Global Research

To prevent the emergence of an economically prosperous Eurasian land space after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington and its NATO allies fostered separatism across the former parts of the Soviet dominated Eurasia. They did so by wooing countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and others to join NATO, feeding tension between those states and Russia.

They seduced oil rich central Asian countries, such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan by bringing in major US and British oil companies and offering a share in the oil riches that could flow if they were to distance themselves from their former Soviet masters and join the Anglo American oil economy. Tension between Moscow and its former satellites was central to US strategy after 1990.

US intelligence agencies and Washington’s NATO allies also used narcotics trafficking to weaken the societies of Eurasia much as the CIA had done during the Vietnam War. US intelligence agencies protected and fostered the cultivation of opium and Afghanistan to record levels after the US occupation in 2001. That opium found its way under the protection of US military aircraft into Russia, Iran, and other Central Asian countries creating major social unrest.

This was a vital part of Washington’s divide and rule strategy to prevent the rise of a coherent and prosperous Asia.

Their method was to create a militant Jihadist terror climate across the Muslim world to be used in Iraq after the US military occupation in 2004. It was introduced by then defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld ordered the leading American war experts into Iraq to work with General Petraeus to foster internal civil war between different religions. It was Sunni against Shiite and Shiite against Sunni and Kurds in order to entrench a firm US military control over Iraq.

In mattered not which side the CIA and Pentagon backed as long as the result was terror and more chaos. The aim was to foster permanent instability that would justify permanent US military presence, a presence that could stir the hornet’s nest of hatred at any time.

In May 2011 several years after leaving Washington Rumsfeld delivered a speech on the War on Terrorism to an influential organization of right wing Christian Fundamentalists called the

Council of National Policy. He said,

“We are going to have to be willing to engage in the battle of ideas, we are going to have to screw up our courage and develop better skills at identifying our enemy and our enemies are radical Islamists, let there be no doubt.”

In October 2007, Wesley Clark, retired US General and former military head of NATO gave a talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. It was some four years after George W. Bush and the cabal of neoconservative war hawks around Paul Wolfowitz had made the decision to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Clark revealed to his audience that the US occupation of Iraq was no spontaneous reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001. He told his listeners that there had been a “policy coup” by the neo conservative hawks together with vice president Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In October 2001, a decade before the misnamed Arab Spring, Clark said that he had been shown a classified Pentagon memo from the office of the defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years, we’re going to start with a Iraq and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran,” Clark explained.

This was the secret Pentagon plan in October 2001. The ensuing 14 years of events in those countries assumed a new dimension when viewed in that light.

Clark described the aim of the Pentagon’s neoconservatives’ plot.

“They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down and make it under our control.” 

The role of the US military, Clark said, was to start conflicts, not prevent them. It went contrary to every precept of international law, the UN Charter, and contrary to what most Americans believe that their Constitution, that the American rule of law, and that their government were about.

What General Wesley Clark described as a coup was indeed the hijacking of the massive American war machinery, and, in fact, the entire foreign policy machinery by a private cabal of very powerful oligarch interests, above all the combined power of the military industrial complex, a handful of Washington neoconservative think tanks and their close cousins in the major US and British oil companies.

In the weeks after President George W. Bush proclaimed his war on terror, a number of backers of the new war, including former CIA Director James Woolsey and other neocon hawks spoke of a global war lasting perhaps 30 years. For them, it was clearly a new global war and like the European Thirty Years War from 1618 through to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it was a war of religions, of each against the other. The comparison of Washington’s War on Terror, to the 17th century European great war of religion was more than fitting.

Increasingly across Christian Europe during the 1500s, some three centuries after the last blood from the Holy Crusades had been spilled, the Roman Catholic Church faced an existential crisis. The power of the Pope was being challenged fundamentally by various reformers led by a rebel German Catholic priest, Martin Luther, and by French theologian, Jean Calvin and others. The Catholic Church Council of Trent, lasting eighteen years to 1563, had defeated the notion that general councils of the Roman Church collectively were God’s representative on earth rather than the Pope. It established the Pope as an absolute ruler. That was to portend ominous developments.

The corruption permeating the highest levels of the Vatican and the Church had become notorious, with open papal polygamy to homosexuality to financial corruption. The corruption and decadence spread from such Popes as Innocent VI and Pope Leo X, the Medici pope who sold indulgences to wealthy Catholics to build Saint Peter’s Basilica, in Rome, to Pope Clement VII. It was creating severe strains and widespread abandonment of the Church among the believers far from Rome.

The Protestant Reformation threatened Papal power from within and without as never before. Luther had committed heresy in the eyes of the Vatican by making knowledge accessible to ordinary citizens. He did that through translating the Bible into German in 1534 from the Hebrew and ancient Greek version done earlier by Erasmus of Rotterdam. That simple act was a threat so great, the very power of the Vatican was threatened as never before.

Luther had made the contents of the Bible directly accessible to ordinary Germans. It was no longer the elite domain of the educated priest of the Roman Catholic Church to interpret. It in fact, Luther, in doing so, created the German language as a written language.

Five years later in 1539, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the request of King Henry VIII, published the “Great Bible” in English, the first English Bible authorized for public use and distributed to every church where it was chained to the pulpit, and a reader was even provided so that the illiterate could hear the word of God in plain English. The Roman Catholic Church responded with no soft persuasion attempts. They threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. For the first time millions of professing Christians could find out the truth that the Roman Catholic official Latin Vulgate Bible bore little relation to the earlier Greek and Hebrew text that were now in German.

John Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press some seven decades earlier made it possible for the Bible translations to spread knowledge as never before. The Roman Church’s monopoly on knowledge was under deadly attack from all sides. Having God‘s word available to the public in the language of the common man meant disaster for the church. No longer could they control access to the scriptures to specially educated priests taught in Latin.

As people began to read the Bible in their own tongue, the church’s income and power began to crumble. Their lucrative selling of indulgences, the forgiveness of sins or selling the release of loved ones from a church manufactured “Purgatory” was under severe attack. People began all across the Christian world to challenge the Roman Church’s authority as the Church was exposed as being led by frauds and thieves.

To reverse the dangerous tide, in the 1540s, Pope Paul III gave official Vatican recognition to a powerful new military order within the Church: the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, founded by two Spanish noblemen, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, namesake of Pope Francis today.

The Jesuits, much like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fethullah Gulen’s Cemaat, concentrated their main effort on shaping the education of Europe’s future nobility, and monarchs in the strict obedience of the Society and a fanatical militancy against Protestant reformers, as well as against heretics within the Church. Their pledge to the Pope of Rome was to roll back the protestant threat and put knowledge back where it belonged, in the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church and its select priests. They would lead a Counter Reformation. Knowledge, reason, and Christian love were to be replaced by fear, darkness, and destruction as the Jesuit influence grew across Europe, especially the German lands and principalities.

By 1618, the Jesuit Order was the crucial string-puller of the Jesuit educated Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, 1619-1637 through his Jesuit confessor advisor, Father Martin Becan, and later his Father confessor Jesuit, Father Willhelm Lamorimaini. As Emperor Ferdinand unleashed one of the most destructive and bloody wars in history, later known as the Thirty Years’ War, there now began a regular system of Protestant persecution, more mean cruel and horrible bloody things happened, indeed that can well be conceived, and according to the evidence furnished by the Jesuits themselves, the originator of all this was their distinguished brother William Lamormaini.

Indicating how deep the scars of war and killings in the name of religion went, one of the greatest military atrocities during the Thirty Years’ War was committed by Roman Catholic Croats, much in the manner of the Croatian fascist Ustasi three hundred years later. Croat soldiers of the Habsburg Catholic forces were employed with drawn swords, in hunting down people, forcing them to the Catholic Mass with dogs and whips and throwing the refractory ones into cages in which they could neither sit, lie down, nor even stand while they were compelled to witness at the same time, the most horrible violence, forcible rape applied to their poor wives and daughters, until the husbands and fathers swore upon their knees to renounce heresy.

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Left to right: The Defenestrations of Prague (23 May 1618); The death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen (16 November 1632); Dutch warships prior to the Battle of the Downs(21 October 1639); The Battle of Rocroi (19 May 1643) (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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The three decades of war were prosecuted by the Catholic Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand, II with a cruelty and ferocious fanaticism that can only be described as Satanic in nature.

Catholic Bishops across the German states initiated witch trials and tortured and burned at the stake hundreds of Protestants accused of witchcraft. The population in the German states was reduced by between 25% and 40%. Wittenberg lost three-quarters of the population during the war. In Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half. Overall, the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half. The population of Bohemia and Moravia fell by a third due to war, disease, famine, and the expulsion of Protestants. Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers.

The Jesuits used Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in opposing the Protestant Union, a process that resulted in the deaths of what was estimated as over ten million people.

One historian states,

“It has been estimated that this benign Catholic sovereign went into the world of spirits with the blood of ten millions of people on his soul. In the whole history of the German race, no other sovereign ever contributed so largely to the woes of the people.”

That war against religion ultimately drew in Muscovy, Sweden, Denmark, England, Holland, and France on the one side against the Catholic League and the Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburg alliance that also included Spain and the princes of Poland and Lithuania. The soil of what became Germany was the battlefield where most of the blood was shed over a span of three decades, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the war and divided Europe into religious enclaves that remained down to the 21st century.

The German poet and historian Frederick Schiller in his history of the war described it as:

“a desolating war of thirty years, which from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of Sheidt, and from the banks of the Po to the coast of the Baltic, devastated whole countries, destroying harvests, and reduced towns and villages to ashes, which opened, a grave for many thousand combatants and for half a century, smothered the glimmering sparks of civilization in Germany, and threw back the improving manners of the country into their pristine barbarity and wildness.”

It was one of the bloodiest wars in history, a nominal war of Christian against Christian. One historian described its consequences for generations of Europeans afterward:

“The deep misery which followed the war of religion, the powerless politics, the intellectual decadence, the moral corruption, a frightful decrease in the population and the impoverishment of the whole of Germany, these were the results of the Jesuit Orders’ actions.”

At the end of the religious war, its toil on civilization was staggering, so horrible that it had not only destroyed the very social and economic fabric of Europe, but it severely damaged, the spiritual and intellectual framework as well by destroying faith in a divine God and in a Renaissance man, opening the door to a new nihilism, a belief in nothing.

The United States’ “War on Terror,” begun in September 2001, was to become tragically similar, a covert and often overt war on religion. Little more than a decade into the new war of religion against religion, the ancient cradle of civilization, Iraq, had been destroyed in the name of “democracy,” which was in effect the new “Pope.” .

The War in Afghanistan began only days after September 11. The nominal excuse used by the Bush crime family administration was that the fundamentalist Sunni Jihadist Taliban regime refused to extradite Osama bin Laden to the USA, without proof of his complicity in the terror attacks in the USA.

Bin Laden had been brought to Afghanistan in 1996 by Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence and mentor of Bin Laden. Washington decided to “negotiate” with saturation bombing of the Afghan landscape and the toppling of the Taliban, a regime its own CIA, along with the old

Mujahideen ally, Pakistan’s ISI and the Saudi intelligence of Prince Turki al- Faisal had brought to power.

The Bush-Cheney wars against Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 were a failure in every dimension. The staggering cost of war counted over ensuing decades in trillions of dollars were dumped onto the American taxpayer and directly to those trades surplus countries like China and Russia or Japan, who bought hundreds of billions of dollars of US government debt as the only secure haven for their massive trade dollar surplus.

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President George Bush, surrounded by leaders of the House and Senate, announces the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, 2 October 2002. (From the Public Domain)

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Then in March 2007, the American sole, superpower faced a profound and terrifying new challenge. This time it was from within.

The US financial system began a domino style collapse as the market for fraudulent real estate loans, especially so-called “sub-prime” home loans, collapsed. It had been a speculation bubble, unlike every other bubble in US history, including the 1920s Wall Street stock market bubble. Unlimited military spending for the expansion of the global domination of the USA was threatened by the financial crisis and with it, American hegemony.

By September 2008, it was clear to powerful circles in Washington and Wall Street that if drastic measures were not undertaken, the role of the USA as the sole superpower would soon end in collapse.

To shift the global calculus again in their favor, they needed drastic and bold measures. The response was a policy that was meant primarily to block an emerging Eurasian economics challenge from Russia and China.

The strategy involved inciting revolutions, later called “Arab Springs,” across the Islamic world to directly challenge the oil and energy flows of China and Russia each in different ways. It was also intended finally to open the staggering sovereign wealth of absolute Arab oil monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and beyond, to western financial domination, using the IMF as they had done so successfully in Latin America and Yugoslavia in the 1980s.

Using their “free market” mantra that had seemed to work so well, they believed they could force open the vast wealth of Arab oil monarchies by looting the sovereign funds of recalcitrant countries, using Wall Street and the city of London Financial institutions. The people who dreamed it up clearly thought they were very intelligent. They weren’t.

By 2014, the only thing that was clear from the US effort to weaponize Islam through the Arab Spring and their later creation of Isis, was the unintended consequences of that effort. The US backed regime of Muslim Brotherhood President Moham Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was ousted in a military coup backed and financed by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf monarchies. Egypt, a traditional military partner of Washington, turned to Russia and Putin instead, with Saudi mediation, to purchase needed arms.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates united to blacklist neighboring Qatar for the latter’s continuing support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and elsewhere. Saudi Arabia itself was undergoing a royal succession as King Abdullah died, and the new King apparently felt he needed to prove himself by bombing Yemen.

Washington was becoming a laughing stock across the Islamic world, a symbol of imperial decline, as President Obama’s policies swerved from one option to another with no clear direction. Obama himself had to be saved from a war he did not want over Syria in 2013 by Vladimir Putin.

In terms of security, Israel found itself surrounded by unstable regimes and hostile Jihadists on every side. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed an unlikely and unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia against Syria, Iran, and most remarkably against her traditional ally the United States.

The neo-conservative war faction in Washington government think tanks and the CIA, the architects of weaponsing Islam in new Holy Wars, then created a violent coup d’etat in Ukraine, beginning with yet another Color Revolution protest in Kiev’s Maidan Square in November 2013. This time Muslims played no role. Ukraine was part of the American oligarchs larger war of privatizing assets against any possible challenge to US sole hegemony.

China, Russia, Iran, and other Eurasian states along with Brazil in the BRICS group and other states in South America were moving clearly away from the destructive efforts of the dollar and from US dictates. The American Century proclaimed by Henry Luce so grandiosely in 1941 was rotting at the very foundation, a mere 73 years into that century.

The Washington criminal coup in Ukraine threatened to restart a new Cold War and possibly a hot war as Russia acted to defend its strategic survival. The foreign policy of the sole superpower, the United States, was in a disastrous shambles in the early months of 2014. European powers, struggling with their own financial and economic crisis were unable to implement constructive peaceful alternatives.

The deadly unintended consequences of not very intelligent people in Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Damascus, and Brussels, and beyond, had brought the world to the brink of global conflagration by the spring of 2015. It was because of their inability to see the deeper significance of relationships that they had destroyed and the consequences of that destruction by their schemes to use their political Islam as a weapon.

The West, especially the CIA and those in the USA military industrial and political complex believed they could weaponize Islam as their killing machine without any unintended consequences. For their part, Jihadists of all currents believed that in the name of Allah, their hate and killing of any, and all “infidels” would give them innocence in an afterlife. Truly, whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

Finally today, many sane voices around the world are beginning to ask whether there is another better way of creating true democracy, constructive diplomacy, development of common and beneficial, economic initiatives to lift mankind out of poverty and hunger, respecting national borders, peacefully negotiating changes when necessary, respecting fellow human beings, regardless their faith, building bridges of cooperation between nations and between peoples.

We are beginning to grasp that there might possibly be a more intelligent and more human alternative to the current agenda of those evil arrogant US oligarchs, one where people could feel good again.

I am good and I want to be good to me to my family and my friends and to others and to my country. After all, in the end, we are everyone and everywhere human beings.