AlterNet By Nicolas J.S. Davies: The Tragic History of U.S. Military Supremacy.

The idea of U.S. "national security" seems inextricably entangled with the notion of "military supremacy." Over the past 15 years, this has served to rationalize the most expensive unilateral military build-up in history. But there is no evidence that having the most expensive and destructive military forces makes Americans safer than people in other countries, nor that restoring a more balanced military posture would leave us vulnerable to dangers we are currently protected from aggression. Many countries with smaller military forces do a better job of protecting their people by avoiding the hostility that is generated by U.S. imperialism, aggression and other war crimes. Now, successful diplomacy over Syria's chemical weapons has demonstrated that diplomacy within the framework of international law can be a more effective way of dealing with problems than the illegal threat or use of military force. Our government claims that its threat or use of military force. Our government claims that its use of force led to the success of diplomacy in Syria, but that's not really what happened. It was only when the sleeping giant of American democracy awoke from its long slumber and pried the cruise missiles from our leaders' trigger fingers that they grudgingly accepted "diplomacy as a last resort." For once in a very long while, our political system worked the way it's supposed to: the public made its views clear to our representatives in Congress, and they listened. We saved our leaders from the consequences of their own criminality, and their efforts to sell a propaganda narrative that turns on its head is a sad reflection on their disdain for democracy and the rule of law. For most of our history, Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the 20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that probably killed a million Filipinos, Americans never dreamt of global military supremacy. At the turn of the 20th century, even as the U.S. waged a genocidal war that probably killed a million Filipinos, American diplomats played key roles in the Hague Peace Conferences and the establishment of international courts, eager to adapt American concepts of democracy and justice to the international arena to develop alternatives to war and militarism. In response yo the horrors of the First World War, an international social movement demanded the abolition of war. In 1828, the U.S. government responded by negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, in which all major powers renounced "war as an instrument of national policy." The treaty failed to prevent the Second World War, but it provided the legal basis for the convictions against genocide,, torture and other war crimes, under which senior U.S. officials must eventually face justice. The allied defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War was not the result of American military supremacy, but of an alliance across ideological lines with imperial Britain and the communist Soviet Union, based on mutual trust, vigorous diplomacy and the recognition of a common existential threat. Most Americans believed at the time that the war would lead to a renewed international commitment to peace and disarmament, not to an American bid for military supremacy. American, British and Soviet leaders agreed that their common interests required what Roosevelt called "a permanent structure of peace" after the war.

By Isreal Shamir: The War on Syria: The September 2013 Military Stand-off between Five Destroyers

and the Russian Flotilla in the Eastern Mediterranian.The Cape of Good Hope Presentation at the Rhodes Forum, October 5, 2013. First, the good news. American hegemony is over. The bully has been subdued. we cleared the Cape of Good Hope, symbolically speaking, in September 2013. With the Syrian crisis, the world has passed a key forking of modern history. It was touch and go, just as risky as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The chances for total war were high, as the steely wills of America and Eurasia had crossed in the Eastern Mediterranean. It will take some time until the realization of what we've gone through seeps in: it is normal for events of such magnitude. The turmoil in the US, from the mad car chase in the DC to the shutdown of federal government and possible debt default are the direct consequences of this event. Remember the Berlin Wall? When it went down, I was in Moscow, writing for Haaretz. I went to a press-conference with Politburo members in the President Hotel, and asked them whether they concurred that the end of the USSR and world socialist system was neigh. I was laughed at, it was an embarrassing occasion. Oh no, they said. Socialism will blossom, as the result of the Wall's fall. The USSR went down two years later. Now our memory has compacted those years into a brief sequence, but in reality it took some time. The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks toward Damascus and facing them, the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Mosva and supported by Chinese warships. Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to reach their destination. It as claimed by a Lebanese newspaper quoting diplomatic sources that the missiles were launched from a NATO air base in Spain and they were shot down by the Russian ship-based sea-to-air defence system. Another explanation proposed by the Asia Times says the Russians employed their cheap and powerful GPS jammers to render the expensive Tomahawks helpless, by disorienting them and causing them to fail. Yet another version attributed the launch to the Israelis, whether they were trying to jump-start the shoot-out or just observed the clouds, as they claim. Whatever the reason, after this strange incident, the pending shoot-out did not commence, as President Obama stood down and holstered his guns. This was preceded by an unexpected vote in the British Parliament. This venerable body declined the honour of joining the attack proposed by the US. This was the first time in two hundred years that the British parliament voted down a sensible proposition to start a war, usually the Brits can't resist the temptation. After that, President Obama decided to pass the hot potato to the Congress. He was unwilling to unleash Armageddon on his own. Thus the name of action was lost. Congress did not want to go to war with unpredictable consequences. Obama tried to browbeat Putin at the 20G meeting in St Petersburg, and failed. The Russian proposal to remove Syrian chemical weaponry allowed President Obama to save face. This misadventure put paid to American hegemony.

Noam Chomsky: The Week the World Stood Still: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World

The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended though unknown to the public, only officially. The image of the world standing still is the turn of phrase of Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy and a close circle of advisers debated how to respond to the crisis. Those meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate compared to other participants, who were unaware that they were speaking to history. Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important record, finally declassified in the late 1990s. I will keep to that here. "Never before or since, he concludes, "has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations," culminating in "the week the world stood still." There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent, a war that might "destroy the Northern Hemisphere," President Dwight Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy's own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the "secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect" in Washington, as described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his well-researched bestseller on the crisis, though he doesn't explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war. Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, "a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile buildup," who saw no way out except "war and complete destruction" as the clock moved to "one minute to midnight," the title of his book. Kennedy's close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as "the most dangerous moment in human history." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he "would live to see another Saturday night," and later recognized that "we lucked out" barely. "The Most Dangerous Moment" A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment. There are several candidates "for the most dangerous moment." One is October 27th, when U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine around Cuba were dropping depth charges on Soviet submarines. According to Soviet accounts, reported by the National Security Archive, submarine commanders were "rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximately the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945." In one case, a reported decision to assemble a nuclear torpedo for battle readiness was aborted at the last minute by Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov, who may have saved the world from nuclear disaster. There is little doubt what the U.S. reaction would have been had the torpedo been fired, or how the Russians would have responded as their country was going up in smoke. Kennedy had already declared the highest nuclear alert short of launch (DEFCON 2) which authorized "NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb, according to the well-informed Harvard University strategic analyst Graham Allison,writing in the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs.

By Pepe Escobar: America Helping the Medieval Saudi KIngdom Step Up Its Sunni Empire.

October 18, 2013  |  

Life is good if you're a member of the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, officially known as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). You can crush the Arab Spring at will. You can hire goons all across dar-al-Islam to advance a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite divide. You can be deeply implicated in the destruction of Syria. You can treat a significant part of your own population as third-class citizens.

Not only you get away with it; you get rewarded with expensive toys. And in one particular case - Saudi Arabia - even with a two-year seat at the UN Security Council.

Not to mention that the House of Saud expertly gets away with manipulating Islam as the pillar of its "legitimacy". The House of Saud controls the Hajj - which took place this week; an enormous logistical operation that "legitimizes" its role as leader of Sunni Islam, and automatically, the whole Islamic world. Well-informed Muslims though are very much aware of the fallacy - as much as they're aware of how the House of Saud is fast transforming Mecca into a Vegas-style pay-per-prayer luxury resort. Who's profiting? Certainly not the pilgrims.

This week, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced it had notified congress about selling more state-of-the-art heavy metal for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That breaks down into "various munitions and associated equipment, parts, training and logistical support" to Riyadh for $6.8 billion and to Abu Dhabi for $4 billion.

Weaponizing "our" Wahhabi bastards is the sweetest deal for the industrial-military-Orwellian Panopticon complex. Sequestration? Tight budgets? Who cares? There's a never-ending contractor bonanza in the Gulf - inbuilt in the narrative of the benign superpower "benefactor" of those helpless oil and gas monarchic monopolies defending them against assorted evildoers; one day the evildoer is Iraq, the next day Iran, the next day could be their own people, so one's gotta be prepared.

Once in a while Israel exhibits the requisite raised eyebrow, but that's just for show. Israel and the GCC have a de facto alliance against the bloc regionally known as the axis of resistance - Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah. Israel would not prevent the GCC from gorging on F-15 Eagles, F-16 Desert Falcons, assorted air-launched cruise missiles, satellite-guided bombs and plenty of high-tech communication gear. Just your average, innocent "military and defense cooperation".

There are glitches in this cozy relationship, of course. Currently, the House of Saud is livid facing the possibility of a negotiated solution for the Iran nuclear dossier - immediately after the Russian-US deal on Syria's chemical weapons. Yet now the House of Saud has even managed to find a pulpit to voice its anger; Saudi Arabia has just won a two-year, rotating UN Security Council seat for the first time - taking over from Pakistan as an Asia-Pacific representative.

The House of Saud has always refrained from competing for a Security Council seat in the past. But now - facing its fabricated version of an "existential threat", which is not only Iran but also Assad in Syria - it's time to act.

So get ready to watch an angry, fearful, medievalist oil kingdom notorious for its spectacular record on human rights and women's rights, and so fond of lashings and beheadings, pontificating on the global stage about…human rights. This is what US Think Tankland describes as "seeking a more active role in key international bodies". When that applies to "our" bastards, of course; otherwise it's about "terror states" trying to subvert the international order.

A number of House of Saud princes are now engulfed in a lethal battle for the Saudi succession - as King Abdullah is about to meet his maker. Are these princes worthy of Machiavelli? Don't hold your breath.

Machiavelli taught us that individual will is as crucial as international power play in determining foreign policy decisions. The Florentine stressed how fortuna (fortune) can be capricious, and how history can be contingent. So how does a great Prince steer his state? By deploying virtu (virtue).

Oh no, this has nothing to do with the guilt-ridden Christian mish-mash, which also happens to be a crucial pillar of the "American exceptionalism" concept. It's all got to do with classical values predominant in the Ancient World - from Greece to Persia. Virtue as in knowledge, strength, courage, and cunning.

So under this gold standard, Vladimir Putin certainly qualifies as a worthy Prince. Deng Xiaoping certainly did. Hassan Rouhani in Iran may reveal himself to be of the same caliber. But what about those angry, fearful, intolerant, yet heavily weaponized Arab princes? You don't need to be a pilgrim to Mecca-as-Disneyland to find your answer.

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky: Fukushima Fraud and Corruption: Japanese Organized Crime

Involved in Recruitment of "Specialized Personnel". What prevails is a well organized camouflage. The public health disaster in Japan, the contamination of water, agricultural land and the food chain, not to mention the broader economic and social implications, have neither been fully acknowledged nor addressed in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion by the Japanese authorities. The crisis in Japan has been described as "a nuclear war without a war". In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami: This time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives." Several Global Research reports and background articles have outlined the dangers of Worldwide radiation resulting from the Fukushima disaster. This disaster is now being sustained and aggravated by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the Abe government. Fukushima and the Yakuza: There is another dimension: The coordination of the multibillion dollar Fukushima decontamination operation relies on Japan's organized crime, the Yakusa, which is actively involved in the recruitment of "specialized" personnel for dangerous tasks. "The complexity of Fukushima contracts and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza, Japan's organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets
for generations." (Reuters, October 25, 2013) The Yakuza labor practices at Fukushima are based on a corrupt system of subcontracting, which does not favor the hiring of competent specialized personnel. It creates an environment of fraud and incompetence, which in the case of Fukushima could have devastating consequences. The subcontracting with organized crime syndicates is a means for major corporations involved in the clean-up to significantly reduce their labor costs. This role of Japanese organized crime also pertains to the removal of the fuel rods from Reactor no. 4. As documented in several GR articles, this undertaking, if mishandled, by careless workers under the lax supervision of corrupt subcontractors linked to the Yakusa creates an environment which could potentially lead to a massive radioactive fallout: An operation with potentially "apocalyptic" consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now, "as early as November 8" at Fukushima's damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor's upper floor. While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event. To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a 273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely from a separate room. A recent Reuters report documents in detail the role of Japan's Yakuza and its insidious relationship to both TEPCO as well as agencies of the Japanese government including the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare:

AlterNet By Thom Hartmann: The Kochs' Brazen Buyout of Our Democracy

Is Right Up There with the Worst Oligarchs in American History. To understand the present, you have to understand the past, which brings us to the story of William A. Clark. Clark was one of the so-called Montana "Copper Kings" of the 1800's. After making millions in the booming mining industry, and trying his hand in the electric, newspaper, banking, and railroad industries, Clark set his sights on political office. Clark had always had a lifelong ambition of becoming an elected official, and of achieving the fame and power that came with it. In 1899, Clark made a serious push to become a U.S. senator from Montana. Back then, U.S. senators were chosen by their respective state legislators. So one afternoon Clark walked into the Montana State Legislature, and announced that he would be standing in the back of the room, holding envelopes filled with thousand-dollar bills. He said he'd give those envelopes to anyone who voted for him. Enough legislators voted for him.
Enough legislators voted for him. Enough legislators voted for him and took his money that Montana sent him to Washington, D.C. as their senator for the 1900 legislative session. But Clark's bribery scheme was so public and brazen that even the largely corrupt U.S. Senate was horrified. They refused to seat him after reading newspaper stories about his passing out thousand-dollar bills to get elected. And it was the notoriety of Clark's naked bribery attempt in Montana, well reported in newspapers across the country, that helped lead to the passage of the 17th Amendment, which says that U.S. senators are elected by the people instead of by state legislatures. With all this notoriety, Clark quickly became public enemy number one in the early 1900's. Speaking about Clark, Mark Twain once wrote that, "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag, he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs."While William A. Clark may have died back in 1925, his willingness to corrupt the American democracy and political process is alive and well today. Just ask the Koch Brothers. Charles and David Koch, worth a combined estimated $68 billion in net worth, are among the driving forces behind the corruption of our democracy. Between 1998 and 2008, Koch brother-controlled foundations gave more than $196 million  to organizations that favor polices that would further pad the wallets of the two brothers. In that same time period, Koch Industries, owned by the two brothers, spent $50 million on lobbying and handed out $8 million in PAC contributions. The Kochs are also behind groups like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, which both gave and continue to give major financial support for the Tea Party movement. And Freedom Partners, a Koch-affiliated organization, has doled out grants  worth over $230 million to a variety of conservative organizations, Tea Party groups, and front-groups that oppose Obamacare. This brings us to the Keystone XL pipeline. Recently, the Koch Brothers have been throwing their billions at lobbyists, front-groups, and lawmakers that support the fossil fuel industry and the construction of the Keystone KL pipeline.

By Robert Parry: A Threat to Nuke Tehran:

When the largest donor to Republican political organizations urges the U.S. military to detonate a nuclear bomb in an Iranian desert with the explicit warning that "the next one is in the middle of Tehran," you might expect that a major American political figures and large U.S. media outlets would strongly denounce such a genocidal blackmail. After all, Tehran has a population of more than eight million people with millions more living in the suburbs. So, this threat to exterminate Tehran's inhabitants from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would be comparable to someone nuking an empty space in the United States as a warning that if Americans didn't capitulate to some demand, a nuclear bomb would be dropped on New York City, the site of Adelson's ugly threat. The fact that the scattered outrage over Adelson's remarks on Oct.22 was mostly limited to the Internet and included no denunciations from prominent U.S. politicians, including leading Republicans who believed from Adelson's largesse, suggests that many Muslims and especially Iranians are right to suspect that they are right to suspect the Internet and included no denunciations from prominent U.S. politicians, including leading Republicans who have benefited from prominent U.S. politicians, including leading
Republicans who have benefited from Adelson's largesse, suggests that many Muslims and especially Iranians are right to suspect that they are the object of obscene prejudice in some American power circles. Indeed, Huffington Post published a vociferous defense of Adelson's comments by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who organized the event at Yeshiva University where Adelson spoke. Boteach, who has been hailed as the "most famous Rabbi in America," treated Adelson's nuke threat as innocent hyperbole only underscoring how aggressively the world should treat Iran. Instead of apologizing for letting Adelson go unchallenged as he mused about murdering millions of Iranians, Boteach expressed outrage over the few expressions of outrage about Adelson's plan. "I found the reaction to this statement illuminating as to the double standards that are often employed on matters relating to Israel," wrote Boteach, who then reprised the infamous false translation of the infamous false translation of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supposedly saying "that Israel must be wiped off the map."Boteach then added to the false quote the assumption that if Israel ceased to exist as a Jewish state, that would require"the murder of six million Jews who live there as precondition of such erasure." However, there is the other possibility that Israel/Palestine could become like the United States, a country that has no official religion but that respects all religions. To lay out only two extremes, that Israel must be officially a Jewish state, with non-Jews with non-Jews made second-class citizens or stateless people, as one option and the other that all the Jews made second class citizens or stateless people as one option and the other that all Jews must be murdered, invites either apartheid or genocide. Boteach also misrepresented recent comments by Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khameney about destroying Tel Aviv and Haifa.