Global Research

In the British Labour Party’s 2017 election manifesto, the pledges to abolish university tuition fees and reintroduce maintenance grants were widely seen as vote winners, but that was the extent of the party’s policy commitments toward the sector. Since the election, Labour has supported staff and students in challenging the yawning gap between highly-paid vice-chancellors and principals on the one hand, and part-time academic staff whose work is extremely insecure and poorly paid; and it has supported the industrial action that academic and administrative staff in UCU have taken in defence of their pension rights.

Important though these issues are, Labour’s policies need to be based on a much more comprehensive analysis of the problems in the sector, framed by the ways in which higher education fits in to our wider economy and society. In short, Labour needs a new strategy for higher education. In what follows, I set out key elements of such a strategy, looking in turn at:

• the overall purpose of higher education (HE);
• management control and the erosion of collegial culture;
• growing differentials in pay and job security; and
• the withering away of part-time and adult education in HE.

What is Higher Education For?

Ever since the 1963 Robbins Report, two principles have remained unchanged: making HE available to all who can benefit from it; and meeting the needs of the economy for skilled labour and knowledge. However, from the 1980s onwards these principles were pursued in the context of a renewed liberal economic philosophy, centred on individual achievement and national competitiveness. As a result, the expansion of student numbers came to be increasingly driven by the allure of a “graduate premium” in life-time earnings, while research was oriented toward improving UK competitiveness in an increasingly global economy, especially through closer links to the private and public sectors.

Labour’s policy through 1997-2010 continued in this vein. The government expanded HE participation toward 50% of the 18-24 age group, and sought to shape the patterns of teaching and research to the needs of the economy primarily through financial incentives. Since the crisis of 2008, there has been a radical acceleration in the role of money and markets, with a major shift in the funding of teaching from central government grants to student fees, and of research from public grants to commercial contracts.

Despite the undeniable successes of UK HE in conventional economic terms, the increasing role of markets has led to significant debate about the wider societal purpose of the sector. Critics have gone back to the concerns of Mill and Arnold (echoed by Robbins) – universities as bearers of public culture and core values, focused on improving the lives of all rather than the profits of the few. While such criticisms cut little ice with committed supporters of the free market model, there is now mounting evidence that they cannot ignore concerning the actual outcomes for students and society. The Economist reported recently¹ that the size of the graduate premium has been widely overstated, and that degrees are often used mainly as a way of simplifying recruitment processes to jobs for which graduate skills are not really required. The report argues further that from the point of view of society, the actual premiums accruing to individual graduates are significantly offset by the loss of earnings among displaced non-graduates.

More broadly, universities need to address the ever-deepening educational divide in our society, which many believe has been a key factor in the rise of the new populism, both in the UK and across the developed world. As the research of Diane Reay and others has shown,² HE remains a major factor in reproducing social inequalities of class, race and gender. In this view, universities should be genuinely universal, as educators of all and as repositories of knowledge for society as a whole.

Markets, Management and Metrics

We are all familiar with the central role of the privatisation of state enterprises in our economy since 1979, but equally important was the ‘new public management’ model which has transformed governance in those parts of the public sector which traditionally did not directly sell their services for money. The HE sector adopted this model in the 1990s, seeking to incentivise both teaching and research through performance measurement (initially Teaching Quality Assessment and the Research Assessment Exercise).

Already by 1997 Michael Power’s study The Audit Society showed how the ‘carrot-and-stick’ private-sector model of top-down management control had spread to the public sector, transforming the culture of an increasing range of organisations. In HE, this new model has seen a major shift in decision powers from academic staff to executive managers. While academics still take part in senior management, the methods and culture of governing bodies have increasingly been shaped by professional executives, partly as a result of the co-option of external members largely drawn from the private sector.

Put simply, the carrot-and-stick approach is based firmly on the assumption that subordinates are motivated solely by a calculus of individual effort and reward, seeking to maximise their financial gain in competition with all others. Such an approach is intrinsically dehumanising in any context, but with the complex nature of teaching and research outputs, relying on ‘metrics’ to assess performance is especially hard to justify.

This top-down and reductionist approach to management has been experienced by many HE staff as profoundly disempowering and oppressive. Both teaching and research are collective activities, motivated by the desire to understand the world and to transform it for the better, rather than by money. The traditional culture of ‘collegiality’ could indeed conceal inefficiencies, but trust and mutual aid were nurtured within it, and these have been greatly eroded.

Labour’s HE strategy should promote governance processes and cultures that build effective management upon a renewal of collegiality and democratic participation.³ Some degree of protection from both immediate market forces and top-down managerial control should be part of this.

The Effects of Financial Uncertainty On Pay and Conditions of Employment

Following the 2011 Higher Education White Paper, the Coalition government introduced major changes in the financing of HE and in the regulation of student numbers.⁴ The shift from block grants to student fees for meeting the costs of teaching, coupled with the removal of caps on recruitment, appeared to ‘free’ providers from direct state control, and instead subordinate them to market competition. This was intended to lead to more diverse provision, with a wide range of fee levels and a greater responsiveness to changes in the patterns of demand for highly-educated labour. Seven years later, the vast majority of ‘home’ undergraduate students pay £9,000 a year, and the sector seems to fare no better than before in terms of addressing skill shortages.

More importantly, the shift from a largely planned model of governance to one of regulated competition has exposed the utter failure – of both the government sector leaders – to appreciate the obstacles that market competition inevitably faces in HE. These difficulties arise not from any opposition among staff and students, but because modern free-market economics has very largely forgotten to take into account the structural conditions that the newly-freed market faced. For a hundred years, orthodox economics taught that efficient market outcomes required easy access for new entrants, and resource inputs readily to hand and flexible in use: these conditions have never applied in HE, and indeed provided a mainstream (pro-market) rationale for putting the provision of a wide range of such goods and services within the public sector.

Developing new capacity in HE – new courses, new staff, new infrastructure such as housing and learning resources (IT, libraries) – requires substantial up-front investments and takes a significant amount of time. Universities have responded in part by seeking external finance based on future revenue streams, taking advantage of historically low interest rates, but still increasing their debt levels substantially. But the unexpectedly slow pace of recovery since the 2008 crisis, accentuated more recently by Brexit, has led to deepening concerns over the stability of the new system. This has given rise to a range of precautionary responses that are affecting staff at all levels.

First, the shift in power from academics to managers has accelerated. This is partly seen in the centralisation of actual decision-making processes, and the prescriptive imposition of a corporate financial mind-set at all levels of management. It is also seen in the sector’s adoption of pay relativities that increasingly resemble the private sector, with vice-chancellors and principals earning far more than heads of NHS Trusts or chief executives of large local authorities. Typically, strategic decision-making in a university is now exclusively reserved for the Council, with Senate’s role limited to strictly academic matters. Governance arrangements increasingly lack external transparency and accountability, e.g. in relation to remuneration committees for vice-chancellors.

Second, the financial risks associated with a competitive market environment have been offset by reducing the cost and increasing the flexibility of the labour force, through the growing use of fixed-term and/or part-time teaching staff. Any suggestion that this is morally equivalent to the employment practices of Sports Direct, Amazon or Uber is of course greeted with howls of outrage.

Third, universities have sought to cut the costs of full-time academic staff through re-writing university statutes in order to reduce employee protection, and now through a coordinated attack on the pension rights of permanent staff; in both cases, the result has been unprecedented levels of industrial action by those staff, with growing support from students.

Access to Higher Education

Thirty years ago, most universities offered schemes for mature entry, and at least some part-time provision of their degree-level programmes. They also provided a wide variety of extra-mural or continuing education opportunities: not only vocational and professional courses leading to qualifications (including many designed for trade unionists), but also traditional ‘liberal arts’ courses taken by local citizens motivated only by a desire to learn.

Since the 1990s, the scope of such ‘non-traditional’ programmes has narrowed almost completely to vocational provision, related to specific job needs or state-accredited return-to-work programmes. This approach has displaced the extra-mural educational purpose which originated in the late 19th century world of Mill, Arnold and Ruskin, and which for a hundred years or more helped to ground universities in the communities surrounding them.

More recently, the sharp rise in student fees since 2011 – albeit deferred in the form of student loans – has been accompanied by sharp falls in the numbers of mature students (defined as those over 21 who have not undertaken any HE already) and part-time students. In this case, the relentless process of marketisation has revealed a serious flaw in the debt-based fee model: older entrants are likely to be already indebted through mortgages or consumer debt, and will have fewer years in which to repay the loans. Not surprisingly, universities prefer to avoid the costs of attracting and preparing such reluctant customers, and focus instead on poaching 18-year-olds from each other.

The role of HE in reproducing social and economic inequalities has already been noted, but we need to see this in relation to the deepening social divisions revealed by the rise of populist politics, and particularly by the EU referendum campaign and its aftermath. Support for Brexit was greatest in towns and counties which either had no HE institutions, or the lowest levels of HE participation by 18-21-year-olds.

It is often argued that the over 50% of our population who do not go into HE should not be expected to shoulder its cost in public support through their taxes. The traditional liberal answer to this is that they do benefit, albeit indirectly through economic growth, better-quality goods and services and improvements in productivity.

But perhaps a more telling response is to argue that a truly universal university system would be designed to meet the life-long educational needs of all our adult citizens. This idea lies behind the recent proposal for a National Learning Entitlement (NLE), providing each person with a fund on which they could draw at any time in their life to meet part of the cost of whatever studies they found appropriate to their needs. An NLE would naturally fit in to a strategy of making HE an integral part of Labour’s proposed National Education Service, bringing the universities firmly under public control. Ideally, this would be accompanied by a devolved system of governance in which HE provision would be tailored to local and regional needs.

Conclusions

The Labour Party’s policies on higher education need to be based on a thorough critical appraisal of the UK’s current market-driven approach, building an alternative strategy based on reducing social and economic inequalities through making knowledge available to all. One element should certainly be the abolition of tuition fees, coupled with the reinstatement of means-tested maintenance grants. Four strategic purposes are suggested here:

• a genuinely universal role for universities in the service of the public interest, not individual gain;
• the governance of HE institutions to be rebuilt around their public purpose and democratic control, not market competition and financial metrics alone;
• staff pay in HE based on greatly-reduced differentials, with security of employment for all;
• HE as an integral part of Labour’s proposed National Education Service, providing direct benefits, both material and cultural, to all citizens.

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Hugo Radice is Life Fellow at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His recent columns on the crisis in the Yorkshire Post are available via his webpage.

Notes

1. See “All must have degrees,” The Economist, February 3rd 2018, p.56-7.

2. For the latest research see Richard Waller, Nicola Ingram and Michael Ward (eds), Higher Education and Social Inequalities (Routledge, 2018).

3. A pioneer of the modern management system in HE was Warwick University in the late 1960s: see E P Thompson (ed.), Warwick University Ltd.: Industry, Management and the Universities (Penguin, 1970).

4. See Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble (Pluto Press, 2013).

Featured image is from the author.

The scandal surrounding Facebook’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica, the election data company previously associated with former Trump campaign Chairman Steve Bannon, dominates the media in the US and Britain.

The serious privacy concerns involved in the harvesting of the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users was underscored by Britain’s Channel 4 News. An undercover investigation filmed Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix boasting of dirty tricks operations to ensnare politicians and subvert elections.

But while the disclosures are being used to bolster hysterical claims of “Russian meddling,” a closer examination reveals that the real and far more fundamental threat to democratic rights involves psy-ops programmes run by elements of the British and US deep state.

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company is British-based SCL. Formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories, it is a private behavioural research and strategic communication company, founded in 1993 by Nigel Oakes. The son of Major John Waddington Oakes and a former boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor, Oakes was formerly employed by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, before establishing SCL.

As with Oakes, SCL’s board members include scions of the British ruling class, from former military officers and defence contractors to major Conservative Party donors.

Lord Ivar Mountbatten, third cousin to Queen Elizabeth, is on the board, while CEO Roger Gabb is a millionaire wine merchant, a former British special forces officer and major contributor to the Tory Party. SCL President Sir Geoffrey Pattie was a defence minister under Thatcher. SCL chairman is the venture capitalist Julian Wheatland, also chairman of Oxfordshire Conservatives Association. Former Conservative Party Treasurer Jonathan Marland, trade envoy under Prime Minister David Cameron, is a shareholder.

Others associated, past or present, with SCL include property billionaire and Tory Party donor Vincent Tchenguiz; Sir James Allen Mitchell, privy counsellor since 1985; Rear Admiral John Tolhurst, a former assistant director of naval warfare in the Ministry of Defence and aide de camp to the Queen; and Gavin McNicoll, creator of the Eden Intelligence firm, which has run projects for the British government.

SCL boasts of providing “data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide,” notably the British Ministry of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. It states that it has carried out “behavioural change programs” in more than 60 countries. One of its first contracts in 1999 was promoting Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. It has worked to influence elections in Afghanistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Nigeria and Kenya among others.

Cambridge Analytica was launched in 2012 by SCL to extend its operations to the US. In partnership with hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, this included the Republican primaries for the 2016 election, where it worked to support Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump.

There is nothing new in this. Similar activities were known of, facilitated and endorsed by the political and military establishment in Britain and the US for years.

According to Liam O’Hare at Bella Caladonia, SCL went public in 2005 at the DSEI conference, a global arms fair in London, promoting itself as the first private company to provide psychological warfare services to the British military:

“Its ‘hard sell’ was a demonstration of how the UK government could use a sophisticated media campaign of mass deception to fool the British people into the thinking an accident at a chemical plant had occurred and threatened central London.”

Such a sales pitch is even more chilling given the recent events in Salisbury, where the alleged attempted assassination of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia—victims of a still unidentified nerve agent—is being used by the government to stage provocations against Russia.

A Freedom of Information request from August 2016 showed the MoD took out a £40,000 contract with SCL for the “provision of external training” in 2010/11 and £150,000 for the “procurement of target audience analysis” in 2014/15.

“In addition, SCL also carries a secret clearance as a ‘list X’ contractor for the MOD. A List X site is a commercial site on British soil that is approved to hold UK government information marked as ‘confidential’ and above. Essentially, SCL got the green light to hold British government secrets on its premises.”

Revelations of the British military’s connections with SCL forced Prime Minister Theresa May to declare in Parliament Wednesday,

“As far as I’m aware the government has no current contracts with Cambridge Analytica or with the SCL Group.”

A spokesperson admitted that the government had held three previous contracts with SCL Group, but said these had now ended.

According to the Guardian, in 2014 “MoD officials worked with SCL Group on ‘Project Duco’ to analyse how people would interact with certain government messaging.”

The project was carried out by the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), which is focused on maximising “the impact of science and technology for the defence and security of the UK.”

Project Duco was part of the government’s “human and social influence” work, and SCL was paid £150,000. It assessed how Target Audience Analysis (TAA) could “contribute to the government’s strategic communications.”

The Guardian has been in the forefront of the campaign over Russian fake news in the UK. But it was forced to acknowledge that SCL’s work on Project Duco and its “list X” ranking “is likely to raise concerns that government officials were aware of Cambridge Analytica and SCL’s operations, and intended to use them to promote government messages.”

In other words, Cambridge Analytica and SCL were not acting as proxies for the Russian state but rather for significant sections of the US/UK military and intelligence apparatus. A link to the heavily redacted report on Project Duco is here. Note that intellectual copyright is held by the government’s science and technology laboratory at Porton Down, just eight miles from Salisbury.

Nafeez Ahmed at INSURGE intelligence elaborated on the connections between SCL, the British foreign office and “other elements of the UK political and financial establishment.” These are so close that “last year the Foreign Office executive agency, Wilton Park, invited SCL Group subsidiary, SCL Elections, to speak about how the use of data in the 2016 Presidential election could be applied in the British government’s diplomatic and foreign policy agenda.”

The SCL Group executives were Mark Turnbull, managing director of SCL Elections, and David Wilkinson, then lead data scientist, who addressed the FCO in February 2017 on the subject of “examining the application of data in the recent US Presidential election.”

“The meeting was attended and opened by Jonathan Allen — then the FCO’s Acting Director General for Defence and Intelligence. Allen is now Theresa May’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations.”

O’Hare explains that the TAA “evolved during the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan.”

A SCL whistle-blower has charged that techniques used by the SCL Group has traced TAA back to the methods used by the US and UK militaries in Iraq. IR.net reports the whistle-blower stating that

“some of this technology was actually owned by the UK Ministry of Defence and/or the US Military, and now they don’t want people to know that it was their weapon that’s currently in the wild, being used privately to manipulate elections worldwide.”

SCL received £548,000 for delivering training to NATO that included providing an eight-week course for its staff. This was “subsequently passed on to Georgian, Ukrainian and Moldovan government officials.”

Turnbull is also head of Cambridge Analytica Political Global. He was previously employed for 18 years at Bell Pottinger where, O’Hare reports, he headed up “the Pentagon funded PR drive in occupied Iraq which included the production of fake al-Qaeda videos.”

The US State Department has a contract for $500,000 with SLC to provide “research and analytical support in connection with our mission to counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation overseas.”

An offshoot, SCL Defense, received $775,000 “to support NATO operations in Eastern Europe targeting Russia.”

O’Hare reports,

“The company delivered a three-month course in Riga which taught ‘advanced counter-propaganda techniques designed to help member states assess and counter Russia’s propaganda in Eastern Europe.’

“The NATO website said the ‘revolutionary’ training would ‘help Ukrainians better defend themselves against the Russian threat’.”

SCL has also had contracts with the Pentagon for psy-ops in Iran and Yemen.

Whatever the exact beginnings of the TAA programme, the real news story being buried by the official media is that the covert operations and subversion techniques deployed in US and British imperialism’s neo-colonial adventures are now being used on their domestic populations.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge.

Featured image: Ahed Tamimi in Ofer military court on 15 January.  (Source: Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

An Israeli military court has approved a plea deal which will see Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi serve an eight-month prison sentence on top of a fine of nearly $1,500.

Ahed, who turned 17 in January, was charged with assaulting soldiers and incitement after a video recorded by her mother Nariman circulated, showing Ahed and her cousin Nour slapping and shoving two heavily armed Israeli soldiers on 15 December.

Ahed was arrested in the middle of the night at her home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on 19 December.

Nour and Nariman were also detained by the army following the videotaped incident and have been sentencedto time served – 16 days in prison – and eight months in prison, respectively, after accepting plea deals.

“Something shameful”

The military court dropped several of its initial charges against Ahed, for which she faced up to 10 years in prison, according to the prisoners solidarity group Samidoun.

An Israeli military court ruled on Sunday that proceedings in Ahed’s case were to be held behind closed doors, rejecting her appeal for a public trial on the basis that it was for “the minor’s benefit.”

“It seems like it finally dawned on them that there’s something shameful about the proceedings against [Ahed], and that it is better to hold a secret trial rather than make public this legal farce,” Ahed’s lawyer Gaby Lasky told The Electronic Intifada prior to the ruling.

Israel’s military courts deny basic due process rights and have a near-100 percent conviction rate for Palestinians.

Concerned by these abuses, 21 members of US Congress are backing legislation to bar Israel from using American aid for the imprisonment and abuse of Palestinian children like Ahed Tamimi.

There are currently more than 300 Palestinian children in Israeli military detention.

Revenge campaign

Ahed’s viral videotaped confrontation with the soldiers occurred outside her home hours after Israeli soldiers shot in the head and seriously injured her 15-year-old cousin Muhammad Fadel Tamimi.

Muhammad was also arrested by Israeli soldiers on 26 January along with several other members of the Tamimi family, most of them children. Muhammad was released after being interrogated.

The Tamimi family is known for its unarmed resistance to Israel’s encroachment on their village of Nabi Saleh.

Ahed’s arrest made international headlines and rallied global support for her freedom, causing major embarrassment for Israel.

Israeli officials made bizarre and absurd claims about her family, with deputy minister Michael Oren positing that the Tamimis were a group of “blond, blue-eyed and light-skinned” actors hired to “make Israel look bad.”

Yoav Mordechai, the general who oversees COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, claimed that the injury to Muhammad Tamimi’s head was caused not by an Israeli soldier’s bullet, but by the child falling off his bike – an outlandish story soon debunked by journalists and human rights defenders.

Discrimination

While Ahed Tamimi was sentenced to eight months for slapping and shoving occupation soldiers, Israeli army medic Elor Azarya will be released from prison in May after serving only nine months for executing a prone Palestinian who lay incapacitated on a Hebron street.

Azarya’s 18-month sentence was shortened to 14 months in September. This week a military parole board ordered Azarya’s release after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

Elor Azaria – Israeli soldier convicted of killing a wounded Palestinian by shooting him in the head. He'll be out in May, having served 9 months.

Ahed Tamimi – Palestinian teenager arrested after slapping a heavily-armed Israeli soldier in her backyard. She's getting 8 months. pic.twitter.com/H6dTm2lbrp

— Ben White (@benabyad) March 21, 2018

An Israeli military court had ruled that Azarya’s act was motivated by revenge.

The chief prosecutor in the case stated Azarya has shown no remorse and taken no responsibility for his actions but poses no danger to the public, according to Haaretz.

Meanwhile, David Muial was sentenced to community service on Wednesday after participating in the lynching of Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum in October 2015.

Zarhum, 29, was severely beaten and shot to death by a mob of Israeli soldiers, prison officers and police after they mistook him for the gunman who had opened fire moments earlier at the central bus station in Beer Sheva, a city in southern Israel.

Israel refused to recognize Zarhum as a “terror victim” on grounds that he had entered Israel illegally, preventing his family from claiming compensation.

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Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada. 

On Thursday, President Trump moved one step closer to completing his preferred cabinet. General H.R. McMaster, whom Trump called boring, was replaced as national security advisor by ultra-hawk John Bolton. This is the same John Bolton who wrote the forward for Pamela Geller’s hate-filled book about President Obama, called on Israel to nuke Iran, urged the United States to bomb Iran and North Korea, abused a female USAID employee, advocated on behalf of the NRA for more gun rights for Russian citizens, and still defends the Iraq war. I could go on.

Trump’s other appointments have similar attributes. Mike Pompeo, set to take over in Foggy Bottom, compared Iran to the ISIS and called it a “thuggish police state” that is “intent [on] destroying America.” Lastly, Gina Haspel, set to take over the CIA, has a history of torturing detainees under the Bush administration. She even destroyed the recordings taken of the torture years later. Meanwhile, John Kelley remains in a precarious position as chief of staff.

This team constitutes a gang of evil. The anti-diplomacy, pro-torture, pro-war initiatives they have supported have cost lives and created instability in the Middle East to the detriment of U.S. national security and international standing. Additionally, Bolton and Pompeo have ties to hate groups that promote division at home (no wonder Trump likes them). Also, some of the initial appointments belong to the same gang, including UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Michael D’Andrea, the head of the CIA’s Iran operations.

Three upcoming dates likely encouraged Trump to make these rapid changes.

North Korea and Iran

Trump is slated to meet directly with Kim Jong Un by this coming May. The changes in Trump’s cabinet have put a damper on the preparations as the deadline approaches. However, the changes are no accident. Trump has used bellicose language towards North Korea from early on in his presidency. By having a like-minded secretary of state and national security advisor in place, he is sending a deliberate signal to Kim Jong Un. If Trump is going to play lead diplomat, he still has threatening cabinet members in place as a counterforce. But with such a high-level start to the talks, as many analysts have repeated, there’s little room for diplomatic recourse should the Trump-Kim discussions fail. Bolton would be the ideal person to game the next move in such a situation and show an aggressive posture. That some in the president’s own party don’t seem to care about the consequences of war or even the consequences of a limited strike does not bode well should the talks fail (or fail to happen).

The Iran nuclear deal is another worrying case. On May 12, Trump must decide whether the deal should be recertified. The International Atomic Energy Agency, assigned to overlook the implementation of the deal, has said that Iran has complied to the benefit of the international community. Meanwhile, the Europeans and the Iranians have grown frustrated regarding Washington’s threats to tear up the deal. The Europeans have proposed adding an addendum regarding Iran’s ballistic missiles, but the Iranians are not having it. Iran remains irritated by the lack of investment from foreign businesses and banks, which they blame on Trump’s bellicose language.

The recent hiring of Bolton sends a major signal to Iran’s leadership that the United States is doubling down on its aggressive posture. Again, this is by design. Trump wants either to provoke Iran to withdraw from the deal first—thus shifting blame away from Washington—or to add sanctions in May in direct violation of the deal and thereby killing it. Either way, Bolton’s presence increases the chance of a conflict that already has concerned U.S. allies.

Several regional enemies of Iran would support an American intervention. The overlap of the Bolton announcement with the visit to Washington of hawkish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, responsible for the deadly Yemen intervention, is likely no coincidence.

The Blue Wave

Everything points toward November. The president and the Republican Party know that they are likely to suffer a “blue wave” on election night. This is the third date likely inspiring Trump’s recent moves. The president is a showman at heart. He is more timing and appearance than substance. Trump is likely to ratchet up tensions with Iran and North Korea in reaction to, or in prevention of, a blue wave. Of course, Trump would need the unlikely approval of Congress for any major intervention, but the intervention does not have to be on a regular armed conflict. It could also be in the cyber realm. Or it could be clandestine, which requires less congressional oversight.

During the campaign, Trump loved to say that he was against the Iraq war, which he called a “disaster.” Apparently during negotiations with Bolton, Trump had him promise that he “wouldn’t start any wars.” However, this is the same Trump who has continued America’s war for the Greater Middle East despite lamenting the “trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost” in the region.

The president has many attributes, but consistency is not one of them. Putting Pompeo and Bolton in such major positions of power suggests that Trump and his gang of evil are preparing for the very conflicts that he promised to avoid.

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Shahed Ghoreishi is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

Featured image is from the author.

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

Mass protests have erupted against the arrest by German police of Catalonia’s former regional premier Carles Puigdemont.

The arrest warrant was requested by the Popular Party (PP) government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. But the PP’s repression has the full support of the Socialist Party (PSOE) opposition. PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez said of Puigdemont’s arrest,

“We live in a social and democratic state governed by the rule of law in Spain and in Europe. Nobody is above the law. [We] Respect judicial decisions and support our security forces.”

Puigdemont’s arrest, carried out on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant issued Friday by Spain’s Supreme Court, saw tens of thousands assemble in the centre of Barcelona, Sunday. Between cries of “Puigdemont, our president”, “This Europe is a shame” and calls for a general strike, the protesters cut the traffic lane for vehicles going down the city’s main avenue in Las Ramblas and four other highways.

The Catalan National Assembly convened a demonstration in front of the EU headquarters in Barcelona to march to the German consulate. Protests have also been called in Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. Protesters clashed with riot police, leading to numerous injuries.

Puigdemont has been living in exile since October, when he fled to Belgium along with four other regional ministers after declaring Catalan independence. In response, Spain’s right-wing Popular Party government invoked Article 155 of the Constitution, dissolving the Catalan government, implementing direct rule from Madrid and imposing snap elections.

Fearing sedition and rebellion charges that led to the imprisonment of three deputies, including vice-premier Oriol Junqueras (Republican Left of Catalonia, ERC), Puigdemont remained in self-imposed exile in Belgium.

Last Friday, Spanish Supreme Court Judge Pablo Llarena reactivated an international arrest warrant for Puigdemont when he was visiting Finland for talks with lawmakers. He also jailed five leaders of Puigdemont’s deposed government without bail as they await trial.

In total, 25 Catalan leaders are to be tried for rebellion, misuse of public funds or disobeying the state. Convictions could result in up to 30 years in prison.

The whole case is built around spurious grounds that the Catalan secessionist movement has used violence to achieve independence, therefore justifying the charge of rebellion, which according to Spain’s penal code may apply only to those who “violently and publicly” try to “abrogate, suspend or modify the Constitution, either totally or partially”.

According to sources of online newspaper, eldiario.es, the police operation resulting in the detention of Puigdemont was led by Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), in coordination with the General Information Office of the National Police. According to the same sources, Puigdemont’s movements have been controlled at all times since he left Belgium.

Puigdemont was heading to Belgium to surrender to the judicial authorities, according to his lawyer in Spain, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, when he was intercepted. According to German news magazine Focus, the Spanish intelligence services informed the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA)—responsible for national and international terrorism—that Puigdemont was moving towards the German border. The BKA then informed the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) of Schleswig-Holstein which arrested Puigdemont.

The decision to arrest Puigdemont in Germany is significant. The German Criminal Code punishes the alteration of the constitutional order and attempts to secede from Germany with a sentence of up to life imprisonment. This is indicated in Article 81 of the German Criminal Code, in the section, “High treason against the Federation,” which states, “Whosoever undertakes, by force or through threat of force, to undermine the continued existence of the Federal Republic of Germany; or to change the constitutional order based on the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, shall be liable to imprisonment for life or for not less than ten years.”

German law is closer to Spanish law than the existing statutes in Belgium, facilitating Puigdemont’s transfer to Spain.

According to sources of El País, the police had assessed whether to call for his arrest in Finland or Denmark, but this “was ruled out having the conviction that the former regional premier was going to continue his journey by land into Germany. This country is considered by Spain one of the EU states with which there are better relations of police collaboration.”

Last November, the German government expressed its full support for Madrid following the detention of eight former Catalan ministers over their role in the region’s independence drive.

Government spokesperson Steffen Seibert told reporters,

“From the federal government’s point of view, Spain is of course a state governed by the rule of law and as government spokesman I see no reason at all to comment on decisions made by Spanish courts. We continue to support the clear position of the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy”, adding that “What’s important to us is that the unity and constitutional order of Spain are maintained.”

The role played by the German government again exposes the politically bankrupt efforts of the Catalan nationalists to promote the illusion that the European Union and its members states would intervene in the Catalan crisis to preserve “democratic values” by brokering a deal with the Popular Party government in Madrid. Instead, the EU and government leaders in Germany, Britain and France have repeatedly backed PP Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and insisted he is the only person with whom they will negotiate.

It is impossible to grasp the historical ramification of the youth march to the U.S. political stage in 2018 without an overall view of the world political situation.

The American youth with their impressive “March for our Lives” in millions- in 800 cities throughout the United States- broke the barrier for “CHANGE” that their parents had been struggling with for decades. Politicians in Washington were surprised and scared (at the same time) of the genuine and powerful messages that they heard from the young speakers (as young as 9) at the march – just a few feet away from their offices! The immense waves of ENERGY and POLITICAL MILITANCY of the youth felt like a tsunami to these old, corrupt politicians. For these ladies and gentlemen in Washington, the chant of “Vote Them Out!” was too real to ignore.

It seems the world was waiting for the American Youth to shout: “Enough Is Enough”. This march divided Americans into two distinctive forces; one that seeks an end to Violence and the other which promotes War and more Violence. This clear division already has become a major problem for the 1% in the U.S.

Before we get to the real challenge of the American Youth Leadership, let’s talk about the “MEDIA”. For the sake of time, let’s see how CNN (the official Warmonger Channel) has covered this march. Well they did their best; they covered the march “live” -unlike Fox News- but at the same time through their robot Pentagon reporter Barbara Star- they “assured” us that the U.S. generals in their deep bunkers are ready to fight Russians at any time and moment!

The challenge for the American youth today is to stay away from the Democratic Party – in any form and shape. A force independent of Democrats, Republicans and other 1% representatives is the only path for change. It is important to realize that today; “Dems” (as they are called) in general -more than ever- are the main political hurdle for progress and change.

*

Image is from the author.

Featured image: An aerial photo shows deforestation associated with a roadway in Colombia’s Amazon. Photo courtesy of CDA

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos declared earlier this month that a controversial highway project that would cut through the Amazon will not be completed. Santos pointed at rampant deforestation and potentially irreversible environmental impacts to a sensitive ecological corridor near three national parks if the highway project were followed through to completion.

The Marginal de la Selva highway is part of $1 billion infrastructure project that would have opened a trade route for heavy land cargo to pass from Venezuela to Ecuador through Colombia without having to enter the treacherous Andes mountains.

Santos told local newspaper El Tiempo that the highway project “is not going to be done because it would be completely counterproductive from the environmental point of view.”

The announcement was made as environmentalists decried a massive increase in deforestation in the region around the proposed highway project, which directly borders three national parks.

Image on the right: A jaguar on the prowl in Colombia.  (Photo by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay)

Following a historic 2016 peace agreement with Colombia’s former largest guerrilla group the FARC, the power vacuum left by the demobilized rebels exacerbated deforestation as land speculators flooded into the area to clear tracts of forest for speculative cattle ranching and palm oil projects. According to environmental government agency Corporation for Sustainable Development of the North-East Amazon (CDA), many of these speculators are connected to illegal armed groups.

Wilfredo Pachón, local CDA Director in San Jose de Guaviare, said property values can increase up to three times over when the forest is cleared. He told Mongabay that much of this land sits empty after being cleared, with investors betting that the titles will be formalized later on down the line.

Deforestation caused by land investors for speculative cattle and other agricultural projects is threatening the last remaining forest corridors in the Amazonian piedmont region that connects three of Colombia’s five regions: the Amazon, the Andes and the eastern plains.

Rodrigo Botero, director of the organization Fundación para la Conservación y Desarrollo Sostenible (FDCS), who has been working in the northwestern Colombian Amazon frontier for the past six years, called the President’s announcement “extraordinary news for deforestation mitigation and restoration efforts” to restore the region’s ecological integrity.

Botero noted that the president’s declaration hadn’t been codified by the Ministry of Transportation, which is needed formally withdraw the Marginal de la Selva plans. He said work must also be done on the departmental and municipal levels to align local development policies with the nation’s environmental agenda.

Without the highway, heavy truck cargo will not be able to pass through the region. Botero said closing the road to heavy truck cargo is “highly important” because it will “close some of the expectations for large-scale development.”

In particular, Botero pointed toward palm oil expansion and petroleum extraction as potential threats to the region’s long-term ecological integrity.

At the same time, Botero pointed out that there is still a navigable river, which means large-scale development in the northwestern Colombian Amazon is “still very much a possibility.”

In addition to closing the Marginal de la Selva project, Santos recently announced a 1.5 million hectare expansion of the Chiribiquete Natural National Park. However, at the same time as the park’s expansion was announced, at least 40 fires were reported raging in and around the park.

Image on the left: The Colombian Amazon provides important habitat for many rainforest species, such as the red howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus).

FCDS recorded 160,000 hectares of Amazon forest cover loss from the beginning of January 2017 until February 2018. The country’s climate and environmental monitoring agency IDEAM said that 70 percent of the country’s deforestation alerts are now happening in the Amazon. From December 2017 until March 2018, the Tinigua National Park alone lost of approximately 5,600 hectares of forest cover, according to government analysis.

 

To address the deepening deforestation crisis, Botero said it’s critical that Colombia definitively closes the agricultural frontier in the Amazon to ensure the region is not further colonized or developed and to prevent land speculators from generating profits on rainforest destruction.

Bill Laurance, a distinguished research professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Australia, has been studying the deforestation effects of road development and infrastructure projects in tropical rainforests for the past 35 years.

Laurance’s research has shown that building paved roads through tropical rainforests causes land-grabbing, illegal road development and accelerated deforestation — all of which have been observed as plans for the Marginal de la Selva highway proceeded.

During the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Summit, Colombia pledged to bring the Amazon deforestation rate down to zero by 2020. However, the Minister of Environment Gilberto Murillo walked back on the goal in February, telling El Espectador that “zero deforestation by 2020 will be very difficult to meet.”

According to the latest research, the Amazon rainforest may be dangerously close to reaching an ecological tipping point where the rainforest ecosystem could rapidly degrade into a more arid savannah if deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent.

It has given those in a permanent state of jitters greater reason to jump off the cliff to a certain fate, but John Bolton’s elevation to President Donald J. Trump’s inner circle is predictable and, patterns of employment permitting, brief.  It is easy to see each and every appointment of the current president as manically dangerous, shading those of his predecessors.  Move over national security advisor H. R. McMaster and welcome Mr. Pre-emption.

The predictions of imminent cataclysm at this latest turn have a certain screeching quality, feeding the endless exhaust fan of Trumpographic terrors.  There is a fear that war with Iran might well be possible.  This would be tenable, presuming that Trump had taken leave of his remaining senses, and Bolton had received a surge of blood lust.  The doomsday cartel is being kept busy.

With all of this, it is easy to forget the last president who found Bolton’s services useful, one who with singular influence plunged the Middle East into multigenerational chaos and sanguinary mayhem.  As a right-wing shock pundit he was appointed by President George W. Bush, that other monstrosity of the White House, to destabilise the United Nations.  (To be more exact, destabilise the US relationship with that oft confused, disparate entity.)

The danger Bolton poses is dependent on the access, regularity and seeming cogency of his advice to the president. As he explained on Fox News, he is an open book, smudged, as it were, by a certain enthusiasm for war.

“During my career, I have written I don’t know how many articles and op-eds and opinion pieces. I have given – I can’t count the number of speeches, I’ve had countless interviews… They’re all out there on the public record.  I’ve never been shy about what my views are.”

He is the creature of pre-emption, the proponent of violent redress regarding international disputes.  Evidence of misconduct matters less than the prompt elimination of threats, a strike on Washington’s enemies before they assume any significant influence or form.  He has, for instance, put forth boisterous, if clinical positions on striking North Korea (amusingly enough, he dresses this as legal), and Iran.

“It is perfectly legitimate,” he wrote last month in The Wall Street Journal, “for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

He admitted to various “gaps in US intelligence in North Korea,” but rather than seeing this as a note to be cautious, Bolton suggests the opposite. Washington “should not wait until the very last minute.  That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation.”

His writings have a cool surgical air to them, absent casualties and consequences. The dead, in these instances, do not speak, let alone matter.  There are only necessary attacks, imbalances of power that need redressing, and military set pieces.  Iran, for instance, requires eradication, a homicidal view that would deserve in at least some small way, the tag of genocide.  “[E]nd the Islamic Republic before its 40^th anniversary,” he cheered in the pages of the WJS.

In 2005, he outlined approaches to crippling the Islamic Republic’s potential nuclear capacity, a somewhat less evolved idea of extinguishing the state.  “Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities.  So, too, would be the little noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan.”  Attack Iran, break “key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle” and retard the program by three to five years.  Naturally bring Israel on board to do the thorough job.

His positions have always assumed pre-emption. Threats loom in a permanent hot house of problems for US security.  In 2002, during his time as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bolton pressed his staff to draw up a document claiming that Cuba had an active biological weapons program and was in the business of transferring that technology to outlaw states.

On May 6, 2002, he described these heralded findings at the Heritage Foundation, prompting something of a storm:

“The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort.  Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.  We are concerned that such technology could support BW programs in those states.”

His superiors were left reeling with qualifications.  “We did not say,” claimed a more cautious Secretary of State Colin Powell, “that [Cuba] actually had such weapons, but it has the capacity and the capability to conduct such research.”

So do most states, for that matter, but such a distinction has never troubled Bolton.

When confronted with demurring views on Cuba’s capabilities, Bolton intimidated the analysts, who grittily held out.  As David Ignatius explained,

“Bolton wanted to sound the alarm about Cuba, regardless of what the [National Intelligence Estimate] said.”

Such conduct led to an initial blocking of his appointment as ambassador to the UN.

 Critics will be wishing some for some act of cannibalisation within the Trump administration.  The vital concern here is whether Bolton’s inability to accept evidence of actual threats coalesces with the president’s fantasies.  But reduced to a personal dimension (the moustache Trump so detests), Bolton’s days are already numbered.

*

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Dr. Kampmark is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]

The following texts are excerpts from the Preface of  Professor Tim Anderson’s timely and important book entitled The Dirty War on Syria. The book is available for order from Global Research, place your order here now!

Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. The British-Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves ‘a depressingly predictable pattern’ of demonising the enemy leader, then demonising the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined (Knightley 2001). Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar al Assad became the new evil in the world and, according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past 15 years.

This book is a careful academic work, but also a strong defence of the right of the Syrian people to determine their own society and political system. That position is consistent with international law and human rights principles, but may irritate western sensibilities, accustomed as we are to an assumed prerogative to intervene. At times I have to be blunt, to cut through the double-speak. In Syria the big powers have sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies while demonising the Syrian Government and Army, accusing them of constant atrocities; then pretending to rescue the Syrian people from their own government. Far fewer western people opposed the war on Syria than opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they were deceived about its true nature.

Dirty wars are not new. Cuban national hero Jose Martí predicted to a friend that Washington would try to intervene in Cuba’s independence struggle against the Spanish. ‘They want to provoke a war’, he wrote in 1889 ‘to have a pretext to intervene and, with the authority of being mediator and guarantor, to seize the country … There is no more cowardly thing in the annals of free people; nor such cold blooded evil’ (Martí 1975: 53). Nine years later, during the third independence war, an explosion in Havana Harbour destroyed the USS Maine, killing 258 US sailors and serving as a pretext for a US invasion.

The US launched dozens of interventions in Latin America over the subsequent century. A notable dirty war was led by CIA-backed, ‘freedom fighter’ mercenaries based in Honduras, who attacked the Sandinista Government and the people of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That conflict, in its modus operandi, was not so different to the war on Syria. In Nicaragua more than 30,000 people were killed. The International Court of Justice found the US guilty of a range of terrorist-style attacks on the little Central American country, and found that the US owed Nicaragua compensation (ICJ 1986). Washington ignored these rulings.

With the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the big powers took advantage of a political foment by seizing the initiative to impose an ‘Islamist winter’, attacking the few remaining independent states of the region. Very quickly we saw the destruction of Libya, a small country with the highest standard of living in Africa. NATO bombing and a Special Forces campaign helped the al Qaeda groups on the ground. The basis for NATO’s intervention was lies told about actual and impending massacres, supposedly carried out or planned by the government of President Muammar Gaddafi. These claims led rapidly to a UN Security Council resolution said to protect civilians through a ‘no fly zone’. We know now that trust was betrayed, and that the NATO powers abused the limited UN authorisation to overthrow the Libyan Government (McKinney 2012).

Subsequently, no evidence emerged to prove that Gaddafi intended, carried out or threatened wholesale massacres, as was widely suggested (Forte 2012). Genevieve Garrigos of Amnesty International (France) admitted there was ‘no evidence’ to back her group’s earlier claims that Gaddafi had used ‘black mercenaries’ to commit massacres (Forte 2012; Edwards 2013).

… Two days before NATO bombed Libya another armed Islamist insurrection broke out in Daraa, Syria’s southernmost city. Yet because this insurrection was linked to the demonstrations of a political reform movement, its nature was disguised. Many did not see that those who were providing the guns – Qatar and Saudi Arabia – were also running fake news stories in their respective media channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. There were other reasons for the durable myths of this war. Many western audiences, liberals and leftists as well as the more conservative, seemed to like the idea of their own role as the saviours of a foreign people, speaking out strongly about a country of which they knew little, but joining what seemed to be a ‘good fight’ against this new ‘dictator’. With a mission and their proud self-image western audiences apparently forgot the lies of previous wars, and of their own colonial legacies.

I would go so far as to say that, in the Dirty War on Syria, western culture in general abandoned its better traditions: of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence at times of conflict; in favour of its worst traditions: the ‘imperial prerogative’ for intervention, backed by deep racial prejudice and poor reflection on the histories of their own cultures. That weakness was reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda. After the demonisation of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad began, a virtual information blockade was constructed against anything which might undermine the wartime storyline. Very few sensible western perspectives on Syria emerged after 2011, as critical voices were effectively blacklisted.

The Dirty War on Syria

by Professor Tim Anderson

click to purchase, directly from Global Research Publishers

In that context I came to write this book. It is a defence of Syria, not primarily addressed to those who are immersed the western myths but to others who engage with them. This is therefore a resource book and a contribution to the history of the Syrian conflict. The western stories have become self-indulgent and I believe it is wasteful to indulge them too much. Best, I think, to speak of current events as they are, then address the smokescreens later. I do not ignore the western myths, in fact this book documents many of them. But I lead with the reality of the war.

Western mythology relies on the idea of imperial prerogatives, asking what must ‘we’ do about the problems of another people; an approach which has no basis in international law or human rights. The next steps involve a series of fabrications about the pretexts, character and events of the war. The first pretext over Syria was that the NATO states and the Gulf monarchies were supporting a secular and democratic revolution. When that seemed implausible the second story was that they were saving the oppressed majority ‘Sunni Muslim’ population from a sectarian ‘Alawite regime’. Then, when sectarian atrocities by anti-government forces attracted greater public attention, the pretext became a claim that there was a shadow war: ‘moderate rebels’ were said to be actually fighting the extremist groups. Western intervention was therefore needed to bolster these ‘moderate rebels’ against the ‘new’ extremist group that had mysteriously arisen and posed a threat to the world.

That was the ‘B’ story. No doubt Hollywood will make movies based on this meta-script, for years to come. However this book leads with the ‘A’ story. Proxy armies of Islamists, armed by US regional allies (mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey), infiltrate a political reform movement and snipe at police and civilians. They blame this on the government and spark an insurrection, seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government and its secular-pluralist state. This follows the openly declared ambition of the US to create a ‘New Middle East’, subordinating every country of the region, by reform, unilateral disarmament or direct overthrow. Syria was next in line, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In Syria, the proxy armies would come from the combined forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanatics. Despite occasional power struggles between these groups and their sponsors, they share much the same Salafist ideology, opposing secular or nationalist regimes and seeking the establishment of a religious state.

However in Syria Washington’s Islamists confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along religious lines, despite many provocations. The Syrian state also had strong allies in Russia and Iran. Syria was not to be Libya Take Two. In this prolonged war the violence, from the western side, was said to consist of the Syrian Army targeting and killing civilians. From the Syrian side people saw daily terrorist attacks on towns and cities, schools and hospitals and massacres of ordinary people by NATO’s ‘freedom fighters’, then the counter attacks by the Army. Foreign terrorists were recruited in dozens of countries by the Saudis and Qatar, bolstering the local mercenaries.

Though the terrorist groups were often called ‘opposition, ‘militants’ and ‘Sunni groups’ outside Syria, inside the country the actual political opposition abandoned the Islamists back in early 2011. Protest was driven off the streets by the violence, and most of the opposition (minus the Muslim Brotherhood and some exiles) sided with the state and the Army, if not with the ruling Ba’ath Party. The Syrian Army has been brutal with terrorists but, contrary to western propaganda, protective of civilians. The Islamists have been brutal with all, and openly so. Millions of internally displaced people have sought refuge with the Government and Army, while others fled the country.

In a hoped-for ‘end game’ the big powers sought overthrow of the Syrian state or, failing that, the creation of a dysfunctional state or dismembering into sectarian statelets, thus breaking the axis of independent regional states. That axis comprises Hezbollah in south Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance, alongside Syria and Iran, the only states in the region without US military bases. More recently Iraq – still traumatised from western invasion, massacres and occupation – has begun to align itself with this axis. Russia too has begun to play an important counter-weight role. Recent history and conduct demonstrate that neither Russia nor Iran harbour any imperial ambitions remotely approaching those of Washington and its allies, several of which (Britain, France and Turkey) were former colonial warlords in the region. From the point of view of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, defeat of the dirty war on Syria means that the region can begin closing ranks against the big powers. Syria’s successful resistance would mean the beginning of the end for Washington’s ‘New Middle East’.

That is basically the big picture. This book sets out to document the A story and expose the B story. It does so by rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence in case of conflict. I hope it might prove a useful resource. Here is a brief overview of the chapters.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Year: 2016

Pages: 240

Author: Tim Anderson

List Price: $23.95

Special Price: $15.00

The Dirty War on Syria 

by Professor Tim Anderson

click to purchase, directly from Global Research Publishers

Chapter Overview:

Chapter 1, ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region.

Chapter 2, ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyper-reliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.

Chapter 3, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.

Chapter 4, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.

Chapter 5, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on long standing collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.

Chapter 6, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.

Chapter 7, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.

Chapter 8, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.

Chapter 9, ‘The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.

Chapter 10, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.

Chapter 11 ‘Washington, Terrorism and the Islamic State (ISIS)’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.

Chapter 12, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.

Chapter 13 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.

When the attacks on Syria abate the Middle East seems set to be transformed, with greater political will and military preparedness on the part of an expanded Axis of Resistance. That will signal the beginning of the end for Washington’s 15 year spree of bloodshed and ‘regime change’ across the entire region.

Also available in PDF version, click here to purchase

Reviews:

Tim Anderson  has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government. 

Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).

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Special: Dirty War on Syria + Globalization of War (Buy 2 books for 1 price!) 

Special: Dirty War on Syria + America’s “War on Terrorism” (Buy 2 books for 1 price!) 

Bulk Order: Click here to order multiple copies at a discounted price (North America only)

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Notes:

Edwards, Dave (2013) ‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies’, Media Lens, 13 June, online: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/735-limited-but-persuasive-evidence-syria-sarin-libya-lies.html

Forte, Maximilian (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Quebec

ICJ (1986) Case concerning the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America) Merits’, International Court of Justice, Judgement of 27 June 1986, online: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5

Knightley, Phillip (2001) ‘The disinformation campaign’, The Guardian, 4 October, online: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/04/socialsciences.highereducation

Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, 16 April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2015-02-16/obamas-libya-debacle

Martí, Jose (1975) Obras Completas, Vol. 6, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana

McKinney, Cynthia (Ed) (2012) The Illegal War on Libya, Clarity Press, Atlanta

Putin, Vladimir (2015) ‘Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech’, RT, 28 September, online: https://www.rt.com/news/316804-putin-russia-unga-speech/

Richter, Larry (1998) ‘Havana Journal; Remember the Maine? Cubans See an American Plot Continuing to This Day’, New York Times, 14 February, online: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/world/havana-journal-remember-maine-cubans-see-american-plot-continuing-this-day.html

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first crossposted on GR in March 2015.

Unless We Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat It

Preface:  I am a patriotic American who loves  my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.

So why do I frequently point out America’s warts?  Because – as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained – we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings.  After all:

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat …

While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, we don’t know that America played both sides … both fighting and supporting the Nazis.

Americans also aren’t aware that the Nazis were – in part – inspired by anti-Semites in America.

Backing Nazis

Large American banks – and George W. Bush’s grandfather – financed the Nazis.

American manufacturing companies were big supporters of the Nazis.   here are 6 historical examples …

(1) IBM.  CNET reports:

IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news.

“The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM’s German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information,” IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. “This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week.”

***

IBM also defended Chairman Thomas Watson for his dealings with Hitler and his regime.

***

On September 13, 1939, The New York Times reports on Page 1 that 3 million Jews are going to be “immediately removed” from Poland, and they appear to be candidates for “physical extermination.” On September 9, the German managers of IBM Berlin send a letter to Thomas Watson with copy to staff in Geneva via phone that, due to the “situation,” they need high-speed alphabetizing equipment. IBM wanted no paper trail, so an oral agreement was made, passed from New York to Geneva to Berlin, and those alphabetizers were approved by Watson, personally, before the end of the month.

That month he also approved the opening of a new Europe-wide school for Hollerith technicians in Berlin. And at the same time he authorized a new German-based subsidiary in occupied Poland, with a printing plant across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto at 6 Rymarska Street. It produced some 15 million punch cards at that location, the major client of which was the railroad.

We have a similar example involving Romania in 1941, and The Sunday Times has actually placed the IBM documents up on their Web site…. When Nazi Germany went into France, IBM built two new factories to supply the Nazi war machine. This is the 1941-’42 era, in Vichy, France, which was technically neutral. When Germany invaded Holland in May 1940, IBM rushed a brand-new subsidiary into occupied Holland. And it even sent 132 million punch cards in 1941, mainly from New York, to support the Nazi activity there. Holland had the highest rate of Jewish extermination in all of Europe; 72 percent of Jews were killed in Holland, compared to 24 percent in France, where the machines did not operate successfully.

***

When Hitler came to power in 1933, his desire to destroy European Jewry was so ambitious an enterprise, it required the resources of a computer. But in 1933 no computer existed. What did exist was the Hollerith punch-card system. It was invented by a German-American in Buffalo, New York, for the Census Bureau. This punch-card system could store all the information about individuals, places, products, inventories, schedules, in the holes that were punched or not punched in columns and rows.

The Hollerith system reduced everything to number code. Over time, the IBM alphabetizers could convert this code to alphabetical information. IBM made constant improvements for their Nazi clients.

***

Our entry was of course precipitated by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7. Shortly before that, with sudden new trading-with-the-enemy regulations in force–this is October 1941–Watson issued a cable to all IBM’s European subsidiaries, saying in effect: “Don’t tell us what you’re doing and don’t ask us any questions.” He didn’t say, “Don’t send machines into concentration camps.” He didn’t say, “Stop organizing the military forces of Nazi Germany.” He didn’t say, “Don’t undertake anything to harm innocent civilians.”

***

He then bifurcated the management of IBM Europe–one manager in Geneva, named Werner Lier, and the other one in New York, in his office, named J.L. Schotte. So all communications went from Switzerland to New York. Ultimately there was a Hollerith Department called Hollerith Abteilung–German for department–in almost every concentration camp. Remember, the original Auschwitz tattoo was an IBM number.

***

IBM put the blitz in blitzkrieg. The whole war effort was organized on Hollerith machines from 1933 to 1945. This is when information technology comes to warfare. At the same time, IBM was supporting the entire German war machine directly from New York until the fall of 1941 ….

***

IBM did more than just sell equipment. Watson and IBM controlled the unique technical magic of Hollerith machines. They controlled the monopoly on the cards and the technology. And they were the ones that had to custom-design even the paper forms and punch cards–they were custom-designed for each specific purpose. That included everything form counting Jews to confiscating bank accounts, to coordinating trains going into death camps, to the extermination by labor campaign.

That’s why even the paper forms in the prisoner camps had Hollerith notations and numbered fields checked. They were all punched in. For example, IBM had to agree with their Nazi counterparts that Code 6 in the concentration camps wasextermination. Code 1 was released, Code 2 was transferred, Code 3 was natural death,Code 4 was formal execution, Code 5 was suicide. Code 7 was escape. Code 6 wasextermination.

All of the money and all the machines from all these operations was claimed by IBM as legitimate business after the war. The company used its connections with the State Department and the Pentagon to recover all the machines and all the bank accounts. They never said, “We do not want this blood money.” They wanted it all.

(2) Standard Oil.   The Nazi air force – the Luftwaffe – needed tetraethyl lead gas in order to get their planes off the ground. Standard Oil sold tetraethyl to the Nazis.

After WWII began, the English became angry about U.S. shipments of strategic materials to Nazi Germany. So Standard changed the registration of their entire fleet to Panamanian to avoid British search or seizure. These ships continued to carry oil to the Nazis.

(3) Ford.  Ford made cars for the Nazis.  Wikipedia notes:

Ford continued to do business with Nazi Germany, including the manufacture of war materiel.  Beginning in 1940, with the requisitioning of between 100 and 200 French POWs to work as slave laborers, Ford-Werke contravened Article 31 of the 1929 Geneva Convention.  At that time, which was before the U.S. entered the War and still had full diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, Ford-Werke was under the control of the Ford Motor Company. The number of slave laborers grew as the war expanded ….

(And see discussion under GM, below.)

Wikipedia also points out that Henry Ford was one of the world’s biggest anti-Semites … inspiring Hitler, Himmler and other high-level Nazis:

In Germany, Ford’s anti-Semitic articles from The Dearborn Independent were issued in four volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem published by Theodor Fritsch, founder of several anti-Semitic parties and a member of the Reichstag. In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler described Ford as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” Ford is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf.  Adolf Hitler wrote, “only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews’] fury, still maintains full independence…[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions.” Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his “inspiration,” explaining his reason for keeping Ford’s life-size portrait next to his desk. Steven Watts wrote that Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany,” and modeling the Volkswagen, the people’s car, on the Model T.
Grand Cross of the German Eagle, an award bestowed on Ford by Nazi Germany

***

James D. Mooney, vice-president of overseas operations for General Motors, received a similar medal, the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, First Class.

***

Testifying at Nuremberg, convicted Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach who, in his role as military governor of Vienna deported 65,000 Jews to camps in Poland, stated,

The decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading and the book that influenced my comrades was … that book by Henry Ford, “The International Jew.” I read it and became anti-Semitic. The book made a great influence on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success and also the representative of a progressive social policy.

(4) GM.  The Washington Post reports:

“General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,” said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching a history of the world’s largest automaker. “Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.”

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.

But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home.

***

When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel — a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary — and flying Opel-built warplanes ….

***

The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market.

***

In 1935, GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named “Blitz” truck, which would later be used by the German army for its blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.

The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland” without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.

As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as “German” as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.

Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets.Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company’s German operations were “highly profitable.”

***

After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Russelsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker “Wunderbomber,” a key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney’s notes show that he returned to Germany the following February for further discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal inspection of the Russelsheim plant.

Mooney’s involvement in the conversion of the Russelsheim plant undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort.

***

At GM and Ford plants in Germany, reliance on forced labor [from concentration camp inmates] increased.

***

In a court submission, American Ford acknowledges that Iwanowa and others were“forced to endure a sad and terrible experience” at its Cologne plant ….

Ford has backed away from its initial claim that it did not profit in any way from forced labor at its Cologne plant.

***

Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford received “indirect” profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant because of the overall increase in the value of German operations during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation from the U.S. government after the war for “losses” due to bomb damage to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any benefits derived from forced labor.

Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants.

(5)  Kodak. During World War Two, Kodak’s German branch also used slave laborers from concentration camps. Several of their other European branches did heavy business with the Nazi government.

And Wilhelm Keppler – one of Hitler’s top economic advisers – had deep ties in Kodak. When Nazism began, Keppler advised Kodak and several other U.S. companies that they’d benefit by firing all of their Jewish employees.

(6) Coca Cola. Coke made soda for the Nazis.  Fanta was specifically invented for Nazi-era Germans.

Leading American financiers Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman also funded Nazi eugenics programs.

And the U.S. government actively backed the Nazis in Ukraine 70 years ago.

Inspired By America

As noted above, Hitler and his top henchmen were inspired by Henry Ford’s writings.

The American author Lothrop Stoddard was the source of the concept of “under-man (sub-human)” adopted by the Nazis in regards to Jews and communists.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the idea of killing Jews, communists and gypsies in gas chambers originated in the U.S. … not Germany.

And Nazis were also apparently inspired by America’s treatment of Native Americans.   Specifically, retired Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, Todd E. Pierce – who researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. as part of his assignment in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions – notes:

Stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler.

Finally, the Nazis copied American propaganda techniques.

Postscript: After WWII, America imported and protected many high-level Nazi scientists and spies, and put them into prominent positions within the U.S.

And many allege that we’re supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

This article which was originally published on Global Research in July 2016 outlines the underreported air base of the US in Germany which plays an important role in the US’ global “war on terrorism”. 

*

The overseas hub for America’s “war on terror” is the massive Ramstein Air Base in southwest Germany. Nearly ignored by US media, Ramstein serves crucial functions for drone warfare and much more. It’s the most important Air Force base abroad, operating as a kind of grand central station for airborne war—whether relaying video images of drone targets in Afghanistan to remote pilots with trigger fingers in Nevada, or airlifting special-ops units on missions to Africa, or transporting munitions for airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. Soaking up billions of taxpayer dollars, Ramstein has scarcely lacked for anything from the home country, other than scrutiny.

Known as “Little America” in this mainly rural corner of Germany, the area now includes 57,000 US citizens clustered around Ramstein and a dozen smaller bases. The Defense Department calls it “the largest American community outside of the United States.” Ramstein serves as the biggest Air Force cargo port beyond US borders, providing “full spectrum airfield operations” along with “world-class airlift and expeditionary combat support.” The base also touts “superior” services and “exceptional quality of life.” To look at Ramstein and environs is to peer into a faraway mirror for the United States; what’s inside the frame is normality for endless war.

Ramstein’s gigantic Exchange store (largest in the US military) is the centerpiece for an oversize shopping mall, just like back home. A greeting from the Holy Family Catholic Community at Ramstein tells newcomers: “We know that being in the military means having to endure frequent moves to different assignments. This is part of the price we pay by serving our country.” Five American colleges have campuses on the base. Ellenmarie Zwank Brown, who identifies herself as “an Air Force wife and a physician,” is reassuring in a cheerful guidebook that she wrote for new arrivals: “If you are scared of giving up your American traditions, don’t worry! The military goes out of its way to give military members an American way of life while living in Germany.”

That way of life is contoured around nonstop war. Ramstein is the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, and the base is now pivotal for using air power on other continents. “We touch a good chunk of the world right from Ramstein,” a public-affairs officer, Maj. Tony Wickman, told me during a recent tour of the base. “We think of it as a power-projection platform.” The scope of that projection is vast, with “areas of responsibility” that include Europe, Russia, and Africa—104 countries in all. And Ramstein is well-staffed to meet the challenge, with over 7,500 “active duty Airmen”—more than any other US military base in the world except the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Serving the transport needs of war efforts in Iraq and Syria (countries hit by 28,675 US bombs and missiles last year) as well as in many other nations, Ramstein is a central pit stop for enormous cargo jets like the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster. The Ramstein base currently supports “fifteen different major combat operations,” moving the daily supply chain and conducting urgent airlifts. Last July, when Ankara gave Washington a green light to use Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base for launching airstrikes in Syria, vital equipment quickly flew from Ramstein to Incirlik so F-16s could start bombing.

But these days a lot of Ramstein’s attention is focused southward. The base maintains a fleet of fourteen newest-model C-130 turboprops, now coming in mighty handy for secretive US military moves across much of Africa. With its sleek digital avionics, the cockpit of a C-130J looked impressive. But more notable was the plane’s spacious cargo bay, where a pilot explained that it can carry up to 44,000 pounds of supplies—or as many as 92 Army Airborne “jumpers,” who can each be saddled with enough weapons and gear to weigh in at 400 pounds. From the air, troops or freight—even steamrollers, road graders, and Humvees—leave the plane’s hold with parachutes. Or the agile plane can land on “undeveloped air fields.”

With Ramstein as its home, the C-130J is ideal for flying war matériel and special-operations forces to remote terrain in northern and western Africa. (The Pentagon describes it as “a rugged combat transporter designed to take off and land at austere fields.”) In mid-2014, the itinerary of a single trip got into a fleeting news story when a teenage stowaway was found dead in a wheel well of a C-130J at Ramstein, after the plane returned from a circuit to Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, and Chad. Stealthy intervention has escalated widely in the two years since journalist Nick Turse found that the US military was already averaging “far more than a mission a day on the continent, conducting operations with almost every African military force, in almost every African country.”

The officers I met at Ramstein in early spring often mentioned Africa. But the base mission of “power projection” hardly stops there.

*  *  *

In the American foreign policy lexicon, peace has become implausible, a faded memory, a mythic rationale for excelling at war. An airlift squadron at the Ramstein Air Base, which proudly calls itself the “Fighting Doves,” displays a logo of a muscular bird with dukes up. On lampposts in a town near Ramstein’s gates, I saw campaign posters for Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke) with a picture of a dove and a headline that could hardly have been more out of sync with the base: Wie lange wollt lhr den Frieden noch herbei-bomben? “How much longer do you want to keep achieving peace by bombing?” Such questions lack relevance when war is perceived not as a means to an end, but an end in itself.

More than ever, with relatively few US troops in combat and air war all the rage, the latest military technology is the filter of the American warrior’s experience. When Ramstein’s 60,800-square-foot Air and Space Operations Center opened in October 2011, the Air Force crowed that it “comes with 40 communication systems, 553 workstations, 1,500 computers, 1,700 monitors, 22,000 connections, and enough fiber optics to stretch from here to the Louvre in Paris.” (Mona Lisa not included.) A news release focused on “the critical mission of monitoring the airspace above Europe and Africa” and “controlling the skies from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Needles.” But the Defense Department didn’t mention that the new hyper-tech center would be vital to the USA’s drone war.

Ramstein receives visual images from drones via satellite, then relays the images to sensor operators and pilots at computer terminals in the United States. “Ramstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program,” says Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator who participated in drone attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia for five years while stationed in New Mexico and Nevada. “All information and data go through Ramstein. Everything. For the whole world.”

Bryant and other sensor operators had Ramstein on speed dial: “Before we could establish a link from our ground-control station in the United States to the drone, we literally would have to call Ramstein up and say ‘Hey, can you connect us to this satellite feed?’ We would just pick up the phone and press the button and it automatically dials in to Ramstein.” Bryant concluded that the entire system for drone strikes was set up “to take away responsibility, so that no one has responsibility for what happens.”

The US government’s far-flung system for extrajudicial killing uses Ramstein as a kind of digital switchboard in a process that fogs accountability and often kills bystanders. A former Air Force drone technician, Cian Westmoreland, told me that many of the technical people staffing Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center are apt to be “none the wiser; they would just know a signal is going through.”

Westmoreland was stationed in Afghanistan at the Kandahar Air Field, where he helped build a signal relay station that connected to Ramstein. He never moved a joystick to maneuver a drone and never pushed a button to help fire a missile. Yet, in 2016, Westmoreland speaks sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes. “I did my job,” he said, “and now I have to live with that.”

During his work on the drone program, Westmoreland developed “a new kind of understanding of what modern warfare actually is. We’re moving towards more network-centric warfare. So, orders [are] dealt out over a network, and making systems more autonomous, putting less humans in the chain. And a lot of the positions are going to be maintenance, they’re technician jobs, to keep systems up and running.”

Those systems strive to reduce the lag time from target zone to computer screen in Nevada. The delay during satellite transmission (“latency” in tech jargon) can last up to six seconds, depending on weather conditions and other factors, but once the signal gets to Ramstein it reaches Nevada almost instantly via fiber-optic cable. Permission to fire comes from an attack controller who “could be anywhere,” as Bryant put it, “just looking at the same video feeds as us pilots and sensors. He just sits in front of a screen too.” As Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recent book Kill Chain, “there is a recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screen—with a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers—is representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents away.”

For all its ultra-tech importance, the Air and Space Operations Center at Ramstein is just a steely link in a kill chain of command, while a kind of assembly-line Taylorism keeps producing the drone war. “I think that’s part of the strength of the secrecy of the program,” Bryant said. “It’s fragmented.” Meanwhile, “We were supposed to function and never ask questions.”

Worlds away, the carnage is often lethally haphazard. For example, classified documents obtained by The Intercept shed light on a special ops series of airstrikes from January 2012 to February 2013 in northeast Afghanistan, code-named Operation Haymaker. The attacks killed more than 200 people, while only 35 were the intended targets. Such numbers may be disturbing, yet they don’t convey what actually happens in human terms.

Several years ago, Pakistani photographer Noor Behram described the aftermath of a US drone attack: “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.”

Even without a missile strike, there are the traumatic effects of drones hovering overhead. Former New York Times reporter David Rohde recalled the sound during his captivity by the Taliban in 2009 in tribal areas of Pakistan: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

But such matters are as far removed from Little America in southwest Germany as they are from Big America back home.

*  *  *

The American drone war has long been unpopular in Germany, where polling indicates that two out of three citizens oppose it. So President Obama was eager to offer assurances during a visit to Berlin three years ago, declaring: “We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones…as part of our counterterrorism activities.” But such statements miss the point, intentionally, and obscure how much the drone war depends on German hospitality.

Attorney Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent Green Party member of the Bundestag, told The Nation that “the targeted killings with drones are illegal executions at least in countries which aren’t in war with Germany. These illegal executions offend against human rights, international law and the German Grundgesetz [Constitution]. If German official institutions permit this and do not stop these actions, they become partly responsible.”

With 10 percent of the Bundestag’s seats, the Greens have the same size bloc as the other opposition party, the Left Party. “To kill people with a joystick from a safe position thousands of miles away is a disgusting and inhumane form of terror,” Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the Left Party, told me. “A war is no video game—at least not for those who have not the slightest chance to defend themselves…. These extrajudicial killings are war crimes, and the German government should draw the consequences and close down the air base in Ramstein…. In my view, the drone war is a form of state terrorism, which is going to produce thousands of new terrorists.”

A lawsuit filed last year in Germany focuses on a drone attack in eastern Yemen on August 29, 2012, that killed two members of the Bin Ali Jaber family, which had gathered in the village of Khashamir to celebrate a wedding. “Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today,” said Faisal bin Ali Jaber, one of the surviving relatives behind the suit. “It is quite simple: Without Germany, US drones would not fly.” But the German judiciary has rebuffed such civil suits—most recently in late April, when a court in Cologne rejected pleas about a drone strike that killed two people in Somalia, including a herdsman who was not targeted.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has played dumb about drone-related operations in her country. “The German government claims to know nothing at all,” Bundestag member Ströbele said. “Either this is a lie, or the government does not want to know.” The general secretary of the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Wolfgang Kaleck, sums up the German government’s strategy as “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.” He charges that “Germany is making itself complicit in the deaths of civilians as part of the US drone war.”

After an uproar over US National Security Agency spying in Germany caused the Bundestag to set up a special committee of inquiry two years ago, it became clear that surveillance issues are intertwined with Ramstein’s role in a drone program that relies on cell-phone numbers to find targets. The Green Party’s representative on the eight-member committee, Konstantin von Notz, sounded both pragmatic and idealistic when I interviewed him this spring at a Berlin cafe. “We assume that there is a close connection between surveillance and Ramstein,” he said, “as data collected and shared by German and US intelligence services already led to drone killings coordinated via Ramstein.”

Left Party co-chair Wagenknecht was emphatic about the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency. “The BND delivers phone numbers of possible drone targets to the NSA and other agencies,” she told The Nation. “The BND and our foreign minister bear part of the blame. They do not only tolerate war crimes, they assist them.”

The United States now has 174 military bases operating inside Germany, more than in any other country. (Japan is second, with 113.) The military presence casts a shadow over German democracy, says historian Josef Foschepoth, a professor at the University of Freiburg. “As long as there are Allied troops or military bases and facilities on German soil,” he wrote in a 2014 article, “there will be Allied surveillance measures carried out on and from German soil, which means, in particular, American surveillance.”

For surveillance and an array of other spooky purposes, the US government created what would become the BND at the end of World War II. “We grew it carefully,” a retired senior Defense Intelligence Agency official, W. Patrick Lang, said in an interview. “They’ve always cooperated with us, completely and totally.” Intelligence ties between the two governments remain tightly knotted. “When it comes to the secret services,” Professor Foschepoth told a public forum in Berlin last summer, “there are some old legal foundations where the federal [German] government follows the American interests more than the interests of their own citizens.”

Extending such talk to depict the current US military presence as bad for democracy in Germany is a third rail in German politics. When Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg quoted from Foschepoth’s article at the Berlin forum—and pointedly asked, “Why are American troops here still? Why the bases?”—the panelist from the Green Party, von Notz, vehemently objected to going there. “I wouldn’t open the discussion or have in the background that this is still an occupation problem or something,” he said. “It’s not a problem of troops somewhere—it’s a problem of lacking democracy, state of law, controlling our secret services today.”

Nine months later, talking with him at Café Einstein on Berlin’s Kurfürstenstrasse, I asked von Notz why he’d pushed back so heatedly against the idea that US military bases are constraining German democracy. “Germany needs to take full responsibility of what is going on on its territory,” he responded. “The German government can no longer hide behind a US-German relation allegedly characterized by the post–World War II occupation. Germany strictly has to ensure that the US intelligence services comply with the law without ignoring the illegal actions of its own Federal Intelligence Service [the BND].”

*  *  *

Whatever the state of its democracy, Germany is continuing to enable America’s furtive warfare in Africa. Ramstein’s many roles include serving as home to US Air Forces Africa, where a press officer gave me a handout describing the continent as “key to addressing transnational violent extremist threats.” The military orders come from the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) headquarters in Stuttgart, a two-hour drive from Ramstein.

At first, AFRICOM—which calls itself “a full-spectrum combatant command”—was to be a short-term guest in southwest Germany, some 800 miles from Africa’s closest shores. A State Department cable, marked “Secret” and dated August 1, 2008, said that “no decision has been made on a permanent AFRICOM headquarters location.” Two months later, just as AFRICOM was going into full-fledged operation, a confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin reported that “the German government strongly supported the US decision to temporarily base” AFRICOM in Germany.

Yet at the outset, as US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show, tensions existed with the host country. Germany balked at extending blanket legal immunity under the NATO Status of Forces Agreement to every American civilian employee at the new AFRICOM facility, and the dispute applied to “all US military commands in Germany.” While the two governments negotiated behind the scenes into late 2008 (one confidential cable from the US Embassy in Berlin complained about the German Foreign Office’s “unhelpful positions”), AFRICOM made itself at home in Stuttgart.

Nearly eight years later, the “temporary” headquarters for AFRICOM shows no sign of budging. “AFRICOM will stay permanent in Stuttgart if Germany won’t protest against it,” said the Green Party’s Ströbele, who has been on the Bundestag’s intelligence committee for almost twenty years. He told The Nation: “We do not know enough about the AFRICOM facility. Nevertheless there is the assumption that this facility is used to organize and to lead US combat missions in Africa. Because of this reason no country in Africa wanted to have this facility.” Whatever political hazards might lurk for AFRICOM in Germany, the US government finds those risks preferable to headquartering its Africa Command in Africa. And there are more and more interventions to sweep under rugs.

“A network of American drone outposts” now “stretches across east and west Africa,” reports the Center for the Study of the Drone, which is based at Bard College. One of the new locations is northern Cameroon, where a base for Gray Eagle drones (capable of dropping bombs and launching Hellfire missiles) recently went into full operation, accompanied by 300 US troops, including special-operations forces. In late winter The New York Times reported that the United States “is about to break ground on a new $50 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya.” In March the Pentagon triumphantly announced that drones teamed up with manned jets to kill “more than 150 terrorist fighters” at an al-Shabab training camp in Somalia.

As drone attacks have widened, they’ve become a growing provocation to a vocal minority of German lawmakers. “We deeply regret Germany’s loss of sovereignty, but the government keeps on acting cowardly,” said Sevim Dagdelen, the Left Party’s leader on foreign affairs. Another member of the party in the Bundestag, Andrej Hunko, told me that “AFRICOM in Stuttgart and the Air Operation Center in Ramstein are very important hubs for drone strikes led by the US military”—but “it is very difficult for German lawmakers to control this issue.”

Hunko and colleagues filed more than a dozen requests for explanation of drone-related policy from the German government, but he says “the answers were always dodgy.” The Merkel government deflects formal queries about Ramstein and AFRICOM by claiming to have no reliable information—a stance abetted by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), now in its third year of serving as a big junior partner to Merkel’s right-leaning Christian Democratic Union. While Left Party legislators and some in the Green Party denounce the stonewalling, they have scant leverage; the two parties combined are just one-fifth of the Bundestag.

Merkel’s stone wall is strengthened by the fact that some Green Party leaders have no problem with US bases. (Citing the very left-wing pasts of several key figures in today’s party, one peace activist near Ramstein tartly remarked that “the Green Party changed from red to green to olive green.”) In the affluent state of Baden-Württemberg, home to AFRICOM headquarters, the state’s Green minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is a military booster. Likewise, the drone program has nothing to fear from Fritz Kuhn, mayor of Stuttgart, the largest city in Germany with a Green mayor. Kuhn declined to answer any of the questions that I submitted in writing about his views on AFRICOM and its operations in his city. “Mayor Kuhn wants to waive the interview,” a spokesman said.

More than publicly acknowledged, the economic benefits of hosting AFRICOM’s headquarters were major factors in the German government’s decision to allow it to open in the first place, a member of the Bundestag told me. With the US military footprint shrinking in the country, Germany’s political establishment saw the chance to welcome AFRICOM as very good news. Today, AFRICOM says that 1,500 US military and civilian personnel are stationed at its Kelley Barracks command center in Stuttgart.

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“Ramstein is a preparation center for the next world war,” Wolfgang Jung said as we neared the base. War has overshadowed his entire life. Jung was born in 1938, and his childhood memories are vivid with fear and the destruction that came with bombs (from both sides). He lost two schoolmates. His father ended up on the Russian front and died in a POW camp just after the war’s end. As a teenager, Jung saw Ramstein open, and in the decades since then he has become a dogged researcher. The base is not just about drones, he stressed. Far from it.

The entire region is brandishing huge arsenals. Ten miles from Ramstein, the Miesau Army Depot is the US military’s biggest storage area for ammunition outside the United States. In late February the depot received what Stars and Stripes reported as “the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10 years”—more than 5,000 tons of US Army ammunition that arrived while the Pentagon was “ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along NATO’s eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive Russia.”

In many ways, this heavily militarized stretch of Germany is now a ground-zero powder keg. The consolidated Allied Air Command, “responsible for all Air and Space matters within NATO,” has been at the Ramstein base since 2013. The command includes a center for missile defense, the nexus of the latest US scenario for a missile shield—which the Kremlin views as a threatening system that would make a first strike against Russia more tempting and more likely. Interviewed by the German newspaper Bild in January, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw “striving for an absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.”

Such matters preoccupy Jung and his wife Felicitas Strieffler, also a lifelong resident of the area. She spoke of Ramstein as a grave menace to the world and a blight on the region. Locals dread sunny days, she said, because roaring warplanes take to cloudless skies for training maneuvers. On a hillside, after climbing a 60-foot tower—a red sandstone monument built in 1900 to honor Bismarck—we looked out over a panorama dominated by Ramstein’s runways, hangars, and aircraft. Strieffler talked about a dream she keeps having: The base will be closed and, after the chemical pollutants are removed, it will become a lake where people can go boating and enjoy the beauties of nature.

Such hopes might seem unrealistic, but a growing number of activists in Germany are working to end Ramstein’s drone role and eventually close the base. On June 11, several thousand protesters gathered in the rain to form a “human chain” that stretched for more than five miles near the Ramstein perimeter. At the Stopp Ramstein Kampagne office in Berlin, a 37-year-old former history student, Pascal Luig, exuded commitment and calm as he told me that “the goal should be the closing of the whole air base.” He added, “Without Ramstein, no [US] war in the Middle East would be possible.” With no hope of persuading the US government to shut down Ramstein and its other bases in his country, Luig wants a movement strong enough to compel the German government to evict them.

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The Pentagon top brass can’t be happy about the publicity in Germany connecting Ramstein to the drone war. “They like to keep these things low key, just because there are points of vulnerability,” former drone technician Cian Westmoreland said, noting that “the military is all about redundancies.” In fact, even while Ramstein’s Air and Space Operations Center was going into action nearly five years ago, a similar facility was on the drawing boards for the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.

According to some sources, the ultimate goal is to replace Ramstein with Sigonella as the main site for relay of drone signals. (Replying to my inquiry, an Air Force spokesman at Ramstein, Maj. Frank Hartnett, wrote in an e-mail: “There are currently no plans to relocate the center’s activities.” He did not respond to follow-up questions.) An investigative journalist working for the Italian newsmagazine L’Espresso, Stefania Maurizi, told me in mid-spring that progress toward such a center at Sigonella remained at a snail’s pace. But on June 21, she reported that an Italian engineering firm had just won a contract for a building similar to Ramstein’s relay center. Construction at Sigonella could be completed by 2018.

As part of the militarization process in Italy—“the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East and beyond,” author David Vine observes—Sigonella already has some infrastructure for satellite communication. Another asset is that Italy is even more deferential to the American military than Germany is. “Italy has become the launching pad for the US wars, and in particular for the drone wars, without any public debate,” Maurizi says. “Our responsibilities are huge and the Italian public is kept in the dark.” And when the Pentagon decides to build big in Italy, it doesn’t hurt the momentum that—as Vine documents in his 2015 book Base Nation—the lucrative contracts are routinely signed with Italian construction firms controlled by the Mafia.

In any event, no one can doubt that the Defense Department has become utterly enthralled with drones, officially dubbed Remotely Piloted Aircraft. “Our RPA enterprise” is now “flying combat missions around the globe,” the general running the Air Combat Command, Herbert Carlisle, testified to a Senate subcommittee in March. There was no mistaking his zeal to further expand drone missions, mangled syntax notwithstanding: “They are arming decision makers with intelligence, our warfighters with targets, and our enemies with fear, anxiety and ultimately their timely end.”

General Carlisle said the US military is now flying five times as many drone sorties as a decade ago—a boost that “exemplifies the furious pace at which we have expanded our operations and enterprise.” But he warned that “an insatiable demand for RPA forces has stretched the community thin, especially our Airmen performing the mission.” Today, almost 8,000 Air Force personnel are “solely dedicated” to Predator and Reaper drone missions. “Of the 15 bases with RPA units,” Carlisle said, “13 of them have a combat mission. This mission is of such value that we plan on consistent increases in aircraft, personnel and results.” Several weeks after his testimony, Reuters—citing “previously unreported US Air Force data”—revealed that “drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising.”

Some in-house government appraisals have concluded that the drone war fails because it creates more enemies than it kills. But the “war on terror” is anything but a failure for many corporations or the individuals who spin through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex. As a critical node in the Pentagon’s global “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” (ISR) system, Ramstein is integral to ongoing boondoggles for contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Dynamics. The bottomless pit for taxpayers is a bottomless well for firms catering to the Air Force, with its jargon-larded pursuit of “a distributed ISR operation capable of providing world-wide, near-real-time simultaneous intelligence to multiple theaters of operation through…robust reachback communications architectures.”

June 11, 2016 protest at Ramstein Air Base. (Courtesy: Activism.org)

Looking back at the milieu of his work in the drone program, Westmoreland has concluded that “it’s more or less a for-profit venture. When you get out of the military, you expect to get a job in the defense sector, an executive position. And really it’s about racking up as many awards and decorations as you possibly can.”

At the top ranks, Westmoreland sees a conflict of interest: “They have an incentive to keep wars going.” For the military’s leadership, the available dividends are quite large. For instance, former NSA and CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden—an outspoken advocate of the drone program—received $240,125 last year as a member of the board at Motorola Solutions. That company has an investment in CyPhy Works, a major developer of drones.

Endless war propels an endless gravy train.

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Like the other drone whistleblowers interviewed for this article, former tech sergeant Lisa Ling was careful not to reveal any classified information. But when we met at a coffee shop in California, what she said at the outset could be heard as subversive of the US drone program: “I would like to see humanity brought into the political discourse.” Her two decades in the military included several years of work on assimilating Air National Guard personnel into the drone program. Now she expresses remorse for taking part in a program where “no one person has responsibility.”

The new documentary film National Bird includes these words from Ling: “We are in the United States of America and we are participating in an overseas war, a war overseas, and we have no connection to it other than wires and keyboards. Now, if that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, it does out of me. Because if that’s the only connection, why stop?”

After leaving the Air Force, Ling went on a humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, planting trees and distributing seeds to people she’d previously seen only as indistinct pixels. The drone war haunts her. Ling asks how we would feel if armed drones kept hovering in the sky above our own communities, positioned to kill at any moment.

In the Little America where the Ramstein Air Base is the crown military jewel, such questions go unasked. For that matter, we rarely hear them in Big America. Yet those questions must be asked, or the forever war will be.

Featured image: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Wess Mitchell (left) and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade on March 14.

The Serbian government is contemplating a “compromise” over Kosovo.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Wess Mitchell last week that his country was “ready to talk about possible compromises” in order to enter the EU, a radical policy shift that’s long been suspected by his critics and which would have to include changing the constitution in order to be legal. It’s not yet known exactly what he intends to “compromise” on, but individuals such as Timothy Less have been speculating since the end of 2016 that it could amount to a territorial swap whereby the northern Serbian-populated regions of the breakaway province are returned to Belgrade in exchange for the remaining Albanian-inhabited majority of the territory being de-facto recognized by the government as an “independent state”.

The problem with this supposedly “pragmatic” proposal – apart from its dubious morality in surrendering the historic cradle of Serbian civilization and the legal complexities inherent in changing the constitution – is that it could easily produce a “domino effect” throughout the region that sees other geopolitical changes occur as well. Serbia’s majority-Muslim region of Raška, which is commonly referred to by its generic Ottoman-era designation of “Sandzak” whenever it’s mentioned by the Mainstream Media, could possibly be next on the chopping block, as could the Kosovo-bordering and Albanian-populated Preševo Valley. Looking beyond Serbia, Macedonia might end up being “federalized” or outright partitioned between its ethnic Macedonian majority and Albanian minority, which could pave the way for both a “Greater Albania” and a “Big Bulgaria” with time.

Bosnia is another Balkan country that could be immediately affected by any speculative “territorial swaps” or “compromises”, as it’s well known that the country’s Serbian half has been proudly protecting its autonomy in the face of the steady and unconstitutional centralizing tendency from Sarajevo. Current Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations and commander of the United States European Command Curtis Scaparrotti recently fear mongered to Congress that “the Serb population” is a “matter of concern” for him “in particular”, confirming that this Russian-friendly people are still in the US’ crosshairs after almost a quarter of century since the NATO War on Bosnia. Interestingly, the US is publicly against the creation of a separate Croat political entity in this fractured nation, but it’s conceivable that it could also “compromise” on this under the pretext that it’s necessary to stop “Serbian secessionism” in the country.

There’s no way to know for sure whether any of these interconnected scenarios would materialize if President Vucic “compromises” on Kosovo, but there’s also no avoiding the fact that the Balkans have always been a geopolitical Pandora’s Box where even the seemingly smallest developments have a tendency to catalyze fast-moving change throughout the region. Another thing to keep in mind is that the US is the only outside power capable of guiding the course of events here because the extent of Russian influence in the Balkans has been largely exaggerated. Moscow wields much more energy and industrial sway than it does political, and as for China, it only cares about the security of its trade routes and logistics centers. Only America has the military-intelligence wherewithal to effect tangible change in the region, and everything that it seeks to do in this regard will be to the benefit of its EU allies and NATO.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Jason Rezaian comments on Bolton’s enthusiasm for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) and what it means for U.S. Iran policy:

The MEK is the type of fringe group that sets up camp across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and hands out fliers filled with unsubstantiated claims. This is America — we let crazy people talk. That’s their right, and I would never suggest that they be prohibited from doing that. But giving the MEK a voice in the White House is a terrible idea.

In John Bolton they have someone who will do it for them.

Now that Bolton is in such an influential position in the Trump administration, his connection with and support for the MEK pose some real dangers for the U.S. He could use his position to funnel misinformation from the MEK to the president to distort U.S. policy in their favor. He might use his position to advocate publicly on behalf of the MEK, and that would give them a de facto endorsement from the administration. Worse still, he could persuade the president that this totalitarian cult is the “real” Iranian opposition, which would simultaneously harm Iranian dissidents and saddle the U.S. with a discredited, deranged cult as its preferred alternative to the Iranian government.

Bolton’s connection with the MEK is not the only disqualifying thing in his record, but it is one of the more egregious red flags that should have prevented the president from ever offering him the job in the first place. If any other group had been removed from the list of foreign terrorist organizations a few years earlier, anyone publicly advocating on their behalf while they were still on the list would have tremendous difficulty getting work with the U.S. government, much less serving as one of the most important officials in the White House. Because the MEK hates the Iranian government, shilling for them is probably considered a plus in this administration. It is a measure of how warped the debate over Iran policy is that Bolton and others like him could openly shill for such a group without becoming pariahs.

Rezaian reminds us just what the MEK is:

But it is the group’s activities in the decades since that have cemented its reputation as a deranged cult. For decades its command center was a compound in Iraq’s Diyala province, where more than 3,000 members lived in virtual captivity. The few who were able to escape told of being cut off from their loved ones, forced into arranged marriages, brainwashed, sexually abused and tortured.

All this was carried out under the supervision of the group’s leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, the husband and wife at the top of the organization’s pyramid. He has been missing since the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is presumed dead. She now runs the group and makes regular public appearances with her powerful friends from the West — such as Bolton.

There has been a shameful parade of former U.S. officials, retired military officers, and has-been politicians making their annual pilgrimage to pay tribute to Maryam Rajavi in Paris every year. Bolton has been a faithful devotee for the last decade, and when he was just a former Bush administration official few people cared that he was disgracing himself with his appearances there. Now that he is going to be the next National Security Advisor, his horrible judgment and sketchy ties to awful groups should receive extensive scrutiny and they should make us extremely skeptical about everything he says and does in that position.

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Donald Trump: Is He Too Dangerous to be Head of State?

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay, March 25, 2018

US President Donald Trump (1946-), as a politician, has succeeded in attracting voters who are dissatisfied or partially dissatisfied with their economic or social situation, especially working class white voters without college degrees. Income inequality and wealth inequality is growing in the United States, and the balance leans toward the winners, even though the losers are more numerous and have not been compensated through job training or social services.

False Flag Operations Will Start New War? Towards a U.S.-Israeli Attack on Syria and Lebanon?

By Edward Curtin and Geopolitics and Empire, March 25, 2018

With Trump’s naming of the war lovers John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, he has signaled that he  is eager to shed more blood and wage a wider war in the service of an imperialistic agenda.

Two Criminal Accusations Against Russia. The Skripal Affair and Flight MH 17

By Michael Welch and John Helmer, March 25, 2018

In a rare show of solidarity, the U.S., Germany, and France have all expressed unity in their position that the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, involving a military-grade nerve agent, was ‘likely’ attributable to Russia.

Continuing Aggression: Nineteen Years Since the Start of the NATO War on Yugoslavia

By Živadin Jovanović, March 24, 2018

Regrettably, the final list of the civilian casualties has not been determined as yet, although the number is estimated to stand at over 3,000. About 10,000 people were wounded. However, the number of those who lost their lives after the end of the aggression due to sustained heavy injuries, or from unexploded cluster bombs, chemical poisoning that resulted from the destruction of refineries, transformer stations, chemical factories and, in particular, due to the delayed effects of the use of missiles with depleted uranium, most likely, will never be precisely determined.

The Betrayal of the Future. Tipping Points in the Earth’s Climate

By Dr. Andrew Glickson, March 24, 2018

As tipping points in the Earth’s climate amplify, including hurricanes, snow storms and wildfires, it appears to be beyond human power to contemplate the consequences of four degrees Celsius warming within less than a couple of centuries, a collapse of civilization and the demise of billions. The consequents of global warming have been underestimated as many cannot bring themselves to look at the unthinkable.

Palestine Sovereignty and the “Peace Process”. What is the End Game? “A Nation is not Defeated Until its Will to Resist is Completely Snuffed”

By Rima Najjar, March 23, 2018

Abbas is scrambling for a political raft to take him to any shore.

How out of tune is he?

Even Jordan is asking Abbas not to undermine Palestinian rights and former Egyptian assistant foreign minister, Abdullah Al-Ashal is calling him a tool for Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’.

The US is threatening to sanction Russia if it sells its S-400 anti-air systems abroad.

Bob Menendez led a group of lawmakers who wrote to the State Department and asked that last year’s “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act”, or CAATSA, be applied against Russia in the event that it exports its latest state-of-the-art defensive technology. The US is evidently scared of the S-400s because it keenly understands just how strongly they undercut the Pentagon’s strategic air and missile dominance and therefore correspondingly raise the cost of any future military campaign. Simply put, investing in this system is akin to investing in one of the most surefire deterrence policies against American aggression, which is why a wide array of states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, India, and China are in the process of doing so.

Qatar had previously been in talks with Russia about purchasing these missiles but looks likely to backtrack on this under American pressure, though there’s recently been speculation that Pakistan might be interested in them as a response to the Pentagon suspending military assistance to the South Asian state at the beginning of this year. Altogether, the identifiable pattern is that countries all across the Eurasian Rimland are interested in buying this technology, with the combined effect being that the US might eventually be shut out of the supercontinental Heartland if all of these prospective sales go through, hence the urgency behind why America wants to sanction Russia for selling its S-400s abroad. Inadvertently, however, this frenzy might backfire and become the best endorsement that Russia could have ever hoped for.

In addition, the threat of concerted American pressure against Moscow and its military partners also creates the opportunity for Russia to lead a broad anti-sanctions coalition in developing and expanding alternative financial and other institutions for limiting the damage that the US could do to their interests through CAATSA. As such, this could become the impetus for strengthening the emerging Multipolar World Order and accelerating the transition away from unipolarity, with the case of possible sanctions and sanction-evading measures related to CAATSA and the S-400s being a trial run for the day when Russia inevitably sells its hypersonic missile technology to other countries in giving them an offensive deterrent to pair with their defensive one against American aggression.

Russia’s “military diplomacy” is helping traditional American allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia diversify their relations with multipolar Great Powers while retaining pragmatic cooperation with the US, with the end result being that they’re able to more comprehensively chart a more independent foreign policy. This ultimately enables them to become the pioneers of a new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM) in the New Cold War that strives to attain strategic equidistance between the US and China, which would be impossible to pull off without the pivotal “balancing” role that their relationship with Russia provides. Approached from this perspective, Russia’s S-400 sales are actually a groundbreaking step in the direction of revolutionary geostrategic change, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the US is reacting as hysterically as it is to this move.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In recent days, Turkey achieved the most notable military victory since the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. On March 18, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) captured the city of Afrin from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) following an almost two-month long military operation in northwestern Syria. The advance, entitled Operation Olive Branch, was widely covered in the Turkish media in a heroic style creating a patriotic frenzy in the country.

During the whole of 2017, the media and authorities were conducting a large-scale propaganda campaign supporting the military and encouraging citizens to enlist. Some foreigners visiting Turkey in the period mentioned leaflets in municipal transport vehicles promoting the ideal of becoming a martyr defending the interests of the country and nation.

Turkish policy is infamous for its flexibility, a rapid and often hard-to-predict ability to change priorities and allies. According to some reports, the Turkish military victory in Afrin had become possible thanks to a political agreement between the Turkish leadership and the administration of US President Donald Trump. In recent months, there was always at least one Turkish deputy foreign minister in the US for negotiations and at one point most of them were there together.

Meanwhile, Ankara was involved in a successful political dialogue with Moscow, thus preventing Russian interference with its plans or support for Syrian Kurds. Nonetheless, the US-Turkish backroom deal was the main factor behind the success in Afrin.

The US halted its military support to Kurdish militias in northwestern Syria and pressured the Kurdish leadership in the rest of so-called Rojava thus preventing a minor chance that the YPG, known in the mainstream media as the SDF, would open up a new front against the Turkish forces. As a result, the YPG abandoned its key stronghold of Afrin almost without firing a single shot.

The number and types of weapons and ammunition captured by the TAF and the FSA in the city proves that the YPG in Afrin had been receiving military supplies from both the so-called US-led and Russian-led blocks. While details of the game behind the scenes are yet to be revealed, the recent developments have, in any case, led to the Turkish military and diplomatic success.

Almost immediately, following the fall of Afrin, Turkey started implementing a more pro-US approach in its foreign policy. It wiped the YPG out of northwestern Syria and thus no longer needs to manoeuvre between the US and Russia over this issue. At the same time, Ankara’s expansionist aspirations are still on the table. The Erdogan regime will try to annex the north and northwest of Syria by establishing a quasi-state or an autonomy controlled by its proxies. The Syrian government, Iran and Russia will not be able to tolerate this. In this  way, the US could become an organic ally of Turkey in northern Syria in the near future.

However, the depth of the possible US-Turkish cooperation will depend on multiple factors, one of them is the Manbij issue. The city is currently controlled by the SDF, which is a mostly PR brand for YPG units backed up by the US. Ankara seeks to kick the YPG out of the city and its countryside by a military force. However, US troops deployed in Manbij and patrolling the Syrian-Turkish border in the SDF-held areas prevent this. In this situation, Turkey has proposed the US to establish a joint security zone in the area, which will not allow the YPG presence. However, the idea has not received a public support from Washington so far.

“That’s funny, because no agreement has been reached,” US Department of State spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters on March 20 commenting on the statement by the Turkish presidential spokesman that the sides have already reached an agreement over the city.

The changes in the Turkish stance towards Russia can be clearly observed through its foreign policy rhetoric. On March 16, the country’s foreign ministry issued an official statement describing the 2014 referendum in Crimea illegitimate.

On the other hand, Ankara seeks to maintain at least neutral relations with Moscow and to develop further the economic cooperation with it. The TurkStream pipeline is a strategically important project for the Turkish leadership because it will allow it to gain control over the transit of natural gas into southern Europe.

In the coming months, Turkey will continue strengthening its political and military influence in the region as well as developing its foreign policy activity. If Ankara succeed in this, the other regional powers will face additional risks caused by the traditional pan-Turkish expansionism, which arises every time Turkey strengthens its military and political power.

Meantime, Turkey has the following goals:

• to consolidate gains and to expand the territory under its control in northern and northwestern Syria as well as in northern Iraq. The expansion in northern Iraq may be conducted under the pretext of military efforts against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sinjar. The military presence in neighboring countries will be justified publicly by the need to create so-called “security zones” to combat “terrorism”;
• to strengthen positions on the so-called Cyprus Issue. Northern Cyprus is a self-proclaimed state occupying the northern part of the island and is recognized only by Turkey. Turkey maintains a notable military force there;
• to strengthen its influence in the Aegean Sea;
• to expand its cultural and political influence into the Turkic states of Central Asia and to restore its clandestine influence on the Turkic regions of Russia.

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This article by the late Professor Edward Herman was among the first articles published by Global Research on September 15, 2001. The article was written in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks

***

One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible.

Editorializing on the recent attacks (“The National Defense,” Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent “resurgent of ethnic hatreds,” but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian “reform”; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.

Prof Edward Herman, right

The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on “religious fanaticism…the anger among those left behind by globalization,” and the “distaste of Western civilization and cultural values” among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.

Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating “nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses” and threatening to respond to “an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses,” as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be “news fit to print.” In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of “disappeared” in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.

During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.

The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of “our kind of guy” Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in “methods of interrogation,” and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his “outstanding service” (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).

The Iraqis then had their turn. Saddam moved from valued ally in the 1980s, whose use of “weapons of mass destruction” against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds caused no problem at all with his U.S. and British friends, to “another Hitler” upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly his possession of “weapons of mass destruction” became an extremely urgent matter as the man had demonstrated an inability to follow orders. The war and “sanctions of mass destruction” that followed have killed more than a million Iraqis, and in the well-know words of Madeleine Albright (image: right), questioned on whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified by the U.S. policy ends, replied, “it is worth it.” No doubt, but an objective observer would recognize that there may be many Iraqis who feel with some justification that the United States is an evil force.

The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas– uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.

All of these victims may well have a distaste for “Western civilization and cultural values,” but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends.

This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions–perhaps even billions–of people “unworthy victims.” The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are prepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.

Featured image: Demonstrators shout slogans and hold Palestinian flags during a protest against the US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, on 7 December 2017 in Gaza City, Gaza (Source: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency)

They do not want to recognise the truth. The project of an independent Palestinian state has ended forever, and any talk about a “Palestinian state” today remains a dead letter that does not go along with its meaning. This is what the Americans, Europeans, Israelis and the Palestinian Authority itself know. There is no possibility for an independent and sovereign state through negotiations based on the current balances.

The project, which was launched by the International Quartet, the US, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations during the George W. Bush era, was concluded with a Road Map for Peace that was supposed to lead to a “viable Palestinian state living in peace and security along with Israel”, as promised. Over time, it has become clear that the project was not about an independent sovereign state, but rather a protectorate curbed with security obligations to the Israeli occupation and restricted with the conditions of grantors who control the daily living of Palestinians who would have to bow to external dictates.

If established, this “state” will today be a dependable non-independent project unable to protect its people and will not enjoy geographical contact between its territories that are fragmented by the occupation. It will be a “state” subjected to the occupation that dominates it, and it will have to fight month after month to receive the crumbs the international funders throw in order to pay the salaries of its employees and security forces.

The expected Palestinian state is basically required to be a security authority to protect the Israeli occupation from the anger of the Palestinian generations who aspire to claim their freedom, independence and their right to return to their land and houses from which they were forcibly displaced. It is obvious that this authority has so far performed its “duties” best under the pretext of “security coordination” even during political tensions between Ramallah and the Netanyahu government.

It seems clear that the Palestinian Authority is in trouble, which explains the current rigorous tone in its speech, especially with the approach of the infamous Trump project called the “Deal of the Century.” The fundamental promises it has made to its people since it was founded in 1994 have not been realised, despite the slogans it has raised about successive “achievements”. People may have forgotten that this power was basically just a transitional phase to an independent state before the end of the last century. However, the temporary situation has become permanent, and there is no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

To compensate for this sovereign stalemate, the Authority held on to some formal independence symbols, such as raising flags and rolling out the red carpet. It has rather remained a mere self-governance administration under the occupation, although it has denied this fact. Israeli forces are still storming Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank and carrying out daily arrests, expanding illegal settlement, and controlling Palestinian movement at crossings and military checkpoints. Several governments have been formed and sovereign positions have been taken under the Palestinian Authority. However, all of its officials remain enchained by occupation restrictions. President Mahmoud Abbas himself has repeatedly stated that he cannot leave his Ramallah headquarters without Israeli approval. Successive complaints from Palestinian prime ministers have been raised over the years from being harshly treated by Israeli soldiers who are the age of their grandchildren. If this is the case with officials holding VIP cards, what does the suffering of Palestinians who are stuck caught between walls, military barriers and settlements look like?

It is not surprising that prominent Palestinian official Saeb Erekat, who has lived the negotiations for a quarter of a century, has announced that the real ruler of Palestine is not Mahmoud Abbas, it is rather the arrogant politician Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli defence minister.

It should be admitted that any “Palestinian state” that will be declared under this deplorable reality will not be a truly independent state, even if the Palestinian leadership will be forced once again to celebrate void achievements with raising more flags and welcoming delegations who will congratulate it.

The fact is that a difficult stage for the Palestinian people has started since the rule of Trump, who seems to seek to impose his forced project to end the Palestinian cause at any price. This time, too, no one has asked the Palestinian people for their opinion and position on this project; neither the US administration nor the Israeli government of course, and not even the Palestinian Authority itself.

The White House master might not notice that the Palestinian cause did not emerge yesterday. It is risky that he and his administration assume that the Palestinian people will bow today and announce the end of history, even if the Palestinian leadership seems weaker and more helpless than ever before.

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The discretionary spending bill Trump signed into law on Friday excludes hundreds of billions of dollars in military related spending, enormous classified amounts for CIA, NSA and other intelligence community black budgets, along with add-on appropriations to come for US operations in multiple war theaters.

America spends over $1.5 trillion annually for militarism, warmaking, maintaining its global empire of bases, highly classified intelligence operations, and related expenses, most of it over and above annual appropriation bills.

US FY 2018 spending is expected to add substantially to the federal deficit, likely exceeding another trillion dollars this fiscal year, amounts increasing annually.

David Stockman estimates the great GOP tax cut heist will increase the federal debt to around $35 trillion by 2028. It’s currently slightly over $21 trillion, around 105% of GDP, the percentage rising annually.

He explained $20 trillion in national debt was reached last September 8 – $21 trillion 186 days later, saying “you haven’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Imagine if US discretionary spending went largely for productive, not destructive purposes – for education, healthcare, low-cost housing, other social justice programs, rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and other homeland needs.

America’s permanent war agenda prevents it – notably since Operation Desert Storm (1991), a decade of Balkan wars, the rape of Yugoslavia and what followed 9/11.

In 1981 when Ronald Reagan’s tenure began, the national debt was less than 32% of GDP. It reached an all-time high of nearly 119% of GDP in 1946 because of WW II spending.

In 2008, it was less than 68%, increasing by around 55% through 2017.

Most discretionary US federal spending goes for militarism, raping and destroying countries, corporate welfare including rewarding banksters, and police state harshness, the nation militarized against its own people – including at the state and local levels.

In his treatise on government, Thomas Paine said

“a republic is supposed to be directed by certain fundamental principles of right and justice, from which there cannot, because there ought not to, be any deviation.”

“(It) is executed by a select number of persons, who act as representatives, and in behalf of the whole, and who are supposed to (govern) as the people would do were they all assembled together.”

“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic, (they) mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them.”

“A republic, properly understood, is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.”

Since its founding, America was never governed by these principles, notably not today, serving wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively, waging war on humanity, the nation thirdworldized to finance it, along with serving its monied interests alone at the expense of most others.

Bloated spending Trump signed into law followed earlier out-of-control budgets.

Stockman believes massive annual deficits are as sure as daily sunrises, the “nation’s fiscal accounts…in free fall…for as far as the eye can see into the future” – a slow-motion “fiscal calamity…unfolding.”

Notably, most US discretionary spending goes for the wrong things, vital ones benefitting ordinary Americans increasingly eroding.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

Bolivia’s efforts to reverse the geopolitical results of the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific with Chile are couched in the liberal naiveté that moral arguments in and of themselves can bring about tangible change in the contemporary Neo-Realist international system.

Chile’s conquest of Bolivia’s Pacific coastline following the now-landlocked state’s utter defeat in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific was psychologically traumatizing for the entire nation and played a key role in shaping its identity in the present day. La Paz has always insisted that the territorial concession agreement was signed by a quisling government under duress, and that Santiago’s annexation of what the victor now refers to as the Antofagasta Region was illegal under international law. Chile also took over a sliver of southern Peruvian territory too, but Lima hasn’t followed in La Paz’s footsteps by agitating for more than the past century for its return, though to be fair, Peru wasn’t left landlocked after this loss and therefore suffered comparatively less than Bolivia did in the many decades since.

This long-dormant dispute is once again at the fore of continental geopolitics because Bolivia has succeeded in getting its case heard at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which has thus brought renewed media attention to its claims. Although the energy- and mineral-rich Heartland state has preferential access to the sea via subsequent agreements that it reached with Chile, it wants to regain administrative-political sovereignty over its lost territory and kick the former conquerors out. Bolivia has an wide array of moral and ethical arguments in support of its case, but at the end of the day, none of them matter much even if the World Court rules in its favor since the globalist body has no enforcement mechanisms for guaranteeing Chile’s compliance.

Liberal Dreams…

It’ll still be a few months before the International Court of Justice makes a decision on this case, so there’s a chance that it will decide to retain the status quo after taking into consideration that Bolivia nevertheless still has unhindered access to the sea via what is now internationally recognized as Chilean territory. Even in the unexpected event that it decides to reverse the geopolitical state of affairs in this part of the world, there’s nothing of tangible consequence that it can do to change the fact that Chile exercises sovereignty over this disputed region. Bolivia is banking on its neighbor adhering to international law despite accusing it of flouting as much for over the past 100 years, which is the epitome of liberal naiveté.

No ruling halfway across the world by a powerless body of unelected and therefore unaccountable bureaucrats is going to get Chile to voluntarily withdraw from the territory that it believes it rightfully received after its victory in the late-19^th-century War of the Pacific. Furthermore, no matter how much “international pressure” Bolivia will try to put on Chile regardless of whatever the World Court’s ruling ends up being, it’s extremely doubtful that it will succeed in getting neighboring Peru – which also lost territory to Chile after that conflict – to formally side with it due to that country’s inclusion in the Pacific Alliance alongside Santiago and a few other Latin American states.

Peru does, however, have ancient civilizational connections with Bolivia and its port of Ilo is the terminal location for the Transoceanic Railroad (TORR) that China is constructing across South America in connecting Brazil to the Pacific via the landlocked state, but this promising Silk Road integrational prospect might not be enough to convince the country to abandon its win-win relationship with Chile out of any potential “zero-sum” pressure that La Paz might put it under. In addition, the reversing of one century-old wartime territorial gain by the International Court of Justice could dangerously open up the Pandora’s Box of drawing into question every other geopolitical change anywhere else in the world since that time, or in its most extreme manifestation, even beforehand as well.

…Are Ruined By Reality

The Neo-Realist school of thought that dominates global geostrategic behavior nowadays, especially in the context of the “19^th-Century Great Power Chessboard” paradigm, teaches that controversial territorial changes of significance are unlikely to occur voluntarily and are more often than not preceded by the use of force. In this instance, Chile won’t give Antofagasta to Bolivia no matter what the World Court rules, meaning that the landlocked state will either have to resort to the unilateral use of conventional force, assemble a “Coalition of the Willing” to assist it, and/or employ Hybrid War tactics to get what it wants, none of which are realistic or viable options at the moment (or ever really have been in this situation).

In the grand sense of how the world actually works, it’s not important whether Bolivia is “right” and Chile is “wrong” – that alone, in spite of whichever globalist body or other third-party entity feels the same way, isn’t going to convince Santiago to surrender the disputed territory. The only thing that can accomplish that in this case is force, which is beyond La Paz’s capabilities and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s improbable that Bolivian President Evo Morales doesn’t realize this, which suggests that he might have other reasons beside soft power prestige and international attention for focusing so much on this sensitive issue at this point in time.

Morales’ Electioneering Magic

The country’s first-ever indigenous leader just won a Supreme Court rulingallowing him to run for an unprecedented fourth term in office next year following the narrow defeat of a recent referendum on this issue, which he blamed on his right-wing foes in Bolivia’s resource-rich “Media Luna” region of the east. Morales’ opponents have been fiercely against him for over a decade now, sometimes even resorting to violence in a desperate bid to provoke the security services into an overreaction that could then be decontextualized and disseminated to “delegitimize” his government. These forces want to “federalize” the country and thereby allow their hoped-for autonomous regions to retain control over their finances, which would in turn be deprived from the majority indigenous-inhabited mountainous western part of the country.

The end result of this plan would be the collapse of Morales’ leftist-socialist welfare programs that have made enormous progress in bettering the living conditions of Bolivia’s native people but which are considered to be financially dependent on the oil and gas resources extracted from the “Media Luna”. That said, the country’s strategic lithium reserves are located mainly in the western half of the state that would be under mostly indigenous control in any prospective “federalization” scenario, but even so, the TORR would still run completely through the “Media Luna”. In order to prevent the “Bosnification” of his country and the very likely re-impoverishment of its majority-indigenous population after they’re cut off from energy revenues and the TORR trade, Morales must win re-election next year, and he’s hoping that his renewed focus on what Chile describes as its Antofagasta Region will help him at the upcoming polls.

It’s not to suggest that Morales is entirely cynical and doesn’t care about returning this lost territory to Bolivia – he does, and he’s totally serious about it – but that he’s wise enough to realize that it won’t happen just because a globalist body might rule in his country’s favor sometime in the coming months. Instead, the contemporary value in reviving this dispute relevantly resides in him being able to galvanize the masses under a patriotic pretext that he could then redirect towards a resounding electoral victory that he absolutely needs to be achieved by a wide enough margin to avoid any external (US) accusations of “fraud”, which will predictably be leveled by the opposition anyhow despite the ultimate results (so long as they’re in his favor).

Concluding Thoughts

Fearful for his political future and that of his country after narrowly losing the 2016 referendum over changing the presidency’s term limits, Morales knows that it’s now or never and that he absolutely must pull off an electoral victory next year. To that end, he’s poised to ride the patriotic wave that will crest later this year regardless of the World Court’s decision, but he must simultaneously take care to not fall for any of the opposition’s Hybrid War provocations in the meantime as they seek to turn Bolivia into the “New Venezuela” of American-backed destabilization, which in this instance would be indirectly focused on disrupting, controlling, and/or influencing China’s TORR Silk Road megaproject in South America. As such, Bolivia’s international liberal plea for sovereign access to the Pacific is interestingly a realist ploy for domestic political purposes that will have profound geostrategic consequences in the New Cold War.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

The completed neocon takeover of Washington, discussed in a day earlier article, risks unthinkable war between the world’s dominant nuclear powers.

Businessman Trump likely had no idea what he was getting into as president – responsibilities of the office world’s apart from the private sector.

As someone focused on growing his enterprise and money-making throughout his years in business, he surely doesn’t want it lost in a mushroom-shaped cloud.

He entered the White House knowledgable about real estate and his other business interests, nothing about affairs of state.

All presidents rely on advisors, experts in their fields to formulate domestic and foreign policies.

Surely influenced by dark forces, Trump chose the wrong ones, swayed to choose a rogue’s gallery of extremists for key administration positions.

He let Wall Street run domestic affairs, put hardline neocons in charge of geopolitics, their agenda focused on achieving global hegemony any way it takes.

The results are clear, an administration escalating endless wars of aggression in multiple theaters it inherited, instead of responsibly stepping back from the brink, threatening new conflicts against sovereign independent countries, a path toward possible catastrophic nuclear war – threatening humanity’s survival if launched.

US/EU hostility toward Russia should scare everyone, things headed toward becoming critical if cool heads in Washington, Britain, and other key NATO countries don’t curb tensions – grown hugely dangerous.

I’ve said many times that nuclear war can happen by accident or design. Events since Trump’s election made a bad situation far worse.

US-led Western hostility toward Moscow is fueled by fabricated claims of Moscow interference in America’s electoral process, false accusations of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine, and rage in Washington over Kremlin success in Syria.

It foiled US imperial objectives, wanting Assad replaced with pro-Western puppet rule, the way to isolate Iran ahead of a similar campaign against its government.

Under present conditions, the best case US-Russia relationship scenario is something similar to heightened Cold War tensions at their worst. The risk of something far more dangerous is huge.

Strategic containment of Russia has been US policy throughout the post-WW II period – formulated by Truman-era geopolitical advisor George Kennan, saying:

“The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

Back then, defeating communism was America’s objective. Today it’s challenging Russian sovereign independence, its superior military might, and Putin’s leadership.

Earlier he said

“(w)e have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today.”

US-led Western nations are “constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position, because we maintain it, and because we call things like they are and do not engage in hypocrisy,” adding:

“Everything has its limits. In Ukraine, our Western partners (sic) crossed the red line.” They “act(ed) irresponsibly and unprofessionally.”

Putin’s opposition to US hegemonic aims made him public enemy number one in Washington.

The false flag UK Skripal incident, likely jointly orchestrated with Washington, exacerbated already dismal relations with Moscow.

They’re more likely to worsen ahead than improve. Given recent events, along with neocons controlling US geopolitics, the risk of East/West confrontation is dangerously high.

Is US war on Russia inevitable? It’s increasingly likely if hostility toward the Kremlin keeps escalating – fueled by a near-daily drumbeat of Russophobic media reports.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s phrase “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” applies to what’s going on today.

Will neocon-controlled Washington’s rage for dominance destroy us all? The possibility should terrify everyone everywhere!

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

A lot of people close to the US president wanted to prevent it at any cost but Donald Trump congratulated President Putin anyway and had a phone conversation with him. The US president said that the two would meet “in the not too distant future.” Preventing an arms race is one issue on the agenda. Donald Trump knew the move would bring forth a tempest but he did it anyway. The president considered the relationship with Moscow to be important enough to defy his numerous opponents. Serbia has already offered to host a summit.

Right after the two presidents’ conversation, the Russian and American chiefs of staff discussed Syria. What’s even more important is that they have agreed to more military-to-military contacts in the future. Why has it suddenly become so important for Washington to launch a dialog on defense issues? The answer was provided by General John E. Hyten, the Commander of US Strategic Command, who admitted in the Senate that the US is defenseless in the face of the threat from hypersonic weapons. This realization came right after Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed his recent information about the new systems capable of hypervelocity flight that are currently being tested and are soon to be operational.

The US is a great military power but it’s not strong enough to force everyone to dance to its tune. Its defense programs suffer from serious shortcomings. The current arms-control system is in crisis. New challenges keep cropping up. They should be incorporated into the international security agenda but that’s not happening.

The looming hypersonic race is a burning issue that still needs to be addressed. It’s a domain in which the US is lagging behind Russia. When the Russian president announced those breakthroughs in military technology, his revelations were met with some skepticism in the West. But the ensuing events proved him right. Vladimir Putin pulled it off, making hotheads come to their senses and realize the need for talks to address the security challenges. Washington needs this dialog more than Moscow does.

So, the Americans’ coveted leadership in military technology has turned out to be a pipe dream. But their furtive steps to bring NATO right to Russia’s doorstep are not. The most interesting things often fall off the radar.

Moldova is to planning to phase out its draft in order to have a professional military. This month, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine formed an anti-Russia alliance. Moving to an all-volunteer force is in keeping with the political goals of this group and is seen as an important step on the path to NATO membership. That reform is scheduled to begin this fall. This is a very costly endeavor, especially when one is talking about the poorest country in Europe. Chisinau cannot afford it. It will be fully dependent on assistance from Romania and other NATO states.

Moldova’s process of embracing the bloc has accelerated recently. A joint Romanian-Moldovan task force equipped and trained in accordance with NATO standards is on its way. That step was agreed on in February. According to the military cooperation agreement signed by Chisinau and Bucharest in 2012 and ratified by the Moldovan parliament in 2013, Romanian troops and police forces enjoy freedom of movement on Moldovan territory. In other words, a NATO member has a free hand in Moldova, although the region of Transnistria, where Russian peacekeepers are stationed, is part of that country. This is a real hornet’s nest and the problem remains unaddressed.

The fact that Poland has shifted its best military forces, including its most modern tanks, eastward has not gone unnoticed in Russia. The country will receive 70 AGM-158B JASSM-ER long-range air-to-surface missiles from the US by 2020 or a bit earlier. With an operational range of roughly 1,000 km, this stealth weapon boasting a penetrating warhead can hit infrastructure deep inside Russia. One does not have to be a military expert to realize that the JASSM-ER’s prime mission is to knock out Russian Iskander short-range missiles deployed in the Kaliningrad region in a first strike.

The small Polish town of Powidz is to become a NATO hub for the Baltics and Northern Europe. Construction is underway to build a storage facility for a brigade’s worth of military hardware and personnel. The US Aegis Ashore BMD system will be operational in Poland this year. This is a highly destabilizing weapon that will become a target for a first strike by the Russian military.

Nor has Russia forgotten about the 300 US Marines stationed in Norway, or the construction of a sophisticated new radar system known as Globus 3 in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. This is a violation of international law, as Svalbard was supposed to be demilitarized under a 1925 treaty. The facility there is an element of NATO’s ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. The joint US-Norwegian radar station is viewed by Moscow as a clear provocation. Norway is to be provided with over 50 US F-35 stealth fighters in 2019, enabling it to strike Russian territory. The F-35 is a nuclear-capable plane.

All these moves are being closely watched by the Russian military. Even if new weapons are incorporated into the bilateral arms-control agenda, the efforts to create the potential for a first strike near Russia’s borders are certainly not something Moscow can turn a blind eye toward. This does not create the right environment for a security dialog between Moscow and Washington. Everything is connected.

What Russia and the US really need is not just talks about curbing super weapons, but also negotiations addressing a much broader security agenda.

*

Alex Gorka is a defense and diplomatic analyst.

Featured image is from the author.

American journalism has long maintained a sort of egalitarian myth about itself. While our country’s free press requires no formal training or licensing, an honest history of the profession shows very distinct hierarchies, from the vaunted Runyonesque blue-collar  beat reporter to legendary insiders, like Washington uber-columnist Scotty Reston, who act as handmaidens to the powerful. And it is no coincidence that arguably the nation’s two preeminent newspapers—the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—stand apart as the most rarefied of perches in our nation’s news ecosystem. It’s at these outlets that these class distinctions are the most glaring—and most problematic.

Just how elite these papers have become was the subject of a new study from Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, respectively. The two have just published a survey in the Journal of Expertise(3/18) that looked at the educational backgrounds of hundreds of Times and Journal staffers, comparing them to the elite individuals these papers routinely cover. The survey reveals how the staffs of the Times and Journal are starkly different than typical journalists. The findings also tell us a lot about how reporters and editors from these two news organizations cover the powerful, as well as why their coverage often falls short of holding the powerful to account.

The reality is that the average New York Times reporter shares much more in the way of educational and cultural background with those they cover than with the general public. Or, as the study found: “Elite journalists resemble senators, billionaires and World Economic Forum attendees in terms of educational attainment.”

As a result, the study concludes that, among those criteria, “top 1 percent people are overrepresented among the New York Times and Wall Street Journal mastheads by a factor of about 50.”

The specific numbers are even more illuminating. According to the survey, “43.9 percent of New York Times and 49.8 percent of Wall Street Journal staff editors/writers attended an elite school.” (At the center-left DC-insider magazine The New Republic, this elite background bias was even more pronounced, as nearly two-thirds of the current staff went to an elite college, and over half attended an Ivy League school.) And even though most journalists do not possess a master’s degree in the field, at the Journal, more than half of reporters and editors had one (at the Times, the number was lower, 14 percent). For both papers, a master’s degree from Columbia University was most prevalent and, according to the authors, “convey[ed] a definite advantage on those hoping to work at elite newspapers.”

Proportion of various occupations that attended elite schools (1.0 = 100 percent) Source: Journal of Expertise (3/18)

To be sure, Columbia’s physical proximity to the Times and Journal plays a part in its alumni’s propensity to be on the staff of those papers; graduates who already live in New York City, after all, are more likely to get jobs with news organizations in that city. Likewise, there is no doubt a correlation between the school’s reputation as having one of the best journalism schools in the country and the willingness of newspapers with high-profile, national reputation to seek out those who attended that school. (Disclosure: I graduated from Columbia’s Journalism School, where my master’s adviser, and numerous other professors, worked for the Times. I have never written for either the Times or the Journal.) However, the paper’s authors also point out that there could be a strong but subtle bias coloring these hiring decisions, one that presupposes to be all about objective merit, but in fact also relies upon in-group signaling (emphasis added):

It is unclear whether a master’s degree from an institution such as Columbia University confers added skills or simply builds a journalist’s network, thereby giving them access to jobs at elite papers such as the WSJ and NYT. Social networks may be disproportionately important in publishing and the arts/humanities generally, given that there are fewer quantitative gauges of output (patents earned/peer-reviewed articles submitted) and talent is more subjectively judged in journalism and publishing.

This is almost certainly true. Journalism is a job that is best learned by doing, which is why the curriculum at journalism schools like Columbia emphasizes reporting, writing and editing actual news stories rather than news theory.

So in a highly competitive journalism job market—which is even more magnified at high-profile newspapers like the Times and Journal—who you know can end up being the tipping point. This strong tendency to hire journalists with academic backgrounds from elite and Ivy League schools, in effect, replicates the same implicit biases that distort admissions to those schools, which are mostly private institutions located on the East and West Coasts with extremely high tuition. Current tuition for Columbia’s full-time, 10-month M.S. program, for example, runs to $105,000 with living expenses.

While many of these elite, competitive schools do make a point of seeking diverse student bodies, and possess large endowments that allow for scholarships for those in need, the high cost of entry naturally precludes many otherwise capable candidates. (I graduated from Columbia Journalism School’s part-time program, which offered no scholarships but allowed me to work full-time and go to school.) So even with these schools’ efforts to recruit students of lower socioeconomic status and diverse ethnic backgrounds, the byproduct of their upper-class student bodies ends up creating an increasingly cloistered news staff whose personal experiences, assumptions and blindspots are unrepresentative of the country in terms of culture and class.

Of course, it should be noted that both the Times and the Journal publish excellent, rigorous journalism every day. Both papers employ plenty of journalists with varied work and class backgrounds as well as educations, and our democracy, on the whole, would be poorer without them. And yet the more the staffs of the Times and Journal resemble those powerful politicians and wealthy public figures that they cover, the greater the risk they will become too credulous or incurious about them, whether intentionally or unwittingly. This, in turn, makes it that much harder for those papers to produce necessarily fair and critical coverage. And because these two newspapers occupy such a key position of prestige, their institutional blindspots can ripple outward through our news ecosystem, fostering reporting failures on a massive scale.

Image on the right: Judith Miller

This point is particularly salient on this, the 15th anniversary of the US’s invasion of Iraq. Of all the flawed reporting by the mainstream media leading up to the war, perhaps none was a bigger contributor to that foreign policy disaster than that of the New York Times’ Judith Miller (Media Beat, 10/17/05). She fits the same profile uncovered by this latest study, having gotten an undergraduate degree from Barnard (now part of Columbia) and a master’s of public affairs from Princeton. Thanks to her background and years of national security reporting at the Times, for which she won a Pulitzer in 2001, Miller had become member of the tony Aspen Institute, a veritable Who’s Who of Washington foreign policy insiders, where she enjoyed access to numerous senior Bush administration officials.

In 2002, those officials wanted to push a phony story about Iraqi WMDs, and Miller, whose reporting clearly suggests she viewed those officials as kindred spirits instead of sources to vet, was more than willing to tell it. And if more and more reporters and editors at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal similarly mirror the powerful subjects that they cover, the likelihood of more such catastrophic failures of journalism will only increase.

*

Reed Richardson is a media critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, AlterNet, Harvard University’s Nieman Reports and the textbook Media Ethics (Current Controversies).

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated.

When you go online you have certain expectations. You expect to be connected to whatever website you want. You expect that your cable or phone company isn’t messing with the data and is connecting you to all websites, applications and content you choose. You expect to be in control of your internet experience.

When you use the internet you expect Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is the basic principle that prohibits internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from speeding up, slowing down or blocking any content, applications or websites you want to use. Net Neutrality is the way that the internet has always worked.

In 2015, millions of activists pressured the Federal Communications Commission to adopt historic Net Neutrality rules that keep the internet free and open — allowing people to share and access information of their choosing without interference.

But right now the internet is in peril. On Dec. 14, 2017, the FCC’s Republican majority approved Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to gut the Net Neutrality protections.

A former Verizon lawyer and a Trump appointee, Pai ignored the widespread outcry against his plan from millions of people, lawmakers, companies andco public-interest groups.

We can’t let Pai have the last word on this — which is why we’re calling on Congress to use a “resolution of disapproval” to overturn the FCC’s vote to dismantle the Net Neutrality rules.

Urge lawmakers to reverse the FCC vote today.

What is Net Neutrality?

Net Neutrality is the internet’s guiding principle: It preserves our right to communicate freely online. Net Neutrality means an internet that enables and protects free speech. It means that ISPs should provide us with open networks — and shouldn’t block or discriminate against any applications or content that ride over those networks. Just as your phone company shouldn’t decide who you call and what you say on that call, your ISP shouldn’t interfere with the content you view or post online.

The internet without Net Neutrality isn’t really the internet.

What will happen to the internet now?

Without the Net Neutrality rules, companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will be able to call all the shots and decide which websites, content and applications succeed.

These companies can now slow down their competitors’ content or block political opinions they disagree with. They can charge extra fees to the few content companies that can afford to pay for preferential treatment — relegating everyone else to a slower tier of service.

The consequences will be particularly devastating for marginalized communities media outlets have misrepresented or failed to serve. People of color, the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples and religious minorities in the United States rely on the open internet to organize, access economic and educational opportunities, and fight back against systemic discrimination.

Without Net Neutrality, how will activists be able to fight oppression? What will happen to social movements like the Movement for Black Lives? How will the next disruptive technology, business or company emerge if internet service providers let only incumbents succeed?

Tell me about the Title II rules we just lost. Why is Title II so important?

After a decade-long battle over the future of the internet, in 2015 the FCC adopted strong Net Neutrality rules based on Title II of the Communications Act, giving internet users the strongest protections possible.

Courts rejected two earlier FCC attempts to craft Net Neutrality rules and told the agency that if it wanted to adopt such protections it needed to use the proper legal foundation: Title II. In February 2015, the FCC did just that when it reclassified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II.

Title II gave the FCC the authority it needed to ensure that companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon can’t block, throttle or otherwise interfere with web traffic. Title II preserved the internet’s level playing field, allowing people to share and access information of their choosing. These rules ushered in a historic era of online innovation and investment.

The Title II rules also withstood two challenges from industry. Free Press helped argue the case defending the FCC — and on June 14, 2016, a federal appeals court upheld the open-internet protections in all respects.

We’re now preparing to sue the FCC to restore the Title II rules.

Why is Net Neutrality so crucial for communities of color?

The open internet allows people of color to tell their own stories and organize for racial justice. When activists are able to turn out thousands of people in the streets at a moment’s notice, it’s because ISPs aren’t allowed to block their messages or websites.

The mainstream media have long misrepresented, ignored and harmed people of color. And thanks to systemic racism, economic inequality and runaway media consolidation, people of color own just a handful of broadcast stations.

This dynamic will only get worse: In 2017, Chairman Pai demolished most of the remaining media-ownership rules. The lack of diverse ownership is a primary reason why the media have gotten away with criminalizing and dehumanizing communities of color.

The open internet allows people of color and other vulnerable communities to bypass traditional media gatekeepers. Without Net Neutrality, ISPs could block speech and prevent dissident voices from speaking freely online. Without Net Neutrality, people of color would lose a vital platform.

And without Net Neutrality, millions of small businesses owned by people of color wouldn’t be able to compete against larger corporations online, which would deepen economic disparities.

Why is Net Neutrality important for businesses?

Net Neutrality is crucial for small business owners, startups and entrepreneurs, who rely on the open internet to launch their businesses, create markets, advertise their products and services, and reach customers. We need the open internet to foster job growth, competition and innovation.

It’s thanks to Net Neutrality that small businesses and entrepreneurs have been able to thrive online. But without Net Neutrality, ISPs will exploit their gatekeeper position and destroy the internet’s fair and level playing field.

Without Net Neutrality, the next Google or Facebook will never get off the ground.

What can we do now?

Congress has the power to reverse the FCC’s vote. Urge your lawmakers to use a “resolution of disapproval” to overturn the FCC’s decision to dismantle the Net Neutrality rules.

The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to clamp down on dissent. If we lose Net Neutrality, it will have succeeded.

“Weary men, what reap ye?—Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?— human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger–stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
There’s a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door?
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping— would to God that we were dead;
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
Speranza (Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde)[1]

Last Wednesday I attended a preview for a forthcoming Irish film, Black 47 (Director Lance Daly), about the worst year of the catastrophic Irish famine and is set in the west of Ireland in 1847.

The story centres around an Irish soldier, Feeney (James Frecheville), returning from serving the British Army in Afghanistan only to find most of his family have perished in the Famine or An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger) as it is known in Gaelic.

The English and Irish terms for Ireland’s greatest tragedy are infused with different ideological approaches to the disaster. By emphasising the failure of the potato crop only, the impression is given that there was no food to be had on the island when the opposite was true – there were many other crops which did not fail but were not accessible to the vast majority of the people – hence, the Great Hunger.

In Black 47, the colonised fight back as Feeney puts the skills he has learned abroad with the British army to effective use in Ireland. He kills or executes the various people involved in the British colonial system he blames for the starvation and death of his family: from the bailiff to the judge to the colonial landlord. Moreover, Feeney goes a step further as he refuses to speak English to those in power before he kills them, reflecting back to them an immediate understanding of the powerlessness of those without the linguistic tools to negotiate compromises (as was seen in the film when a monolingual Irish speaker gets tough justice for ‘refusing’ to speak English in court).

Back in the late 1980s a book entitled ‘The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures’ [1989] showed how the language and literature of the empire, English, was used by colonised peoples in the creation of a radical culture to aid their resistance to the hegemony of imperial power. However, now with many of his family
dead, Feeney has ceased to be a Caliban profiting on the language of his masters and becomes a powerfully drawn hero who is uncompromising in his insistence that the Irish language and culture will be a respected equal to the imposed English language and culture of the colonists.

In the film the ruling class and their hierarchy of supporters are flush with food and the army is used to transport harvested crops to the coast and exportation. This fact is displayed symbolically when one of Feeney’s victims is literally ‘drowned’ in food, as he is found head first in a sack of wheat.

The international aspect of the Black 47 narrative hints at the geopolitics of the day with Feeney’s return from Afghanistan and the concurrent mass emigration to the United States from Ireland. Feeney’s indignation at finding out how his masters have treated his own family and compatriots as he risked his life for them abroad is similar to the
treatment of the African-American soldiers of the Vietnam war on their return to the United States.

But this is not a black and white, Irish versus the Brits, movie. There is complexity as some of the British show empathy for the desperate Irish and pay the ultimate price or go on the run.

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” (Francis Bacon)

Black 47 is a revenge movie which is cathartic for an audience feeling the utter helplessness of the victims living in a brutal system without real justice, where what should have been their protectors (the law, the state, the army, etc.) became their attackers and betrayed them. In previous food crises, according to Christine Kenealy, the –

“Closure of ports was a traditional, short-term response to food shortages. It had been used to great effect during the subsistence crisis of 1782-4 when, despite the opposition of the grain merchants, ports had been closed and bounties offered to merchants who imported food to the country. During the subsistence crisis of 1799-1800, the government had placed a temporary embargo on the export of potatoes from Ireland. In 1816 and 1821, the British government had organised the shipment of grain into areas in the west of Ireland where there were food shortages. The grain was then sold on at low prices. Similar intervention and market regulation occurred in Britain.” [2]

Unfortunately for Ireland, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886), a British civil servant and colonial administrator, was put in charge of administering famine relief. Trevelyan was a student of the economist Thomas Malthus and a believer in laissez faire economics and the free hand of the market. Trevelyan described the famine as an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” as well as “the judgement of God”. [3]

With this change in attitude on the part of the British government towards food shortages, the crisis was doomed from the beginning. Kinealy states:

“In 1847 alone, the worst year of the Famine, almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the major ports of Britain, that is, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. Over half of these ships went to Liverpool, the main port both for emigration and for cargo.” [4]

Ultimately, one million people starved to death and one million emigrated reducing the population by about 20% – 25%.

Black 47 is an uncompromising film that depicts the harrowing results of a crop failure combined with an ultra exploitative system that knew no moral or legal boundaries. Sure, attempts were made by well-meaning people to alleviate the crisis but the failure of the state to end the crisis on a macro level resulted in an unprecedented disaster for the Irish people. It will go on general release in September.

Further research:

For those interested in finding out more about the Great Hunger, here is a select list of material covering different aspects.

Art

The preview showing of Black 47 was to complement a concurrent exhibtion of art in Dublin Castle showing at the Coach House Gallery until June 30. The exhibition, titled ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger’, is an exhibition of the world’s largest collection of Famine-related art.
See this.

Poetry

The full poem by Jane Wilde (Speranza, mother of Oscar Wilde), ‘The Famine Year (The Stricken Land)’ can be seen here.

Music

Sinéad O’Connor – ‘Famine’

Damien Dempsey – ‘Colony’

Christy Moore – ‘On a Single Day’

Books

The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith

The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy by Tim Pat Coogan

The Graves are Walking by John Kelly

Atlas of the Great Irish Famine edited by J. Crowley, W. J. Smith and M.Murphy.
(Massive hardback volume covering almost all aspects of the famine throughout Ireland, lavishly illustrated.)

National Famine Commemoration Committee
The National Famine Commemoration Committee was first established in 2008 following a Government decision to commemorate the Great Irish Famine with an annual national famine memorial day. See this.

Film

Ireland 1848 – ‘An experimental documentary of the Great Irish Famine. Shot as a film might have been shot in 1848 fifty years before the cinema was invented.’
See this.

*

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is a frequent contributor to Global research

Notes

[1] The full poem by Jane Wilde (Speranza, mother of Oscar Wilde), ‘The Famine Year (The Stricken Land)’ can be seen here: http://www.ballinagree.freeservers.com/famyear.html
[2] See: https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/food-exports-from-ireland-1846-47/
[3] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Trevelyan,_1st_Baronet
[4] See: https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/food-exports-from-ireland-1846-47/

I agree with Stephen Lendman  that the Russian government’s efforts to deal with the West on the basis of evidence and law are futile. There is only one Western foreign policy and it is Washington’s.

Washington’s “diplomacy” consists only of lies and force. It was a reasonable decision for Russia to attempt diplomatic engagement with the West on the basis of facts, evidence, and law, but it has been to no avail. For Russia to continue on this failed course is risky, not only to Russia but to the entire world.

Indeed, nothing is more dangerous to the world than Russia’s self-delusion about “Western partners.” Russia only has Western enemies. These enemies intend to remove the constraint that Russia (and China) place on Washington’s unilateralism. The various incidents staged by the West, such as the Skripal poisoning, Syrian use of chemical weapons, Malaysian airliner, and false charges, such as Russian invasion of Ukraine, are part of the West’s determined intent to isolate Russia, deny her any influence, and prepare the insouciant Western populations for conflict with Russia.

To avoid war Russia should turn her back, but not her eyes, on the West, stop responding to false charges, evict all Western embassies and every other kind of presence including Western investment, and focus on relations with China and the East.

Russia’s attempt to pursue mutual interests with the West only results in more orchestrated incidents. The Russian government’s failure to complete the liberation of Syria has given Washington Syrian territory from which to renew the conflict. The failure to accept Luhansk and Donetsk into Russia has provided Washington with the opportunity to arm and train the Ukrainian army and renew the assault on the Russian populations of Ukraine. Washington has gained many proxies for its wars against Russia and intends to use them to wear down Russia. Israel has demanded that Washington renew the attacks on Iran, and Trump is complying. Russia faces simultaneous attacks on Syria, Iran, and the Donatsk and Luhansk Republics, along with troubles in former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union and intensified accusations from Washington and NATO.

The crazed neoconservatives, such as Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, think that Russia will buckle under the strains, sue for peace, and accept US hegemony. If this assumption is incorrect, the outcome of Washington’s hostile actions against Russia is likely to be nuclear war. The side that Stephen Lendman and I are talking is neither the side of Washington nor Russia, but the side of humanity and all life against nuclear war.

How the Russian government could ignore the clearly stated US hegemony in the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine is a mystery. The Wolfowitz doctrine states that the US’s primary goal is “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” The doctrine stresses that “this is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to general global power.” In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Washington’s “overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.” The doctrine also states that the US will act to restrain India’s alleged “hegemonic aspirations” in South Asia, and warns of potential conflicts requiring military intervention with Cuba and China.

By “threat” Wolfowitz does not mean a military threat. By “threat” he means a multi-polar world that constrains Washington’s unilateralism. The doctrine states that the US will permit no alternative to US unilateralism. The doctrine is a statement that Washington intends hegemony over the entire world. There has been no repudiation of this doctrine. Indeed, we see its implementation in the long list of false accusations and demonizations of Russia and her leader and in the false charges against Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, China, Iran, and North Korea.

If Russia wants to be part of the West, Russia should realize that the price is the same loss of sovereignty that characterizes Washington’s European vassal states.

Read Stephen Lendman’s article:

Neocon Takeover of Washington Completed

By Stephen Lendman, March 24, 2018

*

This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Big Lies become embedded in our collective consciousness, they grow roots, metastasize, and become the hardest to dislodge.

The notion that the war on Syria is “humanitarian” (predicated on fabricated atrocity stories falsely attributed to “Assad” who, propagandists would have us believe, “kills and gasses his own people”) is absolutely ridiculous. But people believe it nonetheless.  Historical memory (if it ever existed) is totally obliterated from their consciousness and it is displaced by the Lie[1].

Those who create the lies hold broad-based, infantilized populations, in contempt.

The war on Syria is anti-humanitarian[2] in every imaginable sense.  Evidence on the ground has dismantled the Lie, every day, for the last seven years, but the Big Lie remains ascendant.

Right now, Syrians are celebrating a victory over NATO terrorists in East Ghouta, terrorists who have been targeting school children and innocent civilians in Damascus for years.[3] It is a victory for human rights and for peace as the remaining terrorists are bussed out of the area.

*

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Jeremy Salt, “BBC Betrays the Most Basic Journalistic Principles When It Comes to Syria.” American Herald Tribune. 15 January, 2018.( https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/syria-crisis/2096-bbc-journalistic-principles.html) Accessed 24 March, 2018.

[2] Tim Anderson, “Syria: the human rights industry in ‘humanitarian war’.“  Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies Research Paper. January 2018. (https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/TA-hum-war-18-1.pdf) Accessed 24 March, 2018.

[3] Mark Taliano, “Syrians Have Names And Faces.” Global Research. 21 March, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrians-have-names-and-faces/5632982 ) Accessed 24 March, 2018.

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Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.  

Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

According to Inside Syria Media Center military correspondents, another checkpoint was opened yp to allow for the withdrawal of terrorists and their families from the village of Irbin in Eastern Ghouta on March 24, 2018. In addition, there are dozens of buses ready to transport civilians to refugee camps and ambulances for those affected by the bombing.

Despite the fact that jihadists’ snipers are actively shooting in this area to kill government forces and do not observe the ceasefire, the initiative with the opening of the humanitarian corridors in Eastern Ghouta proved to be quite successful. As for now, tens of thousands of civilians were able to leave the territory controlled by the radicals.

In addition, the unique aspiration of B. Assad and his allies to solve the problem of Eastern Ghouta using peaceful means has affected the militants themselves. Many of them do not want to risk their lives, even for the money of their western patrons.

Attempts by the Ahraa as-Sham and Jaish al-Islam terrorist groups to unite for a joint offensive towards the positions of the Syrian Arab Army have ended in failure. The militants collapsed even to organize a joint defense. Apparently, jihadists are demoralized, and disagreements between the groups are still very strong hindering their unification.

The situation facilitated an agreement between the terrorists and the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, and the process of military withdrawal began. Islamists from Ahrar ash-Sham left Harastа area with their families towards Idlib de-escalation zone.

According to QalaatAlMudiq, some of the radicals from Harasta have already reached the area of North Hama.
The militants holding Jawbar, Zamalka and Irbin reported on the decision to surrender and stop shelling, following the example set by the Ahrar ash-Sham.

It can be concluded right now that the Eastern Ghouta is completely liberated from the terrorists. It seems that recapturing Douma, Beit Sahm, Babbila, and Yarmouk camp’s area is a matter of time.

Image is from the author.

---

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.  

Taliano talks and listens to the people of Syria. He reveals the courage and resilience of a Nation and its people in their day to day lives, after more than six years of US-NATO sponsored terrorism and three years of US “peacemaking” airstrikes.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

Click to order

In the final thirty kilometers’ drive back to my home in the Catskills, along a vacant highway through hills of leafless winter trees colorless and devoid of any sign of life, I inexplicably recall my recent journey in a distant known-but-unfamiliar land. Just a few weeks before, I’d traversed a profoundly different landscape en route from Baghdad to Kerbala city in Iraq.

My Kerbala host and I had quipped that the two hours plus required to reach Kerbala that day was the time I needed to drive upstate from New York city. Except that that holy city is hardly 50 miles from the Iraqi capital. Scores—no, thousands– of military checkpoints slow every kind of movement within Iraq today.

I first traveled to Kerbala 27 years ago, visiting the magnificent Al-Hussain shrine and the city’s general hospital, also named Al-Hussain. On every visit to Iraq during the fierce 13-year embargo (from 1990 to 2003) against the nation– starting in April 1991 when evidence of a government attack against rebels hiding there was still in evidence– I made my way to Al-Hussain General Hospital. On subsequent annual visits, the hospital’s medical staff uncomplainingly helped me document the crime of sanctions, the U.S. campaign deliberately decimating Iraq’s once exemplary health system (along with the entire economy and civil structure).

The four lane highway to Kerbala, the major route into south Iraq, is divided by a wide median. Unlike the vacant fields that stretch to a horizon of palm trees to my right, the median is planted with shrubs and trees. And tributes.
Among the few private cars heading south, I see an occasional small bus. Most vehicles are large transport trucks, and those heading toward Baghdad carry imported goods from Basrah port, or earth from excavation sites in the south.

Although crossing through farmland, viewed from the road there’s little sign of cultivation. Perhaps this is because of the dearth of rain this season. (I would later learn Iraq’s agricultural industry is badly neglected.) Occasionally we overtake a pickup truck loaded with sheep or with vegetables. What roadside structures we pass, auto-repair stations or cafes, look unkempt and uninviting– part of the generally colorless landscape. Now and then I notice a cluster of children in uniform and toting bookpacks, strolling towards their local school.

Kerbala Medical College Students

In the median in the center of the highway is a sight far more compelling and throughout this voyage my eyes refocus there. This is not because of anything alarming or troubling. It’s the stream of arresting, insistent images posted there:– each one a different face, each a martyr of the recent wars (the costly fight against Daesh/ISIS). This silent parade constitutes a kind of running panorama of the battles for Iraq, for its sovereignty, for its honor and its history.

The faces are mainly of young men, most likely no more than 30 years old. Although occasionally, the portrait of an older man, probably an officer, enters this landscape.

All the way to Kerbala, and southward to Al-Najaf and beyond in all directions, Iraq’s roads and highways are adorned with the names and faces of soldiers, most of them volunteers, a placard every few hundred feet, sometimes two or more photos on a single notice.

These martyrs’ banners are posted high, like flags, in rows– mile after mile. Each name a story, each a family’s son, each a patriot, each a sacrifice. For me, a visitor, they evidence the history of what war and nationhood mean.

Today, back in the USA, I ask: Is that vista so different in its meaning and impact on Iraqi citizens from how fields of simple white plaques or crosses at French and Belgian Flanders, at Arlington National Cemetery, or the amassed names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, affect Europeans and Americans?

Although martyrdom may be central to Shiite history, belief and culture, it is deeply embedded in other societies. In Arab culture and thought—martyrdom is expressed in our language as well as our religion. A man can be named Shaheed (pl. Shuhadah) in some countries (see this and this), and street names are prefixed with Shuhadah. The portrait of a martyr has a special place in his family’s home.

A pity that people in the dominant Christian society of the West cannot grasp the universal qualities of the martyr. Was Prophet Jesus Christ not a martyr? As for those who die in battle, sacrifice for the American homeland is visibly displayed today in the high status accorded its soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in inglorious wars moreover. What is “Gold Star Family” but a title honoring American military martyrs?

U.S. veterans, especially the wounded, are heaped with praise for their service and they’re given unlimited government assistance. Even radio and television features regularly tell Americans of ‘noble sacrifices’ of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those stories of hardships, trauma, and handicaps transmit a feeling of martyrdom.

Then come civilians martyred in the daily racist war on America’s streets, deaths that awaken calls for social change. Not co-incidentally it was a religious leader, Reverend Jesse Jackson, who recognized martyrdom in the death of a Black child gunned down for his race: “We must illuminate the darkness with the light that comes from the martyr,” Jackson implored after the death of 14-year old Trayvon Martin.

The paths of martyrs are endless and boundless.

*

BN Aziz recently returned from a two week visit in Iraq. Swimming up the Tigris: Real Life Encounters with Iraq, based on her work in Iraq between 1989 and 2003, is published by University of Florida Press, 2007 plead. Barbara Nimri. Aziz is a frequent contributor to Global Research  

All images in this article are from the author.

With Trump’s naming of the war lovers John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, he has signaled that he  is eager to shed more blood and wage a wider war in the service of an imperialistic agenda. 

It is in the Middle East where this expansion will likely be ignited in conjunction with Israel, and in Ukraine together with neo-Nazis.

But Trump and the Netanyahu government have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one.  No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.  If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will).

Or perhaps they will find what they have already created, as has the UK with the Sergei Skripal lies meant to demonize Russia. Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act. These sinister players have signaled us quite clearly what they have in store.

All signs point toward an upcoming large-scale Israeli/U.S. attack on Syria and Lebanon, with  Russia and Iran as the ultimate objectives. As always, the corporate media play along as if they don’t yet know what’s coming.  Everyone in the know knows what is, just not exactly when.  And the media wait with baited breath as they count down to the dramatic moment when they can report the incident that will compel the “innocent” to attack the “guilty.”

None of this is new.  It has been the American way for a very long time.  It is a twisted history, involving massive propaganda and killing, including assassinations, all in the service of expanding and maintaining an empire built on the blood of innocents.  The following interview explores these matters and much more, all in the hope that shedding light on these machinations will help to prevent them from coming to pass.

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This podcast was originally published on Geopolitics and Empire on March 24, 2018.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

The global trend of connectivity is moving to Northern and Central-Eastern Europe as these regions’ two former Great Powers join forces to deepen their integration with one another and build a new power bloc in the continent.

Poland and Sweden are two of Europe’s oldest Great Powers, though both of them are centuries past their prime and have since seen their influence eclipsed by former competitors such as Russia, Germany, and the UK. The post-Brexit geopolitical reality and Trump’s embrace of his successor’s “Lead From Behind” policy of regional blocs have unexpectedly opened up unprecedented strategic opportunities for these two “has-beens”, and they’re now tacitly cooperating with one another in building a new power bloc in Europe. Sweden – the leader of the “Viking Bloc” of Scandinavian countries and Finland –, is joining forces with Poland – the aspiring hegemon of a “Neo-Commonwealth” that Warsaw wishes will one day rule over the “Three Seas Initiative” – in coordinating the construction of several integrational corridors that will altogether lead to the emergence of a “Baltic Ring”.

A high-speed rail route by the name of “Rail Baltica” is currently being built between Poland and Estonia, whenceforth it might be expanded under the Baltic to Finland through the so-called “Talsinki Tunnel”. Once in the northern nation, existing rail routes could be connected to Sweden via the prospective “Bothnian Corridor”, after which people and freight could link up with Germany through the Swedish-Danish-German rail network that’s already in use. In addition, the German component is already connected with Poland, thereby completing the Baltic Ring. A related element of this developing integrational network is Poland’s planned “Baltic Pipe” that will go through Denmark and bring Norwegian offshore gas to the country. The below map provides a rudimentary glimpse of how this might look if it’s ever completed and fully enters into operation:

It also shouldn’t be forgotten that there are already several ferry services between Sweden and the eastern-southern shore of the Baltic Sea, meaning that the Scandinavian country already has maritime access to the Baltic States and Poland. Because of its sheer demographic and economic size, Germany is clearly a crucial part of the Baltic Ring, but it’s not indispensable in the sense that Swedish-Polish connectivity ventures can still continue without it. Furthermore, these said initiatives are leading to the creation of spheres of influence in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe, whereby Stockholm is once again exerting leadership in its previous imperial realm in the northern part of the Baltic Sea while Warsaw is doing the same along its southern-eastern shoreline.

Finland and Estonia, which are culturally similar nations, can be grouped together as a single strategic entity for the intent of this analysis, and thus might represent a “buffer zone” of sorts, though in a “friendly” way because Poland and Sweden aren’t expected to compete in any traditional manner. In fact, while the “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard” paradigm is veritably in effect today, it doesn’t necessarily take on the same contours as its historical namesake because large-scale conventional warfare between neighboring powers over the “proxy states” between them isn’t anticipated to be a defining element in all cases. Rather, in the instance of Poland and Sweden, these two historically rivaling empires won’t clash, but cooperate, in their shared Baltic Ring space per the logic of contemporary European geopolitics and the win-win zeitgeist of New Silk Road integration.

No one should be under any assumptions that the Baltic Ring would be a Russian-friendly entity, however, since Poland’s political Russophobia is now infecting Sweden, and both Great Power cores are competing with one another in virtue signaling to their unipolar American patron which of the two hates Moscow the most nowadays. This is clearly disadvantageous to Russian interests because of the implication that it has for drawing NATO closer to its borders under manufactured pretexts, but it works out to Poland and Sweden’s benefit because they’re able to secure Washington’s support in their collective quest to carve out spheres of influence in Europe that stand apart from the generally German-controlled EU as a whole. This “decentralization” trend also interestingly aligns with the global tendency of power shifting ever eastward in the 21st century, which is more topical in this sense that it might initially appear.

The Baltic Ring isn’t just a regional collection of states and trading networks inside of Europe, but could one day function as its own Silk Road node in a Multipolar World Order given its connectivity prospects with China. The logical access route to the People’s Republic would be across Russia via the Eurasian Land Bridge, but that might not be politically feasible given the geopolitics of the New Cold War and Poland-Sweden’s hysterical Russophobia. Nevertheless, maritime routes exist along the northern and southern axes, namely through Finland’s desire to link up with the “Artic/Ice Silk Road” via either the Russian port of Murmansk (which is less probable if US-provoked Russian-European tensions persist) or the nearby Norwegian one of Kirkenes, and the possibility of expanding the Balkan Silk Roadfrom the Greek port of Piraeus all the way northward to Poland’s Baltic Ring junction.

In addition, the more logistically complex but currently active corridor through the Caucasus also represents another geographic workaround through which China can connect with the Baltic Ring without going through Russia (keeping in mind that that Poland-Sweden will probably try to avoid having Russia cash in on this trade route however much as they possibly can). The Azerbaijani-Georgian segment of the newly unveiled BTK Railway theoretically allows for the Baltic Ring countries to trade with China via the Black Sea, Caucasus, Caspian Sea, and Central Asia (maritime, mainland, maritime, mainland). If Armenia ever fully develops its Black Sea-Persian Gulf Corridor plans, then a CPEC+ connection to China could also be established across the Black Sea, Caucasus, Iran, and Pakistan, though it’ll still be some years before this is even possible.

From a larger Silk Road perspective, here’s how the Baltic Ring’s connectivity potentials with China look on the map:

The four most important geographic nodes are Finland, Sweden, Poland, and Romania, with the countries of the former Yugoslavia too weak and disorganized to function as the single political-economic unit that they need to be in order to maximally benefit from this and therefore representing nothing more than a transit space in this construction. Out of the four-mentioned states, however, Poland is by far the most important since its population (which strategically translates into labor potential and market size) is almost as much as the total of Sweden, Finland, and Romania’s combined. Excluding Russia from the equation, then China’s Silk Road access routes to Poland go through Sweden-Finland in the north and Romania-former Yugoslavia in the south, all of which have the potential to profit from enhanced Chinese-Polish connectivity via the Baltic Ring and “Three Seas” concepts if they wisely leverage their strategic economic positions.

All in all, the evident pattern on display is that the center of Europe’s strategic gravity is slowly but surely shifting eastward away from Germany and towards Poland & Sweden, with these two “has-been” Great Powers coming together through a new cooperative framework in order to build the Baltic Ring connectivity corridor that they plan to link up with China via the New Silk Roads.The political Russophobia of this developing power center is troubling but not surprising, though the long-term consequences of it might be that China’s envisioned Silk Road connectivity with Europe via the Eurasian Land Bridge could be obstructed as a result. Even so, the Arctic/Ice Silk Road, the Caucasus Corridor (whether across the Caspian or through Iran), and the Balkan Silk Road present northern and southern workarounds for maintaining the Baltic Ring’s commercial access to China.

What this comprehensively signifies is that Poland is becoming the centerpiece of post-European geopolitics in the entire part of the bloc east of Germany, seeing as how it’s one of the most crucial nodes in China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and that the strategic implications of this emerging reality could be far-reaching when it comes to the balance of power in the New Cold War. The Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” and Warsaw’s joint leadership of the Baltic Ring with Stockholm aren’t welcome developments from Russia’s perspective because they’re clearly US-backed moves to deepen American proxy influence all along its rival’s western borderland region, but on the other hand, this inadvertently creates certain irresistible opportunities for China to expand its influence to the furthest reaches of the Eurasian supercontinent and work on silently spreading multipolarity there.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.

“It is a scientific impossibility for Porton Down to have been able to test for Russian novichoks if they have never possessed a Russian sample to compare them to…

If Porton Down can synthesise it, so can many others, not just the Russians.” – Former Ambassador Craig Murray (March 14, 2018) [1]

.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

News of an apparent assassination attempt of a former Russian double agent in Salisbury, England early in March has added fuel to the fire heating up a new cold war between Russia and the West. [2]

In a rare show of solidarity, the U.S., Germany, and France have all expressed unity in their position that the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, involving a military-grade nerve agent, was ‘likely’ attributable to Russia.[3]

While the Russian government has denied responsibility, the government of Theresa May has responded to the incident by expelling 23 Russian diplomats, the largest such expulsion since the cold war.[4]

Doubts however have been raised about the official story. One of the more notable skeptics, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has pointed out that the UK’s only chemical weapons facility Porton Down (coincidentally only 8 miles from the scene of the Skripal poisoning) acknowledged in publications that it has never seen samples of the ‘Novichok’ class of nerve agent such as what was reportedly used to poison Skripal. [5]

As Murray makes clear in a recent article, neither Porton Down, nor the world experts at the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were even convinced of the existence of Novichoks. [6]

Moreover, there is simply no mechanism by which the agent in question could have been identified as Russian. Incidentally, the facility that had been working on the Novichoks during the Soviet era was located at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan, not Russia. [7]

Yet, the UK PM jumped to conclusions about the incident with an alacrity worthy of an Olympic level athlete!

Russian officials are treating the ongoing and intensifying allegations as a provocation, added to a string of such accusations over the last four years. These include the 2014 annexation by Russia of Crimea, the downing of Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in the summer of that year, interference in the U.S. and French national elections, and collaboration with Syrian ‘dictator’ Bashar al Assad in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo and East Ghoutta. [8]

With the Skripal poisoning saga continuing to dominate international headlines, this week’s Global Research News Hour attempts to probe the justification for and context of the West’s latest propaganda push against the world’s largest nation.

In the first half hour, we hear from Moscow based journalist and author John Helmer about his take on the poisoning of former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal, his evaluation of the available evidence pointing to a professional assassination attempt by Russia, his assessment of the political response to the incident, and his opinion of the significance of a recent Court ruling, published on his website, summarizing the blood sampling and other evidence in the case.

In the second half hour, we continue to pursue the ‘Get Russia’ theme with a never before aired interview with Kees Van Der Pijl from October of 2017. Author of a recently released book on MH 17, Van Der Pijl is convinced that the official story of the downing of the flight is impossible. In this half hour conversation, he provides some of the geopolitical context of the incident and speaks to the unlikelihood of political or media breakthroughs regardless of the evidence.

John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, A former professor of political science, sociology and journalism and former staffer with the Carter Administration, Helmer is a frequent commenter on topics related to Russia. His site, ‘Dances with Bears’ can be found at johnhelmer.net.

Kees Van Der Pijl is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the University of Sussex and former director of the Centre for Global Political economy. He is currently active with the Dutch anti-fascist resistance, having served as its president. In 2017 he authored the book, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the new Cold War.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

 
Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-novichok-nerve-agent-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/5632217
2.  Anushka Asthana et al. (March 13, 2018) ‘Russian spy poisoning: Theresa May issues ultimatum to Moscow’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/12/russia-highly-likely-to-be-behind-poisoning-of-spy-says-theresa-may
3. Peter Walker and Andrew Roth (March 15, 2018), ‘UK, US, Germany and France unite to condemn spy attack’; https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/15/salisbury-poisoning-uk-us-germany-and-france-issue-joint-statement
4. Heather STewart et. al (March 14, 2018), ‘Russia threatens retaliation after Britain expels 23 diplomats’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/14/may-expels-23-russian-diplomats-response-spy-poisoning
5. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-novichok-nerve-agent-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/5632217
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/936043/russia-skripal-attack-war-sergei-lavrov-theresa-may-donald-trump

On March 17, the Russian General Staff warned about an imminent attack on Syria. The statement did not elaborate. Of course, some information is classified but an independent and impartial analysis of publicly available information leads one to the same conclusion. Let’s look at the facts.

There are warships deployed by US Navy in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf. They are ready to launch roughly 400 long-range Tomahawks against a target in the Middle East on any given day. Sea-launched cruise missiles were used to strike Syria in April. Anything that is at all related to the military operations on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is hush-hush information, but it’s an open secret that the strategic bombers based there can launch at least a hundred cruise missiles and then use other high-precision munitions in a follow-up attack. On average, one bomber carries 20 AGM-86 ALCMs. Five bombers are believed to be normally stationed on this island that is off-limits to inquisitive outsiders. This means that at least 500 cruise missiles can be fired on short notice.

On March 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Great Britain, France, and some additional countries besides the US had special forces operating in Syria that were engaging the Syrian Army directly. But it’s not just commandos.

It was reported on March 16 that the UK would be stationing a significant number of troops at the US-controlled Al-Tanf military base, adjacent to the Iraqi border. This facility is prominently eatured in NATO’s war planning in Syria. It blocks the corridor linking Iran to Lebanon via Syria and Iraq. The size of the deployment — about 2,300 troops accompanied by tanks and helicopters — is too significant just to be intended to fight Islamic State militants who are already on the run.

Before that, the US had already sent 600 troops with armored vehicles to the base. And American reinforcements have also been sent to the Omar oil field.

On March 12, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley threatened military action against Syria. Experience has shown that the US will strike first and think about explanations later. It’ll no doubt “invent” some pretext to justify its actions.

Tensions have risen since last week. For instance, the mainstream media raised a ruckus over a mysterious “large underground” North Korean military base in Syria! This story about Pyongyang helping Syria to rebuild its chemical stockpiles and other urban legends are going viral.

The escalation coincided with the March 16 meeting between the Russian, Iranian, and Turkish foreign ministers in Astana to discuss further plans to bring peace to Syria, including expanding the concept of the de-escalation zones. That meeting laid the ground for a summit in Istanbul on April 4. There are about two weeks still to go. This top-level event could produce landmark decisions that might foil the West’s plans in Syria. Not much time is left. From the American perspective, this calls for urgent action to stymie that process.

Washington’s plan includes the goal of partitioning Syria in such a way that a large chunk of it would remain under the control of the US-led coalition. The Americans are already assembling municipal councils on the lands east of the Euphrates River. This area must be retained at any cost in order to ensure that Washington has a say in the future settlement of this war-torn country, otherwise all the hard work put in so far will go down the drain, undercutting America’s global standing and diminishing its clout in the Middle East.

Losing Syria would be tantamount to suffering a major defeat in its confrontation with Iran, which it considers its arch-enemy. The plans include a rollback of Russian forces. Syria is the right place to do that. If the Russian military is openly warning the world of an imminent strike, that is a serious threat. And it does not look like a one-strike operation. This time we’re in for something much more serious — a large-scale operation to “contain” Russia, beat back Iran, win the support of the rich oil-exporting Arab nations and make them pay huge sums for American weapons, and show the world the US is omnipresent and adamant in its desire to dictate its will.

Once again this March, the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia and other independent non-party associations in Serbia pay tribute to the victims of NATO’s 1999 aggression on Serbia (FRY).

This aggression took lives of more than thousand defenders, military and the police and their officers, and also of thousands of civilians, including 87 children.

Regrettably, the final list of the civilian casualties has not been determined as yet, although the number is estimated to stand at over 3,000. About 10.000 people were wounded. However, the number of those who lost their lives after the end of the aggression due to sustained heavy injuries, or from unexploded cluster bombs, chemical poisoning that resulted from the destruction of refineries, transformer stations, chemical factories and, in particular, due to the delayed effects of the use of missiles with depleted uranium, most likely, will never be precisely determined. There is a certainty, though, of a large scale of victims of the cancerous diseases never heard of before the aggression, with no end of the suffering of the people at sight. The direct damage from the devastation of the industry, infrastructure, residential buildings and facilities of public importance, was estimated to exceed $ 100 billion.

This year, March 21^st the Central Military Club of Serbia in Belgrade served as the venue for the Conference titled “NATO Aggression 19 Years On – Aggression Continues”. Among the guests were General Aleksandar Živković, State Secretary in the Ministry of Defense, Colonel Iriškić,  of the General Staff of the Serbian Army, Ambassadors of Belarus Valery Brilov and of Palestine Muhammad Nabhan, representative of the Embassy of the Russian Federation Colonel Koronyenko, as well as representatives of other embassies of friendly countries, and colleagues from Montenegro, the Republic of Srpska, Germany, Macedonia, and others.

The Conference speakers included Prof. Dr. Momir Bulatović, former President of the Federal Government of the FR of Yugoslavia, Mr. Nikola Šainović, former President of the Government of Serbia and Deputy-President of the Federal Government of the FRY, General Milomir Miladinović, retired, President of the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, Živadin Jovanović, President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, General Slobodan Petković, retired, Prof. Dr. Milovan Milutinović, President of the Organization of Senior Officers of the Army of Republic of Srpska, Simo Spasić, President of the Association of Families of the Abducted, Missing and Killed Persons in Kosovo and Metohija, and others.

Conference speakers: Nikola Sainovic, Momir Bulatovic, Zivadin Jovanovic, Milomir Miladinovic

The Conference was also attended by about 150 members and friends of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals and of the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, including three former Chiefs of Staff of the Army General Branko Krga, General Dragoljub Ojdanić and General Miloje Miletić.

Tribute to the victims – stop military exercises with NATO in 2019

The participants of the Conference unanimously endorsed two appeals.  The first addressed to the state authorities to declare moratorium on all military exercises of Serbia and NATO in 2019, as the year marks the 20^th anniversary of the aggression, and thus pay tribute to the fallen defenders of the motherland and the civilian victims of this NATO aggression. The second is to invite all peace-dedicated organizations, movements and individuals to engage with a view to halting further rise of tensions and the deepening of mistrust in global relations, to stop the arms race and expansion of foreign military bases, to promote dialogue, partnership and equality as the only basis of normal relations between the countries, stability and development in the world, so to eliminate causes of the growing danger of a global conflict.

“Political processes preceding the 1999 NATO aggression has not been finished as yet” – said the first speaker Momir Bulatovic, the war Prime minister. He said:

“In order to justify criminal act of aggression and preserve Alliance’s credibility they invented our apparent crimes. They created exodus of Albanians falsifying justification for the bombardment. For those who are open to see the truth this has been proved even in Hague tribunal”- said Bulatovic.

The professional presentation of General Slobodan Petković on the catastrophic consequences of the use of missiles filled with depleted uranium on human health and the environment has attracted great attention. He revealed that a massive use of the missiles with depleted uranium began in the final days of the aggression when it became clear that the agreement on termination of the aggression was impending. Hence, it may be inferred that the leading countries of NATO were in a hurry to get rid of such missiles containing nuclear waste, before the opportunity would disappear.

Blow to the European security system

President of the Belgrade Forum, Živadin Jovanović, said that to talk about NATO aggression today means to talk about gross violation of the international laws, the UN Charter, the Final Act from Helsinki, and the Paris Charter. By circumventing the UN Security Council, NATO has created a precedent using it later on for a chain of other aggressions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali and other countries. Such a practice has led to the globalization of interventionism and destabilization of the entire planet. This was not the most severe blow to the European and the global security system, from which neither Europe nor the world managed to recover to this day.

Speaking about this aggression inevitably reminds us on the alliance between NATO and the terrorist KLA which led to the ethnic cleansing of over 250.000 Serbs from the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija who still are waiting to return freely and safely to their homes and fields. Over 150 Serbian churches and medieval monasteries a number of which belong to the world heritage under UNESCO custody had been destroyed during and in the aftermath of the aggression.   The Aggression continues in so far occupied and stolen Kosovo and Metohija has proclaimed unilateral secessions in 2008 in spite of being under UN mandate, solely by support and recognition of that illegal act by the governments of the most of NATO and EU member countries. This is also precedent which has been invoked in a number of other cases and will be invoked even more frequently in the future.

At the April 1999 Washington Summit marking 50^th anniversary of its foundation NATO leaders abandoned the defensive and adopted offensive strategy of expansion to the East, in fact, to the Russian western borders. To date, NATO pursues the same strategy even if in a quite different global distribution of might. Presently, the root causes of the danger for peace are to be found in the denial of a new balance of power that is indicative of multi-polarity, and in the delusions that the privileges of the leading NATO members acquired over the past decades may be defended by military force, that is, by nuclear weapons – contends Jovanović. He went on to say the West is having great difficulties in adapting to the new realities of a multi-polar world. The only way to bring the world back to stability, peace and development is to abide with the principles of equality, partnership and mutual respect.

Kosovo – Sudetenland

He added that, 19 years since the aggression, the leading members of NATO seek to vindicate this crime against the peace and humanity. To that end, they are attempting to coerce Serbia to participate in drawing of the new international borders in the part of Europe, in creation of another puppet criminalized state stealing the part of the Serbia’s state territory. The imposed timetable and solution fitting someone else’s geopolitical goals, in the opinion of Jovanović, cannot result in a peaceful and sustainable solution, but will rather lead to further build-up of conflict potential in the Balkans. The position taken by Europe, most notably by Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as the USA, on how to resolve the matter of status of the Serbia’s Province of Kosovo and Metohija, will reveal whether Europe is on the course of stabilization and development, or is hopelessly stuck on the path to further deepening of instability, weakening of identity and missing development opportunity. This is reminiscent of the situation in 1938, when some European leaders met in Munich naively believing that sacrificing the Czechoslovakian Sudetes would bring peace and stability. In fact, they become entangled in war – warned Jovanović. He emphasized that only a balanced compromise based on the UN SC Resolution 1244, coupled while observance of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia, is capable of guaranteeing the sustainability of peace and the stability in the Balkans and in Europe.

Belgrade Forum and Generals Club Conference on CONTINUING AGGRESSION, March 21^st, 2018

Jovanović pointed out that, in the meantime, the NATO aggression has evolved from its military format into other forms, all having the same goals: stealing Kosovo and Metohija from Serbia, drawing new international borders, creating a new Albanian state on a part of the state territory of Serbia, and dividing the Serbian people to those south of this presumed new border making them to be yet another national minority, and to those north of the border remaining in the central Serbia. Attempts are underway to coerce Serbia, with pressures and threats, into collaboration in this geopolitical project by having her refrain to oppose the admission of this illegal construct in the membership of the United Nations. The form is – signing a “comprehensive legally binding document” particularly advocated by Germany.  The aggression continues also by telling Belgrade that “none has the right to veto the creation of the armed forces of Kosovo”, regardless of the territory of the Province of Kosovo and Metohija still being under the UN mandate. The two-year timeline for the ‘delivery’ recently set for Serbia by the EU European Commission, the USA has subsequently reduced to a year, thus demonstrating its dissatisfaction not only with the pace of ‘delivery’ but also with the inefficiency of the European Union.

Serbia has chosen – neutrality

The public position of senior NATO echelons is that none is forcing Serbia to accept membership, that Serbia alone is entitled to assess her priorities and interests, though NATO remains open. At lower levels and through the so-called non-governmental sector financed by the funds originating from the member states, however, the points made are that joining NATO is but a natural result of the Serbia’s European (EU) option, that Serbia is encircled by NATO members, that membership bestows huge advantages but does not imply participation in all NATO interventions since this is the matter of own discretion of each member, and so on. It is becoming ever more apparent that NATO is disturbed by anti-NATO public opinion in Serbia whose some 85% of the total population are against membership. This worrying reality prompts NATO to invest great efforts and huge financial resources into portraying NATO as promising, democratic, peace building alliance. Relying on the IPAP (Individual Partnership Action Plan), NATO expects that Serbian official and unofficial structures do contribute to a positive, friendly image of NATO in the public of Serbia.

Jovanović recalled that there are other neutral countries in Europe which are surrounded by NATO and yet do not feel threatened nor forced to consider formal accession to it. He cited examples of Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden.  Where a country borders with several member states of NATO, this should not imply that, by virtue, NATO poses a threat to the same – said Jovanović. The countries which joined NATO in the period following 1999 aggression on Serbia (FRY) at a short notice,  have different historic experiences, they were no strangers to affiliation in military treaties, have not been neutral or non-aligned and, none of them has genuinely experienced the true meaning of the offensive character and strategy of NATO endorsed at the 1999 Summit in Washington. After all, pointed Jovanović, each country is entitled to own free choice. Serbia’s choice is military neutrality and let it stay so.. She should nurture this neutrality, affirm and strengthen it, by acknowledging the past experiences, tested alliances, and friendships. Serbia is an open, peaceful country and does not fit in a military alliance of an offensive character – concluded Jovanović.

*

Zivadin Jovanovic is the President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.

UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning.

“People deserve the right to a better process.”

Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, when, after 8:00 PM EST on Wednesday, he and his colleagues were handed a 2,232-page bill to review and approve for a floor vote by the next morning.

In the final pages of the bill—meant only to appropriate future government spending—lawmakers snuck in a separate piece of legislation that made no mention of funds, salaries, or budget cuts. Instead, this final, tacked-on piece of legislation will erode privacy protections around the globe.

This bill is the CLOUD Act. It was never reviewed or marked up by any committee in either the House or the Senate. It never received a hearing. It was robbed of a stand-alone floor vote because Congressional leadership decided, behind closed doors, to attach this un-vetted, unrelated data bill to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill. Congress has a professional responsibility to listen to the American people’s concerns, to represent their constituents, and to debate the merits and concerns of this proposal amongst themselves, and this week, they failed.

On Thursday, the House approved the omnibus government spending bill, with the CLOUD Act attached, in a 256-167 vote. The Senate followed up late that night with a 65-32 vote in favor. All the bill requires now is the president’s signature.

Make no mistake—you spoke up. You emailed your representatives. You told them to protect privacy and to reject the CLOUD Act, including any efforts to attach it to must-pass spending bills. You did your part. It is Congressional leadership—negotiating behind closed doors—who failed.

Because of this failure, U.S. and foreign police will have new mechanisms to seize data across the globe. Because of this failure, your private emails, your online chats, your Facebook, Google, Flickr photos, your Snapchat videos, your private lives online, your moments shared digitally between only those you trust, will be open to foreign law enforcement without a warrant and with few restrictions on using and sharing your information. Because of this failure, U.S. laws will be bypassed on U.S. soil.

As we wrote before, the CLOUD Act is a far-reaching, privacy-upending piece of legislation that will:

• Enable foreign police to collect and wiretap people’s communications from U.S. companies, without obtaining a U.S. warrant.
• Allow foreign nations to demand personal data stored in the United States, without prior review by a judge.
• Allow the U.S. president to enter “executive agreements” that empower police in foreign nations that have weaker privacy laws than the United States to seize data in the United States while ignoring U.S. privacy laws.
• Allow foreign police to collect someone’s data without notifying them about it.
• Empower U.S. police to grab any data, regardless if it’s a U.S. person’s or not, no matter where it is stored.

And, as we wrote before, this is how the CLOUD Act could work in practice:

London investigators want the private Slack messages of a Londoner they suspect of bank fraud. The London police could go directly to Slack, a U.S. company, to request and collect those messages. The London police would not necessarily need prior judicial review for this request. The London police would not be required to notify U.S. law enforcement about this request. The London police would not need a probable cause warrant for this collection.

Predictably, in this request, the London police might also collect Slack messages written by U.S. persons communicating with the Londoner suspected of bank fraud. Those messages could be read, stored, and potentially shared, all without the U.S. person knowing about it. Those messages, if shared with U.S. law enforcement, could be used to criminally charge the U.S. person in a U.S. court, even though a warrant was never issued.

This bill has large privacy implications both in the U.S. and abroad. It was never given the attention it deserved in Congress.

As Rep. McGovern said, the people deserve the right to a better process.

*

Featured image is from the author.

A species which has invented combustion, electromagnetic radiation and nuclear energy orders of magnitude more powerful than its own physical potential, needs to be perfectly wise and in control lest it is overwhelmed by these powers.

As tipping points in the Earth’s climate amplify, including hurricanes, snow storms and wildfires, it appears to be beyond human power to contemplate the consequences of four degrees Celsius warming within less than a couple of centuries, a collapse of civilization and the demise of billions. The consequences of global warming have been underestimated as many cannot bring themselves to look at the unthinkable.

This reticence has penetrated the scientific disciplines themselves, as indicated by James Hansen, the prominent climate scientist, in his papers “Scientific Reticence:

A Threat to Humanity”, “Dangerous Scientific Reticence”. Hansen states: “Several years ago I wrote a paper (Hansen, J.E., 2007) on scientific reticence, naively thinking that drawing attention to the phenomenon might ameliorate its incidence.  Specific reference then was to likelihood of large sea level rise, which also is a central topic in our current paper (Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: Evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2°C global warming could be dangerous).  However, here I address a broader issue of scientific reticence, because, I believe, the affliction is widespread and severe.  Unless recognized, it may severely diminish our chances of averting dangerous climate change.”

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), while documenting the best scientific evidence by competent scientific authorities, has underestimated the consequences of global warming in its summaries for policy makers, in terms of:

1. Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melting rates
2. Sea level rise rates
3. Linear vs increasingly variable projections of temperature rise.
4. The fast rising incidence of fires
5. Arctic warming-triggered permafrost melt and methane release.

Publication of climate updates in the mainstream media has become subject to barriers. Climate exhaustion has set-in, with journals commonly reluctant to accept science-based articles, often on the pretext they are “too complicated”, although publishing economic modelling papers and computer technology papers which are just as complex or more.

Most poignant is the reluctance of the political classes to listen to the science, an attitude that is bound to be considered criminal and worse by those who survive the climate calamity.

In his book “Defiant Earth” Clive Hamilton states: “Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please. The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence” and “So today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy. The indifference of most to the Earth system’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss” and “Yet the Earth scientists continue to haunt us, following us around like wailing apparitions while we hurry on with our lives, turning around occasionally with irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress.

In his book “First and Last Man” Olaf Stapledon describes a planetary civilization which, once aware of the ultimate fate of its planet, plunges into depression, distinct from the oblivious mindset of a majority of contemporary humans.

With this perspective, the failure of humanity to cope effectively with the unfolding climate calamity constitutes its Achilles heel. Further than attributing this failure to mercenary contrarians and to conviction-free politicians, this failure resides with the majority, bar the few courageous individuals who protest in front of mine gates and in small boats on the ocean. It is these people, rather than the comfortable elites, who are carrying the torch of humanity.

*

This article was originally published on Pearls and Irritations.

Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, ANU School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Climate Change Institute, ANU Planetary Science Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Paul Craig Roberts asked: “Is the US Government Criminally Insane?” Judge for yourself from what’s going on.

Trump’s lunatic fringe war cabinet should terrify everyone – comprised of Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis, hawkish imperial spear-carrier Mike Pompeo at State, generalissimo White House czar John Kelly, geopolitical pyromaniac Nikki Haley as UN envoy, and now raging hawk John Bolton as national security advisor.

They comprise a hugely dangerous rogue’s gallery of hot warriors, favoring endless wars of aggression, rejecting peace and stability.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard slammed Bolton’s appointment, tweeting:

“Trump’s choice of John Bolton to replace him, following his pick of Pompeo, continues the extreme warhawk neocon takeover of the White House. Bolton helped build the case of WMD lies that was used to invade Iraq. Bolton still champions that war today,” adding:

“I can’t think of anyone more dangerous than John Bolton to be the National Security Adviser. Pompeo and Bolton are standard bearers for the interventionist neocon foreign policy establishment, addicted to regime change wars, without any thought of the deathly cost or consequence.”

Bolton is long on premeditated aggression to solve geopolitical issues, short on what a national security advisor is supposed to be – serving as an honest counselor to the president on world issues, not pushing advocacy for his or her own agenda.

Israeli hardliners praised Bolton’s appointment. Extremist minister Naftali Bennett tweeted:

“Great appointment (of a) stalwart friend of Israel.”

Minister Zeev Elkin said he’s

“been unquestionably a friend of Israel for many years, including in his position as US ambassador to the UN. I have no doubt it will be comfortable for us to work with him.”

Islamophobe justice minister Ayelet (“little snakes”) Shaked tweeted:

“President Trump continues to appoint true friends of Israel to senior positions. John Bolton is one of the most outstanding.”

Deputy diplomacy minister Michael Oren said

“(t)he days of the (Iran) nuclear agreement, which is terrible in its current form, are nearing an end.”

Israeli military intelligence-connected DebkaFILE noted Bolton “repeatedly urged America to use its military prowess to remind the world that it is still the greatest power on earth whose strength is unrivaled,” adding:

“He has advocated pre-emptive military strikes on Iran and North Korea rather than wasting time on fruitless diplomacy while (both countries) buy time for developing nuclear weapons and missiles.”

He supports removing Syria’s Assad forcibly, claiming (nonexistent) Iranian and Hezbollah expansionist aims must be stopped.

He’s a vocal critic of diplomacy over belligerence, including hardline toughness against Palestinians.

Following Trump’s Jerusalem declaration, he tweeted:

“The Middle East peace process has long needed clarity and an injection of reality, and Trump has provided it by making the decision to move the US embassy in #Israel to #Jerusalem.”

He accused Obama of “stabb(ing) Israel in the front…tip(ping) the peace process toward the Palestinians” for failing to veto Security Council Res. 2334 – demanding “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

It recognized no territorial changes “to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.”

It “(c)all(ed) upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”

At the time, Bolton called “the two-state solution…dead.” In 2014, he advocated a three-state solution – urging Gaza be given to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan, adding:

“The only logic underlying the demand for a Palestinian state is the political imperative of Israel’s opponents to weaken and encircle the Jewish state, thereby minimizing its potential to establish secure and defensible borders.”

In 2016, he addressed the Islamophobic American Freedom Alliance on whether Islam and the West can coexist.

He represents the lunatic fringe of neocon ideology, an interventionist on steroids.

Jewish Voices for Peace called his appointment “a complete disaster for the Middle East, the US, and the entire world.”

The Council on America-Islamic Relations “urge(d) across the political spectrum opposition… speak(ing) out against (his) appointment,” noting his “extremist views (and) ties to anti-Muslim bigots.”

PLO Executive Committee Hanan Ashwari slammed his “long history of hostility to Palestinians, dating to when he was at the United Nations, where he was protecting Israeli immunity,” adding:

He’s allied “with extremist Zionists, fundamentalist Christians and white racists. All this will lead to a devastating reality for Palestine and the region.”

His appointment, along with Pompeo at State, indicates abdication of world peace by Trump and his war cabinet.

Warriors have a stranglehold over US geopolitical policies. PCR is right believing a criminally insane cabal is running things in Washington.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Pompeo at State and Bolton as Trump’s national security advisor completed the neocon takeover of Trump’s geopolitical agenda – Wall Street running domestic affairs.

The combination represents a major setback for world peace and stability, greater aggression likely, along with the triumph of neoliberal harshness over social justice – a dismal and frightening state of affairs.

What to expect ahead? War in Syria is more likely to escalate than wind down, an unthinkable US/Russia confrontation ominously possible.

The Iran nuclear deal is either doomed, or likely to be gutted by Washington, accomplishing the same thing – with only tepid, ineffective opposition from P5+1 countries Britain, France and Germany.

The EU most often bends to US will when enough pressure is applied.

A relatively quiet Ukraine period could explode in greater Kiev war on Donbass, US-supplied heavy weapons and training aiding its aggression.

A Kim Jong-un/Trump summit is likely to fail stepping back from the brink on the Korean peninsula, falsely blaming the DPRK for hostile US actions.

It’ll prove again Washington can never be trusted, its commitments consistently breached when conflicting with its imperial objectives.

A possible trade war with China would be hugely destabilizing, along with economically harmful to both countries and the global economy.

Further EU/US sanctions and other harsh measures are likely to be imposed on Russia over the Skripal affair, an escalated attempt to isolate the country and inflict economic harm – despite Western nations knowing Moscow had nothing to do with what happened.

Theresa May-led Tories are considering tough actions against Russia over the incident. So are other EU countries and Washington.

On Friday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the Trump administration is considering a range of options against Moscow over the Skripal affair – “both to demonstrate our solidarity with our ally and to hold Russia accountable for its clear breach of international norms and agreements.”

No breach occurred. Neocons running US foreign policy don’t let facts and rule of law principles compromise their imperial objectives.

Theresa May provided Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron with cooked “results” of Britain’s investigation so far into the Skripal affair – “convinc(ing)” them they’re “well-grounded,” despite knowing UK claims are pure rubbish.

Macron issued a deplorable statement, saying “there is no…plausible explanation” for what happened to the Skripals other than Kremlin responsibility – abdicating to US/UK-led Russophobic hostility.

On the world stage, Trump is hostage to neocon dark forces controlling him. Relations with Russia, China, and other sovereign independent nations are likely to worsen, not improve.

Unthinkable nuclear war remains an ominous possibility. Russia’s only option is building on its alliance with China and other allies, staying committed to respond firmly to US-led Western harshness against its sovereignty.

Virtually no possibility for improved relations with Washington and Britain exists. It’s fruitless pursuing it.

German and other European dependence on Russian energy, mainly gas, offers only slim hope for improving things with these countries.

Looking ahead, prospects for world peace and stability are dismal. US-led Western hostility toward Russia could erupt in open conflict by accident or design.

The unthinkable could become reality. Preparedness should be Moscow’s top priority given the real danger it faces.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

“Congress shall make no law … prohibiting … or abridging …. the right of the people peaceably … to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Lobbying has become the (paid) act of advocacy of a vested interest of an individual or group that is or can be affected by the decisions of government or other authority. The practice of lobbying is specifically protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it was considered essential to the democratic functioning of government, at that time i.e. prior to the advent of computers and means of mass communication.

Unfortunately, lobbyists today serve a specific minority cause or interest group often to the exclusion of the majority. They are unelected and therefore not representative of majority opinion.

The act of lobbying has become a highly paid and organised political endeavour that pressures, persuades, cajoles and even threatens government officials and elected representatives of the people to act in a way that profits the interests of minority sections of society and/or industry often to the exclusion and detriment of the majority. Furthermore, the level of influence a specific lobbying group has over the legislative process is directly proportional to its resources of time and money that it can expend upon achieving its legislative goal. In certain cases, those resources can run into millions, if not billions, of dollars, as evidenced recently by the use of casino-generated funds being used to successfully achieve a political goal. And that is a dangerous injury to the democratic process.

The act of lobbying that is protected in the US by the Constitution has been used to subvert democratic government to the extent that in specific areas, democracy has been overriden by the illegitimate use of legacy legislation.

Examples of some existing lobbies active in either Brussels, Washington or Westminster, and having a powerful influence upon democratic government, include:

• National Rifle Association if America – the Gun Lobby
• AIPAC – Pro Israel Lobby
• Big Pharma
• The Defence Industry / Aerospace / Aircraft and Arms Manufacturing
• Agribusiness
• British Bankers & Investment Managers
• AARP
• Oil & Gas lobby
• European Israel lobby/ CFI/ BICOM/ EFI/ ECI/ FII
• Tech Lobby
• Mining Industry
• Financial Lobby / Wall Street / City of London

etc etc

Lobbies also exist to modify, change or sometimes to distort public opinion either by overt or covert means and are today employed by foreign entities to influence elections in many parts of the world. So far, this activity is mainly unregulated.

There is a contention that both the US Presidential election that made Donald Trump, POTUS, and the referendum that decided BREXIT in the United Kingdom, were heavily influenced by the effect of electronic lobbying. These allegations are as yet unproven.

However, the undue influence of certain foreign politicians upon the US Congress is the blatant and clear result of so-called legitimate lobbying. This has had, and is currently exerting, a profound effect upon American foreign policy that is not conducive to global peace.

It is clear, therefore, that the unrestricted power of specific lobbyists upon government is detrimental to democracy and highly damaging to society.

Lobbying should be officially, and heavily, regulated by legislation in Washington, London and the EU.

*

Hans Stehling (pen-name) is an author based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

After a series of high-level meetings between officials from Seoul and Pyongyang, the proposal for a face-to-face meeting between the American and North Korean leaders appeared before President Trump, who without much hesitation accepted, upsetting the last 50 years of relations between the countries.

Donald Trump tweeted:

“Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze. Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”

In the blink of an eye, fifty years of international relations were overturned in a tweet. Skillful South Korean diplomacy had also been working towards this end for months. The meetings at the Olympics between Korean diplomats, and in general the good relations between the two countries, have facilitated a thawing of tensions, leading to dialogue that has come after months of insults and threats being thrown between Washington and Pyongyang.

The next move in the White House saw the dismissal of Rex Tillerson, with Mike Pompeo replacing him as Secretary of State. Even National Security Advisor H.R McMaster could be shown the door in what looks like a big shake-up within the White House, with two central matters looming in the coming months and years for the Trump presidency. The American president is focused on creating his legacy, seeking to eclipse that of his predecessors by achieving a peace agreement and trying to avoid a foreign country. The backdrop for these events is a weak American foreign policy exacerbated by the absence of strategic military planning, and a president who has the constant need to give the impression of being strong, in control, esteemed by his colleagues, and not in conflict with a portion of Washington’s security establishment.

Trump’s intention to seek political agreements with his opponents is offset by his inflammatory “fire and fury” statements and his shameful speech to the United Nations threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea (as the Americans already did in the Korean War during the 1950s). In line with this schizophrenic attitude, Tillerson has been removed from office to send two very important messages to Pyongyang and Tehran. If diplomacy fails, the military option remains on the table.

This military threat, however, is unrealistic if not unattainable, and its consequences unforeseeable. It is strongly opposed by many in Washington as well as by its allies and enemies. Trump, however, loves employing bombastic rhetoric and brinkmanship to reinforce the idea that even the unthinkable may be thinkable. Given the image that he has built in recent months, this madman strategy seems to dovetail with the strategic intentions of the White House. The idea is to present Pyongyang with two options: a diplomatic opening and relative trust in negotiations, but at the same time leaving open the option of war if diplomacy fails. Kim for his part is certainly more rational and grounded in his actions than Trump. His father tried negotiating with Washington a couple of decades ago, only to see the United States allowing it to fail, thus forcing Kim Jong-un to embrace the only possible solution left to him to ensure survival of his country, namely nuclear weapons as a deterrent. While the sanctions and international isolation visited on the DPRK have played a role in bringing Pyongyang to the negotiating table, the acquisition of a credible nuclear deterrent has served to reassure Kim Jong-un, while also strengthening his negotiating hand vis-a-vis Washington.

As evidence of this theory, the proposal for a face-to-face meeting was put to the United States by South Korea, with Kim presumably assenting, even if Pyongyang has yet to respond. But the move is shrewd, showcasing the diplomatic skills of the North Koreans. If Washington were to sabotage the meeting, the blame would fall entirely on the United States, with Pyongyang being left off the hook as they are yet to accept.

There are big question marks over the topic of discussion and over what agreements can be reached in the first meeting. Certain hypotheses can be made, and other requests can already be excluded. For example, it is practically impossible for the peninsula to find itself free from the American presence. The United States is stationed in Korea especially to contain China and increase pressure around Russia, placing ABM systems that threaten the Sino-Russian nuclear deterrent. For the US the issue is much more than simply opposing a country like Pyongyang. The THAAD system is in fact directed at China and Russia, while it has little operational effectiveness against any missiles launched from North Korea.

The other hypothesis, currently unattainable, concerns the dismantling of Korean nuclear weapons. The request is impossible without an all-encompassing agreement that would see the the US relinquishing its presence on the peninsula. The argument plays in North Korea’s favor, because here is Pyongyang contemplating the abandonment of its nuclear weapons, while Washington refused to entertain any thought of abandoning its military position on the peninsula.

Realistically, an intense dialogue could put a halt to provocative exercises by South Korea and the United States, as well as halt Pyongyang’s testing of new nuclear-capable missiles. This would then open the way for a continuation of direct negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang while also allowing for the inclusion of other regional actors, namely, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. It would effectively be a return to the six-party negotiations, which for over a decade attempted to accommodate the concerns of all the parties in an effort to reach a peace deal.

Trump and Kim’s unpredictability could bring new twists and turns that further buck the norms and conventions governing international relations. This scenario is certainly dangerous, but it is also full of possibilities. The personalities of these two leaders could be what will ultimately make the difference.

*

This article was originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation.

Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

---

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

Vladimir Putin’s presentation of Russia’s new weapons systems during his address to the Federal Assembly on March 1 seems to have finally elicited the desired response from its target audience in Washington, D.C. In that presentation, Putin spoke about strategic weapons systems employing cutting-edge technology that, he claimed, is more than a decade ahead of U.S. and other competition.

He scored a direct hit in the Pentagon, where senior generals were left dumbfounded. But, as is normally the case, when these gentlemen need time to collect their wits, we heard first only denial: that the Russians were bluffing, that they really have nothing ready, that these are only projects, and that the U.S. already has all of the same, but is holding it back in reserve.

Of course, not everyone among the U.S. political elite bought into this stop-gap response.

On March 8, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) wrote an open letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urging him to send a delegation to open arms control talks with the Russians “as soon as possible.”

This was an improbable demarche that even their supporters in the progressive camp, let alone mainstream Democrats, found hard to believe. Feinstein and Sanders have been vocal critics of Russia and were actively promoting the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale in recent months. They were among those who had hissed at the pictures of Jeff Sessions, not yet Attorney General, shaking hands and smiling with Russian Ambassador Kislyak.  Now they were calling for revival of arms control talks with… the Russians.

This was a story that died before publication everywhere except in Russia, where it had been a featured news item within hours of the letter’s release. The American and world public knew nothing about it, although the letter was there for the reading on the home pages of the Senate websites of the respective co-authors. The American and world public know nothing about that letter today, nearly two weeks after its release, apart from readers of Consortium who were properly informed at the time.

In the meantime, the U.S. propaganda machine moved into high gear, producing diversionary issues to draw the attention of the U.S. public away from what had been the subject of Putin’s speech of March 1.

And so we have been getting saturation news coverage of the “Skripal nerve gas attack,” of the alleged cyber attack on the US energy grid and water systems. Both are pure “Russians did it” stories. And we read about the repositioning of U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean to within cruise-missile range of Damascus for a possible punitive blow in response to a chemical attack on civilians by Assad’s regime that still has not happened, all with intent to humiliate Assad’s backers, the Russians.

Now, at last, after the denial and the diversion, the truth begins to emerge. The President of the United States himself is the bearer of a message that, given American hubris, amounts to the raising of a white flag.

We find the following on page one of the New York Times describing Trump’s remarks about his phone call to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his electoral victory: “We had a very good call,” the Times quotes Trump as saying. “We will probably be meeting in the not-too distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.”

The Financial Times has this to say on page one:

“Donald Trump said he wanted to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss an arms race that was ‘getting out of control’ and other issues over which the countries remain at loggersheads. ‘Being in an arms race is not a great thing,’ the US president said on Tuesday, adding that he would probably meet his Russian counterpart in the ‘not too distant future’.”

In other words, the re-instatement of Russian strategic parity with the United States appears to be making itself felt (see Ray McGovern article). But of course, one has to be an expert in reading between the lines to parse from Trump’s statement the depth of concern about new Russian military potential.

It is a safe assumption that now arms talks with the Russians will begin soon. But the American public should be forewarned that the scope of the discussions will surely be much greater than that of the so-called reset under Barack Obama, which played to an American, not a Russian wish list of cutting warheads. This broader agenda will have to take in Russian concerns about the U.S. global anti-missile system. Should there be agreement, the change in approach to arms control will not from U.S. charity, but out of U.S. fear.

Did Donald Trump raise the white flag and call for negotiations on a whim?  Did he consult with his military advisers?

It is scarcely credible that this president came to the conclusion about the need to halt the arms race on his own or that he dared raise such an inflammatory subject without having the firm backing of Pentagon specialists who evaluated rationally and expertly where we now stand in in strategic security with the Russians. No one will say this, but it is inescapable.

To put the present situation in an historical context: in the past year or two, the United States and Russia have reached a level of confrontation that approaches that of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That crisis was resolved by mutual retreats on positioning of nuclear capable missiles near the borders of the other side. The mutuality of the solution was not announced to the American public until decades later, when the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey was made public.

This time, the mutuality of major concessions will necessarily be part of the presentation of any solution reached to the global community. Vladimir Putin will not go the way of Nikita Khrushchev, who paid for his “concession” to the Americans by a palace coup at home.

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future?was published in October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide.

I tried to view the RT video of President Putin’s meeting with the opposition candidates that took place the morning after the elections in Russia. There was a short clip of his introductory remarks available and the full video running over an hour was listed next to it. But I was not allowed to see that one. Each time I clicked on the link YouTube fed me another video of someone attacking President Putin; the first time it was a video of the slimy Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Minister blathering on and on, the next click brought me a CNN study of a “tyrant,” and the next time, the head of NATO warning Russia to watch its step. And they talk about free speech and democracy. It really is enough to make you cry.

So we have to ask them, to paraphrase Cicero, the ones that claim to rule us, how far do you mean to stretch our patience? How long will your ambitions continue to frustrate us? At what point will your unrestrained inhumanity stop flaunting itself? Have the protests, the deaths, the police in the streets, the fears of the people, the fatigue from war, the need for peace, have the catastrophes that fell on you, and us, one after the other, not had any effect on you at all? Do you not see that your conspiracy has been exposed and recorded, that all the people know about it? Which of us do you think does not know what you were up to yesterday evening, what you were up to last night, where you were, with whom you got together, and what plan of action you decided upon?

Why are you still there? Do we have to remove you? What is the point in waiting any longer, when night cannot cloak your criminal plots in darkness, when a private house cannot confine conspiratorial voices inside its walls-if everything is exposed to the light of day, everything breaks out into the open? Take my advice, call off your plans, and stop thinking of assassination, arson and arms. Whichever way you turn you have been thwarted. Your plans are as clear as day to us. Go and leave us. We have no need of you.

And if you try to deny it we can take you through the long list of your crimes because for years now no crime has been committed that has not been committed by you. You have killed many and have oppressed and plundered more while escaping punishment and remaining free. You have managed not merely to ignore the law but to overturn and shatter it. The world, which could be a peaceful and social and progressive place in the universe is instead, not a jungle, for animals aren’t deliberately cruel, no, more, like a day in America, where every day is a violent day, an angry day. But no doubt I am wasting my breath stating what we all feel since they continue to expand and accelerate their crimes with each new day.

Their latest crimes approach comic opera. The propaganda attack being conducted against Russia regarding the Skripal affair is verging on the surreal since the most likely suspects are running the investigation. Today, as I write this, the day after the Russian election, we have the allegation that the Russian election was rigged inserted into the BBC news coverage of the elections. The second place finish of the communists is not mentioned but Mr. Navalny, who has little if any following in Russia and was barred from being a candidate because of his criminal record, is described as the “main opposition” stopped from taking part because of his political views. The meaning is plain. They are stating the elections were rigged and the outcome illegitimate, therefore Putin’s position as President is illegitimate, Russians can only laugh at such things of course but these absurdities are not designed for Russians but for the average media-massaged citizen in the west. For before every American and NATO attack the government of the country targeted begins to be described as a “regime,” a temporary and illegitimate government.

On top of that Boris Johnson, the fatuous British Foreign Minister, made the assertion that Russia had a ten year programme of making nerve agents, a bold fiction, but to try to add support to this lie the EU “urged Russia to provide immediate, full and complete disclosure of its Novichok programme to the international body, the Organisation For The Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” disclosure, that is, of a progamme Russia does not have. Kafka would smile in recognition. Of course the reply that one does not exist will be described as proof that it does, since every denial by Russia of its involvement in the Skripal affair is characterised as a confession that it was and so we descend deeper into the rabbit hole and the deeper we go the more likely we are to emerge into war.

It seems to me, as other astute commentators have said, that the latest barrage in the propaganda war, part of NATO’s hybrid war, or war on all levels, against Russia, arises from the success of the Syrian and allied forces against the US and allied forces in Syria and the warning by the Russian General Staff, that a major attack on Syria that endangered Russians, by the Americans would bring retaliation in kind against the ships, planes or bases from which the attacks were launched. The reaction to this was for the Americans and their allies to delay attacking Syria until a propaganda campaign has built up enough anti-Russian feeling so that the public of the NATO and allied countries will support them when they decide to risk all and come into direct and major conflict with Russia. At this point there is still no stomach among the people for such a conflict. So they are going to make their stomachs stronger. The British government was happy and ready to oblige in doing its bit with the Skripal incident while the FBI and US media keep up their dramas in the United States. It seems this is what is taking place as Tass quoted the Deputy Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov on March 20, repeating the warning,

“We have been warning the United States about the need to abandon these plans unconditionally. Any illegal use of force, like the air attack on the Shayrat air base about a year ago, would be an act of aggression against a sovereign state, in accordance with the United Nations Charter.”

Dangerous times and yet the sewers of the western media pour their filth over our heads in a continuous stream. This should make us angry, I mean not just shaking our head over our morning coffee angry, or sounding off on Facebook angry, but marching on the streets angry, closing down the streets angry. Marshall McLuhan was right when he predicted decades ago that the new electronic media would create a new type of person, that the media would become the massage, the manipulator of the personality, of consciousness. Many are in need of what he called “open-mind surgery” to resist this manipulation. Alternative media, one of the scalpels available for that surgery, to cut through the lies and search for the truth, are under threat of more censorship while the mass media that they use against us are promoted as the “real news” the “trusted news.”

To be a true human being you need independence, creativity and consciousness and with the mass media our independence can only be expressed within their matrix. They want individual consciousness and creativity submerged in a mass consciousness; a product of mass production and mass propaganda that denies our independence, our rights as citizens to know, to be informed, to be respected. We are like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, ground down by the cogs in the wheels of the conveyor belt and rolled out of the production line as self-maintaining machines whose job is to keep quiet and make them money.

But we are not cogs in their machine. Certainly Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and all the other peoples of the world who want peace and co-operation are not. From around the world governments and people congratulated President Putin on his re-election. The west just sulked and hissed. I would have liked someone further to the left, but perhaps the Russian people, in this time of threat, understandably decided to stay with what they know, a steady, intelligent hand at the helm, until the storm passes. President Putin perhaps recognizing this, called a meeting, the morning after the elections, of all the opposition candidates to ask for their help in administering the country and solving its problems together, to ensure the defence of the nation. It is difficult to deny his gravitas, his courage, his ability think and reason and above all his patience in dealing with the west. His restraint is dealing with the British insults has made them look like the fools they are. But the knives are drawn. The shadows are in motion. We are all in danger.

President Putin can expect the support of the Russian people. What about us here in the west? Are we to remain apathetic, disillusioned, pre-occupied with the struggle to make ends meet, and let ourselves be led by the nose to world war? President Putin thinks not. The Russian people agree. Have we lost hope? Is that why we are not on the streets where we should be to show them they can’t push us around? Or is just that people are still not yet aware of the dangers? On my desk I have a copy of a new book of essays edited by professors Fred Dallmayr and Demenchonok, entitled, A World Beyond Disorder, The Courage To Hope, a very effective title, for that is what we need, the courage to hope, for without hope there will be no action, and there we arrive at the eternal question, what is to be done? There is only one answer to that. Get together. Organise. See you on the streets.

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This article was originally published on One Voyce of the World.

Christopher Black is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The hacking community, like poets, tend to be irritable tribesmen and women.  Their modus operandi functions on the stab, the enthusiastic penetration of insecure computer systems and mockery.  Their role is as much to instruct as it is to disrupt.

To that end, such figures cut different forms.  There is the lonesome soul finding solace in being a nuisance, or the idealist intent on revealing a compromised state of affairs (those working for Anonymous, by way of example).  It was questionable whether Adrián Lamo was of the latter breed.  According to his father, Mario, he lacked malice though not initiative. “Everything he did was out of curiosity.”  Lamo’s views of his own activities suggested less a case of hacking than finding “different ways of seeing.”

Dead at 37 at his Kansas apartment on Wednesday in circumstances that barely struck an interest for most scribblers of the mainstream press, Lamo established his initial claim as one who hacked the Old Gray Lady.  In breaking into The New York Times network in 2003, Lamo proceeded to run up $300,000 in data research fees by means of fake usernames, essentially adding himself to the paper’s payroll.

Cingular Wireless, Microsoft and Yahoo! were also accessed, the latter being notable for receiving touch-ups and satirical readjustments to news articles.  After an 18 month investigation by the FBI, he was subsequently arrested and convicted for computer fraud, spending time in house arrest.

The now notorious James B. Comey, who was then the US attorney in Manhattan, was less than impressed.

“It’s like someone kicking in your front door while you’re on vacation and running up a $300,000 bill on your phone, and then telling you when you arrive home that he had performed a useful service by demonstrating that your deadbolt wasn’t secure enough.”

It was with Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley, with whom he struck historical, if tainted gold.  Lamo’s name had ventured far enough to reach the troubled army private who had, over time, amassed a sizeable trove of classified documents noting everything from brutal military engagements to diplomatic gossip in State Department cables.  Lamo assumed the role of compromised confessor, drawing upon what he regarded as boasts by Manning.

Lamo, it seemed, had undergone a Damascene conversion. During the course of messaging Manning, a patriotic instinct had taken a gripping hold, though when exactly is unclear.  This, from an individual who had shown little sign of it prior. Chat logs obtained via AOL Instant Messenger were thereby surrendered to the FBI, forever marking Lamo as an informant.  Manning was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking some 700,000 government records, a term which was commuted by President Barack Obama in January 2017.

An explanation for his motives was quick to come.  In a 2011 interview that ran in the film WikiSecrets, Lamo claimed a belief that Manning “couldn’t possibly have vetted over a quarter of a million documents”. She had merely assured herself “that they didn’t contain anything that would cause human harm.”

This criticism on vetting – or its absence – which has varying degrees of plausibility in the scope of information warfare, has also been levelled at WikiLeaks.  Such is the distribution, and in some cases relocation, of power when it comes to revealing classified materials.  Detractors prefer the deference to paternalism: only the traditional state and its operatives are fit to assess the quality of those secrets.

That aspect of harm, claims Lamo, was understood after his conviction.  He was, on reflection, not merely dealing with computer systems, “just ones and zeros” but flesh and blood individuals who might be effected.  He had not taken into account the “human cost”.  But in becoming an informant, Lamo had decided to inflict another variant of harm – that of terrorising whistleblowers, notably to WikiLeaks, into revealing the dirty laundry of state entities.

This conformed rather neatly with the strategy outlined by the US Army Counterintelligence Center in 2008, whose own classified, and leaked report to WikiLeaks, proclaimed the organisation “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.”

A vital strategy here entailed outing, targeting and ruining confidential sources and informants. “Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted by Wikileaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others form taking similar actions.”

In life, Lamo remained itinerant.  He moved repeatedly, and remained homeless for long stretches.

 “He was a believer,” claimed self-professed colleague and friend Lorraine Murphy, “in the Geographic Cure. Whatever goes wrong in your life, moving will make it better.”

He certainly engendered, if postings on his Facebook profile are anything to go by, strong impressions amongst those who knew him.

“He was gifted with a brilliant curious mind that sprouted on a compassionate and loving heart,” goes a note from Saulo.

His name in the battlefield of public engagement was something else.  For Julian Assange, he was no less an FBI snitch and poseur.

“Lamo, a fake journalist, petty conman & betrayer of basic human decency, promised alleged source [Chelsea Manning] journalistic protection, friendship and support, then sold him to the FBI.”

Lamo’s mother responded with typical maternal distress.  Being in the Ecuadorean embassy, speculated Mary Atwood Lamo, had denatured publisher.

“Perhaps if you dealt with what you need to personally, you might feel less mean-spirited and more able to exhibit the ‘basic human decency’ you endorse in your own words and behaviour, Mr. Assange.”

As for Lamo’s death, few eyebrows have been raised, though the conspiratorial wilderness may well dredge up something in due course.  “There’s nothing suspicious about his death,” claimed Wichita police officer Charley Davidson.  Toxicology tests will only yield results after some weeks, and the Regional Forensic Science Center is still numb on the cause of death.

Lamo’s underreported passing suggests one object lesson: no plaques are made to the tattler, the squealer, the snitch.  To them is only owed suspicion, the sense that you might well turn at any given moment.  The counterfeit currency that is patriotism only goes so far.  The rest is less history than a concerted forgetting.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Dr. Kampmark is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]

US President Donald Trump has signed into law legislation that halts some aid to the Palestinian Authority until it stops paying Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the families of those killed by Israeli forces.

Trump cut the Palestinian aid as he approved the massive $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill on Friday.

The law includes three exceptions, allowing for US aid to Palestinian water and childhood vaccination programs, as well as to East Jerusalem al-Quds hospitals.

PA, Hamas hit back

The Palestinian Authority has denounced the law, vowing to continue payments to families of Palestinians “martyrs and prisoners.”

Yusef al-Mahmoud, spokesperson for the Ramallah-based PA government, said that the

“martyrs and prisoners are, in the eyes of our people, sacred symbols of freedom and struggle and opposition to humiliation and surrender.”

He noted that Washington should instead have called for “ending the occupation and suffering of the Palestinian people.”

Congress, the spokesman added, should also make aid to Israel conditional on “ending its occupation and settlements because it’s the occupation that is responsible for killing our people and throwing them into prison.”

Sami Abu Zuhri, the spokesman for Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, also condemned the law.

Relations between the US and Palestine have been strained since December 2017 when Trump recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s capital and vowed to relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the occupied city.

Jerusalem al-Quds remains at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinians hoping that the eastern part of the city would eventually serve as the capital of a future independent Palestinian state.

In January, the US administration decided to cut its financial contribution to the United Nations’ Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) that renders aid to Palestinian refugees.

The US State Department announced that Washington would hold back 65 million dollars to UNRWA – more than half its planned contribution this year – and demanded that the agency make unspecified reforms.

UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly in 1946, one year after the creation of the Israeli regime.

More than half of the two million people in the Gaza Strip depend on support from UNRWA or other humanitarian organizations.

This article reviews John Bolton’s role at the United Nations. It was first published on December 12 2006

American democracy is truly a wonder, not because of its own self-inflated glory and rhetoric of its greatness, but because, contrary to that, of its shallowness and lack of democratic processes that put some of the most powerful people in the world into positions for which none of them have been elected.  Further, they are mostly people who have not been elected by anyone at all for anything. 

Congress is elected on a proportional basis, but with only two co-joined parties to choose from there is not much in the way of true representation of the wide diversity of the American population, the majority of whom have opted out of the electoral process.  Rather, elections are mainly a contest between different interest groups (no surprise there) – business, religious sects, AIPAC, military procurements – more than it is a discussion of fundamental policies from a broad spectrum of political views.  The Senate is elected state by state, part of the plan to balance the elements of government, operates in the same manner – two vaguely different parties striving for the political riches and power that elections bring.   Another part of the government is the presidency, among other powers given is the role of Commander in Chief of the armed forces but that also is theoretically subject to Congress to make any declaration of war.

It is what I consider the fourth part of the government that is truly scary – although the features of elections in the U.S. that emphasizes money and power are scary enough – the unelected representatives that are called advisors, or are in unelected cabinet positions, or those ideologue zealots that are appointed to various sub-ministries within the government and government agencies.  These unelected officials – Karl Rove, formerly John Aschcroft and Donald Rumsfield, the new World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney (although it could be argued he was elected along with Bush, although the vote was not directly for him, but also under the electoral college system, no vote is directly for the president, after all we would not want any disruptive factions to enter the contest), Condaleeza Rice – among the best known names, along with some ‘lesser’ players such as Douglas Feith and Richard Perle  – are the ones who set the basic agenda for both foreign policy and through such acts as the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, set the agenda for much of the national scene as well.  Not only are these people in power in the government, they also have to varying degrees an open door policy with transnational corporate business, and while some are not overtly part of the fundamentalist Christian right, their association with various religious groups supports the fundamentalist Armageddon bound intent of that now important Republican element.

Just as Paul Wolfowitz has expanded his horizons to the World Bank, John Bolton was appointed to the UN as the U.S. ambassador, ready to expand on the administration’s unilateralism and contempt for international law.  In Bolton’s case, he becomes the perfect fifth columnist, as he is very outspoken in his contempt for the United Nations and is very much against international negotiations and international treaties that impinge on the ‘freedom’ of the U.S. to act unilaterally. Another leopard who will not change his spots.

It is not that Bolton is actually against the United Nations, it is that he sees it as being used against the United States and needs reforming to become a tool of U.S. foreign policy rather than a tool wielded by the Third World to contain and control the U.S.   In his own words, Bolton, while Senior Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, affirmed the uniqueness of the American way, stating,  “Scepticism about the United Nations is another aspect of what scholars have termed “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is, simply stated, different from other countries. I completely agree.”  From that he asserts that “the United Nations can be a useful instrument in the conduct of American foreign policy” but that “No one…should be under any illusions that American support for the United Nations as one of several options for implementing American foreign policy translates into unlimited support for the world organization”[1]

His contempt of the United Nations is also expressed in a similarly blunt manner in his contempt for international treaties.  He opposed the UN trade regulations on small arms saying they would “abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms.”  His renouncement of Clinton’s signature on the International Criminal Court Treaty was “the happiest moment in my government service.”[2]   Along with this moment of happiness he “almost gleefully pulled the United States out of negotiations on a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention in late 2001 and he negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia”, allowing the U.S. to proceed with its ABM defences.[3]   He scuttled the biological weapons ban, as well as “fiercely opposing” international agreements on landmines and child soldiers.  Obviously, Bolton has been having some very successful moments of personal satisfaction in his quest for preserving the rights of that American exceptionalism, much to the detriment of the rest of the world and its citizens.

The current deputy-secretary general of the UN has dampened this happiness somewhat by recognizing that the U.S. is trying to manipulate the UN to its own advantage while ignoring its responsibilities – or more blatantly, denouncing them – to the international community and pursuing its own unilateralist position.  Malloch Brown, in referring to U.S. actions concerning the UN, said,

“The prevailing practice of seeking to use the United Nations almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the United Nations one way or another.”  He said his remarks were “a warning about the serious consequences of a decades-long tendency by U.S. administrations of both parties to engage only fitfully with the United Nations.”[4]

Anti-internationalism

One of the main thrusts of Bolton’s argument against international treaties is that they are not truly laws, and because they are not truly laws, the U.S. does not have to abide by them, they serve only as guidelines that the U.S. can ignore if its purposes are not served.  It is very difficult to argue with Bolton because his arguments are not based on sequential reasoning but are essentially self-contradictory and based on rhetoric lined up to sound good but effectively meaning little in practical terms.  He also ignores practical applications of ideas contrary to his and always seems to settle on the argument that America is right because America can ignore the international treaties because they hold all the power.  Might is right.

He says,

“Treaties are law only for U.S. domestic purposes. In their international operation, treaties are simply political obligations.”[5]

This is a nonsensical statement, especially the first part.  If a treaty is ignored internationally, why would it be a law for domestic purposes?  Looked at another way, it would mean that international criminal law is okay if it suits the United States purposes to prosecute someone, but don’t dare prosecute an American under any circumstances, which is exactly the line the U.S. takes with its international relations. It is self-serving meaningless rhetoric.

In an article in Foreign Affairs, he concludes his arguments with a blanket statement that “None of the international organizations that exist today could pass for accountable law-giving, law-interpreting, or law-enforcing bodies.”[6]   Perhaps not by the strict rules of perfection, but no legal organization in the world is perfect, and in spite of American belief in its “transcendent perfection” and Bolton’s acceptance of its exceptionalism, the American system is very far from being fully accountable, although it does its best at being fully enforceable, with, as stated before, a bare minimum of acceptance of socially responsible behaviour.  Yes, these organizations and treaties are not perfect, but they are all steps in the right direction, leading towards a safer, non-violent, socially secure world.  It is a long path and will not come easily, just as all movements towards democracy in the past have been struggles that have been ongoing for decades and centuries.

As for John Bolton’s legacy, Brooke Lierman, the special assistant to the senior vice president for national security of the Center for American Progress, said after his role as guardian of the non-proliferation treaty, “At this point it is clear that the world Bolton has left us four years later is one that is more dangerous. He can only do more damage from a position of greater power.”[7]   James Carroll writes in his history of the Pentagon, a personal history in relation to his father Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, that “Bolton was the living icon of the two most dismaying facts of global politics today: nuclear arms control is dead; America killed it.”[8]

Nuclear non-proliferation

Before arriving at the United Nations, Bolton’s main position in the Bush administration was as Undersecretary of State for arms control, non-proliferation and international security. This is perhaps the most laughable assignment within the administration, laughable in a scary absurd perspective.  Bolton is very hawkish, consorts with the Israeli government, and has not had any military service, all of which fits him comfortably into the ‘guidelines’ for participation with the other neocons in the Bush administration.   His title “has an Orwellian ring to it:  Here’s the undersecretary of state for disarmament who is pushing for a U.S. armed to its teeth,”[9]  and “he is a committed unilateralist who opposes global arms treaties on principle.”[10]   Bolton himself has said the U.S. should “Recognize obligations only when it’s in our interest” and that the supporters of test ban treaties were “misguided individuals following a timid and neo-pacifist line of thought.”[11]

When the United Nations was discussing world trade in small arms Bolton declared “that the United States intended to thwart any agreement that might constrict the right of its citizens to possess guns,”[12]  which could have one wondering if he might state the same objections about nuclear arms, that the U.S. would not restrict any state having access to them if that might constrict their right to them as well.  As with most of these hawkish proponents of nuclear first strike capability, there is a different set of rules for other states than for themselves – non-proliferation and arms control should by necessity start at home.

Others however escape the rules of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT).  Bolton said that America “Was not interested in taking Israel to task for its continuing development of nuclear weapons because it was not a ‘threat’ to the United States.”[13]   Quite the contrary, in the event that Israel uses non-conventional weapons (a pleasant euphemism for nuclear weapons) to attack another country, the U.S. position arriving from bilateral discussions on non-conventional weapons between Bush and Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Prime Minister, is that “Israel has the right to defend itself with its own forces.”[14]   That it has not done so yet can probably be attributed to American pressure not to do so, as in the first Iraqi war in 1991, and in other instances because it would be a fully perceived irrational and ridiculous action against a nebulous enemy – terrorists – who really have no hard targets to aim for.

For Iran, however, “Israel is unlikely to ask the United States to approve on any attack on Iran,”[15]  although if other actions of Israel are indicative of their strategy, the U.S. would probably be cognizant of the plans, if not the timing, well before hand, nor would it be surprising to find them actually involved in such planning.   Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter indicates that Bolton,

“a decidedly split personality…has developed a strong relationship with Israel, one that had him undermine official U.S. policy…[and] with Israeli intelligence officials, again outside of official bureaucratic channels.”

He considers it “curious” that Bolton was assigned to the UN “unless the goal and objective was to undermine and/or discredit the U.N. process as a whole, thereby freeing up U.S.-centric unilateralism.” Bolton has acted not “on his own volition…but rather as part of a larger U.S. policy to force a confrontation with Iran,” a confrontation based integrally on Israeli desires.[16]

I will delve more into the nuclear issue shortly, including America’s own ignoring of one major component of the NPT, that of working towards reducing its own arsenal, but it is Bolton’s nefarious character that requires a bit more definition here first.   When it comes to nuclear possibilities, including its extension to Armageddon, Bolton is one of its leading proponents and while he is a Lutheran, he fits in very well with the Christian right and their self-fulfilling prophecies of the end of times.  This leads to the most frequently quoted statement about any of the American hawks in books, articles, and web sites.  It is a comment that leaves no doubt that these officials are willing to use nuclear weapons as a means of sorting out the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’.  It is Senator Jesse Helms describing him: “Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, for what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil in this world.”[17]    One wonders about the intelligence of appointing someone to an office for which they support opposite views, as indicated by Sen. Joseph Biden who said,

“I have always voted against nominees who oppose the avowed purpose of the position for which they have been nominated.”[18]

Scott Ritter agrees fully, as “Bush could not have sent a stronger signal about his ultimate intentions than sending to the U.N. a man who had, throughout his career, openly mocked the world organization.”[19]

Bolton and Israel

Bolton’s support for Israel and from Israel is obvious.  He has attended meetings with Sharon and his government.  He is a former member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.  He participates frequently in representations involving the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), along with Wolfowitz, and is now pursuing Syria as the next threat with weapons of mass destruction.  AIPAC actively lobbies members of the Senate and Congress as well as distributing materials for public consumption, ending by asking the public to thank your members for supporting whatever legislation they see is good.  In meetings with Israeli officials in 2003 concerning American actions in Iraq, Bolton said “It will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea afterward,” with Sharon replying that “the American action is of vital importance,” – which begs the question, vital to whom?[20]

Bolton does not speak of Palestine, neither as a problem that Israel has to deal with, nor as a people with their own proper aspirations for their own homeland.  It leads to the obvious thought that Bolton’s (and most of the hawks) support for Israel extends from the Mediterranean in the west to the Jordan in the east, and from the Sinai in the south to the Golan in the north. Anything or anybody else does not even measure as an inconvenience, it is simply ‘conveniently’ ignored. The more and the longer it is ignored, the more and the longer Israel will be established in the occupied territories. While the U.S. occupies and ‘democratizes’ the Middle East countries, Israel will be more secure in its occupation, colonization, and settling of Palestine.

There is a further contradiction within Bolton’s definitions of laws and constitutional validity when his position on Israel is examined.  He argues

“To have real law in a free society, there must be a framework (a constitution) that defines the government’s authority, thereby limiting it and preventing the exercise of arbitrary power.”[21]

His argument then has two parts:  one, that a constitution limits the powers of a government; and two that without one there is no real law.  So now juxtapose this anti-internationalist with his rabid support of Israel and his comments on constitutional government and multiple problems arise.  First of all, Israel has no constitution, therefore it has no real law.  Secondly, without a constitution there is little to restrict its arbitrary use of power.  Finally there are no guarantees of “freedom of speech, freedom of religion or, most importantly, equality.”[22]   Bolton’s arguments deserve no respect as they dissolve under his double standard acceptance of a non-democratic theocratic Jewish state in Israel that has no constitution while he rejects the same non-constitutional format for international organizations and treaties.  But perhaps as a zealot he is fully aware of that and because his arguments carry little weight logically there is no dissonance within his own mind.

By Bolton’s arguments, the Jewish government of Israel can rule arbitrarily without constitutional limits on its use of power, something he sees as a danger in international institutions.  And that, unfortunately, is exactly what Israel does, both internally with its resident Palestinian population, and ‘externally’ against the Palestinians in the Westbank and Gaza strip.  Added to that, Israel “has never revoked a state of emergency that allows gross violations of human rights inside Israel.”[23]   Again, it is hard to formulate an argument against an illogical non-coherent set of beliefs, but Bolton’s illogical presentation simply highlights the knowledge that Israel treats its internal Palestinian population as non-citizens, as the ‘other’, simply as residents who are excluded from the supposed democratic processes of the country.   His elevation to the UN as the U.S. representative will benefit Israel in two policy areas:  its nuclear policy, without a requirement for recognition of an international treaty that it holds in contempt and disdain; and its policy of exclusion of an indigenous group within a non-democratic theocratic government, an ethnocracy. With a Security Council Resolution presented to denounce the  Israeli bombing of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, the U.S. applied their veto, calling the resolution “unbalanced” and “biased against Israel and politically motivated”.[24]   Of course anything that goes against Israel or the U.S. would automatically be ‘biased’ and ‘unbalanced’ in Bolton’s peculiar manner of thinking.   Although Bolton argues for constitutionality, he is quite happy to operate outside of it, a fully contradictory position.

Goodbye

Bolton is an ideologue who uses quick and catchy phrases that when looked at closely find no point of argument to support them.  He has continually been a proponent of nuclear weapons, continually been a proponent of pre-emptive military action, and like many in the current administration, views it as an American right to act unilaterally to protect American ‘rights’ around the globe.  This is the man that now represents the U.S. in the United Nations, and as with his role of demonizing the Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty and ignoring the fundamentals of the NPT as they should be applied to the United States, he will do his best to manipulate the UN to act as an instrument of American foreign policy.  If not, he will be able to walk away from it all without guilt or concern, fierce in his arrogance and conceit of American exceptionalism, and proceed with promoting whatever unilateral designs the U.S. has conceived for the rest of the world.

It  appears now that Bolton is walking away from this position, probably to assume some form of ‘private’ life in a reconstituted neocon think-tank waiting for the next opportunity to revive itself with some future government. He is far too familiar with the bureacracy and hallways of power to leave them behind if opportunity presented itself otherwise.  Who will replace Bolton is likely irrelevant – someone less acerbic and egomaniacal, softer of speech with a better modulated tone – as American policy underneath whatever rhetoric is presented is unlikely to change.

*

This article was originally published on Palestine Chronicle in December 2006.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles.  His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.

Notes

[1] Bolton, John.  “America’s Skepticism About the United Nations” http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0597/ijpe/pj2bolt.htm

[2] http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/972

[3] Bosco, David. “The World According to Bolton,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2005  pp. 24-31 (vol. 61, no. 04).   www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja05bosco

[4]“U.N. rejects U.S. demand for retraction” http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060607-013127-8199r

[5] Bosco, ibid.

[6] Bolton, John.  “The Global Prosecutors: Hunting War Criminals in the Name of Utopia”, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1999.  www.foreignaffairs.org/19990101fareviewessay1029/john-r-bolton/the-global-prosecutors-hunting-war-criminals-in-the-name-of-utopia.html

[7] Lierman, Brooke. “Who is John Bolton?”  March 7, 2005.  http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=252671

[8] Carroll, James. House of War – The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.  Houghton Mifflin Company, N.Y. 2006. p. 501.

[9] Williams, Ian “Beware of Bolton”  www.alternet.org/story/13256 . November 21, 2004.

[10] Kellner, Douglas.  From 9/11 to Terror War, Rowman and Littlefield New, York 2003.

[11] Bolton cited in Williams, ibid.

[12] Johson, Chalmers.  The Sorrow of Empires Metropolitan Books New York, 2004.

[13] http://lunaville.com/mt/archives/000358.html

[14] Karpin, Michael.  The Bomb in the Basement – How Israel Went Nuclear and What that Means for the World. Simon & Schuster, N.Y. 2006. p. 349.

[15] Ibid, p. 348

[16] Ritter, Scott. Target Iran – The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. Nation Books, N.Y. 2006. p. 142-3.

[17] cited in almost every source that has any comment on the politics of John Bolton.

[18] Lierman, ibid.

[19] Ritter, ibid p. 168

[20] Raimondo, Justin “War is not in U.S. interest”  www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-03-17-oppose_x.htm

[21] Bosco, ibid.

[22] Cook, Jonathan.  Blood and Religion – The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State.  Pluto Press, Ann Arbor, MI.  2006. p. 17-18.

[23] Ibid, p. 18.

[24] Bolton, John.  Cited in  “U.S. veto of Gaza resolution criticised.”   November 12, 2006. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1A32EA5C-7462-4EA0-B642-9363F23A9E79.htm

In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.

But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy.

His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the administration to carry out military action.

More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself—the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson—to get Trump’s ear last October, just as the president was preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las Vegas after meeting with Adelson.

It was Bolton who persuaded Trump to commit to specific language pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if Congress and America’s European allies did not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to ensure the deal would fall apart.

Although Bolton was passed over for the job of secretary of state, he now appears to have had the inside track for national security advisor. Trump met with Bolton on March 6 and told him, “We need you here, John,” according to a Bolton associate. Bolton said he would only take secretary of state or national security advisor, whereupon Trump promised, “I’ll call you really soon.” Trump then replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, after which White House sources leaked to the media Trump’s intention to replace H.R. McMaster within a matter of weeks.

The only other possible candidate for the position mentioned in media accounts is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was acting national security advisor after General Michael Flynn was ousted in February 2017.

Bolton’s high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence.

Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton was also the administration’s main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney’s backing, he was able to flout normal State Department rules by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.

Thus, at the very moment that Powell was saying administration policy was not to attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003 visit, Bolton assured Israeli officials in private meetings that he had no doubt the United States would attack Iraq, and that after taking down Saddam, it would deal with Iran, too, as well as Syria.

During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit, those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S. strike against Iran.

Mossad played a very aggressive role in influencing world opinion on the Iranian nuclear program. In the summer of 2003, according to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their book The Nuclear Jihadist, Meir Dagan created a new Mossad office tasked with briefing the world’s press on alleged Iranian efforts to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The new unit’s responsibilities included circulating documents from inside Iran as well from outside, according to Frantz and Collins.

Bolton’s role in a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy, as he outlines in his own 2007 memoir, was to ensure that the Iran nuclear issue would be moved out of the International Atomic Energy Agency and into the United Nations Security Council. He was determined to prevent IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei from reaching an agreement with Iran that would make it more difficult for the Bush administration to demonize Tehran as posing a nuclear weapons threat. Bolton began accusing Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program in mid-2003, but encountered resistance not only from ElBaradei and non-aligned states, but from Britain, France, and Germany as well.

Bolton’s strategy was based on the claim that Iran was hiding its military nuclear program from the IAEA, and in early 2004, he came up with a dramatic propaganda ploy: he sent a set of satellite images to the IAEA showing sites at the Iranian military reservation at Parchin that he claimed were being used for tests to simulate nuclear weapons. Bolton demanded that the IAEA request access to inspect those sites and leaked his demand to the Associated Press in September 2004. In fact, the satellite images showed nothing more than bunkers and buildings for conventional explosives testing.

Bolton was apparently hoping the Iranian military would not agree to any IAEA inspections based on such bogus claims, thus playing into his propaganda theme of Iran’s “intransigence” in refusing to answer questions about its nuclear program. But in 2005 Iran allowed the inspectors into those sites and even let them choose several more sites to inspect. The inspectors found no evidence of any nuclear-related activities.

The U.S.-Israeli strategy would later hit the jackpot, however, when a large cache of documents supposedly from a covert source within Iran’s nuclear weapons program surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents, allegedly found on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings of a series of efforts to redesign Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to carry what appeared to be a nuclear weapon.

But the whole story of the so-called “laptop documents” was a fabrication. In 2013, a former senior German official revealed the true story to this writer: the documents had been given to German intelligence by the Mujahedin E Khalq, the anti-Iran armed group that was well known to have been used by Mossad to “launder” information the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves. Furthermore, the drawings showing the redesign that were cited as proof of a nuclear weapons program were clearly done by someone who didn’t know that Iran had already abandoned the Shahab-3’s nose cone for an entirely different design.

Mossad had clearly been working on those documents in 2003 and 2004 when Bolton was meeting with Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli contribution towards establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran for which he was the point man. Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that the Iranians were getting close to “the point of no return.” That was point, Bolton wrote, at which “we could not stop their progress without using force.”

Cheney and Bolton based their war strategy on the premise that the U.S. military would be able to consolidate control over Iraq quickly. Instead the U.S. occupation bogged down and never fully recovered. Cheney proposed taking advantage of a high-casualty event in Iraq that could be blamed on Iran to attack an IRGC base in Iran in the summer of 2007. But the risk that pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq would retaliate against U.S. troops was a key argument against the proposal.

The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also well aware that Iran had the capability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces in the region, including against warships in the Strait of Hormuz. They had no patience for Cheney’s wild ideas about more war.

That Pentagon caution remains unchanged. But two minds in the White House unhinged from reality could challenge that wariness—and push the United States closer towards a dangerous war with Iran.

*

Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to TAC. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. Follow him on Twitter @GarethPorter.

Featured image is from Skidmore/Flickr.

---

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

March 2018 will go down in history as a truly historical month.

March 1st, Vladimir Putin makes his historical address to the Russian Federal Assembly.
March 4th, Sergei Skripal, a former UK spy, is allegedly poisoned in the UK.
March 8th, British officials accuse Russia of using nerve gas to attempt to murder Sergei Skripal.
March 12th, Theresa May officially blames Russia for the poisoning and gives Russia a 24-hour ultimatum to justify herself; the Russians ignore that ultimatum. The same day, the US representative at the UNSC threatens to attack Syria even without a UNSC authorization.
March 13th, Chief of Russia’s General Staff Valery Gerasimov warned that “in case there is a threat to the lives of our military, the Russian Armed Force will take retaliatory measures both over the missiles and carriers that will use them”. The same day Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff, Deputy Defense Minister, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov had a phone conversation with Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff.
March 15th, the UK blocked Russia’s draft UN Security Council statement on Skripal poisoning case asking for an“urgent and civilized investigation” into the Skripal case. The US, UK, France, and Germany issue a statement backing the UK and blaming Russia. The UK Defence Minister tells Russia to “shut up and go away”.
March 16th, Major General Igor Konashenkov calls the British Defense Minister an “uncouth shrew” and “intellectual impotent”.
March 17th, Russian Generals warned that the US is preparing a chemical false flag attack in Syria
March 18th, Putin overwhelmingly wins the Presidential election. The same day, General Votel, Commander of CENTCOM declares in a testimony to the Armed Services Committee that differences with Russia should be settled “through political and diplomatic channels”. When asked whether it would be correct to say that “with Russia and Iran’s help, Assad has won the Civil War in Syria?” General Votel replied “I do not think that is too — that is too strong of a statement. I think they have provided him the wherewithal to — to be ascendant at this point”.
March 19th, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council issues a statement fully backing the UK.
March 21st The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs summons all ambassadors to a briefing on the Skripal case. The language used by the Russian representative at this briefing possibly is the bluntest used by any Russian (or even Soviet) official towards the West since WWII. The French, Swedish and US representative at the meeting all stood up to declare their “solidarity” with the UK.
March 22nd, The Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff, Deputy Defense Minister, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov had another phone conversation with Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The same day, General Gerasimov also held another conversation by phonewith the Commander of US European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Army General Curtis Scaparrotti.

So what is really going on here? Surely nobody seriously believes that the Brits really think that the Russians had any motive to try to kill Skripal or, for that matter, if they had a motive, that they would do it in such a stupid manner? And what’s the deal with Syria anyway? Is the USA going to execute their false flag and bomb?

I think that at this point we should not get bogged down in the details of all this. There is a forest behind these trees. What matters most now, is that the most powerful factions of the AngloZionist Empire’s ruling elites are making a concerted effort to create a unified anti-Russian coalition. In this regard it is quite telling that the US, France, and Germany issued a statement on March 15^th without even bothering to consult with their so-called “allies” in NATO or the EU. You can immediately tell “who is boss” in those crisis situations when the rest of the Euro-riffraff simply doesn’t matter (poor East Europeans with their delusions about being appreciated or even respected by the West!). Furthermore, it is quite clear that in this case, the “Anglo” component of the AngloZionist Empire is far more involved than the Zionist one, at least insofar as the front of the stage is concerned (behind the scenes the Neocons are seething at Trump for calling Putin to congratulate him and offer negotiations). I think that a number of crucial developments forced the US and the UK into trying to strong-arm the rest of the western nations to “circle the wagons” around the Empire:

1. The US humiliatingly failed in its attempts to frighten and force the DPRK into submission
2. The AngloZionists have lost the civil war in Syria
3. The UK and the rest of the NATO are becoming militarily irrelevant
4. The Ukraine has crashed and is burning and a Ukronazi attack on the Donbass is most likely
5. The political forces in Europe who opposed anti-Russian policies are on the ascent
6. The Russians are winning many EU countries over by economic means including North Stream whereas sanctions are hurting the EU much more than Russia
7. The anti-Putin campaign has miserably failed and Russia is fully united in her stance against the Empire

What this all means is very simple: the Empire needs to either fold or double down and folding is just not something the imperial elites are willing to consider yet. They are therefore using the tools which they perceive as most effective:

1. False flags: this is really a time-honored western tradition used by pretty much all the western powers. Since the general public is brainwashed and mostly can’t even begin to imagine that “freedom loving liberal democracies” could use methods usually ascribed to evil, bloodthirsty dictatorial regimes, false flags are an ideal way to get the public opinion in the correct state of mind to approve of aggressive, hostile and even violent policies against a perceived threat or obstacle to hegemony.
2. Soft power: have you noticed how the Oscars or the Cannes festival always pick exactly the kind of “artists” which the Empire happens to politically promote? Well, this is true not only for the Oscars or the Cannes festival but for almost all of the cultural, social and political life in the West. This is especially true of so-called “human rights” and “peace” organizations which are simply political pit-bulls which can be sicked on any country in need of subversion and/or intervention. Russia has never developed that kind of political toolkit.
3. Verbal escalation: this tactic is extremely crude yet very effective. You begin by vociferously proclaiming some falsehood. The fact that you proclaimed it in such vociferous and hyperbolic matter achieves two immediate results: it sends all your friends and allies a clear message “you are either with us or against us”, that leaves no room for nuance or analysis, and it gives otherwise rather spineless politicians no way to back down, thus strengthening their “resolve”.
4. Herding: there is safety in numbers. So when dealing with a potentially dangerous foe, like Russia, all the little guys flock together so as to appear bigger or, at least, harder to single out. Also, when everybody is responsible, nobody is. Thus herding is also politically expedient. Finally, it changed the inter-relational dynamic from one of friends or allies to one typically found among accomplices in a crime.
5. Direct threats: the Empire got away with making threats left and right for many decades, and this is a habit which is hard to break. The likes of Nikki Haley or Hillary Clinton probably sincerely believe that the USA is quasi-omnipotent or, conversely, they might be terrified by the creeping suspicion that it might not. Threats are also an easy, if ineffective, substitute for diplomacy and negotiations, especially when your position is objectively wrong and the other side is simply a lot smarter than you.

The big problem is that none of these methods work against Russia or, let me correct that, don’t work anymore (they sure appeared to work in the past). The Russian public opinion is fully aware of all these methods (courtesy of a Russian media NOT controlled by AngloZionists) and Margarita Simonian beautifully summarized the feelings that all this elicits in the Russian population:

“all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to stop respecting you. You and your so-called “values.” We don’t want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer. We have no more respect for you, and for those among us that you support, and for all those people who support you (…). For that, you only have yourself to blame (…) Our people are capable to forgive a lot. But we don’t forgive arrogance, and no normal nation would. Your only remaining Empire would be wise to learn the history of its allies, all of them are former empires. To learn the ways they lost their empires. Only because of their arrogance. White man’s burden, my ass!” (this last sentence in English in the original text – trans.)

The stark truth is that far from wanting to invade, appease or otherwise please the West, Russia has absolutely no need, or even interest, in it. None. For centuries Russian elites have been western-focused to some degree or other and none of them could even begin to imagine a West-less Russia. This is still true today, the Russian “elites” still want to live like (very rich) Brits or Germans and they still hate the common Russian people and Vladimir Putin. But those Russian elites have now been crushed by the magnitude of Putin’s victory in the presidential elections. Normally, this should result in an even bigger exile of Russian “businessmen” to the UK, France or Israel, but the problem now is that the British are making noises about punishing them for, well, being Russians (even Russophobic, pro-western, “Russians”). As a result, these “poor” pro-western liberals can only whine on the social media and in the few pro-western media outlets left in Russia (no, not due to repression, but due to their political irrelevancy being backed, as they are, by something between 2% and 5% of the population).

But setting aside the wealthy “elites” for a moment, Russia as a country and as a nation has simply no use for the West and what it represents. Those who fantasize about Russia being interested in “Europe”, “White identity” or “Western Christianity” are only kidding themselves. They hope that the current cultural and spiritual revival in Russia will somehow spill over to them and allow them to extricate themselves from the gutter in which they are currently prostrated. It won’t. Just read again what Simonian said about the western “values” in the quote above. For most Russians “Europe” reeks of Napoleon, “White identity” of Hitler and “Western Christianity” of the creation of the Ukraine and the “Eastern Crusades“. No, Russia has no interest in revenge against any of that, she just has no respect or interest for what these concepts stand for. (Poland – is possibly the last country where all these things are taken seriously and fondly remembered). Still, the Russians are still willing to negotiate to establish a viable coexistence between the Western and Russian civilizational realms. Putin clearly said so in his speech

There is no need to create more threats to the world. Instead, let us sit down at the negotiating table and devise together a new and relevant system of international security and sustainable development for human civilization. We have been saying this all along. All these proposals are still valid. Russia is ready for this.

But if the AngloZionists are dead set on world domination by means of war, then Russia is ready for that too. Not a war of aggression, of course, not even against the tiny Baltic statelets, Putin made that clear too when he said “we are not threatening anyone, not going to attack anyone or take away anything from anyone with the threat of weapons. We do not need anything. Just the opposite” (emphasis added). But if attacked, Russia is now ready to defend herself:

“And to those who in the past 15 years have tried to accelerate an arms race and seek unilateral advantage against Russia, have introduced restrictions and sanctions that are illegal from the standpoint of international law aiming to restrain our nation’s development, including in the military area, I will say this: everything you have tried to prevent through such a policy has already happened. No one has managed to restrain Russia (…) Any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies, weapons of short, medium or any range at all, will be considered as a nuclear attack on this country. Retaliation will be immediate, with all the attendant consequences. There should be no doubt about this whatsoever.”

Why is the nuclear issue so central? Because the Russians are fully aware of the fact that the AngloZionists cannot win a conventional war with Russia. Thus it is crucial for the Russians to convince the AngloZionists that they are neither militarily superior nor invulnerable (see here for a full analysis of these two myths). But once some kind of modus vivendi is achieved with the West, Russia will focus her efforts in different directions: much needed internal reforms and development, the work with China on the establishment of a single Eurasian zone of economic security, peace and prosperity, the restoration of peace in the Middle-East, the development of the Russian Far East and North – you name it. Russia has plenty of work which needs to be done, none of which involves the West in any capacity.

And that is, of course, what is so totally unacceptable to the West.

Hence this month’s historical developments which have placed Russia and the West in a direct collision course. As I said above, the Empire can now either fold or double down. If it decides to fold, war will be averted and meaningful negotiations finally entered into. If it doubles down, something the Neocons always do, then this means war with Russia. This is a stark and very difficult choice (no, not for normal people, but for the psychopaths ruling the West). And there isn’t much Russia could, or should, do at this point. As is the case every time a serious crisis takes place, the apparently united elites running the West will now break-up into separate factions and each one of these factions will pursue and promote its own, narrow, interests. There will be an intense, mostly behind the scenes, struggle between those who will want to double down or even trigger a war against Russia and those who will be horrified by that notion (not necessarily for profound moral reasons, just out of basic self-interest and a healthy instinct for self-preservation).

As to who will prevail, your guess is as good a mine. But the fact that today Trump replaced McMaster with a warmongering psychopath like John Bolton is a clear sign that the Neocons are in charge in the USA and that the Axis of Kindness is about to get a heck of a lot “kinder”.

*

This article was written for the Unz Review.

Mahmoud Abbas today is in the terrible grip of the second phase of the Oslo accord of 1993, also known as “the peace process”. Many, including myself, have written about the death of this agonizing process, but in reality, it is not dead; it is very much in progress as scripted.

The epic tragedy of the “Peace Process” is not over until Abbas sings.

And he is singing, but off key, out of tune with the aspirations of the Palestinian people on whom he continues to be imposed as a puppet leader. [See The Tragedy of Mahmoud Abbas]

Some years ago, Abbas’s political script was accepted, albeit reluctantly, by a majority of West Bankers. It was a script imposed on Abbas by the so-called peace process, which was hammered out in total secrecy and which dictated a two-state “solution” as the only permissible solution to the problem created by the violent partitioning of historic Arab Palestine in 1948.

After a five-year interim period, the Oslo accord was supposedly meant to go into a second phase during which,

“…a final peace agreement to resolve the thorniest issues [would take place]: final borders (see map), security arrangements, Jerusalem, whether the Palestinians would have an independent state, Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinian refugees’ claims to land and property left behind when they fled Israel.”  The [Negotiations | Shattered Dreams Of Peace | FRONTLINE | PBS]

Well, we are now in that second phase at long last. Instead of five years, the first phase took more than two long decades of stalling and consolidation of Israel’s gains “on the ground”, two decades of exploiting Palestinian resources and blatantly deceiving them. [See How “Oslo” turned diplomatic negotiation into compelling theatre]

And here we are at the end game:

• Final borders?

See: The Role of the Border in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“Israel-Palestine is clearly not a classic territorial dispute in the sense of there being a state ‘A,’ existing on territory ‘X’ and a state ‘B’ existing on territory ‘Y’ with a territorial area ‘Z’ which is in dispute between states ‘A’ and ‘B.’ If this is about territory, then perhaps it is easier to consider the conflict as being about all of the territory.”

• Israel’s security?
  8 billion a year in U.S. military aid to Israel starting in 2019

See: US Military Aid to Israel

• Jerusalem?
  Illegal annexation of Arab East Jerusalem is now recognized by the U.S.

See: Legalising the annexation of Jerusalem

• Independent state?
  Never

See: Netanyahu suggests a sovereign state might not work for Palestinians

• Jewish settlements in the West Bank?
  The more the merrier

See: Analysis | U.S. ambassador breaks with policy: ‘I think the settlements are part of Israel’

• Gaza?
  Under siege, on the brink and its elected government considered as a “terror organization” for not acquiescing to its own subjugation
  See:Designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a Terrorist Organization Is a Bad Idea

“One shudders to think how much worse the attacks from Gaza against Israel would be if Hamas had even more ability to import weapons, construct tunnels, and develop bombs to harm Israel.”

And Who profits from keeping Gaza on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe?

• Palestinian claims to land and property?
  What?

See: Land and Settlement Issues

• Palestinian right of return?
  Over Israel’s dead body – literally.

See: A Plot to Destroy the Jewish State and TV report: Israel now wants Trump to reject Palestinian ‘right of return’

“The settler-colonial Jewish state formed on Palestinian Arab land almost 70 years ago is in de facto sovereignty over all of Palestine today, practicing its internationally-acknowledged illegal activities with impunity.”

Abbas is scrambling for a political raft to take him to any shore.

How out of tune is he?

Even Jordan is asking Abbas not to undermine Palestinian rights and former Egyptian assistant foreign minister, Abdullah Al-Ashal is calling him a tool for Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’.

Polls by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) clearly indicate how discredited Abbas’s political agenda has become.

So, what’s left, you might ask? Well, only Palestinian sumoud (steadfastness) and the strong belief, as Dr.HatemBazian, a Professor and co-founder of Zaytuna College, & Senior Lecturer, UC Berkeley, put it:

“A nation is not defeated until its will to resist is completely snuffed.”

*

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

The ongoing crisis between Britain and the Russian Federation over the poisoning of a former GRU colonel on British soil is the latest episode in what for a number of years has effectively been a ‘Cold War’ between Russia on the one hand, and the Western alliance nations comprised of NATO and the European Union on the other.

It is important, nonetheless, to note that friction and dissonance between Russia and Britain has been an enduring one spanning the centuries. It is a rivalry that has been predicated on cultural differences, ideological antagonism and imperial ambition.

It can in many ways be argued to be in essence a recurring clash of civilisations which today is fixated on the attempts of the Anglo-Saxon powers and their Western allies to maintain their global military and economic domination in the face of a surgent Eurasia at the centre of which is Russia.

But with the ideological Cold War with the old Soviet Union long ended, a crucial question that continues to elude discussion concerns the efficacy of Britain’s prolongation of a ‘rivalry’ with a faraway Eurasian power.

Culture

“All shall serve the state

Only a strong ruler can save Russia

Only strong rule and a united state can repel the enemies at our borders”.

– Words of Ivan the Terrible at his coronation in the Kremlin in Sergey Eisenstein’s 1944 film about the first Tsar of Russia.

A useful starting point would be to emphasise the historical distinctions between Russian and British conceptions of the state as well as the perceptions held by the respective populaces of the role of the state. While the origins of both the British and Russian states are rooted in the autocratic rule of monarchs, the concept of state in feudal England arguably never bore the hallmarks of the sort of absolutism that developed in Russia where the equivalent term for state, gosudarstvo, connoted a sovereign who ruled with unfettered and unaccountable power.

The English innovation of a law-governed state that continued to evolve after Magna Carta contrasted with the iron-fisted rule, zheleznaya ruka, that is the legacy of Russia having been submerged by centuries of Mongol occupation. Writing when he held the position of British Ambassador to Russia at the time of Ivan the Terrible, Giles Fletcher’s astonishment at the unchecked power of the Tsar is evident:

The form of government is plainly tyrannical. All are beholden to the Prince (Tsar) in the most barbarous manner. In all matters of state: making and annulling public laws, making magistrates, the power to execute or pardon life. All pertain absolutely to the emperor as he may both be commander and executioner of all.

Where Anglo-Norman constitutionalism progressively developed, the vestiges of consultative government of the sort practised by Kievan Rus and Novgorod became lost to Russia during a tumultuous history. If, for argument sake, there is truth to the allegations of state-sponsored assassinations of opposition politicians and journalists as well as traitorous figures in the field of intelligence under the rule of President Vladimir Putin, then some will argue that in the Russian psyche the individual consciously subordinates himself to the state and understands that he is liable to forfeit his life to the state in a manner that is incomprehensible to the average Briton. This applies equally to those who sacrifice themselves for Mother Russia, as in the case of Prince Igor’s doomed expedition against the Polovtsians, as well as those who either speak out against an incumbent head of state or who otherwise betray the state.

Thus it is not difficult to fathom why, regardless of the deliberately contrived anti-Russian sentiment by the Western media, many could rationally believe that Putin, a former official of the KGB, who is perceived in the West as a strongman-ruler in the mould of an oriental despot, could be responsible for the targeting of figures such as Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko.

Imperial Ambition

“To those socialists and pacifists I say, ‘Would you betray the courage of the gallant fallen by abandoning our imperial borders to the possibility of future aggression intrigues of the Russians?”

– Winston Churchill, ‘The Riddle of the Frontier’.

It is important to recall the rivalry between the British and Russian empires during the 19th century because there are parallels with the present day confrontation between the West and Russia. The Bolshaya Igra or ‘Great Game’, a term popularised by the English writer Rudyard Kipling, describes the competition between both empires for spheres of influence in Central Asia.

In January 1830, an edict issued by Baron Rupert Ellenborough, the governor of British India, established a new trade route from India to Bukhara (part of modern Uzbekistan) via Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. It had the objective of keeping in check any advance of Russia towards the warm-water sea ports of the Persian Gulf. This stood in opposition to the Russian aim of turning Afghanistan into a neutral zone through which it could secure access to key trade routes.

A series of military confrontations ensued: The first Anglo-Afghan War from 1839 to 1842, the first Anglo-Sikh War from 1845 to 1846, the second Anglo-Sikh War from 1848 to 1849 and the second Anglo-Afghan War from 1878 to 1880. British success in these wars was limited while the Russians succeeded in colonising several central Asian Khanates including the much prized Bukhara. Nonetheless, the British managed to keep Afghanistan as a buffer between Russia and India.

The ‘Great Game’ came to an end with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 which delineated mutual spheres of influence in Persia. Both sides agreed to refrain from intervening in Tibet and Russia acknowledged British influence in Afghanistan.

Ideology

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.

– Winston Churchill speaking in 1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri.

Britain and Russia became allies against Kaiser-era Germany in the First World War and Britain and the Soviet Union would be allied in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War. But such were the differences in ideological outlook between the Western allies and the Soviet Union that a ‘Cold War’ ensued with Britain becoming a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), a military alliance that was confronted by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

The Iron Curtain depicted as a black line. Warsaw Pact countries on one side of the Iron Curtain appear shaded red; NATO members on the other shaded blue; militarily neutral countries shaded gray. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Winston Churchill, who coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’, had as the war secretary overseen the British-led foreign invasion of Russia via Archangel, a move which he saw as an opportunity to strangle Bolshevism “in its cradle”. That military action, as had the Crimean War in the 19th Century in which Britain had allied with France, contributed to the age-long Russian fear of foreign attacks. The British Secret Intelligence Service was also involved in intrigues geared towards overthrowing the Bolshevik regime which had signed an accord with the Germany enemy and through the efforts of Robert Bruce Lockhart, although ostensibly working for the Foreign Office, were almost certainly involved in a plot to assassinate leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky.

The post-war confrontation with the Soviet Union lasted for much of the second half of the twentieth century.  While the issues of a nuclear arms race and proxy wars were significant factors in the rivalry between the West and the Soviets, the intelligence war remains a hugely emblematic feature of the era replete with intrigues of espionage during which British intelligence often tangled with their Soviet counterparts.

Soviet intelligence had great success in penetrating Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, as the defections of Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and Kim Philby spectacularly revealed.

There was also a gruesome episode where the Soviets disrupted a British attempt to spy on a Russian naval cruiser, the ‘Ordzhonikidze’, which was berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard during a 1956 visit to Britain by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, recruited Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a retired naval frogman to reconnoitre the ship on a spying mission which was done without the knowledge or the permission of Prime Minister Harold MacMillan. It ended disastrously. Crabb disappeared and a body purported to be his was found by fisherman a year later decapitated and shorn of its hands.

But the British intelligence services did have their successes. The recruitment of Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU colonel who provided valuable information used by the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, was undertaken by MI6. MI6’s ‘turning’ of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent who was later appointed the London station chief, also counted as a triumph as did its exfiltration of Gordievsky from Russia after he had been recalled home and interrogated as a suspected double agent.

An overall assessment of the degree to which intelligence made a difference in the ‘Cold War’ is difficult because it ultimately did not break out into an all out war after which the strength and accuracy of intelligence related to the other side’s intentions and capabilities could be validated – if at all. For while Britain and the Soviet Union performed excellently in the field of intelligence during the Second World War, a highlight of the former been its breaking of the German enigma code and the latter, SMERSH’s outmanoeuvering of the German Abwehr on the eastern front, an outbreak of all out war between forces of Nato and the Warsaw Pact would have resulted in the mutual annihilation of both sides.

The Cold War in Fiction

“Dear God you’ve no idea have you! People in this business; they’re not noble warriors, saints and martyrs. They don’t sit in London like monks renouncing Satan and Lenin both. There are a procession of fools and chancers, pansies, cowards, daredevils, drunkards and some of them are brilliant. They don’t do it for peace and freedom; they do it for the game.” – Alex Leamas in John le Carre’s ‘The Spy Who came in from the Cold’.

The fiction of the British writers Ian Fleming and John le Carre played a huge part in mythologising this ‘Great Game’ of intelligence. In the case of the former, the James Bond novels consistently sought to portray Britain, whose power was greatly diminished in the post-war period, as a vital cog in the efforts of the American-led ‘free’ West to counter the threat of the spread of Soviet-inspired communism. But where the reduction in power and prestige remained unmentioned in Fleming books, le Carre’s early works frequently reference Britain’s rationale for seeking to compete with the Soviet Union. This relates to a yearning on the part of the British for the pre-war period of imperial grandeur. It also offers a measure of insight into the reason why Britain has continued to pursue a rivalry with Russia after the end of this ideologically-based conflict.

The Soviets were, of course, depicted as villains in Fleming’s books and the Russians, specifically imbued with unenviable characteristics. In You Only Live Twice, a character warns Bond who is suffering from amnesia to be careful about a proposed expedition to Vladivostok because the Russians “are not a friendly people”.

It seems quite possible to argue that the image of Russia never recovered from the negative portrayals of Western political propaganda and popular culture during this era. Indeed, right at its outset, Stalin had not only denounced Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech as “war mongering”, but also interpreted his reference to the “English-speaking world” as imperialist “racism”.

In contrast to the glamour and moral certainties of the Fleming books are the works of John le Carre who’s gritty and morally ambiguous renditions bore the ring of authenticity. The spy games played out in an ideological war between capitalist states and communist states took on undertones that did not reflect the notions propagated in the West of a straightforward morality play of the ‘good’ West versus the ‘bad’ East.

Espionage on both sides was an endeavour shrouded in a great deal of ugliness. In his most famous book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, ‘Control’, the fictional head of British intelligence admits that both sides essentially employ the same methods when stating that “you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”

In several ways, the book portrays British intelligence as been even more ruthless and amoral than the rival secret services of the Soviet bloc. Le Carre was a former intelligence officer with firsthand experience of the intelligence war and this acknowledgement that the British play the game of covert operations as dirty as anyone else should be borne in mind when considering what misdeeds the British and Russian secret services are each capable of accomplishing.

As a character in one of his later books, The Little Drummer Girlexplains: “Terror is theatre … Theatre’s a con trick. Do you know what that means? Con trick? You’ve been deceived.”

Anglo-American Hegemony and the Threat of Eurasia

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;

Who rules the World-Island controls the world.

– Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).

Russia sits at the heart of a contiguous land mass encompassing Europe and Asia. In 1904, a British geographer and scholar named Halford Mackinder, postulated the ‘Heartland Theory’ in a paper he titled The Geographical Pivot of History. This is a geostrategic theory which divides the world into three geographical regions. The Americas and Australia were referred to as “outlying islands” and the British Isles and the islands of Japan he labelled “outer islands”. The combination of Africa, Europe and Asia he termed the “World-Island”. And at the centre of the “World-Island” is the “Heartland”, which stretches from the Volga River to the Yangtze River and from the Himalayas to the Arctic Ocean.

Later in 1919, Mackinder summarised the essence of his theory as follows: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” It served as both a warning and a suggestion. It warned that sea power which had seen the rise of Western European powers and the United States would give way to land power and it suggested that controlling Eastern Europe would serve as the means through which the Heartland’s power could be balanced.

The modifications offered to Mackinder’s thesis by other theorists do not diminish the importance of Russia in any calculations related to the geopolitical balance of power and this is borne out by the policies of Britain and other Western nations in the past as well as the present. Russia is after all located at the centre, the Eurasian core which Mackinder named the “Pivot Area”.

The British Empire, sometimes in concert with other powers such as France and the Ottomans in relation to Crimea, fought the Russian Empire as a means of preventing its expansion southwards. The aim of containing Russia was thus an extension of Britain’s ‘balance of power’ foreign policy doctrine which informed its relations with continental Europe. This was also the rationale behind the alliance first with the Russian Empire as part of the ‘Triple Entente’ against Austria-Hungary prior to the First World War and secondly with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

Britain’s empire of course rapidly dissolved after the Second World War, and so it is not quite accurate to refer to it as having been a rival to the Soviet Union and now Russia. But it remains an important part of the Western alliance led by the United States. Mackinder’s ideas helped shape the West’s management of the ‘Cold War’ and his influence is strong in the foreign policy America has conducted since the ending of the Cold War.

It is important in this context therefore to consider the thinking that has informed American global foreign policy which Britain has slavishly supported. The Brzezinski doctrine is derived from an explicit formulation by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1988 book, The Grand Chessboard, which theorised a formula that was fixated on preventing the rise of a Eurasian power or combination of powers which could challenge the global dominance of the United States. The idea was that the United States needed to militarily intimidate Russia while working to dismantle it for the purpose of using it as a pliant source of Western energy needs.

It is a theory that is in accord with the neoconservative philosophy which has been consistently influential on the policies of successive American administrations dating back to that of President Bill Clinton. Brzezinski’s analysis devoted a great deal to geostrategy in Central Asia which of course was the centre of conflict between British and Russian Empires during the ‘Great Game’.

The end of the Cold War was thought by some intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama to have represented the ‘end of history’, and, by implication, the end of geopolitics. But the neoconservatives and those imbued with a belief in the messianic aspect of ‘American Exceptionalism’ saw in this historical ‘victory’ of liberal democracy and the free market an opportunity for the United States to impose its will on the rest of humanity. Thus the Wolfowitz doctrine asserted the right of the United States to enforce a global American imperium -even at the cost of abrogating on multilateral agreements- in order to assure the continued political and economic hegemony of the United States.

The result was the inauguration of a new age of American militarism which has been supported and embraced to Britain. Thus Britain, under the aegis of the United States-led Nato alliance, supported American interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain also joined with France and the United States in toppling the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

Further, Britain has supported covert operations overseen by American intelligence agencies that have threatened Russia’s security interests. The effort begun in 2011 to attempt to overthrow the secular government of Bashar al Assad in Syria, where Russia has a longstanding naval base, was based on a plan of infiltrating the country with jihadists. Britain through Nato and the EU supported a United States instigated coup d’état in Ukraine which overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych and installed a Russophobic, ultra-nationalist regime which threatened to eject Russia’s Black Sea fleet from its base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula.

While Britain and the West has sought to portray Russia under Vladimir Putin as revanchist, that is, as an aggressive power intent on restoring the former glory of the Soviet Union including the reacquisition of old territories, the truth is that Russian foreign manoeuvres have been reactive rather than proactive.

The Russian incursion into Georgia was a reaction to a Georgian attack on South Ossetia which had been encouraged by Nato. Russia later withdrew it forces. Russia’s reacquisition of Crimea following a referendum came after a United States-sponsored coup carried out by ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups which caused fear and concern among the Russian-speaking population in the eastern part of the country. Russian troops were already in Crimea under a post-Soviet agreement and there was no invasion of the Ukraine despite calls from Russian ultranationalists for Putin invade and annexe the eastern part of the country.

Russian military involvement in Syria was a reaction to Nato’s support for the infiltration of Syria by Islamic fanatics who were to be used to overthrow the secular Baathist government. Britain has supported this endeavour as evidenced by the revelations of Roland Dumas, the former foreign minister of France, who claimed in 2013 that while on a visit to England a few years before, he had been informed of a plan to overthrow the Syrian government. British military officers were among Nato officials stationed on Syria’s border with Jordan in order offer training to Syrian rebels. Furthermore, in 2015 the Old Bailey trial of a man charged with terrorist activities in Syria collapsed on the grounds that Britain’s security and intelligence services would have been “deeply embarrassed” about their covert support of anti-Assad militias. The fall of Syria would have provided a launch pad for the jihadists to foment trouble in the Muslim areas of the Russian Federation.

Russia’s decision to reorganise its military districts and its battle offensive capabilities including developing a new generation of nuclear weapons can also be considered to be reactive rather than as part of a policy of aggression. This is because it is arguably a development stemming from the decision of the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty back in 2002. It is also arguably a reactive episode based on the expansion of Nato to its borders, in contravention of an agreement reached by the leaders of the West and the Soviet Union that Nato would not move an inch eastward in return for consenting to the reunification of Germany as a part of Nato.

While Putin may have declared in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, his statement cannot be definitively taken to reflect a lust to reacquire Soviet borders. Context is important. Putin took over the presidency of Russia, a vast nation that had endured the complete collapse of state authority twice in the twentieth century, after the retirement of Boris Yeltsin, a weak and ineffectual leader who presided over the chaotic and traumatic transformation from a planned economy to a Western free market economy. This period saw the rise of the oligarchs and the wholesale plunder of Russia’s wealth during a structural adjustment programme overseen by Western economic advisors. The Russian death rate increased, living standards decreased and an aura of general insecurity was prevalent. Putin is credited with bringing this state of affairs -comparable in the Russian psyche to the Smutnoe Vremya or ‘Time of Troubles’- to an end.

An understanding of this background is thus important in comprehending the state of animus existing today between Britain and its Western allies on the one hand and Russia on the other. The West is comfortable with a weakened, and even prostrate Russia; a Russia which can be manipulated and exploited, not one which is stable and possessing the potentialities associated with a powerful Eurasian entity. A united and stable Russia which refuses to submit to the hegemony of the West presents an existential threat to continued Western domination.

This sentiment is explicitly expressed by Michael Fallon, a former British minister of defence who in a speech in February 2017 entitled ‘Coping with Russia’, said: “Our hope was to have a partnership with Russia that recognised nations’ pursuit of their self-interest within the framework of the rules-based international order. But Russia has chosen to become a strategic competitor of the West”.

Whereas the West has consistently ignored a ‘rules-based’ approach to international affairs, demonstrated by the destruction -with key British assistance- wrought by invasions and fomented conflicts in locations such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Russia’s actions have been reactive. Its decision to enter into the Syrian conflict at the invitation of the legal government of that nation, an action which reintroduced multipolarity into the geopolitical arena, has been welcomed by many. In assisting the Syrian Army, Iran and Hezbollah in destroying Western-sponsored Islamist groups, Russia, in the words of Britain’s former foreign secretary Lord David Owen, has “saved civilisation”.

The Aftermath of the Poisoning of Sergei Skripal

“Frankly, Russia should go away – it should shut up”.

– Gavin Williamson, Britain’s defence secretary, speaking in March 2018.

The poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the former GRU colonel turned MI6 double agent in the English city of Salisbury has plunged Anglo-Russian relations to new depths. The tit-for-tat expulsions of embassy staff are reminiscent of the Cold War era. The immediate reaction by British politicians and much of the mainstream media was to immediately hold the Russian state responsible for the attempted murder of Skripal and his daughter.

Image on the right: Sergei Skripal and his daughter

But within the atmosphere of strident accusation and vilification, is a litany of unanswered, even troubling questions. Firstly, why would the Russian state feel it necessary to attempt to kill an apparently retired agent who no longer poses a threat to its security? Secondly, why would the assassins choice of weapon, novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, be utilised for such a enterprise in the full knowledge that the source of the attack would be traced back to Russia? Thirdly, how were the victims able to survive what has been described as a “military grade nerve agent”? Fourthly, what would Russia stand to gain from such an act so close to the Russian presidential elections and only months away from the World Cup which it will be hosting? Fifthly, why would Russia risk upsetting the established convention associated with spy swaps which entails that such agents are not subject to future reprisals?

The rush to judgement, which has involved abrogating the key tenet of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence of the presumption of innocence before a finding of guilt is somewhat perplexing. As Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party said: “To rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police, in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security”. Prime Minister Theresa May had been quick to announce to the House of Commons that “there is no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter”.

May’s demand on March 14th that Russia provide an “explanation” within 48 hours, was, argued Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Britain, he insisted was under an obligation to hand over samples of the chemical agent allegedly used in the attack to the Russian side and that a ten day window be given.

There is an argument that Article IX (2) of the convention has not been breached by Britain because the language used in the convention is not of an absolute nature. There is also the claim that as the British government concluded that Russia was “highly likely” responsible for the attack, the provision which refers to “any matter which may cause doubt about compliance” did not apply and that Britain was free to pursue a different way of dealing with the matter.

But these arguments are just that: arguments. While it is true to assert that the convention does not provide an exclusive remedy and that exchange of information would not be practical under circumstances when countries are engaged in full-blown military exchanges, the request of Russia appeared reasonable because both nations are not involved in an all-out war.

Further, it can be argued that reasonable doubt does persist given the fact that the British government has failed to disclose any hard evidence confirming the use of novichok. The novichok programme was centred in Nukus, Uzbekistan -not Russia- where weapons stocks are claimed to have been dismantled and destroyed under supervision of the United States. But even if Russia still has stocks of the nerve agent, as the whistleblowing Russian chemist Vil Mirzayanov alleged, it is not accurate to declare that only Russia is capable of producing the variants of the chemical. Indeed, a book published in 2008 by Mirzayanova entitled State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Programme, provides the formula associated with the production of novichok. This means that any chemical or pharmaceutical corporation or government agency such as Porton Down, the British government-run scientific research laboratory, are capable of reproducing it.

While it is not beyond the scope of Russia to have committed the attack, suspicions that it may have been a black operation conducted by British intelligence agents with the motive of discrediting Russia in a campaign that has been actively pursued for over a decade. The allegation made by Andrei Lugovoi, the former FSB agent whom the British authorities claim murdered Alexander Litvinenko that the Skripal incident was another “provocation by British intelligence services” will not impress the many who are aware of the historical record of generations of Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies.

But Ray McGovern, a former long-serving CIA officer who received the Intelligence Commendation Medal is on record as not ruling out the possibility of an operation carried out by either Britain’s Security Service or Secret Intelligence Service. Britain’s intelligence agencies have after all been claimed to have been involved in plots of assassination against world leaders ranging from Vladimir Lenin to Muammar Gaddafi and Slobadan Milosevic.

There will be those who will refuse to follow the official narrative because of the lack of evidence and motive on the part of the Russians. Some will go further in asserting their belief that the incident is part of a sinister propaganda exercise. The proximity of Porton Down, to Salisbury, will for some be a source of disquiet. Porton Down has a murky history that includes the use of unwitting individuals and the general public in secret experiments.

Furthermore, it may not be uncoincidental that a number of attacks made during the Syrian conflict which have involved chemical weapons such as in Ghouta in August 2013 and Idlib in April 2017 came at significant junctures in the conflict where their use happened to provide justification for Western intervention in ways that would debilitate the Syrian government, which of course has been supported by Russia. Blame on each occasion was affixed on the Syrian government in highly disputed circumstances where there was no discernible advantage to be gained by the Syrians in employing their use against Western-backed rebel forces.

The analogy with the Salisbury attack is that Russia, as was the case with the Syrian government, have little to gain, while Britain has the opportunity to take the moral high ground from which to demonise an enemy and discredit an enemy which has won a great deal of goodwill around the world because of its decisive role in defeating Islamist militias in Syria where it has frustrated Western efforts aimed at overthrowing the government of Bashar al Assad.

The underlying question remains: cui bono?

Conclusions

“Even I thought that with the end of the ideological barrier in the form of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, things would change radically. But it turns out … there are geopolitical interests not linked to ideology at all”.

– Vladimir Putin, speaking in 2015.

The maelstrom of invective and counter-invective related to the fallout over the attempt on the life of Sergei Skripal -one episode within the wider, longstanding state of tension between Russia and the West- tends to obscure one fundamental question: Why does Britain persist in positioning itself as a rival of Russia? It is a question which ought to exercise the mind of any prudent and critical observer.

Both countries do not share a common border. Nor do they have any territorial disputes. And Russia is not seeking to overthrow Britain’s political system, impose an ideology upon it or to conquer it militarily.

Vladimir Putin has consistently expressed the view that since the end of the Cold War Russia has always wanted to foster closer ties with the West, but that this has been consistently rebuffed. It is important to note that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service turned Sergei Skripal into a double agent in 1995 only a few years after the end of the ideologically-motivated Cold War. This was at a time when Russia was a pliable country undergoing the Western-managed transformation from Soviet socialism into a laissez faire economy.

Espionage directed at another nation state often denotes hostile intent and it is not surprising that Putin amongst many Russians has sensed that the West has sought to break up the country leaving it balkanised in a manner similar to what happened in Yugoslavia.

Britain has certainly worked towards effecting regime change.

In 2006, the Russian authorities revealed an elaborate scheme in which British operatives used a fake rock in Moscow to hide electronic equipment. The FSB linked the item to a British secret service operation involved with making covert payments to pro-democracy and human rights groups – the classic cover used by Western intelligence services, notably the CIA, to foment so-called ‘colour revolutions’. Putin responded by passing legislation restricting non-governmental organisations from obtaining funding from foreign governments.

The perception among many Russians is that these goals indicate that Britain, like rest of the American-led West, has no intention of wanting to treat Russia as equals and only seeks to co-opt Russia into the Western fold on the terms of a subordinate partner.

Since Peter the Great, many Russian leaders and thinkers have gazed westward, seemingly fixated, but at the same time ruefully understanding, as implied by a famous poem by Aleksandr Blok, that such yearning will never be reciprocated. Russia represents the buffer between Europe and the Mongol hordes, is culturally and racially distinct and thus is ultimately unassimilable. And while today the goal of Western assimilation is held by a still influential group sometimes referred to as the ‘Atlantic Integrationists’, the other faction, the ‘Eurasian Sovereignists’, of which Putin is a representative, have been empowered by Western policies which have caused Russia to look eastwards for increased security and economic cooperation with China as well as to other parts of the world.

This meeting of minds between both powers and the policies they have begun to pursue, is to an increasing number of intellectuals the beginning of a geopolitical trend that represents the birth of a Eurasian project, one to which the political and economic destiny of Europeans will increasingly become linked. It is a trend which ought to make Britain re-evaluate its long-term strategy of binding itself with the American goal of maintaining global hegemony. It is a development which arguably reveals the self-defeating element and ultimately the futility of British hostility towards Russia.

Such hostility, represented by an escalating policy of demonisation, is geared towards an inevitable outcome of war between the Western military powers and Russia, a war which some would argue is already in progress. This is presently, for the most part, informational but is also composed of an economic element, the conduct of cyber warfare and is partly kinetic.

A ‘hot war’ with Russia would risk ending life in earth. It is thus incumbent on Britain’s political, intellectual and security leadership to rethink this increasingly fruitless rivalry.

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This article was originally published on Adeyinka Makinde’s blog.

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How Many Millions of People Have Been Killed in America’s Post-9/11 Wars?

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, March 23, 2018

The numbers of casualties of U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001 have largely gone uncounted, but coming to terms with the true scale of the crimes committed remains an urgent moral, political and legal imperative, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies.

“The Sloppy Dossier”: Plagiarism and “Fake Intelligence” Used to Justify the War on Iraq: Copied and Pasted from the Internet into an “Official” British Intel Report

By Glen Rangwala and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 22, 2018

Fake intelligence as well as plagiarized quotations had been slipped into an official intelligence report pertaining to Iraq’s WMD presented to the UN Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003.

Iraq’s US-led “Illegal” Invasion Brought Nothing But Disaster

By Tallha Abdulrazaq, March 23, 2018

15 years ago, the United States and its allies launched the opening salvos of a devastating military campaign against Iraq that would forever change the face of the Middle East, and have reverberating effects that would affect the entire world.

Death and Impunity: Iraq Fifteen Years After

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 23, 2018

 Fifteen years before, governments aligning with the dogs of war decided, in defiance of millions of protestors globally, to invade a sovereign state. Papers cheered with blood lust; propagandists and public relations firms were hired to push the politics of regime change in a country that was already hemmed in by sanctions and surveillance.

The United Nations and Its Conduct During the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

By Denis Halliday, March 23, 2018

With US invasion intentions announced, where were the UN voices of moral law and integrity? Where was the outrage? Where was the intervention of the Secretary-General as per his obligations of UN Charter Article 99? Where were the many member states committed to protecting the UN Charter and tenets of international law? Given the forum of the General Assembly and the power of the majority, where were the states prepared to stop the oil/military strategic aggression blatantly being pursued by Bush and Blair?

Iraq: Will Tony Blair Finally Stand Trial for His Part in the “Supreme International Crime”?

By Felicity Arbuthnot, March 23, 2018

In the light of the Court hearing, Sir John Chilcot – who headed the seven year Inquiry in to the decimating attack on Iraq and found that the Blair Cabinet’s decisions on the matter had been “far from satisfactory” – broke a year long silence in an interview with the BBC. 

Há um bom tempo ando com “as barbas de molho” em escrever em português, para brasileiro ler. No aniversário dos 41 anos do assassinato do ex-presidente João Goulart (1961-1964) na Argentina em dezembro, publiquei quatro diferentes reportagens em dois idiomas – nenhuma em português, por pura falta de vontade/motivação/interesse.

Mas vamos lá, mais uma publicação didática explicando o que, em qualquer parte do mundo, é desnecessário fazer agora – mesmo para estrangeiros que mal sabem localizar o mapa do Brasil.

O assassinato de Marielle não é mais um entre milhares, como a maioria idiotizada por excrecências como Rede Globo, Veja, Estadão e diversos reaças tupiniquis têm afirmado, por alguns motivos mundialmente claros (nesta terça-feira, entre manifestações populares em todo o mundo, foi a vez de The Washington Post concordar com este autor e todos os habitantes da Terra exceto uma centena e tantas dezenas de milhões de basileiros, autoconsiderados a “nata intelectual e moral”: o jornal norte-americano publicou reportagem indignada com a morte da ativista pelos direitos humanos no Rio).

Antes de mais nada, trata-se de uma vereadora. Assassinada brutalmente (= crime hediondo) em pleno Centro da segunda maior metrópole do País. Marielle foi morta com uma arma capaz de atirar 20 balas por segundo (!) um dia após ter denunciado, como vinha fazendo, o 41º Batalhão de Polícia Militar da sua cidade, o mais violento do mundo.

O assassiato da Marielle não é mais um, vitima de violência “fortuita” como andam palrando especialmente os ignorantes, histéricos, raivosos e devastadores setores reacionários pois teve um motivo bem claro; silenciar uma voz que denunciava os crimes contra sua gente, gente das favelas e de sua etnia, a negra. E aí mesmo está o grande problema para o brasileiro médio, dono de mentalidade elitista.

Diferentemente de seus politiqueiros de estimação, que os enganam com estupidez/márquetim político de péssimo nívelcomo o “gestor e não político” prefeito paulistano João Dória, bem à altura da mentalidade dessa gente, Marielle não vivia engabinetada, e foi enterrada em um cemitério ao lado de outros favelados: morreu tão barbaramente quanto brava e dignamente!

O assassinato da Marielle esfrega na cara da sociedade e do mundo a máfia policial – que deveria, ao menos por motivo de mínima coerência, indignar os reaças tupiniuins -, e a própria insegurança pública.

E, a grande ferida, o assassinato de Marielle escancara, tanto quanto a resposta de milhões de imbecis a ele, o ódio étnico e classista, uma guerra declarada contra negros, vermelhos e pobres deste país falido!

Essa voz eles querem silenciar. Essa vergonha contra si, tentam abafar.

Marielle, presente, nosso amor!

Edu Montesanti

One of the most discouraging aspects of the musical chairs being played among the members of the White House inner circle is that every change reflects an inexorable move to the right in foreign policy, which means that the interventionists are back without anyone at the White House level remaining to say “no.” President Donald Trump, for all his international experience as a businessman, is a novice at the step-by-step process required in diplomacy and in the development of a coherent foreign policy, so he is inevitably being directed by individuals who have long American global leadership by force if necessary.

The resurgence of the hawks is facilitated by Donald Trump’s own inclinations. He likes to see himself as a man of action and a leader, which inclines him to be impulsive, some might even say reckless. He is convinced that he can enter into negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with virtually no preparations and make a deal that will somehow end the crisis over that nation’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, for example. In so doing, he is being encouraged by his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his Pentagon chief James Mattis, who believe that the United States can somehow prevail in a preemptive war with the Koreans if that should become necessary. The enormous collateral damage to South Korea and even Japan is something that Washington planners somehow seem to miss in their calculations.

The recent shifts in the cabinet have Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. A leading hawk, he was first in his class of 1986 at the United States Military Academy but found himself as a junior officer with no real war to fight. He spent six years in uniform before resigning, never having seen combat, making war an abstraction for him. He went to Harvard Law and then into politics where he became a Tea Party congressman, eventually becoming a leader of that caucus when it stopped being Libertarian and lurched rightwards. He has since marketed himself as a fearless soldier in the war against terrorism and rogue states, in which category he includes both Iran and Russia.

Pompeo was not popular at the CIA because he enforced a uniformity of thinking that was anathema for intelligence professionals dedicated to collecting solid information and using it to produce sound analysis of developments worldwide. Pompeo, an ardent supporter of Israel and one of the government’s leading Iran haters, has been regularly threatening Iran while at the Agency and will no doubt find plenty of support at State from Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East David Satterfield, a former top adviser of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Pompeo has proven himself more than willing to manipulate intelligence produce the result he desires. Last year, he declassified and then cherry picked documents recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan that suggested that al-Qaeda had ties with Iran. The move was coordinated with simultaneous White House steps to prepare Congress and the public for a withdrawal from the Iran nuclear arms agreement. The documents were initially released to a journal produced by the neocon Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Pompeo has a number of times spoken, to guarantee wide exposure in all the right places.

Pompeo’s arrival might only be the first of several other high-level moves by the White House. Like the rumors that preceded the firing of Secretary of State Tillerson two weeks ago, there have been recurrent suggestions that McMaster would be the next to go as he reportedly is too moderate for the president and has also been accused of being anti-Israeli, the kiss of death in Washington.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton (now appointed National Security advisor) has been a frequent visitor at the White House. He was the preferred candidate to fill the position (replacing H. R. McMaster). He is an extreme hawk, closely tied to the Israel Lobby, who would push hard for war against Iran and also for a hardline position in Syria, one that could lead to direct confrontation with the Syrian Armed Forces and possibly the Russians.

Bolton, who has been described by a former George W. Bush official as “the most dangerous man we had during the entire eight years,” will undoubtedly have a problem in getting confirmed by Congress. He was rejected as U.N. Ambassador, requiring Bush to make a recess appointment which did not need Congressional approval.

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Featured image is from the author.

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

The spending plan introduced in Congress Wednesday includes $641 million for border wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley and $1.6 billion for border enforcement. While the proposed budget prohibits funding new border wall designs, such as Trump’s prototypes, it authorizes construction of approximately 33 additional miles of border walls on public and private lands in the coming months, without any meaningful environmental review.

“It’s heartening to see Congress reject the worst symbol of Trump’s bigotry and racism by prohibiting a concrete wall along the border,” said Paulo Lopes, a public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “But jaguars and other wildlife can’t get over a wall, no matter what it’s made of. Congress should not sanction the building of border walls and fences on public lands or anywhere else.”

The first planned sections of the Trump border wall would tear through public lands, ranchlands, national historic sites and the National Butterfly Center in the Rio Grande Valley. Congress only spared the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge from these destructive construction activities.

“Our environment continues to pay a staggering cost for the border wall and the infrastructure that comes with it,” Lopes said. “Now that Congress has given Trump this down-payment, he’ll only keep demanding more.”

A recent study by the Center identified more than 90 endangered or threatened species that would be threatened by wall construction along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

The Center filed the first lawsuit against Trump’s border wall, and will appeal a recent ruling in a separate lawsuit that challenges the Trump administration’s waiver of dozens of environmental laws to replace border walls near San Diego. The Trump administration is expected to set aside these same laws to speed construction of border barriers in Texas.

Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.