espionage on 35 world leaders, but most of these programs
have been terminated or are set to be terminated. This official also
claims that Obama was unaware of the program, and that the NSA had
chosen not to brief him on all their various spying operations, saying,
“These decisions are made at the NSA. The president doesn’t sign off on
this stuff.”<br />
<br />
Whatever the exact truth of the matter, there are two possible
scenarios. Either the President was fully aware of the extent of the
NSA’s criminal activities, which violate both domestic and international
law, and was willing to go along with them or the NSA has amassed so
much power in Washington that it literally operates outside the chain of
command and above the rule of law. In either case, we face a tyrannical
force the likes of which have never been seen in the United States
before.<br />
<br />
In just one month (January 2013), the NSA spied on some 125 billion
phone calls worldwide, 3 billion of which originated in the United
States. In addition to German and French citizens, the NSA has targeted
Spain as well, sweeping up some 60 million communications in the span of
one month.<br />
<br />
Of course, this global surveillance program should come as no surprise.
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent over $500 billion
on an intelligence community that, according to the Washington Post,
constitutes an “espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those
of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds
the levels at the height of the Cold War.” The CIA and NSA have both
begun to engage in so-called “offensive cyber operations,” which
involves hacking into foreign computer networks in order to either steal
information or sabotage the network itself.<br />
<br />
In fact, the NSA has been conducting worldwide surveillance for quite
some time. Echelon, a global electronic surveillance network that allows
security agencies of Great Britain and the United States, as well as
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to collect and exploit intelligence
collected worldwide, was developed by the NSA. Created in the heat of
the Cold War, Echelon intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone
call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. It does so by
positioning “listening stations” (including land bases, satellites and
ships sailing the seven seas) all over the globe to capture data,
satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic.<br />
<br />
Although Echelon was originally established as an international spy
system, suspicions arose at the dawn of the new millennium that its
intelligence ambitions might have turned inward. A Congressional
investigation determined that Echelon had not only turned inward,
targeting such peaceful political groups as Amnesty International,
Greenpeace and several Christian groups, but had actually broadened the
scope of its mission to include political espionage. It also became a
means of benefiting big business and advancing personal political
agendas. For example, in March 2003, the British Observer asserted that
the Bush Administration had used its Echelon satellite station in New
Zealand to spy on council members from Angola, Bulgaria, Camaroon,
Chile, Guinea and Pakistan in its effort to garner support for the
impending war against Iraq.<br />
<br />
The other main object of Echelon seems to be corporate espionage. In
1993, President Bill Clinton directed the NSA to use Echelon facilities
to spy on Japanese car manufacturers developing zero-emission cars and
to pass on critical information to the three largest American car
manufacturers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. In the 1990s, German
firm Enercon, a wind generator manufacturer, developed innovative wind
related technology. However, by the time it was ready to sell the
technology to the US, the US rival company had already patented a
similar project. Later, an NSA employee admitted to stealing the
technology through phone taps and computer link line spying.<br />
<br />
Given the NSA’s history, there is nothing innocent about a worldwide
program of surveillance. Rather, this is the dawning of a new era, an
expansion of the Cold War mentality of tracking an unknown enemy which
only exists in the imagination of those who seek more power. Al-Qaeda’s
capability to penetrate the American homeland is nil. The chances of
dying in a terrorist attack are miniscule. There is no justification for
these programs, which is why they have been conducted and approved in
secret. Any public scrutiny would demonstrate their ineffectiveness and
uselessness.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, our so-called representatives in Congress are doing very
little to combat the menace of unlawful surveillance, going out of their
way to justify these programs and give them the trappings of
legitimacy. For example, Rep. Mike Rogers, head of the House
Intelligence Committee, made the bizarre claim that the rise of fascism
in Europe in the early 20th century could be attributed to the United
States failing to spy on its allies: “We said: ‘We’re not going to do
any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate’ Look what
happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the
rise of imperialism. We didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the
deaths of tens of millions of people.”<br />
<br />
Battles are being waged between civil liberties-minded representatives
and law-and-order types such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is
drafting a bill that would codify the NSA’s program of collecting the
metadata of American communications. She supports her position by making
nonsensical statements such as, “People believe it’s surveillance, but
it’s not.”<br />
<br />
Contrary to Feinstein’s claims, the NSA is collecting personal
information on every single person in the United States who uses a
computer or phone. The NSA is able to crack the security of all major
smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, which
gives agents access to information such as contacts, SMS messages, and
location data. The NSA is also suspected to be engaging in so-called
“man in the middle” attacks, which involve NSA agents pretending to be
legitimate web services (in this case search engine Google) in order to
obtain private information. These and other programs, such as PRISM and
XKEYSCORE, open our private lives to government agents who are only a
computer click away from knowing what we do on a daily basis.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want an open, transparent and
therefore free government or a closed, secretive, authoritarian regime.
For those who claim to want open and free government, it’s time to
restore the rightful balance in government and make it clear to our
leaders that these spying programs are unacceptable and will not be
tolerated. Remember, a true patriot is one who upholds the principles
upon which his country was founded, not the power of those who have
hijacked the nation.<br />
<br />
John Whitehead is founder and president of <a href="https://www.rutherford.org/">The Rutherford Institute</a>, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-55219392653784553702013-11-03T13:40:00.000-08:002013-11-03T13:40:05.191-08:00By David Swanson: Doughboys and Dumb Things Humans have Done!This November 11th at 11 a.m. will mark 95 years since World War I ended. Next July 28th will mark 100 years since it started. The world war, the great war, the war for no good reason, the war of poison gas, the war to end all wars, the war for mass stupidity, the war that went on for days after the Germans agreed to end it, the war that continued until 11 a.m. as that time had been set to end it, the war whose last man killed in action was a suicidal American who ran at the Germansat 10:59.the war that in fact was intentionally not ended but extended into mass-punishment of the German people until World War II could be commenced, this century-old piece of historical stupidity that shames our species is about to be commemorated on a serious scale, so dust off your gas masks and get ready. A hundred years. A hundred years. A hundred ever-loving years, and we've neither learned that wars don't end wars nor ever really ended World War II, ever brought the troops home from Japan and Germany, ever scaled back the taxation and military spending and foreign basing and war profiteering. The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten War by Richard Rubin is 500 pages of excellent history of World War I but without the appropriate rejection of the decision to go to war or the embarrassment one should feel for those who thought they could find glory or goodness by joining in this mass murdering madness. We tend to look down on all sorts of aspects of early 20th century morality. Colonialism, sexism, racism, corporal punishment in schools, creationism you name it, we've moved on. Yet writers still recount wars as if the decision to take part in them were neutral or admirable. In a way this makes sense, given what we're all taught about history. The Khan Academy is a wonderful website for kids, or anyone to use in learning math. But if you click over to the section on history its literally nothing but wars. Perhaps they plan to add in a few unimportant things that happened during the pauses in between wars, but they haven't done so yet. Its' nothing but war after war. That's history. President Kennedy supposedly said Lincoln would have been nothing without the Civil War, it takes war to make greatness. It takes war to be in the history books. Richard Rubin found and interviewed the last remaining U.S. veterans of World War I before they died. As he spoke with them their average age was 107. Everything he learned and recorded is of great interest, but much of it is simply about what it's like to become 107. Everything he learned and recorded is of great interest, but much of it is simply about what it's like to become 107. Everything he learned and recorded is of great interest, but much of it is simply about what it's like to become 107. Such a study could have been done of non-veterans. A comparison could hsve been done of non-veterans. A comparison could have been made of veterans and non-veterans. Or a study like this one could have looked at World War I resisters. That there's not a similar book about them, and now can never be, says little about them and a great deal about all of us. A comparison of the lifespan of veterans and refuseniks would have been an interesting test of the author's theory that going along to get along increases your life. <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-81424967292906097492013-11-02T12:38:00.003-07:002013-11-02T12:38:54.782-07:00Making Sport of Veterans for Profit and Ratings By William Rivers PittThe Boston Red Sox are on the verge of winning the World Series for
the third time since 2004, which, for fans of the team, is the sports
equivalent of seeing Halley's Comet three times in one decade. The last
two times the Sox won the title, they were on the road in St. Louis and
Denver respectively. Tonight, if they win, they will have secured the
championship at home in Fenway Park for the first time since 1918.<br />
I am a Red Sox fan, a sports fan in general, and I make no apologies
for it. Quite a lot of people in my neck of the political woods look
down on sports, and on sports fans, with considerable disdain. This is,
to no small degree, completely understandable; Howard Zinn once noted
that America would be a far better place if the people followed the news
and policy with the same detail-driven zeal they follow sports. The guy
who calls a talk radio show demanding that the government keep its damn
hands off his Medicare can turn on a dime, call a sports talk show, and
remember the batting average of the guy who played shortstop for the
Knobville Derptastics in 1947. The ability is there. The disconnect is
astonishing.<br />
That having been said, I am an avid sports fan for a couple of
reasons: 1. The drama that can unfold during a really good game leaves
even very good fiction and film in deep shade; and, 2. I'm allowed to
have a diversion. Frankly, I need one. People who hate sports and call
it frivolous would have me spend 24/7/365 tearing my guts out over all
the ills of the world, but you know what? I give at the office, every
day and twice on Sunday. Sports, for me, are a vitally necessary escape.
Without them, I would have started firebombing years ago.<br />
Even when sports gives the best it has to offer, however, it cannot
completely seal me off from the grim realities of life in America. The
wildly popular war-weapon fly-overs that take place at virtually every
major sporting event serve as a constant reminder that America's
business is war, and for the war-makers, business is good. That
militarization has filtered all the way down to street level, literally;
tonight, at the corner of Landsdowne Street and Brookline Avenue in the
shadow of Fenway's Green Monster, hundreds of police officers in full
military-style body armor will be standing post, armed to the teeth.<br />
I know this, because I've seen it more than once from my stool at the
Cask & Flagon, which sits right on that corner across from the
park, during previous championship runs. The police will assemble in
phalanxes around the 5th inning, and God help anyone who so much as
sneezes wrong, because no one else will.<br />
In 2004, 90 minutes after the Red Sox defeated the Yankees for the
American League championship, a 21-year-old college student named
Victoria Snelgrove was shot in the face by a Boston cop named Rochefort
Milien with a "non-lethal" projectile for the crime of sitting on a
girder attached to Fenway Park. She died the next day, eight days before
her 22nd birthday. Six days later, the Red Sox won the World Series for
the first time in 86 years, and Victoria Snelgrove was all but
forgotten.<br />
So I will watch tonight. All the horror and sorrow and rage and woe
is always waiting for me when the last out is recorded and the last
second ticks off the clock. If sports do not make me entirely forget
these things, they allow me to at least put them down for a little
while. The fact that I choose to make a small space in time for a game
helps me pick it all back up again. It is, in its own small way, a balm.<br />
At least, that was the case until this particular World Series began.
You see, the series is being broadcast on Fox. Beyond the fact that
listening to the game commentators Joe Buck and Tim McCarver is the
broadcasting equivalent of scraping fingernails across the chalkboard of
my soul, beyond the terrible camera work and ghastly graphics, is what
they have been doing to war veterans during the seventh-inning stretch
of every game.<br />
Fox, along with mega-sponsor Bank of America, has been "honoring" the veterans.<br />
Fox, which did more than all the other networks combined to pour American soldiers into the meat-grinder of war by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE75EAE594A73155E" target="_blank">ginning up support for the invasion of Iraq</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span>,
which coddled every lie-spewing Bush administration official to make
damn sure that war happened, which spread every piece of propaganda they
could find to make sure that war kept going and going and going, and
which now works hammer and tong to promote politicians whose life's work
involves stripping service members of benefits duly earned in blood and
pain, is "honoring" the veterans during every game.<br />
Don't try to tell me the sports division is different than the news
division, by the way. Fox is Fox is Fox, period. They all get their
paychecks from the same place, and are therefore party to the galling
hypocrisy of it all.<br />
Fox's sidekick in this gruesome charade: Bank of America, which, along with a handful of other monster banks, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/07/1831451/bank-of-america-to-pay-368-million-to-military-members-for-improper-forelosures/" target="_blank">illegally foreclosed on the homes of thousands of American service members</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>
while they were fighting and dying overseas. In 2011, Bank of America
paid out tens of millions of dollars in a settlement with the soldiers
whose homes they stole, and now, they are "honoring" those same soldiers
during the games.<br />
<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2010/0816/Wounds-of-Iraq-war-US-struggles-with-surge-of-returning-veterans" target="_blank">Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Michael Zacchea</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span>
served in Iraq. He was awarded the Bronze Star, and later the Purple
Heart for wounds he suffered in Fallujah. Upon returning home, his life
very nearly collapsed in a frenzy of aggression, violence and madness,
and he was later diagnosed with severe PTSD and traumatic brain injury.<br />
Lt. Colonel Zacchea knows everything there is to know about that war
and its horrific aftermath, and today sits on the Board of Directors of
the advocacy group <a href="http://veteransforcommonsense.org/about-vcs/" target="_blank">Veterans for Common Sense</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span>. I asked him what he thought of Fox "honoring" veterans during the World Series.<br />
Ever the Marine, he did not mince words. I quote in full:<br />
<blockquote>
The Fox Network remained the unrepentant cheerleader for
war in Iraq for more than a decade of war, yet Fox reports little when
the overwhelming facts show Veterans Affairs (VA) continues stumbling
when it comes to caring for our disabled veterans and the shattered
American families created by the war.<br />
Fox seriously harms our veterans by their unreasonable insistence on
tax cuts for the richest Americans. The two Bush Administration tax cuts
for the top 1% effectively isolated America's richest 1% from the real
costs of the war, which is several trillion dollars and rising. The
policies of Fox - abandoning responsibility to all 300 million Americans
and our veterans - are a sharp contrast to the common-sense progressive
tax policy during World War II.<br />
The current fights in Congress are over who is going to pay for the
tax cuts and the wars. Right now, Fox and the richest 1% are avoiding
their responsibility as citizens to our wounded veterans. Yes, there
have been recent substantial increases in VA spending under President
Obama. But it isn't enough.<br />
Today, with Fox leading the charge, the 1% continue sticking a knife
in the back of middle-class America, Main Street, and our veterans by
not providing enough to VA so that our wounded, injured, ill, and
disabled veterans get high quality and prompt medical care and
disability benefits.<br />
Fox should be covering the stories of our veterans who died waiting
for VA treatment or benefits. Fox should be showing America that VA
needs more funds so our veterans are not left twisting in the wind. If
Fox had any moral responsibility, they would be insisting that no
American be left behind, be it one of our veterans or any other equally
deserving American. The morally and fiscally responsible position would
insist no veteran be left behind by regressive economic policies.</blockquote>
I have a better idea for how Fox can honor the veterans tonight. Send
Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and all of Murdoch's other
henchmen out to home plate during the seventh-inning stretch. Have them
get on their knees and beg forgiveness from the thousands of American
soldiers they helped kill, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians
they helped kill, the tens of thousands of American soldiers they helped
to maim and permanently damage, the families and friends of all the
fallen and the wounded, <a href="http://waterford.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/justin-eldridges-battle-with-ptsd-ended-in-tragedy-last-night" target="_blank">the soldiers who have come home and taken their own lives</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span>
because the damage done to them was too much to bear, the veterans who
lost and are in danger of losing the benefits they desperately need,
have the whole Fox family beg for forgiveness for everything they have
done to the people they are "honoring," on their own network just before
the bottom of the seventh starts, and an infinitesimal measure of
justice will be served.<br />
It won't happen like that, of course.<br />
But it God damned well should.<br />
Go Sox.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-20986244872569528282013-11-02T10:00:00.002-07:002013-11-02T10:00:42.246-07:00AlterNet: By Jodie Gummow: Will Dick Cheney be Arrested For War Crimes in Canada?The international group, Lawyers Against War, has urged Canadian authorities to arrest former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for war crimes when he arrives at the Toronto Global Forum this week, Huffington Post reported. The anti-war group wrote a letter to the Attorney General John Gerretsen and Police Chief Bill Blair saying it was their duty to arrest Cheney, "as a person suspected on reasonable grounds of authorizing, counseling, aiding, abetting and failing to prevent torture."Once Richard Dick Cheney enters Canada, Canada must ensure that Dick Cheney is either investigated and prosecuted for the indictable offense of torture in Canada or extradited to another country willing and able to do so," Lawyers Against the War's Gail Davidson wrote. Cheney was a "big supporter" of waterboarding and other unlawful interrogation techniques during his vice presidency, in which thousands of people were tortured, kidnapped and assassinated based on his instruction. Last year, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal convicted Chaney, as well as former U.S. President George W. Bush and six other Bush administration officials in absentia of war crimes including torture and cruelty. Cheney's visit is likely to spark large protests. In September 2011, he was barricaded during large protests on a visit to Vancouver, where demonstrators blocked him from leaving an exclusive hotel for several hours before police were able to evacuate him. Subsequently, he cancelled a trip to Toronto in March 2010 citing safety concern, which led to large protests.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-50999520990643884362013-11-02T09:28:00.002-07:002013-11-02T09:28:27.839-07:00Dick Cheney Calls for War on Iran. By William Boardman:Over a decade of warmongering and only a couple of wars to show for it. "Let's go make war on Iran!" said Republican Dick Cheney in somewhat different words on one of those silly Sunday shows October 26th. This wasn't the first time Cheney had advocated for war on Iran. Or for torture. Or for assassination by drone. Or for any other war crime for which he is unlikely ever to be held accountable. But in all fairness to the former president, this time he really only implied that war on Iran was inevitable. Looking at the record, however, it's hard to find any war Cheney hasn't found "inevitable," even if he had to lie to get it started, as he did with Iraq. And Cheney's fondness for "inevitable" wars relies not merely on dishonesty, but more importantly, on personal detachment. Cheney has wanted all these wars to be inevitable for other people, not for anyone in his circle. That's the way it's been for Cheney since he copped out on the war of his generation, getting five deferments from Vietnam because he had "other priorities" that included cheering on the the warmakers who were sending more and more of other people's children to suffer and die in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, Cheney didn't call for attacking Iran with nuclear weapons the way Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson did a few days earlier at Yeshiva University. Cheney did not object to nuking Iran either. And he hasn't publicly disagreed with the octogenarian gambling mogul, so one suspects Cheney would be happy enough to see this particular smoking gun turn into a mushroom cloud. Is nuking the Iranian desert really a smart move? In fairness to Adelson, who heavily backed Newt Gingrich for president, he didn't call for nuking Tehran right off. He said the U.S. should drop a demo nuke in an Iranian desert and then say: if you don't drop your nuclear weapons development program, then we'll nuke Tehran. Either strike would be a war crime. But it's far from certain that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons development program. Those who say it is certain are lying, for whatever political purpose they think their lies may serve. The same might be said about those who claim it's certain that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons development program, people who have included the government of Iran and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as well as Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, at least according to the New York Times and Ha'aretz). The reality is that, outside of Iran, no one has any certainty what Iran's long term intentions are, never mind what they might be doing about those intentions at the moment. Too many people, especially people in assorted governments, have a vested interest in not believing that, even if it's true. They'd rather tale a chance on creating an untenable Catch-22 demand for Iran to drop a program it doesn't have, even if it means<br />
another war. Iran is the right's favorite straw man, scapegoat, and imagined existential threat. And Iran, perversely, seems to delight in baiting its declared enemies to make those fears demonstrably real. This is like deja vu all over again, a replay of Saddam Hussein's self-defeating posturing in defense of his own nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. A whole history matters, not just one side of it. <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-61002801350066442592013-11-01T11:01:00.002-07:002013-11-01T11:01:36.201-07:00By Sam Muho: The Iranian "Smoke and Mirrors Threat" and Washington's "Human Rights Card"<div class="author">
By <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/sam-muhho" title="Posts by Sam Muhho">Sam Muhho</a></div>
<div class="grDate">
Global Research, October 27, 2013</div>
<div class="url">
Url of this article:<br /><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-iranian-smoke-and-mirrors-threat-and-washingtons-human-rights-card/5355699">http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-iranian-smoke-and-mirrors-threat-and-washingtons-human-rights-card/5355699</a></div>
<div class="article-content">
<em><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22181">In
a cycle of habit borne out repeatedly in the mainstream western media,
demonization and fear mongering against Iran is picking up pace again in
the face of attempts by the new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to
rebuild relations with the west and work toward international
cooperation. The techniques and methodologies used by the west in
perpetuating the geopolitically-motivated, neo-imperialist, agenda
against Iran often come across in the media as clumsy and awkward in
their reasoning. Before delving into the hard geopolitical reality, a
much needed word on the disingenuous leveraging of human-rights against
countries such as Iran is critical.</span></em><br />
<strong> Iran and the Western “Human Rights Card”</strong><br />
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22186">
In a recent <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/10/24/iran-gives-christians-80-lashes-for-communion-wine-as-un-blasts-human-rights/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fox News report</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22188">,
Iran’s human rights record is criticized by Benjamin Weinthal, a
Berlin-based fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
His arguments are employed to argue against the feasibility of pragmatic
negotiations with Iran as according to his logic, Iran is not a regime
“worthy” of practical negotiation with. To use the reported human right
violations against religious minorities and Christians and particular as
geopolitical leverage to argue against diplomacy and negotiation with
Iran wreaks of compromised, corporate-financier motivation, especially
when juxtaposed with </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/introducing-gulf-state-despots-10-facts.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the intimate collaboration of the United States</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22190"> and its allies with one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East (and the world), Saudi Arabia. </span></div>
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22193">While Iran is often
berated for its short-comings, these short-comings pale in comparison to
the atrocities perpetuated by the Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, no Jewish or
Christian worship is allowed and possession of a Bible could warrant
you various brutal punishments. Saudi Arabia has been notorious for </span><a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/saudi.arabia.officials.condemned.for.abuses.against.bibles.christian.symbols/2992.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rigid campaigns against Bible possession</a> and religious symbols, especially in airport customs searches including the shredding of any Bibles found and in one case, <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/saudi.arabia.officials.condemned.for.abuses.against.bibles.christian.symbols/2992.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">harassing a nun</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22196"> who was passing through Jeddah on a transit flight. </span><br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22196">Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with the United States, is currently promoting a <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/05/syrian-war-prequel.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sectarian-extremist-driven destabilization</a>
campaign in Syria whose byproduct has resulted in nightmarish lives for
people across religious lines which can be described as nothing less
than </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/un-defends-natos-premeditated-genocide.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">premeditated genocide</a>
with former CIA official Robert Baer predicting campaigns against
Christians in Syria and Lebanon during an interview with Seymour Hersh
for his excellent 2007 article, “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Redirection</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22198">.” </span><br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22198">What is rather ironic in
light of western focus on Iran is that Baer stated that joint
US-Saudi-Israeli machinations in Lebanon, which were generating radical
Islamist groups, would necessitate the protection of Christians which
would be done by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and the Shiites as
opposed to the US and France. Iran is predominantly Shiite and while
conservative Islam is the norm, this conservatism is distinct from the
twisted </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/introducing-gulf-state-despots-10-facts.html" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22201" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22200">inventions and atrocities</span></a> of radical Wahabism in Saudi Arabia which serve as the hotbed of global Al Qaeda activity.<br />
Let it not be forgotten that Saudi Arabia is the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">primary underwriter</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22204">
of Al Qaeda’s proliferation throughout Eurasia, done admittedly and
particularly in line with western imperialist designs of isolating Iran
and serving as geopolitical pawns. It is noted that the Taliban and the
Wahabi fundamentalists that constitute its ranks and the ranks of
extremists from Nigeria to the Philippines would not exist without Saudi
financing done purposefully to create a twisted brand of Islam and
produce a “Swiss-Army knife” to be used against the targets of western
foreign policy such as </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/05/syrian-war-prequel.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Syria</a> today and previously against <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/madrassas.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Afghanistan</a> during the 1980s; it has since formed the cornerstone of the <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/09/war-on-terror-is-fraud.html" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22208" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22207">fake “war on terror”</span></a> driven by <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/02/empires-double-edged-sword-global.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">western neo-imperialist interests</a>. The <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2010/10/20101020173353178622.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">largest arms sale in U.S. history</a> has been to Saudi Arabia.<br />
Saudi Arabia regularly conducts brutal executions through the means
of hooded swordsmen including on religious charges of being accused of “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18503550" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sorcery and witchcraft</a>” in the grimly-dubbed “<a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/453240/20130403/saudi-arabia-chop-square-beheading.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Chop-Chop Square</a>.”
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and foreign women cannot
visit the country without being accompanied by a male guardian. In
addition to toeing the line of western corporate-financier geopolitical
agendas <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/03/world-must-unite-against-us-saudi.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in cooperation with Israel such as in Syria</a>, the Saudi establishment interlocks with these interests as noted in points “6” and “7” in the article “<a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/introducing-gulf-state-despots-10-facts.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Introducing the Gulf State Despots</a>” by Tony Cartalucci.<br />
Iran, which may have its shortcoming, has an unprecedented standard
when compared to Saudi Arabia. Iranian Jews, Christians, and
Zoroastrians are guaranteed their own seats on the Iranian parliament in
proportion to their population. Iranian Jews, roughly 30,000 in
population, enjoy relatively peaceful lives in Iran with a Jewish
hospital, two kosher restaurants in Tehran, 11 synagogues, many with
Hebrew schools, and a Jewish library including 20,000 titles. Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini issued edits in the 1980s stating that Iran’s Jewish
and Christian populations be “protected.” Many of these points are noted
by Benjamin Schett’s article “<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/debunking-anti-iran-propaganda-the-myth-of-the-new-holocaust" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Debunking Anti-Iran Propaganda</a>” which conflict with the gravely austere picture painted by western media. This short <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngttxIzXRsE" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">documentary by Journeyman Pictures</a> gives a candid picture of Jewish life in Iran.<br />
It is often claimed that Iran promotes institutionalized anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial but <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/debunking-anti-iran-propaganda-the-myth-of-the-new-holocaust" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Benjamin Schett</a>
explains why this is not true. Ahmadinejad has made accusations against
the reliability of the Holocaust but this does NOT represent the
position of the Iranian state or people whose state-media even
broadcasted a popular, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7119474.stm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hollywood-quality film</a>
commemorating the suffering of the Jews and featuring the story of
Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian diplomat who helped save Jews from the
Holocaust by giving them false passports to flee Nazi-occupied France.
Iran’s former Jewish Member of Parliament, Moris Motamed, has <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/07/14/talking-to-iran-s-only-jewish-member-of-parliament/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">criticized Ahmadinejad</a>
for his statements on the Holocaust and even held a press conference to
denounce those statements. However, such sentiments must not be seen as
reflecting the entirety of the Iranian society as clearly is not the
case.<br />
Criticism against Israel is mainstream and expected but not because
of any religious animosity towards the Jews, as Ahmadinejad himself
stated in a speech in Esfahan cited by Schett, but rather because of the
complicated political issues surrounding the <a href="http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story707.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Palestinian plight</a>.<br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22210">Benjamin Schett notes
that it is impossible to give 100% insight of life as a religious
minority in a religiously conservative country without being in that
position oneself but unlike in Saudi Arabia, at least such minorities
openly exist. Of course, such minorities must not settle for the bare
minimum and as a westerner, I’m in the tradition of the equality for
all. If and where any cases of rights violations exist, such as those
noted in the original Fox News article by Benjamin Weinthal, they must
be openly addressed but done so in a manner unlike the western media’s
purpose which is to highlight certain facts, at the expense of others,
and use any incident they can as propaganda fodder for the sake of </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/middle-east-then-world.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">western geopolitical objectives</a>
aimed at stifling peace and diplomacy, substituting it with
war-mongering, and covering up the west and its assets’ own serial
crimes against humanity.<br />
<strong> Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): Is it Really About Democracy?</strong><br />
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22218">
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22217">Of
particular interest in the Fox News article is that the author,
Benjamin Weinthal, is listed as a fellow at the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies (FDD), an organization with a vested interest in
promoting western corporate- financier objectives around the world with
human rights simply employed as an easily-leveraged cloak for naked
imperialism. I will assume good faith on the part of Benjamin Wienthal
as many people drawn into organizations and NGOs that served western
subversion are drawn it by honest intentions which is something that
imperialist systems exploit as </span><a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/02/empires-double-edged-sword-global.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">they have in history</a>.
Nevertheless, the overall bulk and existence of the FDD cannot be
casually excused when one gets an insight into the interests and
networks propping it up. Tony Cartalucci in his excellent article, “<a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/09/war-on-terror-is-fraud.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The War on Terror is a Fraud</a>”, explains the FDD:</div>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22219">
The <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd/team-overview/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Foundation for Defense of Democracies</a> (FDD) is <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/FDDdonors.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a corporate</a> and <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd/frequently-asked-questions/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">US State Department</a>-funded policy institute that <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">claims to be dedicated to promoting</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22221">
“pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies
that threaten democracy.” It is decidedly “Neo-Conservative” and focuses
almost exclusively on starting and maintaining wars at America’s
expense.</span></div>
FDD’s “<a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd/team-overview/category/executive-team" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">executive team</a>” includes James Woolsey and Clifford May, while its “<a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd/team-overview/category/leadership-council" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">leadership council</a>” includes Bill Kristol – all signatories of a recent Foreign Policy Initiative <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/pnac-reborn-calling-for-greater-libyan.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">letter addressed to House Republicans</a>
asking them to discard the UN mandate for NATO’s Libyan intervention
and commit more support specifically for regime change. Acting <a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/about-fdd/team-overview/category/leadership-council" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Senator Joseph Lieberman also can be found on FDD’s “leadership council</a>” and has been a chief proponent of war with Libya, as well as Syria and Iran, <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/04/warmonger-mccain-in-benghazi.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">alongside John McCain</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22223">.
FDD has a myriad of publications expressing the elation of the
“Neo-Conservative” establishment over current operations against Libya
and the possible springboard the Libyan war serves toward US
intervention in Syria and Iran. FDD’s only criticism of Obama is that
more should be done, faster, and at a greater expense to America.
Michael Ledeen, a “freedom scholar,” expresses this well in his article
titled, “</span><a href="http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/lessons-of-libya-and-syria-and-some-day-iran/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Lessons of Libya (and Syria, and, Some Day, Iran)</a>,” where he throws in his organization’s collective desire to intervene in both Syria and Iran, for good measure.<br />
The Atlantic article, “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/al-qaeda-is-winning/244701/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Al-Qaeda Is Winning</a>,”
written by FDD “senior fellow” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, expresses the
true contempt these individuals have toward their audience. In this
piece reflecting on the last 10 years of the “War on Terror,”
Gartenstein-Ross claims that Al Qaeda’s ability to use cheap means to
provoke the United States into a multi-billion dollar defense is
rendering an Al Qaeda victory through a “strategy of a thousand cuts.”
Of course, the x-ray machines and other security apparatuses being
installed across the United States and the tremendous amount of money
being used to sustain combat operations around the world “hunting
terrorists,” doesn’t go into a black hole. Instead, it goes into the
pockets of the very people funding the work of Mr. Daveed
Gartenstein-Ross and his peers throughout his and other US and British
think-tanks.<br />
<br />
Those who have read <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-libyan-puzzle-in-the-scramble-for-africa/5355475" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">my recent article on Libya</a>
will note the entirely illegitimate nature of the NATO campaign against
Libya and the intellectually bankrupt mentality of those who shamefully
perpetuate its talking-points. The FDD, at the top of the organization,
is not merely concerned with human rights themselves but rather
leveraging such concerns for their own sake, something the US government
and the corporate-financier interests it represents have clearly done
before <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/04/neo-cons-hypocritically-leverage-human.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">with regards to China</a>.
It should be noted that the FDD is just one element in the
neo-imperialist racket. Other corporate-financier, “globalist”
think-tanks, who are the true underwriters of western policy, includes
the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the International
Crisis Group, and the Brookings Institute. In “<a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/naming-names-your-real-government.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Naming Names: Your Real Government</a>”,
Tony Cartalucci points out who truly controls the United States/NATO
and lists the prominent individuals and corporations financing and
directing them.<br />
<strong> Iran and the Western Geopolitical Struggle</strong><br />
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22224">
The Brookings Institution is of
particular concern among these think-tanks as it has been the primary
facilitator in the drive for war against Iran founded on distortion and
geopolitically-motivated propaganda. Contrary to media reports
portraying Iran as an immediate, existential threat to US and Israeli
security, the <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/brookings-which-path-to-persia.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Brookings Institute released a policy report</a> that was basically a handbook for overthrowing nations titled <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/108902116/brookings-institution-s-which-path-to-persia-report" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Which Path to Persia? (.PDF)</a>. It was written by six prominent analysts within establishment circles, including <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/united-front-against-iran.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kenneth Pollack</a>,
admitting that Iran poses not a threat to the survival of the United
States and Israel’s security but their collective regional and
geopolitical hegemony and interests across the region. It was noted that
Iran was playing a strategy of firmness and even aggressiveness but not
recklessness in combating western hegemony and imperialism as can be
seen in its recent economic endeavors in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTp9M9JLkbc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pipeline and gas politics of the region</a>.
It was also noted that Iran was deliberately avoiding a conflagration
with the west and that any possible nuclear weapons capability for Iran
(which is noted as unconfirmed and nonexistent in other reports) would
be used as a deterrence for attack and protecting regional ambitions
Iran has for the region (pg. 24-25).</div>
This is reconfirmed by the recent 2013 <a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR310.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">RAND Corporation report Iran After the Bomb</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22230">
which while noting that no evidence exists that Iran is pursuing
nuclear weapons according to the US intelligence community, envisions a
post-nuclear scenario of Iran. RAND is another “globalist” think-tank
that hosts compromised interests but manages to give an honest synopsis
of the Iranian reality. It is also noted that Iran’s “supreme leader”
Ayatollah Khamenei has issued religious decrees labeling nuclear weapons
as “against Islamic principles.” Contrary to recent reports circulation
by MEMRI TV and mainstream media, </span><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/yes-memri-there-is-a-fatwa-from-khamenei-forbidding-nukes.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">these fatwas are not fake and actually do exist</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22233">. And contrary to some critics, they are </span><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/irans-forbidden-nukes-and-the-taqiya-lie.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">not an example of taqiyya (deception) as Juan Cole notes</a>. One thing that is very revealing is the following statement by RAND which sums up their insightful report:<br />
<blockquote>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22235">
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22234">The
Islamic Republic [of Iran] is a revisionist state that seeks to
undermine what it perceives to be the American-dominated order in the
Middle East. However, it does not have territorial ambitions and does
not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations. Its chief military
aim is to deter a U.S. and/or Israeli military attack while it
undermines American allies in the Middle East [which includes the
economic interests of the totalitarian kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and
Qatar whose atrocities in human rights dwarfs anything Iran is guilty
of]…</span> <span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22226">Iran’s
possession of nuclear weapons will lead to greater tension between the
Shi’a theocracy and the conservative Sunni monarchies [Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, etc.] However, Iran is unlikely to use nuclear weapons against
other Muslim countries…The Islamic Republic views Israel in ideological
terms. However, it is very unlikely that Iran would use nuclear weapons
against Israel, given the latter’s overwhelming conventional and nuclear
military superiority. (pg. vii)</span></div>
</blockquote>
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22237">The Brookings Institution
not only enumerates transparently the similar points that Iran is not
an existential threat but goes further to enumerate a list of strategies
for US provocations against Iran to initiate a war that, according to
the report, Iran does not want. It is even noted that an Iranian
retaliation in the case of American airstrikes would not be inevitable
and that Iran may deliberately refrain from retaliation in order to
strategically “play the victim” (pg. 84-85, 95) Let it not be forgotten
how the US and Britain staged the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CIA “Operation Ajax”</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22240">
in 1953 to oust the democratically-elected Iranian president Mohammad
Mosaddegh, who nationalized the country’s oil, in favor of the
pro-American Shah who ruled as a brutal dictator. Similar plans for
regime change are enumerated in the Brookings Institute report where it
is admitted that the opposition “Green Movement” in 2009 was
orchestrated by the US government through “civil society and NGOs” in
order to provoke Iranian belligerence through regime change operations,
capitalizing on internal dissent. This is not to deny any legitimate
aspirations and calls for reform in Iran which are prevalent among
student groups but merely to point out how such ambitions are co-opted
and used by western interests for their own agenda (103-105, 109-110).
See this excellent <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/05/which-path-to-persia-redux.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">summary</a> of all these critical points.</span><br />
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22242">Other means proposed
included playing upon sectarian and ethnic divisions inside Iran to
destabilize the country and even funding radical Sunni militant groups,
specifically the MEK, which has killed Americans in the past and is
labeled by the U.S. state department as a “foreign terrorist
organization”. Its ideology is described by analysts as radical
“left-wing” Islamic-Marxism which makes it interesting to consider the
US plans to fully employ this group as political assets. MEK has also
collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s forces in guerilla warfare against
Iran in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s (113, 117-118). The group is
against the dominant Iranian establishment and it is noted that the US
has worked covertly with them in the past and that in order to work
overtly with them, the group had to be removed from the terrorist list
(118). Regarding the MEK on pages 117-118, Brookings states:</span><br />
<blockquote>
“Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most
controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a
potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of
Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e
Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and
indeed anti-American.</blockquote>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
In contrast, the group’s champions
contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian
regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering
operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also
argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit
of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in
the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for
regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering
intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of
intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran
for enriching uranium.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK
remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations.
In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian
contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group
praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino
reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks,
within the group celebrations were widespread.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
Undeniably, the group has conducted
terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are
directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group
bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then
the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an
estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed
credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other
assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001.
At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an
overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of
foreign terrorist organizations.”</div>
The compounded criminality of western and Israeli collaboration with MEK is emphasized <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/04/confirmed-terrorist-organization.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>.
It should be noted that the MEK has recently been removed from the US
list of terrorist organizations as part of the next phase of using them
as a proxy. MEK claims to have killed 40,000 Iranians in the past and
has been trained on U.S. soil in a secret base in Nevada, published on
the Huffington Post and <a href="http://www.infowars.com/war-with-iran-started-five-years-ago/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">cited here by Kurt Nimmo</a> in an excellent and well-sourced article emphasizing the coordinated western agenda against Iran.<br />
In culminating these abhorrent proposals, Brookings further notes the
option of a military invasion and conventional war against Iran if the
above proposals failed to accomplish western interests. This is the most
alarming option especially in context to the following admission:<br />
<blockquote>
If the United States were to decide that to garner
greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or
provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait
for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might
stretch out indefinitely. ..However, since it would be up to Iran to
make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times
in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would
get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at
all (65)… it would be far more preferable if the United States could
cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes [as a
catalyst for an invasion] before launching them. Clearly, the more
outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action,
the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very
difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation
without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then
undermine it (85).</blockquote>
In all this certified criminality, which has obviously been at play
even as the report was being published in 2009, it must not be forgotten
that the <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/naming-names-your-real-government.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Brookings Institution is of, for, and by big business</a>
and their collective agenda of integrating Iran into their
international consensus and exploiting its 76 million population for
their unipolar order. This is opposed to Iran’s attempts to foster
national self-sufficiency and develop ties with nations strategic to
western interests including <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-carried-out-the-terrorist-car-bombings-in-india-thailand-and-georgia-iran-or-someone-else/29320" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">India, Thailand,</a>
China, and Russia. Brookings Institution is funded by the likes of the
Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, The Carnegie Foundation,
Goldman Sachs, and the Carlyle Group among others; their report even
includes a special acknowledgement of financial support from the Smith
Richardson Foundation upon which Zbigniew Brzezinski sits as an active
governor as pointed out by Tony Cartalucci and easily verifiable in the
report’s preface.<br />
Such international criminality is magnified when Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Seymour Hersh revealed</a>
in his article “Preparing the Battlefield” that the U.S. is cooperating
with their anti-Iranian terrorist asset, Saudi Arabia, in order to fund
radical, <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/04/us-canada-claim-iran-al-qaeda-ties.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Al Qaeda-linked, Sunni-groups like the Jundallah</a>
to destabilize and destroy Iran as a viable geopolitical opponent. Al
Qaeda, directed by the Saudis in cooperation with western geopolitical
objectives, has been leveraged as a “Swiss army knife of
destabilization” across the Middle East in the fake “war on terror” as
Seymour Hersh exposed in another report titled “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Redirection</a>”
published in 2007. In that report, Hersh reveals that the U.S. and
Saudi Arabia have been working since 2007 to destabilize Syria and
Lebanon with a wave of sectarian-extremists currently being marketed in
the media as a “political uprising” and a “revolution”. This is
different from the legitimate internal political opposition in Syria
that has collaborated with the Syrian government in a reform initiative
and maintains distinctiveness from the extremist and terrorist elements
that clearly constitute the bulk of the “Syrian rebels” supported by the
west. In his report, Seymour Hersh states:<br />
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">
To undermine Iran, which is
predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to
reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the
Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is
Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah,
the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken
part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A
by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni
extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile
to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda…[Saudi Arabia's Prince] Bandar
and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a
very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was
‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we
don’t want the Salafis [Al Qaeda] to throw bombs; it’s who they throw
them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they
continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.</div>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22246">
There is no doubt that there is an anti-Iranian proxy conflict being waged in Syria by a <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2013/03/world-must-unite-against-us-saudi.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">joint US-Saudi-Israeli effort</a> to further the <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/middle-east-then-world.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wall Street-London geopolitical consensus</a>. Undermining and destabilizing Syria would further isolate Iran and perpetuate <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/united-front-against-iran.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the united geopolitical front</a>
against Iran that has been the objective of western politicians and
think-tanks. Iran would ultimately serve as a vital door into central
Asia and a springboard against <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/middle-east-then-world.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Russia and China</a><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22245">
who are the ultimate target for absorption within the western design of
a unipolar world order. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who is an active agent in the networks of these
machinations, makes it no secret in his book <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Grand Chessboard</a> that U.S. “global pre-eminence” (a euphemism for Wall Street/London </span><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22248">geopolitical
domination and a unipolar world order) is the agenda along with
American influence in central Asia to which Iran is a doorway. </span><span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22251">Russian
President Vladimir Putin has also spoken of hegemonic ambitions on the
part of the west to establish a unipolar order at a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VokyM3YFo3Q" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22250" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2007 Munich conference</a>.</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22255">
In addition to this evidence of open subversion, it must be noted that <span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22254">Clinton Bastin, former director of US nuclear weapons production programs, <a href="http://larouchepac.com/node/21190" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">has sent an open letter to President Obama</a>
in December 2011 claiming that there is no nuclear weapons threat from
Iran, stating the following on Iran’s nuclear weapons program: </span></div>
<blockquote>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22261">
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22260">The
ultimate product of Iran’s gas centrifuge facilities would be highly
enriched uranium hexafluoride, a gas that cannot be used to make a
weapon. Converting the gas to metal, fabricating components and
assembling them with high explosives using dangerous and difficult
technology that has never been used in Iran would take many years after a
diversion of three tons of low enriched uranium gas from fully
safeguarded inventories. The resulting weapon, if intended for delivery
by missile, would have a yield equivalent to that of a kiloton of
conventional high explosives. </span></div>
</blockquote>
<div id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22265">
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22262">As
warmongering against Iran is expected to drastically pick up pace as
western designs for domination across the Middle East show increasing
signs of faltering, it is absolutely critical to be educated on these
matters in order to undermine and extinguish the effects of the media
propaganda echo-chamber. This is not to deny any human rights
accusations against Iran altogether but one must guard themselves from
being misguided and swayed by disingenuous <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/naming-names-your-real-government.html" id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22271" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">corporate-financier, globalist interests</a>
seeking to expand their empire. It is imperative for people around the
world to recognize the corporations and institutions perpetuating
systematic atrocities and genocide across the planet and realize that
once they eliminate the sovereignty of other countries, they will then
turn their attention fully to the people within their own borders in the
west. </span></div>
<span id="yui_3_13_0_1_1382880097269_22262">A <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/02/real-revolution.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">real revolution</a>
will come by boycotting the degenerate corporations and financier
interests seeking to enslave humanity and building up our own
communities to create a world order <a href="http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/decenralize-big-retail.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">in our own image</a> and not in the image of Wall Street and London.</span><br />
<em><strong> Sam Muhho </strong>is a student of history and an advocate for anti-imperialism and anti-globalism. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:smuhho1@gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">smuhho1@gmail.com</a> and runs the Facebook page “<a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/facebook.com/gwatch1776" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Globalist Watch</a>” at <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/facebook.com/gwatch1776" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">facebook.com/gwatch1776</a> in order to explain the reality at play in global affairs. </em><br />
</div>
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Copyright © 2013 Global Research</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-75795008898873414872013-11-01T10:49:00.001-07:002013-11-01T10:49:39.874-07:00By Sam Muhho: The Iranian "Smoke and Mirrors Threat" and Washington's "Human Rights Card". In a cycle of habit borne out repeatedly in the mainstream western media, demonization and fear mongering against Iran is picking up pace again in the face of attempts by the new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to rebuild relations with the west and work toward international cooperation. The techniques and methodologies used by the west in perpetuating the geopolitically-motivated, neo-imperialist, agenda against Iran often come across in the media as clumsy and awkward in their reasoning. Before delving into the hard geopolitical reality, a much needed word on the disingenuous leveraging of human-rights against countries such as Iran is critical. Iran and the Western "Human Rights Card". In a recent Fox News report, Iran's human rights record is criticized by Benjamin Weinthal, a Berlin-based fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). His arguments are employed to argue against the feasibility of pragmatic negotiations with Iran as according to his logic, Iran is not a regime "worthy" of practical negotiation with. To use the reported human right violations against religious minorities and Christians and particular as geopolitical leverage to argue against diplomacy and negotiation with Iran wreaks of compromised, corporate- financier motivation, especially when juxtaposed with the intimate collaboration of the United States and its allies with the intimate collaboration of the United States and its allies with one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East and the world, Saudi Arabia. While Iran is often berated for its short-comings, these short-comings pale in comparison to the atrocities perpetuated by the Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, no Jewish or Christian worship is allowed and possession of a Bible could warrant you various brutal punishments. Saudi Arabia has been notorious for rigid campaigns against religious symbols, especially in airport customs searches including the shredding of any Bibles found and in one case, harassing a nun who was passing through Jeddah on a transit flight. Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with the United States, is currently promoting a sectarian-extremist driven destabilization campaign in Syria whose byproduct has resulted in nightmarish lives for people across religious lines which can be described as nothing less than premeditated genocide with former CIA official Robert Baer predicting campaigns against Christians in Syria and Lebanon during an interview with Seymour Hersh for his excellent 2007 article, "The Redirection." What is rather ironic in light of western focus on Iran is that Baer stated that joint US-Saudi-Israeli machinations in Lebanon, which were gathering radical Islamist groups, would necessitate the protection of Christians which would be done by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and the Shiites as opposed to the Us and France. Iran is predominantly Shiite and while conservative Islam is the norm, this conservatism is distinct from the twisted inventions and atrocities of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia which serve as the hotbed of global Al Qaeda activity.<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-21758052538126589932013-11-01T09:48:00.001-07:002013-11-01T09:48:09.611-07:00By Bill Van Auken: Two Years Since the End of the US-NATO War in Libya!Today, October 31, 2013, marks two years since the official end of the US-NATO war for regime change in Libya. It is unlikely that this second anniversary will be marked with any fanfare in Washington, the capitals of Western Europe or Libya itself. The nearly eight-month-long war achieved its goal of toppling the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, whose murder by a mob of NATO-backed "rebels" prompted President Barack Obama to proclaim from the White House Rose Garden that this grisly event signaled the event of "a new and democratic Libya." Two years later, there is no sign of any such Libya. The country bombarded by the US military and its European allies is in an advanced state of disintegration. It was reported Monday that oil production, which is responsible for virtually all of the country's export earnings and over half of its gross domestic product, has fallen to 90,000 barrels per day, less than a tenth of the pre-war level. Major installations<br />
have been seized by armed militias. In eastern Libya, these militias advocate the country's partition into the three regional governorates-Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan, maintained under the colonial regime of fascist Italy. According to best estimates, there are nearly one-quarter of a million militiamen who are armed and paid by the Libyan government but operate with complete impunity under the direction of Islamist and regional warlords. The warlords constitute the principle power in the country. Clashes between these militias, attacks on the government, and assassinations of its officials are routine. Earlier this month, Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was himself abducted by an Islamist militia that acted in protest over the October 5 abduction of alleged Al Qaeda operative Abu Anas al-Liby by US Special Operations troops. Thousands of Libyans as well as sub-Saharan African migrant workers are being held incommunicado in makeshift prisons controlled by the militias, subjected to torture and killings. Conditions for the masses of the oil-rich nation remain abysmal, with a real unemployment rate estimated at over 30 percent. One million people, many of them supporters of the former regime, remain internally displaced. The continuation of this chaos two years after the end of the war reflects the character of the war itself. The US and its principal NATO allies, Britain and France, launched the war on the pretense that it was a humanitarian intervention, designed only to protect innocent lives. Based on unsubstantiated claims that a government massacre of a rebellious population in the eastern city of Benghazi was imminent without immediate intervention, the NATO powers pushed Resolution 1973 through the United Nations Security Council, authorizing them to impose a no-fly zone and "take all necessary measures" toprotect civilians. This served as the pseudo-legal fig leaf for an imperialist war of aggression that killed an estimated 50,000 Libyan civilians and wounded at least that number. This war was patently not about saving lives.. Rather, it was a war of neocolonial plunder, its principal objective being to topple the Gaddafi regime and impose a more pliant puppet in its place. <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-49331073255639837222013-11-01T08:50:00.000-07:002013-11-01T08:50:03.500-07:00By Dr. Ali Kadri: Downward Development Spiral in the Arab World:Imperialist Hegemony and the Return of Merchant Capital. Capital in the Arab World (AW), viewed in its dimension of consuming and allocating resources, has edged close to a mercantilist mode of accumulation whose principal characteristic is the near absence of positive intermediation between private and public wealth, literally it leaves behind the progressive side of capitalism. The merchant mode of accumulation revolves around quick private gains and does not require productive reinvestment in society, the usurpation of value by financial means is a subsidiary outcome. The practice of merchant capital mimics that of financial capital, in the sense that money is transmuted into money without much involvement in production processes: M-M', Rentier or rent-grab maybe too general a categorisation, it is transmuted into money without much involvement in production processes: M-M'. Rentier or rent-grab maybe too general a categorisation, it is also something of a misnomer, meant to support an ad hominem and faux-nationalist argument which conceals the fact that value transfers away from the working classes in the AW are conducted by national as well as by US-led international financial capital. The resurrected merchant mode of accumulation is a reincarnation of medieval merchantilism in a modern guise and, as was pointed out quite early in the industrial age, 'wherever merchant capital still predominates we find backward conditions, (Marx, vol. III, p. 327). The degeneration in social and political rights, including the status of women, is a vivid manifestation of the social retrogression driven by the ebbing of industrial culture in much of the AW. The broader context from which this condemnation stems is as follows: The independent development of merchant's capital there fore stands in inverse proportion to the general economic development of society (Marx, Capital Vol. III, p327). A qualification is in order to allow for the juxtaposition. Save slavery, imperialist aggression, and colonial genocide, the evolution from the merchant mode as Venetian traders began to control and own upstream cottage-scale or small manufacturing undertakings represented progress and a turning point in the organization of social production around labour (Engels, 1891). Integrating the merchant mode with an industrial one designated a cultural step forward-culture here meaning the universal store of humanity's knowledge.<br />
The AW has de-industrialized under the combined effects of war and neoliberalism. What has occurred in the AW is the gradual disengagement of national industrial capital from commercial capital, after which commerce bereft of industrialization became the dominant mode. Value usurpation policies, inherently uneven development, blocking the homogenisation of labour, and value grab by imperialist conquest are some of the processes that have underpinned the resurrection of merchant capital in this instance. Here I am relying on Meszaros' notion that capital as a social relationship regulates its metabolic rate of reproduction in relation to value destruction /grab and value creation, albeit within a context of class struggle and its associated power structure. (Mezaros, 1995). <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-12471237227320118292013-11-01T07:46:00.002-07:002013-11-01T07:46:49.471-07:00By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: Fukushima: The Ticking Nuclear Bomb. Over 800 Tons of Radioactive Material Pouring into the Pacific Ocean. In August this column ran a piece claiming that the Pacific Ocean was being poisoned by radioactive material escaping from Fukushima, two years after the devastating tsunami and meltdown at the Japanese nuclear facility. Three \months later, shocking evidence points towards a calamity situation. Silence from the corporate media. There is growing evidence coming from numerous reports aired on social networks and the so-called social media, among which is the article "Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning The Entire Pacific Ocean", which claimed that every day and for 750 days, now over 800 tonnes of toxic materials have been pouring into the Entire Pacific Ocean. The toxic substances were identified as Tritium, Cesium and Strontium, being carried far and wide by winds, rain and ocean currents, entering the food chain through seaweed and seafood, building up high levels of toxicity in the fish, and humans, at the top end of the consumption chain. TEPCO, or Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the plant, admitted in August that between twenty and forty trillion becquerels of radioactive material have entered the Pacific Ocean after a security barrier had been breached. The same operator admitted that in just one week, in August, levels of Caesium134 rose by 90 times and Caesium-137 rose by 86 times. Fresh research provides a chilling reminder that this situation is serious, will not go away, is getting worse and cannot be swept under the carpet. This research points to "massive numbers" of sea creatures dying across the Pacific, and that high levels of Cesium-137 are present in "a very high percentage of fish" caught in this ocean "and sold in North America." The research then moves on to specific and unexplained incidents. For example, the unexplained death of starfish off Puget Sound off Canada. The animals seem to be melting, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in Canadian waters. Divers spoke of live creatures literally disintegrating in front of them, in "massive numbers." On to British Columbia, where abnormal behavior and an unusually high death rate has been observed among killer whales. The vocal communication among the animals has ceased, and in the last two years, seven matriarchs have died. An Australian traveler sailing from Japan to California, USA, referred that it appeared the entire ocean was dead. Al he saw was a whale rolling helplessly in the sea with a tumour on its head, and and "for 3,000 nautical miles there was nothing to be seen". No turtles, no sea birds, no dolphins, no sharks. On to Alaska, where polar bears seals and walruses have loss of fur and suffer from open sores on their skin. On to Southern California, where 45 per cent of sea lion pups have died, described by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as "an unusually mortality event. Back up to Canada, where the sockeye salmon faces record low numbers, up across the entire west coast of Canada, where fish are dying from bleeding eyes, gills and bellies. Back across the Ocean, where extremely high levels of Cesium-137 have been found between Hawaii and California. <div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.buzzflash.com/content-syndicate.php?width=100&logo=top&amount=10"></script></div>Wolfgang P. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11222451927453015247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8031713.post-66107650647714892032013-10-31T10:51:00.002-07:002013-10-31T10:51:21.273-07:00By: Tom Engelhardt - Why Washington Can't Stop[<strong>Note for TomDispatch Readers:</strong> <em>Thought I might recommend a new little book series from the </em>Nation<em>
magazine (everyone’s publishing these days!) -- classic essays by some
of that mag’s best writers and among my own favorites, including </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CA95LZI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00CA95LZI&linkCode=as2&tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank">Gore Vidal’s State of the Union</a><em>, [Kurt] </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EDYFH0W/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00EDYFH0W&linkCode=as2&tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank">Vonnegut by the Dozen</a><em>,
and an upcoming volume by E.L. Doctorow. Each is a guarantee of
pleasure. And here’s a small reminder: if you are an Amazon customer,
travel to that site via any TomDispatch book link (or cover image link),
and buy books we recommend or anything else whatsoever, book or not,
we get a small cut of your purchase at no cost to you. It’s a fine,
no-pain-all-gain way to contribute to the site. Tom</em>]<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>Why Washington Can’t Stop </strong></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><strong>The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts </strong></span><br />By <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom">Tom Engelhardt</a><br />
In terms of pure projectable power, there’s never been anything like
it. Its military has divided the world -- the whole planet -- into six
“commands.” Its fleet, with <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57363407/u.s-to-keep-11-aircraft-carriers/">11</a>
aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done so largely
unchallenged for almost seven decades. Its Air Force has ruled the
global skies, and despite being almost continuously in action for years,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175368/When">hasn’t faced</a>
an enemy plane since 1991 or been seriously challenged anywhere since
the early 1970s. Its fleet of drone aircraft has proven itself capable
of <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/">targeting</a>
and killing suspected enemies in the backlands of the planet from
Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia with little regard for
national boundaries, and none at all for the possibility of being shot
down. It funds and trains <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/nick_turse_blowback_central">proxy armies</a>
on several continents and has complex aid and training relationships
with militaries across the planet. On hundreds of bases, some tiny and
others the size of American towns, its soldiers <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175338/nick_turse_planet_of_bases">garrison the globe</a> from <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175755/david_vine_the_italian_job">Italy</a>
to Australia, Honduras to Afghanistan, and on islands from Okinawa in
the Pacific Ocean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its weapons
makers are the most advanced on Earth and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/world/middleeast/us-foreign-arms-sales-reach-66-3-billion-in-2011.html">dominate</a>
the global arms market. Its nuclear weaponry in silos, on bombers, and
on its fleet of submarines would be capable of destroying several
planets the size of Earth. Its system of spy satellites is unsurpassed
and unchallenged. Its intelligence services can <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/">listen in</a> on the phone calls or read the emails of almost anyone in the world from <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/02">top foreign leaders</a> to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/documents-reveal-nsas-extensive-involvement-in-targeted-killing-program/2013/10/16/29775278-3674-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html">obscure insurgents</a>. The CIA and its expanding paramilitary forces are capable of <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175650/greg_grandin_the_latin_american_exception">kidnapping</a> people of interest just about anywhere from <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/14/usa.germany">rural Macedonia</a> to the streets of <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/7789/engelhardt_the_cia%27s_la_dolce_vita">Rome</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/06/libya-kidnapping-citizen-us-forces-raid-somalia">Tripoli</a>. For its many prisoners, it has set up (and dismantled) <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer">secret jails</a> across the planet and on its <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/10/07/230096048/heres-why-the-navy-is-holding-a-terror-suspect-at-sea">naval vessels</a>. It spends more on its military than the next most powerful 13 states <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/">combined</a>. Add in the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175545/tomgram%3A_hellman_and_kramer,_how_much_does_washington_spend_on_%22defense%22/">spending</a> for its full national security state and it towers over any conceivable group of other nations.<br />
In terms of advanced and unchallenged military power, there has been
nothing like the U.S. armed forces since the Mongols swept across
Eurasia. No wonder American presidents now regularly <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175337/william_astore_we%27re_number_1">use</a>
phrases like “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” to
describe it. By the logic of the situation, the planet should be a
pushover for it. Lesser nations with far lesser forces have, in the
past, controlled vast territories. And despite much discussion of
American decline and the waning of its power in a “multi-polar” world,
its ability to pulverize and destroy, kill and maim, blow up and kick
down has only grown in this new century.<br />
No other nation's military comes within a country mile of it. None has more than a handful of foreign bases. None <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_by_country">has</a> more than two aircraft carrier battle groups. No potential enemy has such a fleet of robotic planes. None has more than <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175426/nick_turse_a_secret_war">60,000</a>
special operations forces. Country by country, it’s a hands-down
no-contest. The Russian (once “Red”) army is a shadow of its former
self. The Europeans have not rearmed significantly. Japan’s
“self-defense” forces are powerful and slowly growing, but under the
U.S. nuclear “umbrella.” Although China, regularly identified as the
next rising imperial state, is involved in a much-ballyhooed military
build-up, with its one aircraft carrier (a retread from the days of the
Soviet Union), it still remains only a regional power.<br />
Despite this stunning global power equation, for more than a decade
we have been given a lesson in what a military, no matter how
overwhelming, can and (mostly) can’t do in the twenty-first century, in
what a military, no matter how staggeringly advanced, does and (mostly)
does not translate into on the current version of planet Earth.<br />
<strong>A Destabilization Machine</strong><br />
Let’s start with what the U.S. can do. On this, the recent record is
clear: it can destroy and destabilize. In fact, wherever U.S. military
power has been applied in recent years, if there has been any lasting
effect at all, it has been to destabilize whole regions.<br />
Back in 2004, almost a year and a half after American troops had
rolled into a Baghdad looted and in flames, Amr Mussa, the head of the
Arab League, <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0914-01.htm">commented</a>
ominously, “The gates of hell are open in Iraq.” Although for the Bush
administration, the situation in that country was already devolving, to
the extent that anyone paid attention to Mussa’s description, it seemed
over the top, even outrageous, as applied to American-occupied Iraq.
Today, with the latest scientific estimate of invasion- and war-caused
Iraqi deaths at a staggering <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/16/this-chart-shows-that-the-iraq-war-was-worse-than-we-think/">461,000</a>, thousands more a year still <a href="http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/09/27/the-surge-didnt-work-or-how-can-we-continue-to-ignore-iraq/">dying</a> there, and with Syria in flames, it seems something of an understatement.<br />
It’s now clear that George W. Bush and his top officials, <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101850/engelhardt_bush%27s_faith">fervent fundamentalists</a>
when it came to the power of U.S. military to alter, control, and
dominate the Greater Middle East (and possibly the planet), did launch
the radical transformation of the region. Their invasion of Iraq
punched a hole through the heart of the Middle East, sparking a
Sunni-Shiite civil war that has now spread catastrophically to Syria,
taking more than <a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/10/01/syria-crisis-toll-idINDEE99009A20131001">100,000</a> lives there. They helped turn the region into a <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174892/michael_schwartz_the_iraqi_brain_drain">churning sea</a> of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/16/world/middleeast/syrian-refugee-crisis-photos.html">refugees</a>,
gave life and meaning to a previously nonexistent al-Qaeda in Iraq (and
now a Syrian version of the same), and left the country drifting in a <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/updates/2013/10/18/more-bombs-for-baghdad-39-killed-63-wounded/">sea</a> of roadside bombs and suicide bombers, and threatened, like other countries in the region, with the possibility of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/29/sunday-review/how-5-countries-could-become-14.html">splitting apart</a>.<br />
And that’s just a thumbnail sketch. It doesn’t matter whether you’re
talking about destabilization in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have
been on the ground for almost 12 years and counting; Pakistan, where a
CIA-run drone air campaign in its tribal borderlands has gone on for
years as the country grew ever shakier and more violent; Yemen (ditto),
as an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula grew ever
stronger; or Somalia, where Washington repeatedly backed proxy armies it
had trained and financed, and <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-07-ethiopia_x.htm">supported</a>
outside incursions as an already destabilized country came apart at the
seams and the influence of al-Shabab, an increasingly radical and
violent insurgent Islamic group, began to seep across regional borders.
The results have always been the same: destabilization.<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20"><img align="left" alt="" hspace="6" src="http://www.tomdispatch.com/images/managed/revisedvictory.jpg" vspace="6" /></a>Consider
Libya where, no longer enamored with boots-on-the-ground interventions,
President Obama sent in the Air Force and the drones in 2011 in a
bloodless intervention (unless, of course, you <em>were</em> on the
ground) that helped topple Muammar Qaddafi, the local autocrat and his
secret-police-and-prisons regime, and launched a vigorous young
democracy... oh, wait a moment, not quite. In fact, the result, which,
unbelievably enough, came as a surprise to Washington, was an
increasingly damaged country with a desperately weak central government,
a territory controlled by a range of militias -- some Islamic extremist
in nature -- an insurgency and war across the border in neighboring
Mali (thanks to an influx of weaponry looted from Qaddafi’s vast
arsenals), a dead American ambassador, a country almost incapable of
exporting its oil, and so on.<br />
Libya was, in fact, so thoroughly destabilized, so lacking in central authority that Washington recently felt free to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/world/africa/Al-Qaeda-Suspect-Wanted-in-US-Said-to-Be-Taken-in-Libya.html">dispatch</a>
U.S. Special Operations forces onto the streets of its capital in broad
daylight in an operation to snatch up a long-sought terrorist suspect,
an act which was as “successful” as the toppling of the Qaddafi regime
and, in a similar manner, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/opinion/talk-about-political-dysfunction.html">further destabilized</a> a government that Washington still theoretically backed. (Almost immediately afterward, the prime minister <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/libyan-prime-minister-ali-zeidan-freed-kidnap">found himself</a> briefly kidnapped by a militia unit as part of what might have been a coup attempt.)<br />
<strong>Wonders of the Modern World </strong><br />
If the overwhelming military power at the command of Washington can
destabilize whole regions of the planet, what, then, can’t such military
power do? On this, the record is no less clear and just as decisive.
As every significant U.S. military action of this new century has
indicated, the application of military force, no matter in what form,
has proven incapable of achieving even Washington’s most minimal goals
of the moment.<br />
Consider this one of the wonders of the modern world: pile up the
military technology, pour money into your armed forces, outpace the rest
of the world, and none of it adds up to a pile of beans when it comes
to making that world act as you wish. Yes, in Iraq, to take an example,
Saddam Hussein’s regime was quickly “decapitated,” thanks to an
overwhelming display of power and muscle by the invading Americans. His
state bureaucracy was dismantled, his army dismissed, an occupying
authority established backed by foreign troops, soon ensconced on huge
multibillion-dollar military bases meant to be <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/engelhardt_the_great_american_disconnect">garrisoned</a> for generations, and a suitably “friendly” local government installed.<br />
And that’s where the Bush administration’s dreams ended in the rubble
created by a set of poorly armed minority insurgencies, terrorism, and a
brutal ethnic/religious civil war. In the end, almost nine years after
the invasion and despite the fact that the Obama administration and the
Pentagon were <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-09-07/world/35273329_1_troops-iraqis-coalition-government">eager</a>
to keep U.S. troops stationed there in some capacity, a relatively weak
central government refused, and they departed, the last representatives
of the greatest power on the planet <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/middleeast/last-convoy-of-american-troops-leaves-iraq.html">slipping away</a> in the dead of night. Left behind among the ruins of historic ziggurats were the “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/camp-victory-the-us-military-headquarters-in-iraq-getting-ready-to-close/2011/09/01/gIQA4tb5NK_print.html">ghost towns</a>” and stripped or <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/06/AR2009120602689_2.html?sid=ST2009120602379">looted</a> U.S. bases that were to be our monuments in Iraq.<br />
Today, under even more extraordinary circumstances, a similar process
seems to be playing itself out in Afghanistan -- another spectacle of
our moment that should amaze us. After almost 12 years there, finding
itself incapable of suppressing a minority insurgency, Washington is
slowly withdrawing its combat troops, but wants to leave behind on the
giant bases we’ve built perhaps 10,000 “trainers” for the Afghan
military and some Special Operations forces to continue the hunt for
al-Qaeda and other terror types.<br />
For the planet’s sole superpower, this, of all things, should be a
slam dunk. At least the Iraqi government had a certain strength of its
own (and the country’s oil wealth to back it up). If there is a
government on Earth that qualifies for the term “puppet,” it should be
the Afghan one of President Hamid Karzai. After all, at least 80% (and
possibly <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2012/0708/Another-16-billion-in-aid-but-Afghan-businessmen-say-help-us">90%</a>) of that government’s expenses are covered by the U.S. and its allies, and its security forces are considered <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-afghanistan-army-struggles-to-wage-war-with-damaged-equipment-poor-logistics/2013/10/17/96118b40-34e6-11e3-89db-8002ba99b894_story.html?hpid=z4">incapable</a>
of carrying on the fight against the Taliban and other insurgent
outfits without U.S. support and aid. If Washington were to withdraw
totally (including its financial support), it’s hard to imagine that any
successor to the Karzai government would last long.<br />
How, then, to explain the fact that Karzai has refused to sign a
future bilateral security pact long in the process of being hammered
out? Instead, he recently <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/08/hamid-karzai-outburst-nato-afghanistan">denounced</a>
U.S. actions in Afghanistan, as he had repeatedly done in the past,
claimed that he simply would not ink the agreement, and began bargaining
with U.S. officials as if he were the leader of the planet’s other
superpower.<br />
A <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-10-10/world/42902092_1_aimal-faizi-u-s-forces-afghan-taliban">frustrated Washington</a>
had to dispatch Secretary of State John Kerry on a sudden mission to
Kabul for some top-level face-to-face negotiations. The result, a
reported <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2013/10/12/partial-afghan-security-deal-reached-kerry-says/KUzf2YWxHP1epEngyf1dFL/story.html">24-hour marathon</a>
of talks and meetings, was hailed as a success: problem(s) solved.
Oops, all but one. As it turned out, it was the very same one on which
the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq stumbled -- Washington’s <a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-01-161013.html">demand</a> for legal immunity from local law for its troops. In the end, Kerry flew out <a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2013/10/13/kerry-leaves-afghanistan-without-troop-deal/">without an assured agreement</a>.<br />
<strong>Making Sense of War in the Twenty-First Century</strong><br />
Whether the U.S. military does or doesn’t last a few more years in
Afghanistan, the blunt fact is this: the president of one of the poorest
and weakest countries on the planet, himself relatively powerless, is
essentially dictating terms to Washington -- and who’s to say that, in
the end, as in Iraq, U.S. troops won’t be forced to leave there as well?<br />
Once again, military strength has not carried the day. Yet military
power, advanced weaponry, force, and destruction as tools of policy, as
ways to create a world in your own image or to your own taste, have
worked plenty well in the past. Ask those Mongols, or the European
imperial powers from Spain in the sixteenth century to Britain in the
nineteenth century, which took their empires by force and successfully
maintained them over long periods.<br />
What planet are we now on? Why is it that military power, the
mightiest imaginable, can’t overcome, pacify, or simply destroy weak
powers, less than impressive insurgency movements, or the ragged groups
of (often tribal) peoples we label as “terrorists”? Why is such military
power no longer transformative or even reasonably effective? Is it, to
reach for an analogy, like antibiotics? If used for too long in too
many situations, does a kind of immunity build up against it?<br />
Let’s be clear here: such a military remains a powerful potential
instrument of destruction, death, and destabilization. For all we know
-- it’s not something we’ve seen anything of in these years -- it might
also be a powerful instrument for genuine defense. But if recent
history is any guide, what it clearly cannot be in the twenty-first
century is a policymaking instrument, a means of altering the world to
fit a scheme developed in Washington. The planet itself and people just
about anywhere on it seem increasingly resistant in ways that take the
military off the table as an effective superpower instrument of state.<br />
Washington’s military plans and tactics since 9/11 have been a
spectacular train wreck. When you look back, counterinsurgency
doctrine, resuscitated from the ashes of America’s defeat in Vietnam, is
once again on the scrap heap of history. (Who today even remembers its
key organizing phrase -- “clear, hold, and build” -- which now looks
like the punch line for some malign joke?) “Surges,” once hailed as
brilliant military strategy, have already <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/16/this-chart-shows-that-the-iraq-war-was-worse-than-we-think/">disappeared</a>
into the mists. “Nation-building,” once a term of tradecraft in
Washington, is in the doghouse. “Boots on the ground,” of which the
U.S. had enormous numbers and still has <a href="http://www.armytimes.com/article/20131018/NEWS05/310180024/Hundreds-U-S-troops-will-deploy-Romania-next-year">51,000</a>
in Afghanistan, are now a no-no. The American public is, everyone
universally agrees, “exhausted” with war. Major American armies
arriving to fight anywhere on the Eurasian continent in the foreseeable
future? Don’t count on it.<br />
But lessons learned from the collapse of war policy? Don’t count on
that, either. It’s clear enough that Washington still can’t fully
absorb what’s happened. Its faith in war remains remarkably unbroken in
a century in which military power has become the American political
equivalent of a state religion. Our leaders are still high on the
counterterrorism wars of the future, even as they drown in their
military efforts of the present. Their urge is still to rejigger and
reimagine what a deliverable military solution would be.<br />
Now the message is: skip those boots en masse -- in fact, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-by-80000-in-5-years.html">cut down</a>
on their numbers in the age of the sequester -- and go for the
counterterrorism package. No more spilling of (American) blood. Get
the “bad guys,” one or a few at a time, using the president’s <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175547/andrew_bacevich_golden_age">private army</a>, the Special Operations forces, or his <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175551/engelhardt_the_president_as_assassin">private air force</a>,
the CIA’s drones. Build new barebones micro-bases globally. Move those
aircraft carrier battle groups off the coast of whatever country you
want to intimidate.<br />
It’s clear we’re entering a new period in terms of American war
making. Call it the era of tiny wars, or micro-conflicts, especially in
the <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/terror-hidden-source/">tribal backlands</a> of the planet.<br />
So something is indeed changing in response to military failure, but
what’s not changing is Washington's preference for war as the option of
choice, often of first resort. What’s not changing is the thought that,
if you can just get your strategy and tactics readjusted correctly,
force will work. (Recently, Washington was only saved from plunging
into another predictable military disaster in Syria by an offhand
comment of Secretary of State John Kerry and the timely intervention of
Russian President Vladimir Putin.)<br />
What our leaders don’t get is the most basic, practical fact of our
moment: war simply doesn’t work, not big, not micro -- not for
Washington. A superpower at war in the distant reaches of this planet
is no longer a superpower ascendant but one with problems.<br />
The U.S. military may be a destabilization machine. It may be a <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/nick_turse_blowback_central">blowback machine</a>. What it’s not is a policymaking or enforcement machine.<br />
<em>Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the </em><a href="http://www.americanempireproject.com/"><em>American Empire Project</em></a><em> and author of </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">The United States of Fear</a><em> as well as a history of the Cold War</em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">, The End of Victory Culture</a> <em>(now also in a </em><em>Kindle edition</em><em>), runs the Nation Institute's </em><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/"><em>TomDispatch.com</em></a><em>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086EF89K/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tomdispatch-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0086EF89K">Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050</a>.<br />
[<strong>Note:</strong> A deep bow of thanks to Nick Turse for his continuing help and, above all, inspiration.]<br />
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch">Facebook</a> or <a href="http://tomdispatch.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Changing-Face-Empire-Cyberwarfare/dp/1608463109/"><em>The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare</em></a>.<br />
Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"
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