Global Research

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The Western-controlled International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was charged with delivering victor’s justice, polar opposite the real thing.

In March 2016, it wrongfully convicted Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on multiple counts of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 40 years in prison.

At age-71, it was a virtual life sentence. He served as Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska president from 1992 – 1996, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Alleged genocide at Srebrenica was more myth than massacre. Deaths were hugely inflated, the ICTY established to blame Serbs for war crimes committed by both sides.

Srebrenica was a combined Muslim military base and refugee “safe area.” Serbian President/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia leader Slobodan Milosevic, wanted Serbs restrained from overrunning it.

Before the alleged July 1995 massacre, falsely claiming 8,000 Muslim Bosniak deaths, Srebrenica-based Muslim forces carried out numerous attacks on nearby Serb villages.

Muslim Sarajevo officials withdrew their Srebrenica commanders, leaving thousands of soldiers leaderless.

When Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, civilians wanted to leave because of chaotic conditions.

Women and children were separated from men to locate perpetrators of raids on Serb villages and take revenge.

A small number alone were detained. Alleged Srebrenica victims reflected lies and half-truths based on what’s known – omitted in official and major media accounts.

The 8,000 number included the Red Cross estimate of 3,000 “witnesses” allegedly detained by Bosnian Serbs, along with another 5,000 the Red Cross said “fled Srebrenica,” many to Central Bosnia.

They fled for safety and weren’t killed. Years later, forensic teams discovered 2,361 bodies where heavy fighting occurred – including combatants on both sides, not massacred civilians.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Karadzic and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic were declared guilty by accusation.

Milosevic perished from medical neglect at the Hague.. Karadzic was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, Mladic unjustly treated the same way.

Presiding Judge Alphons Orie unjustifiably said his actions were “among the most heinous known to humankind” – an outrageous perversion of truth.

According to his son Datco, his father said

“(t)his is all lies. This is a NATO (hanging) court” – dispensing injustice, not the other way around.

“The court was totally biased from the start,” Datco stressed, its ruling certain before proceedings began.

Mladic was falsely charged with two counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war, including for the fantasy Srebrenica massacre.

The so-called victim count was invented. Thousands of alleged victims weren’t massacred. They fled. Yet they were included in the mythical death toll to inflate it.

Mladic intends appealing his unjust sentence. Western injustice makes overturning it virtually unattainable.

In 2015, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution on the 20th anniversary of the fantasy Srebrenica massacre, saying it solely blamed Serbs for the rape of Yugoslavia.

Washington during the Clinton co-presidency warrants full responsibility, wanting Yugoslavia raped and balkanized for easier Western control.

Slobodan Milosevic was falsely charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and violations of the laws or customs of war.

In the March 2016 ICTY wrongful conviction of Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic was posthumously exonerated – unannounced and practically unnoticed, buried well into Karadzic’s 2,590-page conviction.

Will he and Mladic be absolved one day when they’ve passed, each no longer able to say I told you so.

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One day there may be reason to give thanks. How can there be now with endless US wars raging, force-fed austerity on ordinary Americans, poverty the nation’s leading growth industry, real unemployment at Depression-era levels, police state laws destroying fundamental freedoms, and governance of, by and for the privileged few exclusively.

Super-rich Americans never had things better, benefiting from the greatest ever wealth transfer scheme from ordinary people to them.

Trump’s tax cut scheme will hand them trillions more dollars if enacted into law – coming out of the pockets of low and middle-income households.

America is a plutocracy, not a democracy, run by sinister dark forces, presidents and key congressional leaders serving their interests.

The law of the land is consistently ignored when conflicting with the agenda of its ruling class.

Societies are judged by their freedom from poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, imperialism, environmental devastation, commitment to social justice, and respect for the sovereign rights of all nations. America fails dismally on all counts.

Most US workers struggle to get by on part-time or temp jobs paying poverty wages – one missed paycheck from homelessness, hunger and deprivation, an uncaring nation doing nothing to help, pretending prosperity exists.

The nation was thirdworldized to benefit its privileged class. It’s the most inequitable of all developed ones.

A year ago at Thanksgiving, I wrote an open letter to Trump – post-election, pre-inauguration. You’ll have the power of your incumbency for good or ill, I said.

I hoped for improvement over dismal governance under the Clinton co-presidency, Bush/Cheney and Obama.

Instead, things are worse than ever. Trump’s latest outrages include destroying digital democracy by ending Net Neutrality, along with deporting 59,000 Haitians, given temporary protection after their country’s devastating 2010 earthquake – unwanted by the administration because they’re Black, not white Anglos.

A year ago, I asked if Trump’s promises were real or empty. Will history remember him as another dirty business as usual leader or a force for positive change?

Would he renounce perverse notions of American exceptionalism; the indispensable nation; US moral, ethical and cultural superiority; and its self-proclaimed right for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations?

Would he drain the swamp instead of filling it to overflowing, restore honor to Washington, give working people a voice for the first time, improve their lives and welfare, serve all Americans equitably, not just its privileged few.

Would he end US imperial wars against nations threatening no one, beginning a new era of world peace and stability?

Would he normalize relations with Russia as promised, end illegal sanctions, work cooperatively with Putin, along with treating other independent world leaders respectfully?

Would he be a peacemaker, not warrior president? Would he favor disarmament instead of a continuing arms race? Would he save humanity from unthinkable nuclear war?

Would his tenure deliver historic change or hugely dangerous continuity?

History will judge him accordingly, I said. After 10 disastrous months in office, the verdict is in.

He failed on all counts, governing more deplorably than my worst fears – short of nuclear war perhaps yet to come.

On Thanksgiving day, privileged Americans have much to be thankful for, millions of ordinary ones paying the price for their bountiful blessings.

A growing number are urging Government to move support from the Trident project and arms export industry to other sectors that meet real needs and use highly skilled workers for constructive purposes, designing emission-free rail, road and waterway vehicles, advancing renewable energy, particularly wave and tidal energy, engineering low emission new-build housing and retrofitting much of the housing stock.

• On the Lucas Plan website, following its 40^th anniversary, we read that one of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s excellent reports, released during his 2015 election campaign, has put arms conversion firmly back on the political agenda.
• Following this, Steve Schofield, who is arguably the country’s leading authority on arms conversion, wrote “Defence Diversification or Arms Conversion? Why Labour needs a programme for nuclear and conventional disarmament“.
• The Campaign Against Arms Trade’s 2015 case study “Arms industry in the Clyde and renewable energy options” examined an arms dependent area in depth.
• The Unite trade union, withits dual commitment to world peace and disarmament and to the protection of its members’ jobs published “Defence Diversification Revisited” in March 2016. This looks at the history of “defence diversification” in the UK and elsewhere. At its July policy conference Unite committed itself to campaigning for a serious government approach to “defence diversification”, condemning the failure of successive governments to grapple with the issue after the Cold War.
• In 2016, MEP Molly Scott Cato commissioned a report “Devonport: Trident alternatives”, an overview of green employment potential.

In October this year, Andrew Smith cited a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which put the cost to tax payers of government support for the arms trade at more than £100m a year, adding,

“This is to say nothing of the huge levels of political and logistical support that the arms companies are offered”.

Widely accepted figures from the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) are that arms exports only count for 0.2% of UK jobs and around 1% of exports. According to the MoD, 65,000 British jobs depend on arms exports and as the total number of jobs in the UK is just over 30 million the arms trade accounts for a tiny fraction of total employment.

And this manufacturing sector is not flourishing – the ‘defence’ industry now represents only 10% of all manufacturing.

A range of housing has been built on the Royal Ordnance site in Euxton, where the land is so contaminated that vegetable growing is forbidden. Last month, BAE, major employers in the area, announced that it will be cutting up to 750 jobs Warton and Samlesbury plants in Lancashire and up to 400 people will be made redundant in Brough, East Yorkshire.

The Trades Union Congress, passed a motion in October calling for the Labour Party to set up a shadow defence diversification agency to engage with plant representatives, trades unions representing arms industry workers, and local authorities. The agency would listen to their ideas, so that practical plans can be drawn up for arms conversion while protecting skilled employment and pay levels.

Some opportunities are listed in the Green New Deal Report (2008) and the Green Homes Guide– just as relevant today or more so, as concerns about air pollution and climate instability escalate.

GND:

“At the high skilled end (engineering and electronic) design; though to medium and unskilled work making every building energy tight, and fitting more efficient energy systems in homes, offices and factories . . . putting in place a new regional grid system, ranging from large-scale wind, wave and tidal electricity to decentralised energy systems that increase domestic and local energy production”.

We add to their recommendations the designing of emission-free rail, road and waterway vehicles and of advances in tidal and wave power, which have enormous potential but are currently lagging far behind solar, wind and hydropower technologies.

As Matthew Lynn wrote in The Spectator:

“There might be a case for maintaining a modest, specialised arms industry to support our own army. But anyone who thinks an export-driven defence industry is important to the economy should stop kidding themselves”.

The US media this week broadcast videos provided by the Pentagon purporting to show American airstrikes against Taliban-run “drug labs” in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Parroting claims by the top US military commander Gen. John Nicholson, television news broadcasters reported that Washington is attempting to stop the Islamist insurgency from “profiting from narcotics trade and other criminal activities.”

The bombing raids in Helmand announced on Monday are merely part of a sharp escalation in the US air war in Afghanistan that is claiming increasing numbers of civilian casualties. Statistics released Tuesday by the US Air Force Central Command establish that the Pentagon is on track to drop more than triple the number of bombs and missiles on the impoverished country this year, compared to 2016.

According to the US military’s own figures, it has dropped 3,554 weapons on Afghanistan during the first 10 months of this year and, at the current rate, is expected to top 4,000 before year’s end. Last month, it recorded 653 bombs and missiles used against Afghan targets, the highest number since November 2010 at the height of the Obama administration’s “surge”, when over 100,000 US troops were deployed in Afghanistan.

The latest raids included strikes by advanced F-22 stealth fighters, which the Pentagon claimed were employed in order to carry out “precision” bombing designed to avoid civilian casualties. This assertion was undercut by the fact that B-52 strategic bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs were used in the same operation.

Under the new rules of engagement unveiled by the Trump administration in August, the military brass has been given a free hand to escalate the conflict as it sees fit. A total of 16,000 American troops are slated to be on the ground in Afghanistan by the beginning of next year, while the air war is expected to continue escalating

The claims by the Pentagon and the US media that the latest attacks were designed to combat drug trafficking are a patent fabrication aimed at evoking public sympathy for the more than 16 year-old war–America’s longest–that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Afghans, while turning millions into homeless refugees.

The reality is that poppy cultivation and drug trafficking from Afghanistan–which were banned by the Taliban regime–have grown exponentially since the US invaded the country in 2001. In the 16 years of US war and occupation, there has been a 20-fold increase in the territory under poppy cultivation, and the amount of opium produced in the country is 25 times that of 2001.

According to conservative UN estimates, opium production accounts for some 16 per cent of Afghanistan GDP and more than two-thirds of the entire agricultural sector of the country. Not just the Taliban, but government officials, from the top of the US-backed regime of President Ashraf Ghani to local police, are heavily involved in the trafficking of drugs, as are the collection of warlords cultivated by US imperialism as a counterweight to the Taliban.

Local leaders in Helmand province condemned the US raids, saying that they targeted rudimentary sheds in rural areas and did nothing to stop the production and trafficking of opium.

Moreover, among the victims of the airstrikes, unseen in the video-game style footage broadcast on US television news, were Afghan civilians, men, women and children. The entire family of a Helmand resident identified by local authorities as Habibullah was wiped out when a bomb struck their home on the western outskirts of the Musa Kala district center. A total of 12 were killed, including the man, his wife and their children.

The number of civilian casualties is today higher than at any time since the 2001 invasion, with the sharpest increase in deaths caused by air strikes and artillery barrages carried out by US and Afghan puppet forces.

The buildup of troops and airstrikes in Afghanistan is part of a broader US military escalation that is being carried out from the south Asian country, through the Middle East and into ever growing territory on the African continent.

Figures released by the Pentagon indicate that the number of US troops and contractors deployed in the Middle East has risen by 33 percent in the last four months alone, going from 40,517 to 54,180. This is undoubtedly a significant undercount, as the US military often fails to include forces that are rotated in and out of the region on a supposedly temporary basis.

This troop buildup has been carried out without any public announcement, much less debate, and is being decided by the cabal of current and former US generals who largely control US foreign policy. Sharp increases in the number of American troops deployed in a number of Persian Gulf countries are indications of Washington’s preparations for a war against Iran.

According to the latest quarterly reports from the Pentagon, between June and September, the US military deployment increased in the area’s two active war zones; in Iraq, from 8,173 to 9,122 and in Syria, from 1,251 to 1,723.

Far larger increases have been registered in neighboring countries. In Turkey, the number went from 1,405 to 2,265; in Qatar from 3,164 to 6,671; in Bahrain from 6,541 to 9,335; in the United Arab Emirates from 1,531 to 4,240 and in Kuwait, from 14,790 to 16,592. Further increases have been registered across the region, including in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and Oman.

Featured image: Ratko Mladić (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for a conviction.

The “Serb Warlord” or the “Butcher of Bosnia”, as he has been termed in various circles, had finally received a verdict few were doubting. One of the doubters was, naturally, the man himself, Ratko Mladić, who accused the judicial officers of incurable mendacity.

Of the 11 charges levelled at Ratko Mladić, he was acquitted of one – genocide in Bosnian municipalities outside Srebrenica. Others covered genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity which took place while he was Chief Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Judicial deliberations are rarely the stuff of fine history. Verdicts are, by their very nature, judgmental, giving false finality and coherence to muddy narratives. In the Balkans, muddy narratives have met and parted; others have been forged in the blood of memories constructed and confected.

Bodies have been heaped over these generational accounts – the wars, the murders, the ecstatic patriotism and genocidal enthusiasm, and in time, the descendants pursue the task, less of living for the future than inhabiting the unchanging past.

The politicians have been attempting to make do with the verdict. The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, is mindful that anything less than solemn acceptance of the ruling is bound to be met with stares of disbelief throughout Europe. This is hardly the view within the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska.

“I would like to call on everyone [in the region] to start looking into the future and not to drown in the tears of the past… we need to look to the future… so we finally have a stable country.”

Stability, that cherished dream, an ambition long frustrated in the region, and ever precarious.

Bosnia itself is a divided creature barely on political life support. Rather than promoting reconciliation, one of the proclaimed aims of the ICTY’s judgments, the opposite is true. Ed Vuilliamy, who spent much time covering instances of camp brutality and atrocity during the Yugoslav wars insists that Mladić may have lost his case, but won, at least in a part of Bosnia.

His consternation is the customary one that insists that Serbia and Serbian policies should have been brought to the fore as culprit and villain, rather than atomised through individual verdicts. Again, such are the limits of law and its false didactic worth.

Accordingly,

“for all the back-slapping by human rights organisations and lawyers, there is a dark cloud under which the majority of those who survived Mladić’s hurricane of violence etch out their lives, and that shrouds the memory of those killed, or are still ‘missing’.”[1]

Niđara Ahmetašević enlarges that black cloud, accusing Europeans, notably in the west, for hypocrisy and willful blindness.

“By not reacting on time to stop mass crimes being committed, Western leaders sent a message to everybody in the world that it is OK to kill other people, and to promote dangerous, ultranationalist ideas.”[2]

With little surprise, survivors of the conflict find little in terms of satisfactory proportion. Sead Numanović of the Sarajevo daily, Dnevni Avaz, felt “some kind of emptiness.” Ajša Umirović went so far as to see such a verdict as futile.

“Even if he lives 1,000 times and is sentenced 1,000 times to life in prison, justice would still not be served.”[3] That’s what losing 42 relatives to massacre does.

As with all matters to do with trauma, memory lingers as poisoned, selective and singular. It banishes other accounts and plights, becoming self-referential, a sort of infirmary consciousness. These sufferings and tendencies are not confined to the Bosnian Muslims.

When Yugoslavia fractured in the spirit of hypernationalism, it split the groups making up the entity. Jungle retributions, territorial seizures, expulsions, took place as a matter of historical account keeping. Elephantine memories were triggered and enacted upon.

Mladić insisted on purging the old remnants of the Ottoman Empire, a historic mission he dedicated himself to with conspicuous enthusiasm. He was fortunate to be quick off the mark in the aftermath of the independence referendum held by Muslims and Croats. Others, given the same opportunity, would have exploited it, given the men and material put at his disposal.

That the main fighting, slaughter and ethnic cleansing took place in Bosnia on, it is important to note, all sides, is a point judgments of law can only imperfectly consider. What rendered the killings in Srebrenica so fundamental was the scale and avid dedication of the butchers – some 8,000 Muslim men and boys dispatched – and the question of abandonment by the international community.

Mladić himself furnished a sense of how the law remains, in some instances, the least capable of resolving what are, essentially, social and political problems that linger with vicious obstinacy. “I am here,” he told a pre-trial hearing in 2011, “defending my country and people, not Ratko Mladić.” He is far from the only one to persist holding this view, nor will he be the last.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge and lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

Notes

Featured image: Imam Khomeini Street in central Tehran, Iran, 2012. Credit: Shutterstock/Mansoreh

For many years, major U.S. institutions ranging from the Pentagon to the 9/11 Commission have been pushing the line that Iran secretly cooperated with Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. But the evidence for those claims remained either secret or sketchy, and always highly questionable.

In early November, however, the mainstream media claimed to have its “smoking gun”—a CIA document written by an unidentified Al Qaeda official and released in conjunction with 47,000 never-before-seen documents seized from Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Associated Press reported that the Al Qaeda document “appears to bolster U.S. claims that Iran supported the extremist network leading up to the September 11 terror attacks.” The Wall Street Journal said the document “provides new insights into Al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran, suggesting a pragmatic alliance that emerged out of shared hatred of the United States and Saudi Arabia.”

NBC News wrote that the document reveals that, “at various points in the relationship… Iran offered Al Qaeda help in the form of ‘money, arms’ and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon in exchange for striking American interests in the Gulf,” implying that Al Qaeda had declined the offer. Former Obama National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, writing for The Atlantic, went even further, asserting that the document includes an account of “a deal with Iranian authorities to host and train Saudi-Al Qaeda members as long as they have agreed to plot against their common enemy, American interests in the Gulf region.”

But none of those media reports were based on any careful reading of the document’s contents. The 19-page Arabic-language document, which was translated in full for TAC, doesn’t support the media narrative of new evidence of Iran-Al Qaeda cooperation, either before or after 9/11, at all. It provides no evidence whatsoever of tangible Iranian assistance to Al Qaeda. On the contrary, it confirms previous evidence that Iranian authorities quickly rounded up those Al Qaeda operatives living in the country when they were able to track them down, and held them in isolation to prevent any further contact with Al Qaeda units outside Iran.

What it shows is that the Al Qaeda operatives were led to believe Iran was friendly to their cause and were quite taken by surprise when their people were arrested in two waves in late 2002. It suggests that Iran had played them, gaining the fighters’ trust while maximizing intelligence regarding Al Qaeda’s presence in Iran.

Nevertheless, this account, which appears to have been written by a mid-level Al Qaeda cadre in 2007, appears to bolster an internal Al Qaeda narrative that the terror group rejected Iranian blandishments and were wary of what they saw as untrustworthiness on the part of the Iranians. The author asserts the Iranians offered Saudi Al Qaeda members who had entered the country “money and arms, anything they need, and training with Hezbollah in exchange for hitting American interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.”

But there is no word about whether any Iranian arms or money were ever actually given to Al Qaeda fighters. And the author acknowledges that the Saudis in question were among those who had been deported during sweeping arrests, casting doubt over whether there was ever any deal in the offing.

The author suggests Al Qaeda rejected Iranian assistance on principle.

“We don’t need them,” he insisted. “Thanks to God, we can do without them, and nothing can come from them but evil.”

That theme is obviously important to maintaining organizational identity and morale. But later in the document, the author expresses deep bitterness about what they obviously felt was Iranian double-dealing in 2002 to 2003.

“They are ready to play-act,” he writes of the Iranians. “Their religion is lies and keeping quiet. And usually they show what is contrary to what is in their mind…. It is hereditary with them, deep in their character.”

The author recalls that Al Qaeda operatives were ordered to move to Iran in March 2002, three months after they had left Afghanistan for Waziristan or elsewhere in Pakistan (the document, by the way, says nothing of any activity in Iran before 9/11). He acknowledges that most of his cadres entered Iran illegally, although some of them obtained visas from the Iranian consulate in Karachi.

Among the latter was Abu Hafs al Mauritani, an Islamic scholar who was ordered by the leadership shura in Pakistan to seek Iranian permission for Al Qaeda fighters and families to pass through Iran or to stay there for an extended period. He was accompanied by middle and lower-ranking cadres, including some who worked for Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The account clearly suggests that Zarqawi himself had remained in hiding after entering Iran illegally.

Abu Hafs al Mauratani did reach an understanding with Iran, according to the Al Qaeda account, but it had nothing to do with providing arms or money. It was a deal that allowed them to remain for some period or to pass through the country, but only on the condition that they observe very strict security conditions: no meetings, no use of cell phones, no movements that would attract attention. The account attributes those restrictions to Iranian fears of U.S. retribution—which was undoubtedly part of the motivation. But it is clear Iran viewed Al Qaeda as an extremist Salafist security threat to itself as well.

The anonymous Al Qaeda operative’s account is a crucial piece of information in light of the neoconservatives’ insistence that Iran had fully cooperated with Al Qaeda. The document reveals that it was more complicated than that. If Iranian authorities had refused to receive the Abu Hafs group traveling with passport on friendly terms, it would have been far more difficult to gather intelligence on the Al Qaeda figures who they knew had entered illegally and were hiding. With those legal Al Qaeda visitors under surveillance, they have could identify, locate and ultimately round up the hidden Al Qaeda, as well as those who came with passports.

Most of the Al Qaeda visitors, according to the Al Qaeda document, settled in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan Province where the majority of the population are Sunnis and speak Baluchi. They generally violated the security restrictions imposed by the Iranians. They established links with the Baluchis—who he notes were also Salafists—and began holding meetings. Some of them even made direct contact by phone with Salafist militants in Chechnya, where a conflict was rapidly spiraling out of control. Saif al-Adel, one of the leading Al Qaeda figures in Iran at the time, later revealed that the Al Qaeda fighting contingent under Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s command immediately began reorganizing to return to Afghanistan.

The first Iranian campaign to round up Al Qaeda personnel, which the author of the documents says was focused on Zahedan, came in May or June 2002—no more than three months after they have had entered Iran. Those arrested were either jailed or deported to their home countries. The Saudi Foreign Minister praised Iran in August for having transferred 16 Al Qaeda suspects to the Saudi government in June.

In February 2003 Iranian security launched a new wave of arrests. This time they captured three major groups of Al Qaeda operatives in Tehran and Mashad, including Zarqawi and other top leaders in the country, according to the document. Saif al Adel later revealed in a post on a pro-Al Qaeda website in 2005 (reported in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat), that the Iranians had succeeded in capturing 80 percent of the group associated with Zarqawi, and that it had “caused the failure of 75 percent of our plan.”

The anonymous author writes that the initial Iran policy was to deport those arrested and that Zarqawi was allowed to go to Iraq (where he plotted attacks on Shia and coalition forces until his death in 2006). But then, he says, the policy suddenly changed and the Iranians stopped deportations, instead opting to keep the Al Qaeda senior leadership in custody—presumably as bargaining chips. Yes, Iran deported 225 Al Qaeda suspects to other countries, including Saudi Arabia, in 2003. But the Al Qaeda leaders were held in Iran, not as bargaining chips, but under tight security to prevent them from communicating with the Al Qaeda networks elsewhere in the region, which Bush administration officials eventually acknowledged.

After the arrests and imprisonment of senior al Qaeda figures, the Al Qaeda leadership became increasingly angry at Iran.  In November 2008, unknown gunmen abducted an Iran consular official in Peshawar, Pakistan, and in July 2013, al Qaeda operatives in Yemen kidnapped an Iranian diplomat. In March 2015, Iran reportedly released five of the senior al Qaeda in prison, including Said al-Adel, in return for the release of the diplomat in Yemen.  In a document taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center in 2012, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote,

“We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).”

There was a time when Iran did view Al Qaeda as an ally.  It was during and immediately after the war of the mujahedin against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. That, of course, was the period when the CIA was backing bin Laden’s efforts as well. But after the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 1996— and especially after Taliban troops killed 11 Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998—the Iranian view of Al Qaeda changed fundamentally. Since then, Iran has clearly regarded it as an extreme sectarian terrorist organization and its sworn enemy. What has not changed is the determination of the U.S. national security state and the supporters of Israel to maintain the myth of an enduring Iranian support for Al Qaeda.

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014).

The US Treasury announced new sanctions on Tuesday that not only target North Korea, but a number of Chinese companies and individuals. The latest penalties underscore Washington’s determination to exploit the current confrontation with Pyongyang to undermine China economically and strategically.

The announcement followed Trump’s decision on Monday to redesignate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism—an utterly cynical move that further undercuts the possibility of negotiations to end the crisis. A North Korean spokesman yesterday denounced the step as “a serious provocation” and warned that Pyongyang would continue to strengthen its nuclear arsenal as long as the US continued its “hostile” policy toward his country.

The new US sanctions will hit six North Korean shipping companies and 20 vessels, along with the Korea South-South Cooperation Corporation, which allegedly organises the employment of North Korean guest workers in other countries, including Russia and China.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that the US was “steadfast in our determination to maximise economic pressure to isolate it [North Korea] from outside sources of trade and revenue.” His comments demonstrate that Washington is seeking a complete blockade of North Korea, aimed at strangling it economically, not simply the enforcement of existing UN sanctions.

The impact of the latest US sanctions on the Pyongyang regime is limited. Successive UN Security Council resolutions already ban virtually all North Korean commodity exports, including coal, iron, other minerals and seafood, as well as limiting joint investment and the hiring of extra North Korean guest workers, and capping the sale of oil and related products to North Korea.

The US, however, is going well beyond the UN measures, which were pushed by Washington and reluctantly agreed by China and Russia in a bid to forestall war. In effect, the Trump administration has unilaterally declared that any trade or investment with North Korea is out of bounds and any individual or company that does so faces exclusion from the US financial system.

The US Treasury imposed secondary sanctions on three Chinese companies—Dandong Kehua Economy and Trade, Dandong Xianghe Trading and Dandong Hongda Trade—which it claimed had done more than $750 million in combined trade with North Korea over almost five years up to August 31. This included trade in coal, iron ore, lead, zinc and silver ore, lead metal and ferrous products, as well as notebook computers.

The Trump administration has not attempted to justify its move against these companies by referring to UN sanctions, international law or even previously declared US policy toward North Korea. Up until the latest UN resolution in August, the purchase of coal, iron ore, lead and ferrous products was not subject to a total ban. The US has arbitrarily singled out Chinese companies for retrospective penalties.

Chinese citizen Sun Sidong and his company Dandong Dongyuan Industrial were also sanctioned for allegedly exporting more than $28 million worth of goods, including items connected to nuclear reactors, to North Korea over several years.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang on Wednesday condemned the US actions, saying:

“We consistently oppose any country adopting unilateral sanctions based on its own domestic laws and regulations and the wrong method of exercising long-arm jurisdiction.” Lu warned that “if other parties wish to have effective cooperation with China” they should share intelligence and cooperate with China “to appropriately handle the issue.”

The Trump White House, however, has no intention of winding back the confrontation with North Korea or China. During his visit to Beijing earlier this month, Trump demanded that China “act faster and more effectively” to force North Korea to capitulate to US demands for it to abandon its nuclear programs.

However, every step taken by China is only met with new US pressure. The decision to rename North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism was a deliberate slap in the face to Chinese efforts to bully Pyongyang to the negotiating table on US terms. Just last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a special envoy to North Korea for the first high-level talks with its leaders in more than two years.

The US confrontation with North Korea is also aimed at weakening and ultimately subordinating China, which Washington regards as the chief threat to its continued dominance in Asia and the world. The sanctions against Chinese companies are just an element of Washington’s far broader plans for trade war measures against China. In Beijing, Trump demanded that China “immediately address the unfair trade practices” in order to reduce its trade surplus with the US.

Trump’s trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who accompanied Trump to Beijing, is notorious for his advocacy of trade war measures against China. According to a Wall Street Journal article this week entitled, “US throws out playbook on China trade,” Lighthizer “shocked the Chinese hosts by declining their proffered trade concessions including a financial-opening package… His message: Half-measures won’t work for a White House seeking fundamental change.”

Beijing is reluctant to impose a complete economic blockade on North Korea, fearing it will provoke an economic and political crisis in Pyongyang that Washington will exploit. An implosion in North Korea would not only threaten chaos on China’s border but raise the possibility that the US could impose a pro-American regime in Pyongyang.

At the same time, China is acutely aware that the US has advanced military preparations and plans for an all-out war and, to use Trump’s words, the “total destruction” of North Korea, which is formally a Chinese ally.

A debate has opened up in Chinese ruling circles over how to respond to the US over North Korea. According to an article in the Diplomat this week, a rare public debate between academics over the contentious issue points to deep divisions in the Chinese state apparatus. While one wing blames the US for the crisis and continues to call for a negotiated end to the standoff, its opponents suggest that China should cut ties with North Korea and draw up “contingency plans” with the US in case of war, or regime collapse in Pyongyang.

The very fact that a public debate is taking place at all suggests real fears in Beijing that the US will wage a war of aggression against North Korea that could drag China and the world into a catastrophic conflict.

A new report from the Forest Peoples Programme assesses six different certification schemes being used by companies to facilitate their access to international markets for edible oils and biofuels. The desk-based study used the same yardstick to assess the various schemes against a range of criteria including:

• fair land acquisition, respect for customary rights and Free, Prior and Informed Consent
• treatment of smallholders
• social and environmental safeguards
• core labour standards
• gender and discrimination
• quality assurance
• access to remedy

After scoring and ranking the various schemes, the study concluded that the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has the strongest set of requirements, followed by, in declining order of ranking, Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB), Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC), and Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO). The Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) standard came out worst in the ranking and provides very little protection of human rights and community livelihoods. The review also assessed the High Carbon Stocks Approach against the same yardstick, although it is not a certification scheme, in order to gauge the relative risks and benefits of the approach being used as a stand-alone endorsement of performance.

The report’s author, Angus McInnes, notes that:

The schemes vary a lot. None is perfect and all could benefit from adopting some stronger provisions from competing schemes. RSPO now provides the most robust standard for oil palm certification, although there are still some gaps. The main challenge for RSPO is to ensure RSPO members actually apply the standard in practice. The unreliability of complaints and remedy  procedures when non-compliances are identified is also worrying.

Marcus Colchester, FPP’s Senior Policy Advisor, notes:

The European biofuels market by and large relies on the ISCC certification scheme to fulfil EU requirements. Although precise figures are not available, it seems that about half of RSPO members’ palm oil sold in Europe, mostly for biofuels, is ISCC- and not RSPO-certified. For those concerned about human rights and social justice, this is very troubling as the ISCC standard, while quite strong on environmental requirements, falls way below the RSPO standard on social protections. 

As an addendum, the study also compared the standards of the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG) and RSPO Next, both of which have added social and environmental provisions on top of the RSPO generic standard but lack additional challenge and remedy procedures. The POIG standard includes additional human rights and workers’ rights provisions.

For copies of the report:

Executive Summary

Full report

Reconceptualizing the Indian Ocean as an African one can help to craft creative strategies for maximizing Pakistan’s strategic significance in the emerging Multipolar World Order through a reinvigorated naval strategy that capitalizes on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s “Global South” connectivity potential via the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden (ASGA).

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the so-called “Indo-Pacific”, which the author himself has admittedly used in a geographic sense to describe both oceans but which has recently taken on subtle political connotations when employed by Western and Mainstream Media commentators. These voices have started to trumpet the “Indo-Pacific” term in order to provocatively suggest that India is a rising global superpower that is in some way or another capable of “containing” China, thereby “justifying” the 100-year-long military-strategic partnership that the US is unprecedentedly building with it for this purpose. The irony, however, is that the Indian Ocean is named after India, which in turn received its name because of the Indus River that’s nowadays located mostly in Pakistan. Moreover, the “Indus” isn’t even an indigenous term, as the locals refer to it as “Sindh”, ergo the Pakistani province of the same name.

From The Indian Ocean To The African One

All etymological issues aside, the case could equally – and in some cases, even more convincingly – be made for calling the “Indian Ocean” (or whatever other name is used to refer to it in the context of the subcontinent’s civilization[s]) the African Ocean. Using the Indian subcontinent as the basis for describing this body of water is only relevant insomuch as one takes into account the spread of its historic civilization across mainland and insular Southeast Asia in this ocean’s eastern half, but this Indo-centric view ignores the similarly large spread of African civilization across this ocean’s western half even though it mostly occurred as a result of slavery and indentured servitude. Conveniently left out of the global narrative because of the liberal zeitgeist of “political correctness”, Arab slave traders were responsible for spreading African civilization into the Mideast and as far away as Persia, thereby giving it a larger geographic scope than its Indian counterpart.

Another argument in favor of conceptualizing the Indian Ocean as the African Ocean is that it would be more representative of the many countries that are expected to form the basis of China’s “South-South” engagement in the emerging Multipolar World Order. Not only does the vast majority of China’s trade traverse through this body of water, but it will inevitably begin to be increasingly concentrated on the African landmass as the People’s Republic pioneers new trade routes and develops new marketplaces as destinations for its excess production. In fact, one of the driving motivations behind China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity is to stave off socio-economic challenges caused by the country’s overproduction crisis long enough for Beijing to transition its structural model from a secondary to a tertiary one.

ASGA

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) indispensably provides the People’s Republic with reliable non-Malacca overland access to the African Ocean and further afield to this neologism’s namesake continent, which thus ensures the security of China’s trade routes with the “Global South” by avoiding any unnecessary entanglements in the ever-complicated geostrategic environments of the South China Sea, Strait of Malacca, and Bay of Bengal. Instead of transiting the long way through these regional waters and potentially risking disruption by the US and its allied Indo-Japanese navies, China could use CPEC’s terminal port of Gwadar as its base of trading operations for greatly shortening its Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC) with Africa by focusing more on strengthening connectivity via the more easily defensible Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden (ASGA).

The logic behind this is that Ethiopia, which is the second-most populous country in Africa and the world’s fastest-growing economy, is China’s premier partner in the continent, and Beijing just built the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway as a de-facto Horn of African Silk Road for efficiently accessing this landlocked but rising African Great Power. Seeing as how Ethiopian-Chinese trade will in all likelihood begin to transit across CPEC en route to the People’s Republic, it makes sense for the Pakistani Navy to begin proactively safeguarding the ASGA SLOC between Gwadar and Djibouti together with the Chinese. Not only could this allow Pakistan to enhance its economic and political presence in Africa via “CPEC diplomacy”, especially in the event that it could also acquire a base in Djibouti or at the very least end up using the Chinese one there, but it could give Islamabad’s strategists the necessary experience for crafting a more comprehensive connectivity policy with the African Ocean’s similar OBOR-linked ports in Kenya’s Mombasa and Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam.

Ethiopia’s Strategic Edge

As an added benefit, Pakistan might even be able to one day “balance” the divergent interests of its traditional Arab partners in the Horn of Africa if it’s successful in establishing excellent working relations with Ethiopia, nearly half the population of which is Muslim and presumably receptive to Islamabad’s soft power sway. Ethiopia’s ambitious plan to build a massive dam on the Blue Nile has roiled Egypt, which considers this to be a threat to its national security, and Cairo has accordingly taken steps to put pressure on Addis Ababa. One of these has been that Egypt’s close UAE ally exploited the disastrous Saudi-led War on Yemen to establish military bases in the neighboring country of Eritrea and the internationally unrecognized polity of “Somaliland” along Ethiopia’s northeastern periphery, which not only allows Abu Dhabi to influence the SLOC on both sides of the Bab el Mandeb, but to crucially exert influence into the Horn of African hinterland against Addis Ababa in the event that Cairo decides to strike the landlocked country.

Complicating matters, however, is that Qatar has taken advantage of the “Gulf Cold War” to enter into a fast-moving rapprochement with Ethiopia in order to spite Egypt and its monarchic allies, even though Doha and Addis Ababa had at one point broken off diplomatic relations a little more a decade ago over Ethiopia’s concern that the thumb-shaped country was supporting instability within its borders. Ethiopia also blocked Al Jazeera in 2013 as well. Nevertheless, both sides saw an opportunity to put the past behind them and accelerate relations out of their shared interest in countering Cairo and its regional “containment” policy against both of them. Bearing in mind that Pakistan is on great terms with all of the Arab players involved in this, it could gain unparalleled strategic leverage with them if it improved its relations with Ethiopia in accordance with the ASGA plan and placed itself in a position to “balance” all the parties involved. Through these means, Pakistan could become a crucial force for stability in China’s most important continental region for OBOR investments at the pivotal maritime crossroads of Afro-Eurasian trade.

Chinese Maritime Silk Road

Piercing India’s Missile Defense Shield

Last but certainly not least, Pakistan’s ASGA strategy for the Afro-Pacific could provide the much-needed impetus for directing more funds towards the country’s naval modernization program, relying on the publicly plausible reason of protecting the SLOC in the Arabian Sean-Gulf of Aden region but also clandestinely improving Pakistan’s nuclear triad through advancements in submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) technology. It’s no secret that India is investing in missile defense capabilities in order to neutralize the credibility of Pakistan’s nuclear second-strike deterrent and therefore gain a hegemonic advantage over it by perpetually keeping Pakistan in a state of strategic blackmail. This state of affairs would expectedly be exploited in order to force the South Asian state into submission and could therefore potentially pose an existential threat to CPEC – and by extent, to China too – under this scenario.

The most surefire way to offset India’s plans is to develop Pakistan’s SLBM program in order to ensure that Islamabad can always defend itself in the event that New Delhi launches a nuclear first strike against it, which would thus preserve the balance of power between these two rivals and accordingly diminish the prospects of war between them, however much this is to the US’ anti-CPEC chagrin. For this reason, China should support Pakistan’s ASGA strategy in both its public and clandestine forms, encouraging it to play a more proactive role in safeguarding the SLOC between Gwadar and Djibouti (and eventually, Gwadar and the East African ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam) so that there’s a justifiable reason for increasing naval investments in order to secretly fund a more robust SLBM program for piercing India’s missile defense shield.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the fundamentals of Hybrid War is language and the subconscious ideas that are transmitted through select words, which is why it’s so important to use the most accurate terms in conveying a given side’s intentions and correspondingly countering those of their adversaries. The recent trend in talking about the “Indo-Pacific” is a perfect case in point because the terminology no longer refers to the innocent idea of both oceans but has been perverted to carry unipolar geostrategic connotations about “containing” China. The only suitable recourse in this case is to introduce another word to more accurately convey what some analysts mean when talking about this body of water and drawing attention to its importance to China’s global trade routes, particularly as it relates to Africa’s growing role in the Multipolar World Order. Therefore, it’s necessary to reconceptualize the “Indian Ocean” as the African Ocean and then work on popularizing this term in the wider strategic discourse.

Following that, it’s then easier to understand why CPEC’s terminal port of Gwadar should be paired with Djibouti, Mombasa, and Dar es Salaam in facilitating “Global South” trade between China and Africa, the SLOC of which could be protected by the Pakistani Navy out of the self-interest that Islamabad also has in securing its own trade routes with the continent. Furthermore, Pakistan stands to gain immense strategic benefits if it can clinch a comprehensive and fast-moving partnership with Ethiopia that puts it in a position to “balance” relations between the Horn of African country and Egypt, as well as between the two rival states’ feuding Gulf allies. Should it work out as planned, then Pakistan would acquire an unparalleled importance to its partners that it could later leverage on a bilateral basis to advance its pecuniary, military, and other interests with each of them.

Altogether, the success of Pakistan’s ASGA strategy would also allow the country to justify more funding for its naval forces, which could provide a publicly plausible cover for investing in the SLBM technology that’s going to become absolutely necessary for piercing India’s missile defense shield in the next decade. It’s not to say that Pakistan can’t develop this program on its own and without ASGA, but just that appearances are very important and that it might be more acceptable to its domestic and international audiences if it does so under the pretense of investing in its surface convoys and trade ships, both of which would inevitably be empowered by more funding but which additionally serve to disguise the redirection of some financial assets to SLBM-related projects. One way or another, Pakistan is going to have to counter India’s efforts to neutralize its nuclear second-strike capabilities, and if it can do so while also profiting in a commercial and geostrategic sense, then it will have discovered the ultimate win-win policy for carrying out this urgent task.

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.

All images, except the featured, are from the author.

End 2017/early 2018, all major Western Central Banks will be putting a final stop to the 2008 crisis-related unconventional monetary policies, namely the famous quantitative easing policies (QEs) which enabled to provide liquidity to those banks which saw their mutual confidence for borrowing collapse in the aftermath of the subprime crisis.

Fiscal QE in rich countries

The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are all approaching a slowdown in bond buyback. In Europe, Draghi has repeated it over and over again[1]: the Central Bank cannot do everything and therefore structural reforms of the euro are urgently needed. This is the context is which the term of “fiscal QE”[2] was coined, aimed at allowing the financing of infrastructure via a strengthening of fiscal policies at European level, something which would serve the real economy and would logically consolidate the Juncker investment plan[3].

The announced policy of the Bank of Japan follows roughly a similar strategy, except that it does not need to consolidate the governance of its own currency as a prerequisite. Recently, Shinzo Abe’s electoral victory provided the necessary conditions to initiate the transition period of buyback and debt amount decrease (200% of their GDP) through enhanced fiscal policies [4].

Military QE in the others

As for the BoE, it hasn’t yet announced the end of the tightening of its monetary policy, but due to the inflation problems currently faced (3% despite a rise in interest rates), it should not be long in coming[5]. Probably tax policy is not an option for the United Kingdom, whose inhabitants experience significant debt problems[6]. So, is it also likely to engage in a convincing military QE? Or will Europe ultimately be the only last resort solution?

On the US side, things are a bit different: the Fed ended its QE three years ago already and, since then, it had simply maintained its stock by reinvesting the amounts of maturing bonds into new bonds[7]. However, since October, this has come to an end too and the Fed has started to diminish the bond stock it had acquired in order to support the economy. Basically, this decrease requires to:

1) “Cancel” the currency entries created on the accounts of the banks (as regards to the pure monetary creation part);

2) Find real customers for the issues or renewals of treasury bills, now that the Fed no longer plays this role. There is a problem though: in our multipolar and ultra-competitive world, how to create strong positive attraction differential in favour of the American economy?

Treasury bills could be sold to the US citizens, but they would need savings to do so, which is still not the case… On the contrary, we note a new increase in US household indebtedness and delinquencies[8]. This situation proves two things: a tax policy is no more conceivable than the sale of T-Bonds to Americans, and there is no time to lose to avoid a second subprime crisis.

This second point also shows that the strategy of reviving the economy by weakening the dollar (and therefore increasing imported products prices) is a far too longstanding policy.

Does the US have any potentially highly profitable business other than their famous military-industrial complex? Not much in fact, at least not much that isn’t already optimised. Depending on what is included in the military budget, this business represents between 700 and 1000 billion dollars a year[9]…

Figure 1 – Military spending of the first 9 countries, 2016. Source: PGPF.

This is how our team came up with the concept of “military QE”, echoing the European “fiscal QE”. The question then becomes:  how could the United States quickly and significantly optimise the profitability of this part of their economy?!

The three tracks

Three simple tracks come out as options:

1- The European Track: the United States pours oil on some of the numerous conflicts on the planet, send their military in rescue and ask the concerned countries to pay for the service. The 2014 Euro-Russian crisis, the resulting deployment of US-NATO troops in Europe and the allies’ contributions increase somehow appear as a first practical application of this notion of “military QE” (at the precise moment when the Fed stopped its own QE, 2014, by the way …).

Weaknesses:

• by increasing their contributions, the allies regain control over command functions which is a bore for the US almightiness on their Alliances (ex: Europe with NATO or, on the contrary, South Korea, whose new government is extremely reluctant to pay bills for unwanted services);
• it pays, but it also costs a lot. Even if the allies contribute better to the budget, if the total budget increases, the US share also increases;
• if no one manages to restore order, there are also real conflagration risks which are not part of the US military objective: cost issue, transparency issues on comparative advantages, disastrous image leading to the implementation of decoupling strategies from the American “ally”.

 2- The Japanese Track: instead of betting on the “military”, the United States bets on the “industrial” component of the “complex”, and operates a real reform of this complex along a principle of economic rationality: expenditure decrease (military bases, men, missions, etc.) and revenue optimisation (arms sales). In this logic, there may still be interest in stirring up conflicts, but the main aim would be to leave the concerned countries to take their strategic independence (for this very trend, Japan provides the perfect example[10]).

Weakness: the world could turn into a very dangerous place, which ultimately is not in anyone’s interest. No modern leader can ignore globalisation – not economic globalisation, but societal one, where what happens here has immediate consequences there.

3- The Middle East Track (?): The United States bet on “industrial” only and count on the explosion of the multipolar world-related military spending in order to take advantage of this shoring up market at a time when the US technological primacy is still proven and credible[11]. They restore confidence among their future clients by becoming more impartial in conflicts, or even by helping to reduce tensions here and there. They bring back to them part of the expenses related to the establishment of those defence systems of the big emerging geopolitical actors – who are looking more and more towards Russia or China. They generate margins and provide real fuel to their economy; they can even reinvest part of the profits in research to increase their chances of remaining number one and keep their advantage on competitors (if our analysis in the Perspectives part of this GEAB is right, we assume the Middle East will inaugurate this new strategy).

Weakness: even if conditions of deployment of the global arms market are more secure, the world can still become a dangerous place in the longer run…. unless the evolution goes hand in hand with the establishment of a new multipolar governance; one which could anchor the partners’ confidence in military systems focused on defence instead of attack (from ministries of war to ministries of defence, from missiles to shields).

In numbers…

Let us carry a little mental exercise … The country can not afford to maintain its 800 military bases abroad, the cost of which goes up to $160 billion a year[12].

Figure 2 – US military bases abroad, 2015. Source: Politico.

If the United States abandoned half of their bases abroad, the amount saved would be around $65 billion a year[13]. On the other hand, in a multipolar world where peace is ensured by the balance of powers, the need for armament is still huge. For example, Japan is remilitarising rapidly[14]. US arms exportations could therefore be considerably strengthened. If they increase for example by 50%, this would mean around 25 billion additional income[15], i.e. $90 billion a year in savings or profits. If we take into account the large increase in next year’s military budget desired by Trump and voted almost unanimously by the Congress[16], we reach a “stimulus” of about $150 billion a year. Here it is, the new QE: it is a “Military QE” in the sense that, more than ever, the military expenses massively support the economy. The amounts involved are obviously much smaller than those of the Fed’s QE, but allow us to remind that such support is far more impactful on the real economy than virtual entries on bank accounts.

As a matter of fact, the first signs of the replacement of the petrodollar by the “military QE” we have just described seem already visible: for example, the US arms exports to Saudi Arabia increased in 2016, at the precise moment from US oil imports from this country fell sharply[17], thus rebalancing the US-Saudi trade in favour of the former. Given the trade balances that the United States has accustomed us to in the past decades, this kind of tiny fact can easily be interpreted as a real change of trend and the beginning of the famous US “economic landing” we have been anticipating in the past months and that the country needs so badly to reduce its financial infusions and start walking alone again…

Notes

[1] Last speech dated October 18. Source: BCE, 18/10/2017

[2] In this respect, please read CNBC, 05/10/2016

[3] Plan which was analysed by our team within an article about the EIB; read the GEAB n°118 / Oct. 2017

[4] Source: Tokyo Foundation, 09/11/2017

[5] Source: Seeking Alpha, 10/11/2017

[6] Source: The Guardian, 18/09/2017

[7] Source: Les Echos, 08/11/2017

[8] Source: MarketWatch, 14/11/2017

[9] Sources: The Balance (24/05/2017), POGO (10/02/2016)

[10] Shinzo Abe has been working for years to obtain a change in the Japanese constitution to allow Japan to regain control of its national defence. He seems well positioned to get this amendment by 2020. Source: Japan Times, 03/05/2017

[11] See the article of the GEAB n°117 (« The superiority of the US military ») on the tightening of the US technological advance vis-à-vis new players in the arms industry. Source: GEAB n°117, 15/09/2017

[12] Source: Mint Press News, 07/03/2016

[13]   That is 80 billion a year corresponding to half the cost of foreign bases, to which we must still take out the staff costs remaining, about 15 billion. In fact, there are approximately 300,000 US soldiers abroad, and 150,000 to repatriate. Each of them “costs” the country an average of $100,000 a year. Source: Wikipedia, here and there.

[14]    Sources: Reuters (04/06/2016), BFMTV (05/09/2017)

[15]    On average, the US arms exports reached $47 billion a year between 2012 and 2016. Source : Wikipedia

16]    Within an astonishing agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans who have allocated more than what Donald Trump was asking for… Undoubtedly this was a sign that everyone was aware of the support for the economy represented by military spending. Source: New York Times, 18/09/2017

[17]    Source: Bloomberg, 14/11/2017

Featured image is from GEAB.

Anyone willing to think carefully and critically about the use of armed force against a target such as Islamic State (ISIS) would do well to read the intensively researched piece in the New York Times by investigative journalist Azmat Khan and Arizona State professor Anand Gopal about civilian casualties from the air war waged by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The key conclusion is that those casualties are far higher — probably many times higher — than what the U.S. military acknowledges.

Such a discrepancy has been suspected for some time, based on earlier work by private organizations that comb press reports and other publicly available information from afar. Khan and Gopal went beyond that work by selecting three areas in Nineveh province as samples in which they performed an exhaustive on-the-ground investigation, interviewing hundreds of residents and sifting through the rubble of bombed structures. They compared such direct evidence, incident by incident, with what the responsible U.S. military command said it had in its records about airstrikes it had conducted in the area and the results of those airstrikes.

The authors were given access to the operations center at a U.S. airbase in Qatar that has directed the air war, and their article includes the U.S. military’s side of this story, with a description of the procedures used to select targets and assess damage, including civilian casualties. The impression left is not one of willful deception or malfeasance. Rather, the problem is partly a matter of lacking the time and personnel to do the sort of detailed after-the-fact, on-the-ground investigation for every target that Khan and Gopal did with their sample.

It is partly a matter of deficient record-keeping. It is in large part a matter of the fog of this kind of war making much faulty and woefully incomplete information almost inevitable. Although some of the civilian casualties represent collateral damage in the form of people who were in the vicinity of bona fide ISIS targets, others were in places that the targeteers mistakenly identified as having an ISIS connection.

The conditions in which civilians were living when under ISIS control worked against accurate analysis by the military of potential targets, which relied heavily on aerial observation. The observing of people going in and out of buildings in what looked like normal everyday activity was taken as a sign either that the building itself was a normal civilian structure or that there were too many innocent people in the immediate vicinity to hit it.

The absence of such innocent-looking activity tended to be taken as confirmation of any other reason to suspect that malevolent ISIS operations were going on inside. But in the so-called caliphate of ISIS, many people who otherwise would have been moving around freely tended instead to stay indoors at home. They in effect had the choice of increasing their exposure to the vagaries and brutality of ISIS or of raising suspicion at that airbase in Qatar that their home had something to do with ISIS.

Khan and Gopal are unable to extrapolate from their data, being only a sample, to any comprehensive number of innocent civilians killed and wounded in this air war. They note, however, that the concentration of civilian casualties is likely to be even higher in some areas, such as the western part of Mosul, where ISIS held out longer against coalition bombardment than it did in the areas that the authors investigated.

Values and Morality

These findings provide disturbing food for thought in at least three respects. One concerns the values and morality involved in a U.S. military operation in which so many innocents suffer so much. The human faces that Khan and Gopal attach to some of the specific cases of suffering they have investigated underscore the fundamental wrongness of what has been occurring.

A second concerns the counterproductive aspects of an offensive that is supposed to be a combating of terrorism. The Donald Rumsfeld question — are we creating more terrorists than we are killing? — is still quite pertinent. The unsurprising resentment against the United States that results from U.S. aircraft killing and maiming innocent people, or destroying their homes, tends to create more terrorists.  At a minimum, it fosters the sort of sentiment that existing terrorists exploit and win them support.

A third implication involves the ability of the American public and political class to assess adequately what is going on with a military campaign of this sort. The biggest problem as always is an unwillingness to pay adequate attention to information at our disposal.

But in this case there is the added problem of bum information. Khan and Gopal write that the huge disparity between official numbers and probable actual figures of civilian casualties means this aerial offensive “may be the least transparent war in recent American history.”

There are important policy decisions ahead about a continued U.S. military role, if any, in the areas where the ISIS caliphate once stood. Civilian casualties, and the importance of having an accurate sense of the extent of casualties that our own forces cause, need to be part of any debate about those decisions. But probably the lessons of the anti-ISIS air war apply at least as much to other states and regions where the United States has assumed the role of aerial gendarme, using either manned or unmanned means, against groups such as ISIS or al-Qaeda.

One thinks in particular of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in the absence of any geographically defined Congressional authorization for such use of force, there is no limit to where the United States will bombard from the sky and where, given the intrinsic difficulties in assembling accurate targeting information against such shadowy adversaries, more innocent civilians will die. This is one of the continuing dark sides of a “war on terror” that has been militarized to the extent that ill-chosen metaphor implies.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America Misunderstands the World. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

Hydraulic fracturing is a natural gas extraction method that has become extremely controversial for its environmental impacts. Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand, and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure, which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. Wastewater produced from this process is highly toxic and filled with a variety of chemicals.

In many cases, people who live near fracking sites have been able to set fire to the water and air that comes through their pipes. It has also been found to contaminate drinking water. Unfortunately, fracking is still somewhat popular publicly because people know very little about it and it is also popular politically because all of the politicians have a hand in it.

According to Austin Holland, the former lead seismologist for the state of Oklahoma, officials at the University of Oklahoma worked to actively cover up scientific findings that linked fracking to earthquakes. Oklahoma is one of the most drastic examples of how fracking can cause an upsurge in seismic activity, with the state seeing 639 earthquakes in the year of 2016 alone.

In a deposition last month, Holland stated that Larry Grillot, former dean of OU’s Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, and Randy Keller, the former director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey pressured him to alter his findings to be more favorable to fracking companies. After the incident, Holland left his position at OU and the Oklahoma Geologic Survey.

“I don’t know if ‘angry’ is the right word, but just disappointed … that I’d spent my time working towards something, and I thought I was in my dream job, and then I couldn’t be a scientist and do what scientists do, and that’s publish with colleagues. Well, that’s the point at which I realized that for my scientific credibility, I had to leave the position I was in,” Holland said.

Keller and Grillot took issue with Holland’s report because they said that it advocated for specific policy changes. However, the only policy measures that Holland advocated was to ensure that important information about fracking and its effects were made available to the public.

Holland was told that the following passage in his article was “unacceptable“:

“Even if a network is owned and operated by industry, regulators must ensure that seismic data are not withheld from the public,” the report read. “Similarly, making injection data, such as daily injection rates, wellhead pressures, depth of the injection interval, and properties of the target formation, publicly accessible can be invaluable for attaining a better understanding of fluid-induced earthquakes. Open sharing of data can benefit all stakeholders, including industry, by enabling the research needed to develop more effective techniques for reducing the seismic hazard.”

Holland went through with publishing the report anyway, and although he did not receive a formal reprimand, his superiors were not pleased.

“Well, the president of the university expressed to me that I had complete academic freedom, but that as part of being an employee of the state survey, I also have a need to listen to the people within the oil and gas industry. So Harold Hamm expressed to me that I had to be careful of the way in which I say things, that hydraulic fracturing is critical to the state’s economy in Oklahoma, and that me publicly stating that earthquakes can be caused by hydraulic fracturing was — could be misleading, and that he was nervous about the war on fossil fuels at the time,” Holland said.

Holland also pointed out that while energy companies and environmentalists both contacted him and attempted to recruit him as a spokesperson for their cause, he did not feel directly threatened by them as he did by the bureaucratic structure within his own industry.

“I was navigating a difficult landscape, but I was not pressured by industry to change what I’m doing, I was pressured by staff. Now, I did — was pressured by Harold Hamm to change the way I spoke about [fracking] in public. And I did have people in the industry say, ‘Well, you can’t say that’ or ‘You can’t say this.’ But the ones that actually write the paycheck control what I say in the public eye and what I don’t,”Holland said.

It was also reported this week that the EPA approved dangerous fracking chemicals even though previous studies had shown that they had a significant negative impact on living creatures and ecosystems.

John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page.John is currently battling cancer , and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments consider subscribing to his podcast to support.

Featured image is from the author.

As a US-backed Saudi tightening of the blockade against the impoverished and war-ravaged country of Yemen enters its third week, the International Committee of the Red Cross has reported that pumping stations and sanitation facilities in both the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and the south-central city of Bayda have run out of fuel, leaving 2.5 million in crowded urban areas without access to clean water.

The ICRC had reported last Friday that the Yemeni cities of Ta’izz, Sa’ada and Hudaydah had been deprived of clean water and sanitation due to the blockade. It added on Monday that water and sewage systems in the cities of Dhamar and Amram are operating at only half their normal capacity.

The aid agency warned that this breakdown threatened to reignite the worst cholera epidemic in modern history, with over 940,000 people already infected and more than 2,200 reported deaths due to the disease just since April. New cases are still being reported at the rate of some 2,600 per day and that number is now expected to rise sharply. Meanwhile, a rapidly spreading diphtheria outbreak has also placed at least 1 million Yemeni children at risk.

The blockade has shut down nearly all airports, seaports and borders since November 6, leaving a country dependent upon imports for 90 percent of its food on the brink of mass starvation.

A US-funded famine survey released on Tuesday warned that thousands of Yemenis will die daily if the Saudi-led blockade is not lifted. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network noted that, even before the tightening of the blockade, at least 15 million Yemenis were confronting a severe food crisis or worse.

“Therefore, a prolonged closure of key ports risks an unprecedented deterioration in food security to Famine across large areas of the country,” the survey said.

Last week, the relief group Save the Children warned that hunger and disease will kill at least 50,000 Yemeni children under the age of five before the year’s end as a result of the desperate conditions created by the nearly three-year-old US-backed war against Yemen.

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and the UN’s former aid chief, issued a stark and pointed warning in a tweet Tuesday:

“US, UK & other allies of Saudi [have] only weeks to avoid being complicit in a famine of Biblical proportions. Lift the blockade now.”

This follows a statement signed last week by a number of international relief agencies, including the UN, the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children, which stated:

“Ongoing obstruction by the Saudi-led coalition to the delivery of critical supplies is a measure which may amount to collective punishment of millions of Yemeni people. It exacerbates the world’s worst humanitarian crisis where almost three years of war have left over twenty million people in need of assistance, seven million of them on the brink of famine.”

What is unfolding in Yemen is unquestionably a war crime and one of the worst acts of collective punishment against a civilian population since Hitler’s Third Reich.

The US government and military have played an indispensable role in enabling the reactionary Saudi monarchy to carry out this crime. Massive arms deals have supplied the Saudi air force with missiles, cluster bombs and other munitions that have been used to reduce Yemeni schools, hospitals, residential areas, farms, factories and basic infrastructure to rubble. US Air Force planes are flying refueling missions to allow the Saudis to carry out round-the-clock bombing, while intelligence officers are supplying them with targets. The US Navy is deployed off Yemen’s coast backing up the Saudi blockade.

In Saudi airstrikes Monday, three civilians were killed in the northern province of Sada’a, while another nine were killed and three more wounded when a Saudi warplane bombed a vehicle in Hudaydah province. The day before, a Saudi airstrike killed eight children and three women in a residential area in Yemen’s northern Jawf province.

The Trump administration has signaled the Saudi regime that it enjoys unconditional support from Washington in carrying out this near-genocidal aggression. The US is seeking to build up a military alliance with Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms, together with Israel, in a bid to reverse the growth of Iran as a regional obstacle to the imposition of American hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East.

The administration has remained silent on the catastrophic deepening of the worst humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet, issuing a protest only over Yemen’s Houthi rebels firing a missile that was shot down on November 4 near the Saudi capital of Riyadh before doing any serious damage. This justifiable retaliation for the merciless bombing of civilian targets in Yemen was attributed by both the Saudi regime and the US—without any evidence—to Iran, and seized upon as the justification for the imposition of the crippling blockade.

While Iran has voiced sympathy for the Houthis and denounced the Saudi war, there has been no serious substantiation of any Iranian involvement in the fighting in Yemen or any significant arms shipments from Iran. Saudi Arabia has intervened in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, because it fears the emergence of any regime on its border that is not a puppet of the House of Saud.

The US role in the war to starve the Yemeni people into submission has developed behind the backs of the American people, with the complicity of the Congress, both major political parties and the corporate media. Support for the war began under the Obama administration and has only escalated under Trump.

Last week, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a cowardly and toothless resolution that called for an end to actions in Yemen “inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict” and “unobstructed access for humanitarian organizations,” while praising the Saudi regime and denouncing Iran.

While the initial bill included language threatening a cut-off of military support to the Saudi aggression, that was stripped from the legislation, as was a reference to the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires the US president to end foreign military interventions within 60 days unless they are approved by Congress. The bill that was passed merely noted impotently:

“To date, Congress has not enacted specific legislation authorizing the use of military force” in Yemen.

Meanwhile, the CBS News program “60 Minutes” broadcast a segment on Yemen Sunday titled “When Food Is Used as a Weapon,” which managed to present a stark picture of the intense human suffering in Yemen, while deliberately obscuring the fact that the US is fully complicit in inflicting these conditions upon the Yemeni people. Not a word was said in the broadcast about direct US military participation in the Saudi war or the massive arms deals that have allowed it to continue.

This deliberate misinformation from the politicians and the media is designed to keep the American public in the dark as Washington creates the conditions for a new region-wide war against Iran that could rapidly eclipse the immense carnage inflicted upon Iraq and Afghanistan, while paving the way to a third world war.

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Battle lines are drawn. Trump’s FFC chairman Ajit Pai is on record against Net Neutrality, saying its days are numbered.

He took the first step. On November 22, he’ll publish his plan to kill digital democracy, letting users access all content without restrictions, limitations, or discrimination, an online level playing field for everyone – on the 54th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s state-sponsored assassination.

His plan will let ISP giants establish toll roads or premium lanes, charge extra for speed and free and easy access, control content, as well as stifle dissent and independent thought – a dismal prospect.

His order will also ban states from imposing their own Net Neutrality rules, forbidding them from overriding federal regulations.

He’ll reverse Title II classification of ISPs, classifying them as common carriers, restricting their actions, an “information service” classification replacing it. A federal court ruled it’s less comprehensive, weakening consumer protections.

Pai issued a statement, saying

“(u)nder my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet.”

“Instead, the FCC would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that’s best for them and entrepreneurs and other small businesses can have the technical information they need to innovate.”

Free Press.net issued a stinging indictment of his policies since becoming FCC chairman in January, saying:

“(Y)ou’ve turned over our collective resource of the public broadcast airwaves to a company whose business model is built on tearing apart the fabric of communities by pushing racist fearmongering in the guise of news.”

“You granted Sinclair the ability to not simply broadcast this hate, but to maximize its already inflated profits by targeting its seeds of hate.”

“You’ve removed the last barrier preventing one voice from monopolizing every aspect of news production in America’s smaller communities, ensuring future generations will remain ignorant of the corruption taking place around them.”

“You’ve ripped away a literal lifeline to the world for millions of families struggling in ways you will never understand.”

“You’ve taken away basic connectivity to the forgotten seniors who worked their entire lives only to find themselves in abject poverty, failed by politicians like you who pay them cynical lip service and then spit on them when the cameras are off.”

“And you’re on the verge of turning over control of the internet on-ramps to a handful of companies so they can steal even more from their captured customers, and cut them off from the promise of an open and connected world.”

“You did all of this not for any legitimate public-policy reason; your actions will move us further from your own stated goals.”

“No, you are cruelly punishing the public and enriching the already fabulously wealthy in service of a radical and immoral ideology.”

Trump’s FCC has three Republican and two Democrat commissioners. Dem Jessica Rosenworcel blasted Pai’s plan, saying it

“hands broadband providers the power to decide what voices to amplify, which sites we can visit, what connections we can make, and what communities we create.”

“It throttles access, stalls opportunity, and censors content.” It’s an affront “to the millions of Americans who use the Internet every day.”

Dem commissioner Mignon Clyburn said

Pai’s rules “would dismantle net neutrality as we know it by giving the green light to our nation’s largest broadband providers to engage in anti-consumer practices, including blocking, slowing down traffic, and paid prioritization of online applications and services.”

On December 14, FCC commissioners will vote on Pai’s plan, approval almost certain with a GOP majority.

Rules he’ll establish ISP giants like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are designed exclusively for maximum profit-making, not consumer protections or service the way it should be for everyone.

Once changes are made and take effect, likely in January, the Internet won’t resemble the way it is now.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Pai’s plan “invites a future where only the largest Internet, cable, and telephone companies survive, while every start-up, small business, and new innovator is crowded out – and the voices of nonprofits and ordinary individuals are suppressed.”

“Costs will go up, as ISPs take advantage of monopoly power to raise rates on edge providers and consumers alike.”

“The FCC (is) abdicat(ing) a fundamental responsibility” to assure competition, along with “protect(ing) consumer” rights.

ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley warned that

“(g)utting net neutrality will have a devastating effect on free speech online. Without it, gateway corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will have too much power to mess with the free flow of information.”

Once voted on and approved, new policies will be published in the Federal Register and take effect in weeks.

Congressional legislation can rescind them – unlikely with GOP control and Trump as president. Whether virtually certain court battles can change things remains to be seen.

While the Yemenis wonder whether the Saudi Crown Prince will ever stop bombing them with American weapons, and the President threatens to take on North Korea, the US media mainly talks about the sexual harassment of women by powerful men.

It all started with testimonies that a judge running for the US Senate from the fiercely Republican state of Alabama. had tried to seduce teenagers in the past. His accusers were rapidly followed by a complaint against a famous Democratic comedian turned Senator, followed by similar revelations about a famous television personality, Charlie Rose. Like broken records, the testimonies of women who were molested years or even decades ago, alternate with opinions as to the offenders’ proper punishments, superseding everything else going on in a world that the United States claims to lead.

The only mitigating factor is that the back story is more complicated than in other cultures, touching on both religion and politics. In the nineteen fifties, in boys’ fathers’ spacious cars parked in secluded places, American teenage girls allowed themselves to be ‘petted’, and the onus was on them not to ‘go too far’. In the sixties, the women’s liberation movement and the hippies brought ‘free love’ to communes and suburbia. Although the women’s liberation primer, The Second Sex, published in 1953, was written by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, it produced a much more robust feminist movement in the US than in Europe.

In Europe, a tradition of extra-marital sex had been immortalized in nineteenth century ‘boulevard theatre’, and pre-marital sex owes more to the pill than to reactions against religious strictures. In France and Italy, Catholicism famously ‘forgives’ while in Lutheran Scandinavia, the films of Ingmar Bergman deftly revived a pre-Christian paganism.

While in Europe, feminism was associated with the socialist tradition, in the United States, sexual liberation has been largely a reaction against the Puritan religious tradition that excluded include sophisticated love-making. During the years when I lived in various European countries, many women were attracted to the tall, athletic build of American men, however they were never viewed as great lovers. The predatory behavior of the Bill Clintons and the Roy Moores are just as surely a response to Protestantism’s emphasis on sin which, among today’s young has led to an excessively casual attitude toward sex.

Combining this hamstrung ethos with the traditional of being ‘a nation of laws’, in America, the law’s representatives are expected to be above reproach when it comes to sex.  It’s ok to allow lobbyists to help write laws, but a sex scandal spells the end of a political career, as it nearly did with Bill Clinton over a dalliance with an intern. When he was impeached (but not condemned) my European friends were in hysterics at the lengths to which the United States goes to subject both sex and politics to the law, and I would bet that our latest sex scandal has them rolling in the aisles. It’s true that several European women have joined the ‘me too’ movement with accusations of sexual harassment, but I like to think it’s more ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ than ‘How disgusting!’

After ten days of non-stop talk about ‘unwanted sexual advances’ and ‘sexual assaults’, I’m amazed at the righteousness of it all. The mature woman who came forward to accuse Judge Roy Moore of trying to seduce her when she was fourteen is referred to as having been ‘a mere child’ at the time. Yet in 2015, women aged 15 to 19, had a birth rate of 22.3 per 1,000 compared to the mean average across all age groups of 16 per thousand in 1990.

As for the sophisticated, witty comedian turned Senator, Al Franken, his sin was to have kissed a former newscaster for real during an act for US troops, and to have groped her while she slept. Although Franken photographed the gesture as an obvious prank, and is known as a defender of women’s rights, not only did he feel compelled to apologize profusely, he requested that the Senate ethics committee ‘investigate’ him.

Once over the shock of that ‘auto-critic’, I naively thought Franken’s female colleagues would forgive him, but every congresswoman interviewed called for him to resign, in a lack of both Christian spirit and sensuously motivated indulgence — not to mention political judgement. As the nuclear clock reaches two minutes to midnight, like their male counterparts, female lawmakers focus on peccadillos rather than on the fact that our nuclear suitcase is in the hands of a president declared unfit by a team of psychiatrists. How can these women consider themselves ‘liberated’, if they are still mainly concerned about sex?

That said, it will be more difficult for America to shield unwanted sexual behavior from a ubiquitous recourse to investigations. The scandal over Judge Moore’s refusal to quit the Senate (race even though he was removed twice from the bench for questionable sexual behavior and early in his career was banned from a local mall for soliciting teenagers), promoted the media to rerun a 2005 tape of Donald Trump bragging to a newsman about how easy it was for a celebrity to grab women anywhere on their body.

For days, the president insisted he was ‘leaving it to the people of Alabama’ to decide whether to support Moore’s run. Finally, knowing that Alabamans respect him for his public religious gestures, such as insisting that the ten commandments be displayed in front of his courthouse, he prioritized having enough votes to pass his tax and health care reforms. A few black pastors condemned Moore’s behavior, while one white pastor claimed that since Mary was a teenager when she became the mother of Jesus, whose father was an adult, to fault an adolescent girl for having sex with an older man was tantamount to blasphemy

Twinned with the country’s religious zeal is the legacy of the long-time head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, who used America’s legacy of suspicion to keep compromising files on every American politician, (including JFK), creating a culture of investigations that views sexual harassment in legal terms, even if the perpetrators cannot easily be ‘proven’ guilty in a court of law.

During forty-some years living in half a dozen other countries, I never witnessed either a religious obsession with legality or a political obsession with foreign countries. While ‘Russiagate’ (so named after the Watergate scandal that cost Richard Nixon his presidency),centers on the prohibition against candidates receiving anything from a foreign country, when various French presidents were accused of receiving campaign funds from African dictators, it was they who threatened to sue their accusers….

As I have written elsewhere, it was America’s founding as a revolt against another country that resulted in the US psyche becoming permanently suspicious of foreigners. When Russians offered Donald Trump Jr. ‘dirt’ on Hilly for his father’s presidential campaign, according to the law, echoed by the media, he should have righteously alerted the FBI so it could pounce on the foreign sinners!

Perhaps it was inevitable that five hundred years later, a country founded on draconian religious principles should view the law as an all-embracing crusade…

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) has published several reports over the last few years. They discuss geopolitics and related themes, one of which is the likelihood of nuclear war or accident, including what it means for long-term survival.

Experts say that even a so-called limited exchange or accident would be catastrophic. For example, a recent paper in Earth’s Futurecalculates that the most optimistic scenario of a “small,” regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan would wipe out millions of people through famine and result in a nuclear winter. An exchange between the USA and Russia, for instance, could be even bigger and more devastating.

America’s ongoing “Asia Pivot” encourages China to build up its arsenals. Proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine with Russia and continuing tensions with North Korea also increase the risk of brinkmanship and miscalculation between those nuclear powers.

Britain’s Role 

By training rebels in Syria and armed forces in Ukraine, the UK is particularly responsible for contributing to escalating tensions. Britain remains one of the USA’s closest allies and enjoys a “special relationship” with the US. It serves as a proxy for US Trident nuclear weapons systems. The UK’s Vanguard submarines host US-supplied Trident II D5 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. In 2016, a dummy ICBM was launched by the UK at a test target off the coast of Africa. It self-destructed and headed for Florida, according to news reports. The event took place a time when the British government voted to upgradeTrident in violation of Britain’s Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations and at a time when the newly-appointed Prime Minister, Theresa May (not yet elected), answered “Yes,” when asked by a member of Parliament if she would launch a nuclear missile and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Let’s look at some examples of the UK MoD’s admissions that: 1) the world is getting more dangerous, 2) it is likely that some states will use nuclear weapons at some point, 3) brinksmanship increases the risk of miscalculation, and 4) that such events threaten human existence. These admissions are startling for a number of reasons: the MoD possesses nuclear weapons, yet acknowledges their danger; the media fail to report on these matters, despite their coming from establishment sources; and governments are not inherently compelled by this information to de-escalate.

“Doomsday Scenarios.”

Every few years, the MoD updates its studies concerning the nature of global developments. The third edition of the Strategic Trends Programme predicts trends between the years 2007-2036. It states (MoD’s emphases):

Accelerating nuclear proliferation will create a more complex and dangerous strategic environment, with the likely clustering of nuclear-armed states in regions that have significant potential for instability or have fears about foreign intervention. For example, North Korean, Pakistani and potentially, Iranian nuclear weapon capability will increase significantly the risks of conflict in Asia if a system of mutual deterrence does not emerge. In addition, nuclear possession may lead to greater adventurism and irresponsible conventional and irregular behaviour, to the point of brinkmanship and misunderstanding. Finally, there is a possibility that neutron technologies may reemerge as potential deterrent and warfighting options.

Neutron weapons supposedly kill living things but do not harm property. The report also notes a potential “revival of interest” among “developed states” in “neutron and smarter nuclear technologies.” Neutron bombs could become “a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world.” The document concludes rather casually, stating: “Many of the concerns over the development of new technologies lie in their safety, including the potential for disastrous outcomes, planned and unplanned.” Note the word planned. It goes on to say: “Various doomsday scenarios arising in relation to these and other areas of development present the possibility of catastrophic impacts, ultimately including the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”

Will the US or Israel get impatience and attack Iran or North Korea? The now-archived Future of Character of Conflict (2010) predicts trends out to 2035 and states:

The risk of Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) use will endure; indeed increase, over the long term. The strategic anxiety and potential instability caused by CBRN proliferation is typified by international frustration over Iran and North Korea, with the risks of pre-emptive action and regional arms races, and where soft power alone has not been notably successful.

Soft power refers to economic and diplomatic coercion. As the US expands its global reach, other countries might seek possession of nuclear weapons to deter the USA: “[t]he possession of nuclear weapons, perceived as essential for survival and status, will remain a goal of many aspiring powers.”

Unless enforcement mechanisms are imposed, will arms controls and treaties be effective? Out to the year 2040, says the MoD’s fourth edition of its now-withdrawn Strategic Trends Programme, “[t]he likelihood of nuclear weapons usage will increase.” It goes on (MoD’s emphases):

Broader participation in arms control may be achieved, although this is unlikely to reduce the probability of conflict. Effective ballistic missile defence systems will have the long-term potential to undermine the viability of some states’ nuclear deterrence.

Could that last statement refer to ICBMs being integrated into a so-called defense shield and used by the few countries that possess them against ones that do not? What is the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used for warfighting? Finally, Future Operating Environment 2035 states:

Some commentators believe it is increasingly likely that a range of state actors may use tactical nuclear weapons as part of their strategy against non-nuclear and conventional threats coming from any environment, severe cyber attacks. Limited tactical nuclear exchanges in conventional conflicts by 2035 also cannot be ruled out, and some non-Western states may even use such strikes as a way of limiting or de-escalating conflict.

Conclusion

These analyses and admissions on behalf of the UK MoD and its reliance on US-produced weapons systems should serve as enough of a warning to scholars and anti-nuclear weapons campaigners to suggest that, as long as weapons of mass destruction exist and as long as international treaties have no enforcement mechanisms with regards the powerful countries, the clock to midnight will continue ticking.

Dr. T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and the forthcoming Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia (both Clairview Books).

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Peace one day will return to Syria. The question is when and under what circumstances.

Will its sovereign independence remain unchanged? Will its territorial integrity stay intact?

Will it be free from US occupation of northern and southern areas? Will Israel end terror-bombing targets at its discretion?

Will a sinister US/Saudi/Israeli alliance decide continued or renewed conflict in the country isn’t worth it?

Will Syria be the nation it was before US aggression began, still ongoing – able to rebuild and restore normality for its people?

Trump is a weak president. Dark forces control him. He may genuinely want conflict ended. It’s not his call to make – what’s most important to understand.

On Tuesday, during his hour-long conversation with Putin, key geopolitical issues were discussed, Syria the main one.

A White House statement said the following:

“President Donald J. Trump today spoke with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for more than one hour.”

“The presidents affirmed their support for the Joint Statement of the United States and the Russian Federation, issued at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit on November 11.”

“Both presidents also stressed the importance of implementing UN Security Council Resolution 2254, and supporting the UN-led Geneva Process to peacefully resolve the Syrian civil war, end the humanitarian crisis, allow displaced Syrians to return home, and ensure the stability of a unified Syria free of malign intervention and terrorist safe havens.”

“The two presidents affirmed the importance of fighting terrorism together throughout the Middle East and Central Asia and agreed to explore ways to further cooperate in the fight against ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations.”

“President Trump and President Putin also discussed how to implement a lasting peace in Ukraine, and the need to continue international pressure on North Korea to halt its nuclear weapon and missile programs.”

On Tuesday, Putin had phone discussions with four leaders – Netanyahu, Egypt’s el-Sisi, Saudi king Salman and Trump.

A Kremlin statement on his conversation with Trump covered much of the same ground as the White House reported.

Key isn’t what was agreed on. It’s what follows. All US post-9/11 wars continue. Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are occupied by US forces.

In September, the Pentagon conducted multiple drone strikes on Libya – on the phony pretext of combating ISIS Washington supports, likely more of the same coming.

Yemen and Somalia are US battlegrounds, the former supporting Saudi aggression, a war planned and orchestrated in Washington.

Pentagon terror-bombing in Syria continues. US aggression in the country showing no signs of ending contradicts Trump saying he and Putin “talk(ed) very strongly about bringing peace to Syria.”

America doesn’t wage wars to quit. Multiple endless US conflicts speak for themselves – their goal to replace all sovereign independent governments with pro-Western puppet ones.

Syria is unfinished business. The road to Tehran runs through Damascus – first by ending Syrian sovereignty, replacing its government and establishing control over the country, then repeating the same thing against Iran.

Will Washington admit defeat in Syria and agree to conflict resolution? Its sinister alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran and Hezbollah suggests otherwise.

It’s just a question of what’s coming next – unknown until turbulent events begin unfolding.

US belligerent history suggests continued Middle East strife, more of what Washington instigated since the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

Peace and stability defeat America’s imperial agenda. Endless wars serve it.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has thrown the Federal Republic of Germany into the greatest period of political instability since WW2 as the electorate increasingly rejects CDU policies that appear to have now destabilised the country’s economic and social structure, and also endangered its security by: 

1. Allowing the mass influx of over one million migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, to join the substantial number already in Germany, who cannot be absorbed without damaging society and who pose serious social and economic consequences for native German citizens the majority of whom have apparently only now realised that the huge numbers of foreign migrants have no intention of ever returning to their home countries when the wars are over but will instead insist on bringing their families to live with them permanently in Germany, to eventually replace the local population.

2. Taking the extraordinary action, (out of some misplaced sense of guilt for WW2), to supply Binyamin Netanyahu’s hard-Right, Israeli administration with a fleet of state-of-the-art, German-built, government-subsidised, Dolphin Class submarines now converted by the Israeli navy to be nuclear-armed, undersea, military attack vessels with cruise missiles that could blow Germany itself out of the water, and which are now assumed to be secretly patrolling the Mediterranean and other international waterways.

Both these unilateral actions are, unfortunately, irrevocable and will inevitably bring far-reaching repercussions to Europe – consequences that are only now being belatedly appreciated, not just by Germany but by the EU as a whole.

Angela Merkel’s legacy will be one of disunity and divisiveness of cultural identity that has structurally, socially and militarily weakened that which had been the strongest political and economic entity in Europe for over 70 years, and which will almost certainly also impact the future of major German exporters  such  Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche and others.

Western media predicted that the Russian military campaign in Syria would end in ‘failure’. That – presumably – has been achieved (not). Now follows a push of diplomatic efforts to settle the war.

In September 2015 the “west” prepared for an open military aggression on Syria. The purported aim was to fight ISIS and to stop the migrant flow into Europe. The real aim was “regime change”. Russia stepped in by sending its cavalry to Syria:

The U.S., Britain, France and others announced to enter Syrian skies to “fight the terror” of the Islamic State. Russia will use the same claim to justify its presence and its air operations flying from Latakia. Simply by being there it will make sure that others will not be able to use their capabilities for more nefarious means. Additional intelligence from Russian air assets will also be helpful for Syrian ground operations.

The Obama administration was surprised by the Russian (and Iranian) intervention. It had no sensible means to counter it. The administration and the U.S. commentariat tried to hide this impotence by predicting that the Russian campaign would fail.

Obama himself led the pack:

“An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won’t work,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the White House on Friday …

As reminder, and for your amusement, an incomplete list of the then published “Russia fails” nonsense:

• Obama: Russia’s strategy in Syria ‘doomed to fail’ – Al Jazeerah, September 11 2015
• Could Syria be Putin’s Afghanistan? – Al Jazeerah, September 14 2015
• Why Iran’s Plan in Syria Will Fail – Aawsad, September 15 2015
• U.S. to Putin: Welcome to the ISIS ‘Quagmire’ – The Daily Beast, September 29 2015
• Secretary of Defense: Russia ‘Doomed to Fail’ in Syria – September 30, 2015
• Saudi official says Russia will fail to save Syria’s Assad – USA Today, September 30 2015
• Why Putin is doomed to fail in Syria – Vox.com, October 1 2015
• Obama: Russia heading for ‘quagmire’ in Syria – CNN, October 2 2015
• Obama Sees Russia Failing in Syria Effort – NY Times, October 2, 2015
• Like Brezhnev in Afghanistan, Putin will Fail in Syria – Palestinian Chronicla, October 5 2015
• Putin will fail in Syria: The West must take a step back – CityAM, October 5 2015
• DOD: Russia ‘Doomed to Fail’ in Syria – CNS news, October 6 2015
• Don’t Chase Putin Out of Syria — Let Him Fail On His Own – GMF-US, October 9 2015
• Echoes of Afghanistan in Syria – National Interest, October 9 2015
• Russian army in Syria: A failure foretold – Ynet News, October 10 2015
• Russia’s ‘quagmire’ destroys all hope of defeating ISIS – The Hill, October 16 2015
• Russians support airstrikes in Syria, despite haunting memories of quagmire in Afghanistan – Foxnew, October 20 2015
• Russia risks Syrian quagmire -U.S. deputy secretary of state – Reuters, October 31 2015
• The Syrian quagmire – Daily Times (Pakistan), November 3 2015
• Putin is in a quagmire in Syria — and Russians deserve better – Chicago Tribune, November 11 2015
• Is Russia’s Syria Intervention Doomed to Fail? – RUSI, November 20 2015
• Russia’s Failed Adventure in Syria – Gatestone Institute, December 1 2015
• Putin risks a new Afghanistan, Obama warns – Politico, December 1 2015
• Putin’s Quagmire in Syria Proves Obama Prescient – Bloomberg, December 9 2015
• Putin bogging down in Syria – December 10, 2015
• Putin’s Middle East Misadventures – U.S. News, December 11 2015
• Is Syria Already A Quagmire For Putin? – Outside the Beltway, December 12 2015
• The Danger of Putin Losing in Syria – The Atlantic, January 11 2016
• Russia will ‘fail to save’ Syria’s Assad: Saudi Foreign Minister – Daily Mail, February 14 2016
• Putin is making a mistake in Syria — and Russia will pay the price – WaPo, September 26 2016
• The Latest: Tillerson says Russia has ‘failed’ in Syria – Fox, April 6 2017
• Russia is at a dead-end in Syria – Al Jazeerah, June 25 2015
• Putin is drowning in Syria – Israel National News, June 28 2017

In October 2015, in the mid of the above propaganda onslaught, the presidents of Russia and Syria met in Moscow. It was a warm meeting despite the NY Times groundless efforts to portrait it as “chilly“. The plans were laid for the military efforts to regain the country. They were successfully implemented. Russia’s “quagmire” in Syria turned out to be a Well Designed Campaign.

The U.S. tried its best to hinder Syrian and Russian progress in the war. But despite Obama’s unrelenting efforts, the Syrian alliance managed to regain control over Aleppo, Palmyra, Deir Ezzor and most of the south-east. The borders to Lebanon and Iraq are open and secured. Russian pressure turned Turkey around. Local ceasefires were arranged in over 2,500 towns and hamlets. The Islamic State is defeated. The Syrian army is again fully equipped and a fearsome force.

Yesterday the Syrian President Bashar al Assad again met President Putin. Assad remarked:

I am very glad to have this opportunity to meet with you two years and several weeks after Russia launched a very successful operation.Over this period, we have achieved major success both on the battlefield and on the political track. Many regions in Syria have been liberated from the terrorists, and the Syrians who had to flee from these regions can now return there.

After several hours of talk Putin introduced Assad to Russia’s military leaders. He noted:

As you know, we will hold a trilateral meeting here in Sochi. However, I would like to say that conditions for a political process could not have been created without the armed forces, without your efforts and the efforts and heroism of your subordinates. This goal has been achieved thanks to the Russian Armed Forces and our Syrian friends on the battlefield. Thank you for this.

Since 1945 the U.S. military has, arguable, won no war. (No, Grenada does not count.) Russia demonstrated in Syria how it is done. This must be food for thought to “western” staffs.

Yesterday’s meeting was the launch event for the main diplomatic campaign to end the war. Today Putin held phone conservation with U.S. President Trump, the Saudi King, the Emir of Qatar, the President of Egypt and the Prime Minister of Israel. Tomorrow he will meet President Rouhani of Iran and President Erdogan of Turkey. In parallel a meeting of high military officials of the Syrian-Russian alliance takes place. Saudi Arabia is cleansing the “High Negotiations Committee (HNC)” opposition group it supports. The uncompromising head of the HNC, Riyad Hijab, was fired. The groups meets in Riyadh on November 22. On November 28 another round of talks under UN supervision will be held in Geneva. Russia is planning to host a gathering of about 1,300 Syrians representing the revamped opposition on December 2.

Syria’s will to fight, the reliability of its allies and Russian military competence have turned the war around. The Putin-Assad meeting in Sochi sets the foundations for a lasting peace.

There are remaining challenges: Al-Qaeda still controls Idleb governate, Israel protects Jihadi groups along the Golan heights, 1,700 U.S. soldiers and their Kurdish proxy forces try to establish themselves in north-east Syria. The Zionist lobby is pressing in Washington to prolong the war. It will take another year or two, and require more fighting, to overcome these issues. But the conditions to solve the remaining problems are now clearly in place. The diplomatic push by Russia and Syria will find solutions for many if not most of the unsettled problems.

The U.S. commentariat was wrong in predicting a failure of the Russian military campaign. It will continue to sow doubt over Russia’s diplomatic efforts. It will try to hinder and denigrate Syria’s progress in regaining full sovereignty over its land and people.

No longer should anyone fall for such bullshitting.

Americans have been living in a country that has not known peace since 9/11, when President George W. Bush and his posse of neoconservatives delivered the message to the world that “you are either with us or against us.” The threat was coupled with flurry of hastily conceived legislation that opened the door to the unconstitutional “war on terror” carried out at the whim of the Chief Executive, a conflict which was from the start conceived of as a global military engagement without end.

Bush and his handlers might not have realized it at the time but they were initiating a completely new type of warfare. To be sure, there would be fighting on the ground worldwide against an ideologically driven enemy somewhat reminiscent of communism, but there would also be included “regime change” of governments in countries that were not completely on board with the direction coming out of Washington. Instead of invading and occupying a country in the old-fashioned way, so the thinking went, far better to just knock off the top levels and let the natives sort things out while acting under direction from the pros in Washington.

Even though “regime change” in Iraq and Afghanistan did not work out very well, Bush saw himself as a triumphant war leader with his vainglorious “Mission Accomplished,” and he later dubbed himself the “decider.” He insisted that his reelection in 2004 when running against a weak John Kerry was a validation of his policies by the American people, but one has to wonder how many voters really understood that they were signing on for perpetual war that would of necessity also diminish their most cherished liberties.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and U.S. President Barack Obama followed Bush and made it clear that there would be no stepping back from a policy of proactively “protecting” the American people. Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton destroyed Libya, a disaster that is still playing out, increased involvement in Syria, and introduced death by drone for both American citizens who have transgressed and random foreigners who fit a profile. And to eliminate any pushback to what he was doing, Obama relied on invoking the state secrets privilege to block legal challenges more times than all his predecessors in office combined.

And now we have President Donald Trump, whose foreign policy is particularly unarticulated, though in many ways similar to that of his predecessors. The United States is increasing its involvement in Afghanistan, where it has been engaged for longer than in any previous war, is threatening both Iran and North Korea with annihilation, and is hopelessly entangled in Trump’s pledge to completely eliminate ISIS. Indeed, destroying ISIS (and al-Qaeda) has been the one clearly articulated part of the Trump foreign policy, though there are also occasional assertions that it should be accompanied by yet one more try at regime change in Damascus.

And the grand tradition of using military might to back up diplomacy has certainly found little favor, so much so that it is certainly clear even to the supine American public and a risk averse congress that there is something wrong in Foggy Bottom. It is astonishing to note the mainstream media, which reviled George W. Bush when he was in office, describing him currently as a voice of moderation and restraint due to his recent criticism of the White House. You can’t go wrong if you pile on Trump.

Even the U.S. media has been reluctantly reporting that ISIS has been rolled back in Syria by the joint efforts of the Syrian Army and the Russian air force with the United States and its allies playing very much secondary roles in the conflict. The Russians have, in fact, complained that Washington seemed just a tad disinterested in actually cooperating to destroy the last remnants of ISIS in the few areas that the group still controls, citing most recently an alleged incident during the Syrian government liberation of the town of Abu Kamal in which U.S. air assets on site appear to have allowed ISIS fighters to escape.

The shambles of American policy as it applies to the Middle East was highlighted by yet another similar and particularly bizarre episode that was revealed initially by the BBC on Monday of last week. In early October, when the Syrians and Russians were closing in from the west on Raqqa, the “capital” of the ISIS caliphate while the U.S supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which predominantly consists of the Kurdish militias, was closing in from the east, a deal was reportedly struck to permit an evacuation of the remaining ISIS fighters and their families.

According to the BBC investigative report, the SDF and Kurds were wary of clearing out the remaining fighters from the ruins of the city and so negotiated an agreement whereby the ISIS fighters from Syria and Iraq and their families would be able to leave and be allowed to either go home and face the consequences or proceed to ISIS controlled areas about one hundred miles away. The objective was to avoid a final assault from the air and using artillery that would have produced a bloodbath killing thousands, including large numbers of civilians. The agreement stipulated that only ISIS fighters who were local would be allowed to leave. Others, referred to as “foreigners,” from Europe, Africa or Asia would have to surrender in order to avoid their going free and getting involved in new terrorist activity after returning home.

U.S. and British military advisers who were with the SDF and Kurds reported, somewhat improbably, that they had not been party to the negotiations, that it was “all-locals,” though they later admitted that there had been some involvement on their part. In the event, trucks and buses were assembled on October 14^th, formed into a convoy, and were loaded with more than 4,000 fighters and families. More than 100 ISIS-owned vehicles also were allowed to leave and there were ten trucks filled with weapons. The convoy stretched for more than four miles and film footage shows trucks pulling trailers filled with militants brandishing their weapons. The fighters were not allowed to display flags or banners but they were not forced to disarm and in fact loaded all the vehicles with as many weapons as they could carry, so much so that one truck broke its axle from the weight. The BBC reported that “This wasn’t so much an evacuation – it was the exodus of so-called Islamic State.”

The drivers reported that they were abused by the ISIS fighters, many of whom were wearing explosive belts, and they also claimed that there was a large percentage of foreigners among those escaping. Various drivers told the BBC that there were French, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Pakistani, Yemeni, Saudi, Chinese, Tunisian and Egyptian nationals among their passengers. The evacuees made it safely to ISIS controlled territory and presumably will be ready, willing and able to fight again.

The escape of the Islamic State from Raqqa is, to put it mildly, bizarre. One might accept that avoiding the carnage that would have been part and parcel of an assault on the shattered city should have weighed heavily on the decision making by the attacking forces, but allowing hardened fighters to escape with their weapons would hardly seem a good way to end the conflict. In May, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said on television that the war against ISIS was one of “…annihilation. Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to north Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We are not going to allow them to do so.”

Well, Mattis was possibly lying back then, or at least saying what he thought would play well on television and in the newspapers. On November 14^th, the day after the BBC story about Raqqa broke, he lied again, saying that the United States is in Syria under a U.N. authorization to fight ISIS, which is not true. The Russians have been invited into the country by its legitimate government but the U.S. is not there legally. The Turks are claiming that there are 13 U.S. military bases already in Syria, some of which are permanent.

Mattis added to his bit of fiction by stating, somewhat ominously, that while the first phase of the ISIS war is coming to an end

“Basically we can go after ISIS. And we’re there to take them out. But that doesn’t mean we just walk away and let ISIS 2.0 pop back around. The enemy hasn’t declared they’re done with the war yet. So, we’ll keep fighting them as long as they want to fight.”

A waggish friend of mine suggested that Mattis might be deliberately selectively releasing ISIS fighters so the U.S. will never have to leave Syria, but my own theory is somewhat different. I think that Washington, which has done so little to defeat ISIS, wants some threat to continue so it can keep its own “resistance forces” in place and active to give it a seat at the table and a voice at the upcoming Geneva discussions for a political settlement in Syria. Otherwise Washington will be outside looking in. The unspeakable Nikki Haley at the U.N. appears to endorse that line of thinking by asserting that Washington will continue “to fight for justice” in Syria no matter what the rest of the world decides to do.

Does this mean that we can expect considerable fumbling and a game with no exit strategy, something like a replay of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? You betcha.

Featured image is from the author.

Dopo 60 anni di attesa, annuncia la ministra della Difesa Roberta Pinotti, sta per nascere a dicembre la Pesco, «Cooperazione strutturata permanente» dell’Unione europea nel settore militare, inizialmente tra 23 dei 27 stati membri.

Che cosa sia lo spiega il segretario generale della Nato, Jens Stoltenberg. Partecipando al Consiglio degli affari esteri dell’Unione europea, egli sottolinea «l’importanza, evidenziata da tanti leader europei, che la Difesa europea debba essere sviluppata in modo tale da essere non competitiva ma complementare alla Nato».

Il primo modo per farlo è che i paesi europei accrescano la propria spesa militare: la Pesco stabilisce che, tra «gli impegni comuni ambiziosi e più vincolanti» c’è «l’aumento periodico in termini reali dei bilanci per la Difesa al fine di raggiungere gli obiettivi concordati». Al budget in continuo aumento della Nato, di cui fanno parte 21 dei 27 stati della Ue, si aggiunge ora il Fondo europeo della Difesa attraverso cui la Ue stanzierà 1,5 miliardi di euro l’anno per finanziare progetti di ricerca in tecnologie militari e acquistare sistemi d’arma comuni. Questa sarà la cifra di partenza, destinata a crescere nel corso degli anni.

Oltre all’aumento della spesa militare, tra gli impegni fondamentali della Pesco ci sono «lo sviluppo di nuove capacità e la preparazione a partecipare insieme ad operazioni militari». Capacità complementari alle esigenze della Nato che, nel Consiglio Nord Atlantico dell’8 novembre, ha stabilito l’adattamento della struttura di comando per accrescere, in Europa, «la capacità di rafforzare gli Alleati in modo rapido ed efficace».

Vengono a tale scopo istituiti due nuovi comandi. Un Comando per l’Atlantico, con il compito di mantenere «libere e sicure le linee marittime di comunicazione tra Europa e Stati uniti, vitali per la nostra Alleanza transatlantica». Un Comando per la mobilità, con il compito di «migliorare la capacità di movimento delle forze militari Nato attraverso l’Europa».

Per far sì che forze ed armamenti possano muoversi rapidamente sul territorio europeo, spiega il segretario generale della Nato, occorre che i paesi europei «rimuovano molti ostacoli burocratici». Molto è stato fatto dal 2014, ma molto ancora resta da fare perché siano «pienamente applicate le legislazioni nazionali che facilitano il passaggio di forze militari attraverso le frontiere». La Nato, aggiunge Stoltenberg, ha inoltre bisogno di avere a disposizione, in Europa, una sufficiente capacità di trasporto di soldati e armamenti, fornita in larga parte dal settore privato.

Ancora più importante è che in Europa vengano «migliorate le infrastrutture civili – quali strade, ponti, ferrovie, aeroporti e porti – così che esse siano adattate alle esigenze militari della Nato». In altre parole, i paesi europei devono effettuare a proprie spese lavori di adeguamento delle infrastrutture civili per un loro uso militare: ad esempio, un ponte sufficiente al traffico di pullman e autoarticolati dovrà essere rinforzato per permettere il passaggio di carrarmati.

Questa è la strategia in cui si inserisce la Pesco, espressione dei circoli dominanti europei che, pur avendo contrasti di interesse con quelli statunitensi, si ricompattano nella Nato sotto comando Usa quando entrano in gioco gli interessi fondamentali dell’Occidente messi in pericolo da un mondo che cambia. Ecco allora spuntare la «minaccia russa», di fronte alla quale si erge quella «Europa unita» che, mentre taglia le spese sociali e chiude le sue frontiere interne ai migranti, accresce le spese militari e apre le frontiere interne per far circolare liberamente soldati e carrarmati.

Manlio Dinucci

Foto : Illustration ©FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP

Robert Mugabe resigned as president on Tuesday, six days after Zimbabwe’s military first moved against him. His resignation was announced in the midst of a debate in parliament on impeachment initiated by his factional rivals in the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).

Mugabe, 93, who has led the country for 37 years, refused to go after last Wednesday’s move by the army targeting the G40 faction of his wife, Grace Mugabe, and supporting the former deputy prime minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa. He failed to resign in a televised address Sunday while flanked by top military figures, having been removed as party leader earlier that day. Instead, he suggested that he would lead a party congress next month.

Despite the staging of rallies and scenes of euphoria in Harare at news of Mugabe’s resignation, his removal is the result of a palace coup with political and economic aims dictated by bourgeois forces no less corrupt than Mugabe.

Mugabe finally submitted his resignation in a letter to parliament that was read out by the speaker, Jacob Mudenda, to the assembled MPs. The cheering in the chamber was an indication of how far removed the political overturn was from what the army and sections of the media had proclaimed to be a genuinely popular uprising. Even the charges under which Mugabe was to be impeached—that his advanced age allowed his wife to “usurp power”—reflected the intention to limit any fallout.

Mnangagwa, who is to be Mugabe’s replacement, has no principled differences with the man for whom he acted as enforcer for decades. He moved against his former boss only when Mugabe deposed him a fortnight ago, after sidelining other members of the “old guard” close to the military in favour of a younger bourgeois layer around “Gucci Grace.”

The military portray Mugabe’s actions as undermining the heroes of the independence movement. But in the decades since the 1980s, the military leveraged its power to become a major economic force that grew wealthy at the expense of the working population. The generals were angry at Mugabe only for his promotion of a younger venal layer at their expense.

Mnangagwa has been alleged to be Zimbabwe’s richest man in cables released by WikiLeaks and written by a US ambassador in 2001. The sources of his wealth include ill-gotten gains obtained while secretary for finance in ZANU-PF as well as illegal mineral exploitation in the Congo. His first destination in seeking support for a move against Mugabe was Beijing, Zimbabwe’s biggest investor, where Mnangagwa fled after being deposed. Mnangagwa has appealed to China, the US and Britain by advancing himself as “engagement”-friendly and an opponent of Mugabe’s recent turn to policies of “indigenisation” that penalised foreign investors in mining and other key industries.

The man immediately in charge of the palace coup, commander of the Zimbabwe national army, General Constantine Chiwenga, is also fabulously wealthy, with an extensive real estate portfolio, control of some 100 companies, a fleet of luxury cars and a mountain of jewellery.

The extent to which the military is managing events was epitomised by the statement issued Monday by Chiwenga. Flanked by Air Force of Zimbabwe Commander Perrance Shiri, Police Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri, Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services Commissioner-General Paradzai Zimondi and acting Central Intelligence Organisation head Aaron Nhepera, Chiwenga warned against any action by anyone that would “threaten peace, life and property.”

Zimbabweans, he declared, had to “remain calm and patient, fully observing and respecting the laws of the country,” while “your defence forces…remain seized with the operation codenamed ‘Operation Restore Legacy.’” Chiwenga urged students protesting at the University of Zimbabwe “to be calm and to proceed with their educational programmes as scheduled.”

Lining up behind the impeachment move is Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The former leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) now speaks of his desire to see all the hungry fed as a reason for temporarily siding with the Mnangagwa faction. But he and the trade union bureaucracy are aligned with bourgeois forces in Zimbabwe and major imperialist powers, including Britain and the United States.

Set up in 1999, the MDC stood against ZANU-PF as the defender of International Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment programmes and white farming interests when Mugabe was forced to make a show of opposition to both to preserve his popular base. In an interview with the South African Mail and Guardian in 1997, Tsvangirai denied that the IMF caused Zimbabwe’s social crisis, insisting that it was because “We are not living within our means.” He continued: “At the stage we had reached, some form of structural adjustment was needed… We had to relax and open up and allow business to operate without these constraints.”

The MDC has been a consistent advocate of this agenda and backed Western moves to depose Mugabe that involved crippling sanctions that destroyed the livelihoods of millions.

London and Washington have over time combined backing for the MDC with seeking relations with factions within ZANU-PF, including that led by Mnangagwa. The ailing Tsvangirai still enjoys international backing, with the US and Britain insisting that the military must give way to civilian rule in arrangements that include the MDC and other opposition tendencies. The MDC is considered to be an important political lever against China’s influence within ZANU-PF.

Another party concerned that Mugabe’s departure from office be carefully managed is the African National Congress government in South Africa. President Jacob Zuma heads a regime that has just as decisively betrayed its promises to the working class and poor farmers in return for a share in their exploitation through governmental positions and business connections forged by means of the policies of “Black economic empowerment.” He arrives in Harare today from a meeting in Angola of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) to discuss how the power transition will continue.

Yesterday, Reuters reported a cable it received weeks prior to the palace coup from South Africa’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). The cable reports that sixteen African leaders in the SADC led by Zuma were encouraging Mugabe to step down in the knowledge that the army was ready to remove him. Dated October 23, the CIO source warns that Mugabe would face “fierce resistance from the military” if Mnangagwa was removed and that “the military is not going to easily accept the appointment of Grace.”

The report adds that Reuters “reported in September that Mnangagwa was plotting to succeed Mugabe, with army backing, at the helm of a broad coalition. The plot posited an interim unity government with international blessing to allow for Zimbabwe’s re-engagement with the world after decades of isolation from global lenders and donors.”

Mnangagwa yesterday, in his first public appearance since the coup, offered his vision for a “new Zimbabwe” that was in line with this aim, describing “a national, not party political, project” that was “not a job for Zanu-PF alone…”

The imperialists are calculating that opportunities will indeed be opened up to them. Prime Minister Theresa May said that the UK, “as Zimbabwe’s oldest friend,” will do all it can to help “rebuild” the Zimbabwean economy.

Whatever rebuilding is planned involving Britain and other imperialist powers will be at the expense of the working class and rural poor. The essential issue posed before the working class of Zimbabwe is to assert its interests independently of all factions of the bourgeoisie. That class and not just Mugabe has proved incapable of freeing the masses from imperialist domination and creating the conditions for genuine and lasting social and economic progress.

We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the selection of articles below which reveals the insidious role of the US and its allies in fomenting war and conflict in the Middle East, not to mention the biased news coverage of the corporate media. 

Please help us spread this selection of articles by forwarding it far and wide, discussing it within your circle of friends and colleagues,  reposting our articles on blog sites and social media, etc.

*      *     *

How Syrian-Nuke Evidence Was Faked

By Gareth Porter, November 21, 2017

When Yousry Abushady studied the highly unusual May 2008 CIA video on a Syrian nuclear reactor that was allegedly under construction when Israeli jet destroyed it seven months earlier, the senior specialist on North Korean nuclear reactors on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s staff knew that something was very wrong.

Why Are We Helping Saudi Arabia Destroy Yemen?

By Rep. Ron Paul, November 21, 2017

It’s remarkable that whenever you read an article about Yemen in the mainstream media, the central role of Saudi Arabia and the United States in the tragedy is glossed over or completely ignored. A recent Washington Post article purporting to tell us “how things got so bad” explains to us that, “it’s a complicated story” involving “warring regional superpowers, terrorism, oil, and an impending climate catastrophe.”

The Middle East: the Decline of American Might

By Victor Mikhin, November 21, 2017

The Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that the cooperation between Moscow and Tehran and the refusal of mutual payments in US dollars could isolate the USA and “repel the American sanctions”. The Supreme Leader added, “It is possible to cooperate with Russia in dealing with large-scale issues requiring commitment and determination, and to cooperate with it logistically”.

The Faces of Yemen – Where Is American “Outrage?”

By Brandon Turbeville, November 20, 2017

While not overwhelmingly involved with troops, bombing campaigns, and the like in the way that it is in Syria or Iraq, the United States is nonetheless complicit in the destruction of an entire country by providing intelligence, weapons, and political support to Saudi Arabia and the GCC in their war against the Yemeni people. In addition to that support, however, the United States has, at times, also contributed limited direct military support to the Saudi effort.

Experts Warn It Would Take More Than One US General to Thwart “Illegal” Nuclear Strike Emanating from the White House

By Jon Queally, November 20, 2017

While a top U.S. nuclear military commander made global headlines over the weekend after he stated plainly on Saturday that he would resist any order from President Donald Trump that he deemed “illegal,” including an unlawful directive to carry out a nuclear strike, experts warn that individual objections such as that could be overcome by a commander-in-chief determined to launch an attack.

US/Saudi/Israeli Alliance for Greater Regional Turbulence?

By Stephen Lendman, November 20, 2017

US-orchestrated Saudi war on Yemen only achieved the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, nothing else. Houthi fighters remain strong and resilient after two-and-a-half years of aggression on the nation.

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Hello Fellow Healthcare Worker! Having managed so far to avoid being fired for refusing the seasonal Flu vaccine, with methods ranging from Religious Exemption, to Mask-Wearing, here are some of my observations “from the field”, in hopes that you may find something that will be useful in your own situation. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in America, Civil Disobedience has a long and effective history of being utilized by those oppressed, to bring attention to their plight, gain sympathy from persons of influence, and change the course of the national conversation regarding their cause.

The more trouble for the employer that we can make of Mandatory Vaccination Time, the more annoyed they will be with the whole process.

Most people really don’t like having to get shots. This includes some managers, Human Resources personnel, the Infection Control team, Pastoral Care staff, administrators, office staff, and legal department personnel. These people are not likely to go against the tide. In fact they usually “go along to get along”. However, at least some of them must secretly be a little disgruntled about the whole thing. Some may even be secretly cheering us on. Let’s leverage any support we can get from them. If they are not against us, they may potentially be for us.

The more of a hassle it is to get the 90% vaccination rate and to fill out and submit all the necessary documentation, plus the nuisance of annually dealing with exemptions, declinations, and documenting and policing all of that, the worse of a taste it will leave in people’s mouths.

These people are busy and most of them don’t welcome any more impositions on their time. (This can also work in our favor in the future, for if the flu shot is enough of a hassle, then when CMS attempts to mandate even more vaccines in the future, employers who are already resenting the bureaucratic hassles, may begin to “push back” a little.)

When they roll out “Flu Shot Time”, try asking your fellow employees, to please consider waiting until the last possible day to get their mandatory shot. You can say you are helping participate in the national observance of “After You Day!”

This day will vary from each place of employment, it is basically the final day of any “deadline” that is given, to get a flu shot.  We can frame the “After You Day” in this way: Healthcare workers are conscious of the fact that some years there are flu vaccine shortages, and being the noble, self-sacrificing professionals that we are, we merely wish for all others to have their chance to get the vaccine first. If your employer says “Oh, we have enough for everybody”, staff can demur & say, “Oh, that’s ok, we always think of others first!”

Having a substantial portion of the employees wait until the last day, would surely cause some teeth-gnashing in the Infection Control office. They may move back the deadline, in which case the staff should take advantage of getting to wait longer!

Wouldn’t it be great if this really did catch on as a national thing? The public would have to ask, why ARE all those healthcare people putting off getting THEIR shot until the last possible day? Some light bulbs may go off above some people’s heads.

Below are some examples of nonviolent civil disobedience that hospital employees can use that will help highlight the unfairness and absurdities of coercive flu vaccinations (which are usually ineffective and, in most years, also unnecessary). Coerced flu shots are also in total violation of the sacred principle of informed consent.

1) Don’t go to the vaccine pushers, make them come looking for you.

If you are in danger of being fired over the issue:  Drag out all interactions. Don’t respond to emails right away. Make appointments for meetings as far in the future as possible. Make the meetings last a long time. If you are handed something to read and/or sign, take as long as possible reading it.  Ask for clarification.  Pause a long time to digest the “clarification”. Also, most people don’t realize, they usually don’t have to sign anything “right now”.  Say you would need to take a copy home with you so you can research it further, or talk it over with “someone”. Then, don’t be in any hurry to return the paperwork. If they press you to return it, say you need more time. You might even misplace it!

2) Regarding signing anything, follow suggestions others have posted to NAMV, such as, drawing a line through things you don’t agree with, writing in your own statements, and then sign “Under Duress” next to your signature. If you have to write in a reason for declining, you can type your statement out, print it off, then make a copy of their paper with your typed statement superimposed over the area where you were supposed to handwrite an answer. (It helps to use a bolder typeface than their paper used.) It looks much more serious & professional, when you can turn in a paper that they thought would have a little handwritten statement on it, to rather look like you mean business. Insist on having a copy of everything.

3) If you have to meet with management or Human Resources, try to meet with just one person. Then after that meeting, request to meet with their superior, or your superior, or any other department you can think to involve, but make the meetings one at a time, and as many days apart from each other, as possible. The goal is to stay employed as long as possible, plus those meetings should be on paid time, right?

4) If your hospital requires masks, depending on their policy, flout it when you are off-duty. If staff is allowed to have family members or others stop by the nurse’s station to pick up or drop off things, chat briefly while on duty, make sure to do the same to your on-duty coworkers, unmasked. Bring cookies. Visit in the rooms of friends or relatives who are hospitalized. Eat meals at the hospital cafeteria on your time off. All without a mask. (And see the light bulbs go on.)

5) If you are to be terminated, DON’T Resign! Don’t go with quiet dignity. Be angry (not threatening) or miserable, whichever feels right to you. Make them (from the higher-ups to the secretaries) look you in the eye. Make them squirm with discomfort. Try to make sure their consciences bother them. Your tears affect your fellow humans at the gut level. Especially in health care, where empathy is hopefully in greater supply. Take a long time to clean out your desk, locker, etc., and do it when there are likely to be the most people around. Write farewell notes. We want this to affect morale. If coworkers are fearful and resentful, and higher-ups are feeling, used, guilty, and uncomfortable, that is as it should be.

6) Once terminated, gather your quiet but cheerful dignity about you, hold your head up, and go back to visit often, taking cookies to former coworkers, visiting patients, eating in the hospital cafeteria, (lunch dates with former coworkers?), visiting the chapel, anywhere where members of the public can be. Smile a lot. You are free!

7) If terminated, try to network with others in your area.  As a group, perhaps you can get local news media interested in your story. If interviewed, stay on-topic, i.e., this is about resisting MANDATORY vaccination, don’t stray into individual concerns about vaccine safety, ingredients, etc. You can say something like: “No vaccine is 100% effective, and no vaccine is 100% risk-free. Vaccination is an invasive medical procedure, and we support voluntary, informed consent, for our patients as well as ourselves.”

8) If you are a religious person, pray for guidance before any meeting. Christians may wish to ask the Holy Spirit to give them the right words. Catholics may wish to ask the intercession of St. Michael, or another favorite saint. If you work for a faith-based entity, where meetings are often opened with a prayer, before meeting with anyone in regard to your declining the flu shot, say you would like to begin the meeting with a prayer, and have an appropriate prayer ready.

9) Be sure to seek medical attention to document the traumatic after effects and difficulties you have been put through (whether submitting to the shot or not). If you absolutely feel you have no option but to get the shot (nursing students have my greatest sympathies here!), you may find that being forced into having a vaccination is likely to haunt you and be memorable to you for a long time.

The person who gives you the shot may also find it a memorable experience. Your soul is likely to be in agony over this and you may find yourself giving it full expression at the time the shot is being given. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself letting out your pent-up frustration, screaming, sobbing, hyperventilating, writhing, jumping around, yelling, knocking the syringe away, all giving expression to the angst you are feeling at this violation of your body and your conscience.

When you finally get control of yourself afterward, you may need to explain that the symptoms were out of your control. You may wish to ask the person who gave you the shot, to then help you fill out and file a Vaccine Adverse Event Report (VAERS) to the government, and, be sure to mention that you hope you don’t get Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from this whole event. If you DO experience symptoms such as sleep disturbance, depression, crying for no reason, anxiety, nervousness, appetite disturbances, poor concentration, flashbacks, or feeling ill when you have to be around needles at work, etc., be sure to seek medical attention to document the after-effects and difficulties you are having.

If you do end up having to sue for workplace trauma or file a disability claim it will be very important to have documents with dates, times, who, what, where, and, of course medical records showing how forced vaccination has adversely affected you will be very helpful.

Be brave, fellow Healthcare Worker, and remember, while the other side accuses us of not protecting our patients, understand, we ARE protecting them from something far worse than Influenza, by fighting to protect the right to Informed Consent and the right of competent adults to control their own healthcare decisions. This IS for our patients!

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived at 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; 

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2; or at 

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

This article was originally published at Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines.

The ambitiously conceived exhibition ‘Dentro Caravaggio’ (Inside Caravaggio) wants us to see this extraordinary painter with new eyes. Currently on display at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, eighteen masterpieces are accompanied by never-before-seen reflectographs and x-radiographs. These artistic diagnoses offer viewers a glimpse into Caravaggio’s creative process – to see how he worked, to observe his method. To be sure, the journey that this exhibition takes us on is revelatory and transformative.

Caravaggio is ultimately a painter of exposure, revealing the human experience as one of constitutive vulnerability. Michaelangelo Merisi was born in 1571 in the town of Caravaggio, not far from Milan, where he spent much of the first twenty years of his life, before making his way to Rome. With the arrival of the plague, Caravaggio’s family was not spared: by the time he was eight, the boy had lost his uncle, grandfather, and father. There can be little doubt that early exposure to extreme terror, physical anguish and death informed his vision as a painter who specializes in scenes of humanity in extremes.

No hope no fear. This was the motto of Caravaggio and his comrades. When we look at his life—the constant run-ins with the law, his sword and dagger wielding escapades in Rome, his irascibility and propensity to self-sabotage; his readiness to quarrel, attack and even to kill—we see a man who seems to be perpetually drawn to the edge, who only knows how to live at the extreme verge of existence. And in fact, the truth of his art is just that: it expresses our ineluctable fate – our existence is always and ever on the brink of being and non-being.

Caravaggio Judith Beheading Holofernes (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Nowhere is this clearer than in Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599-1600), where we see the Assyrian General precisely at the moment when he is no longer alive, and not yet dead. The show opens with this breathtaking masterpiece: a work of such immense power that one is left speechless before it, as if a witness to the ravishingly beautiful Judith and her deliberate and studied decapitation of the powerful man she has just seduced. In the painting, the heroine’s lips are parted slightly, a rendering that is true to the Book of Judith which tells us that the pious widow prayed Give me strength this day, O Lord God of Israel as she severed the head of her enemy. As the late art historian E. H. Gombrich rightly observed,

“Caravaggio must have read the Bible again and again, and pondered its words.”

Not mentioned in the text are Judith’s erect nipples, visible beneath her semi-translucent blouse. This subtly underscores the eroticism of an unusually violent act of unexpected intimacy – where the Assyrian is literally being penetrated by his own sword, undone by the very thing which represents his power, his manhood. The mighty commander is brought low by a determined young woman, while her wizened old maid looks on ready to gather the head “in her food bag” once her mistress has succeeded in detaching it.

Caravaggio painted St. John the Baptist numerous times, and two of these are in the exhibit. The more extraordinary one is St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (ca.1603), now owned by the Nelson-Atkin’s Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. This is a John who speaks to us loudly, even as he sits silent and brooding.

St. John the Baptist in the wilderness, c. 1604, oil on canvas; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri | Photo: Jamison Miller (Source: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

At first sight, the young man can easily be viewed as a rather moody adolescent – but the sullenness is not mere juvenile petulance. This is a deeply religious rendering of John as he meditates on his ultimate fate – which will be to suffer execution on the orders of King Herod; he knows about the abuse of power, and the corruption of conscience it breeds. With the intense chiaroscuro, the picture is lit as though a flash of lightening has, for an instant, illuminated John in a woodland setting. The severity and intensity of this saint, with his crimson drapery, animal furs, and simple reed cross reminds us that this is a preacher of repentance: a Nazarite who understood the inadequacy and folly of mankind, along with the reckless and foolish ways of those who wield power.

In the Madonna of Loreto (1605), two kneeling peasants pray before the Virgin and Child. Caravaggio characteristically emphasizes the naked legs and exposed dirty feet of the male pilgrim, as well as the torn soiled cap of the old woman. While it is undoubtedly true that pilgrims to Loreto entered the shrine with bare feet and tattered clothing to display their humility, the artist’s insistence on their poverty reveals his affinity for the severe pauperist strain of the Catholic counter-reformation. Caravaggio’s Christianity is emphatically a Christianity of the poor. Andrew Graham-Dixon rightly calls the painting “a tour de force of naked religious populism … blatant in its appeal to the masses.”

Caravaggio’s work is a prolonged meditation on the vulnerability which marks our condition regardless of how powerful or brave we might be, regardless of our skill with a blade. In fact, Caravaggio was, by all accounts, a quite proficient swordsman; so much so that in 1606 he killed a man in a prearranged duel, prompting his flight from Rome.

By 1607 Caravaggio found refuge in Naples, where he would transform painting literally overnight. Among the greatest treasures to be included in the show is the monumental Flagellation of Christ (1607), a painting of such harrowing brutality that it is almost unbearable. At the same time, it is the consummation of Caravaggio’s art, one of his most perfectly realized works, encapsulating his vision of humanity in all its terrible beauty and fragility. Initially greeted by the Neapolitans with “stunned admiration, bordering on bewilderment,” the Flagellation lays bare for all to see the true meaning of fleshly existence, and the radical vulnerability it implies.

On the one hand, we are witnessing a man being tortured, confronted with its awful and twisted form of intimacy. We see the classically conceived Christ as he is literally beginning to collapse from exhaustion, while his tormentors kick, snarl and yank his hair to get him back in place. There hardly appears to be any note of transcendence here – we seem to be alone with nothing but darkness lying beyond a scene of torment. At the same time, Christ’s body has within it a kind of luminescence: in the very flesh that is being savaged there is a divinity. Caravaggio finds the transcendence here, in this world – God is made manifest in the flesh.

Although his art soared, and commissions poured in, Caravaggio’s troubles did not end: he would acquire new and dangerous enemies among the Knights of Malta, who for a time welcomed the painter and were even prepared to make him one of their own. Caravaggio’s portrait of the dignified and stern Maltese Knight, Fra. Antonio Martelli (1608) is included in the exhibition – it is one of the finest of the seventeenth century, and would have a powerful influence on Rembrandt, among others.

Portrait of a Knight of Malta, 1607-1608, oil on canvas, Pitti Palace, Florence (Source: The Uffizi Gallery)

In just over a year, the painter would fall out with the brotherhood and eventually suffer grievously for a perceived insult to one of its members. In 1610, as he left a tavern in Naples, Caravaggio was ambushed and his face badly mutilated. A struggle for his life ensued, and shortly after his recovery he was finally permitted to return to Rome. However, ill fate and exhaustion caught up with the artist and he died enroute.

With the Martyrdom of St. Ursula (1610) we have what is perhaps Caravaggio’s final painting. Ursula stands, gazing down, her fingers placed on either side of the arrow that has just been fired at pointblank range into her chest by the King of the Huns. It is a terrible scene of very matter-of-fact, almost mechanical, killing. Ursula is caught, like many of Caravaggio’s other subjects, between life and death. She hovers at the edge of the abyss, and the insinuation – in the positioning of her hands and her slightly protruding belly – is that she is about to give birth, highlighting the interpenetration of living and dying. The picture contains the last portrait we have of the painter, whose upturned head peers blindly into the impenetrable darkness, mouth agape as though overcome by the desperation and inscrutability of our human lot.

This exhibition brings out a Caravaggio that we cannot afford to overlook. “…to be afraid of ugliness seemed to Caravaggio a contemptible weakness,” as Gombrich observed, “what he wanted was truth.” Caravaggio insists on a Christianity of the poor and underprivileged, on a realism that is unabashed and uncompromising – and at a time when we seem to be drowning in the lies and the corruption emanating from powerful elites, the painter offers us a sorely needed antidote.

Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City.

The number of people sitting outside AIIMS, waiting to be treated, reflects the grim reality of health sector in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, etc.

“I am counting the last days of my life, along with waiting to get operated; whichever comes soon will end my ordeal,” said attendance Mishra from West Champaran district of Bihar. He visited countless hospitals in various states, in hopes of being treated, in the last one year; but all doctors failed to diagnose that he was suffering from mouth cancer and they referred him to AIIMS.

AIIMS: Indias premier Hospital displays  grim state of health services in India

Bus stops outside AIIMS turns into beacon of light for the poor patients

Santoshi Devi and Manoj Kumar Sahu from Kanpur district wait for their seven year old son, who was hit by a bike while he was crossing the road, to be treated. After getting treated for 5 months in Lala Lajpat Rai hospital in Kanpur, doctors suddenly referred the child to AIIMS saying that they did not have the necessary machines for surgery.

According to the 60th AIIMS Annual Report of the year 2015-2016, most of the outstation patients were from UP followed by Bihar, which reflects the dire state of health facilities in two of the most populous states of India.

Amit Gupta, chief spokesperson of AIIMS, said that 50% of the patients coming to AIIMS do not even need AIIMS-like facilities. According to him, these patients could be treated in their home states as well.

 “Simple surgeries like uncomplicated Hernia, Hydrocele and other smaller surgeries are cramping the system of AIIMS,” said Gupta.

Speaking about the massive rush, he added

“It is the failure of the system that everybody is flocking to AIIMS. It was not envisioned for AIIMS to be treating common ailments but it was established to deal with complex cases.”

An Internal Committee Constituted by AIIMS under the supervision of Chandralekha in 2013, who was faculty head at anesthesiology department stated that in ICU with 225 Beds and Surgical block with 121 beds. The problem ranges from congestion to  shortage of manpower, medicine and funds. But report concluded that on  equipment front the picture is not so grim. All ICUs have modern beds, advanced technology and facilities. AIIMS 60th Annual report also reflects the numerous problems such  as manpower shortage, as there is huge gap between the number of patients coming to AIIMS and the patients who undergo treatment in AIIMS. According to the Report, year 2015-2016, witnessed outpatient attendance at 18,33,156 but only 1,02,037 fortunate patients got treated in AIIMS. This huge gap alludes to the manpower shortage in AIIMS, as per report the sanctioned faculty strength in AIIMS is 882 but in position faculty strength is 718, so there is need for 182 more faculty members to be recruited. Even number of technicians are not as per sanctioned strength, number of technicians for ECG and ventilator is also less than required which is exacerbating the situation. Even in job category A,B,C which comprises technicians and staff members other than doctors are also less than the sanctioned strength.

In the Emergency wing AIIMS, shortage of resident doctors is also affecting the services, as per report there is shortage of resident doctors who are temporarily employed, they left their job to appear in entrance examination for pursuing MD (Master in Medicine) thus creating large number of Doctors positions vacant. This is situation every six month, when tenure of resident doctors ends or when they left job to pursue higher studies.

“Within last ten years we have increased faculty strength from 300 to 600  and we are working hard to recruit more and more doctors and nurses at every level said ,” said spokesperson of AIIMS.

The central government is resorting to every available option to increase the number of beds so that more patients can be treated. Currently, AIIMS has a total bed strength of 2,500 but with further development of the trauma center, AIIMS’ bed strength will directly go up by 2,000.

“Even if we get 10,000 beds, this problem will persist,” said Gupta.

He added that states should take cognizance of the fact that referring patients to AIIMS should be the last resort. State administration should equip hospitals with the required facilities to treat patients. This will help the system to reduce the inconvenience caused to patients who are forced to spend months and years on pavements and metro stations outside the hospital.

The number of people sitting outside AIIMS, waiting to be treated, reflects the grim reality of health sector in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, etc.

“I am counting the last days of my life, along with waiting to get operated; whichever comes soon will end my ordeal,” said attendance Mishra from West Champaran district of Bihar. He visited countless hospitals in various states, in hopes of being treated, in the last one year; but all doctors failed to diagnose that he was suffering from mouth cancer and they referred him to AIIMS.

AIIMS: Indias premier Hospital displays  grim state of health services in India

Bus stops outside AIIMS turns into beacon of light for the poor patients

Santoshi Devi and Manoj Kumar Sahu from Kanpur district wait for their seven year old son, who was hit by a bike while he was crossing the road, to be treated. After getting treated for 5 months in Lala Lajpat Rai hospital in Kanpur, doctors suddenly referred the child to AIIMS saying that they did not have the necessary machines for surgery.

According to the 60th AIIMS Annual Report of the year 2015-2016, most of the outstation patients were from UP followed by Bihar, which reflects the dire state of health facilities in two of the most populous states of India.

Amit Gupta, chief spokesperson of AIIMS, said that 50% of the patients coming to AIIMS do not even need AIIMS-like facilities. According to him, these patients could be treated in their home states as well.

 “Simple surgeries like uncomplicated Hernia, Hydrocele and other smaller surgeries are cramping the system of AIIMS,” said Gupta.

Speaking about the massive rush, he added

“It is the failure of the system that everybody is flocking to AIIMS. It was not envisioned for AIIMS to be treating common ailments but it was established to deal with complex cases.”

An Internal Committee Constituted by AIIMS under the supervision of Chandralekha in 2013, who was faculty head at anesthesiology department stated that in ICU with 225 Beds and Surgical block with 121 beds. The problem ranges from congestion to  shortage of manpower, medicine and funds. But report concluded that on  equipment front the picture is not so grim. All ICUs have modern beds, advanced technology and facilities. AIIMS 60th Annual report also reflects the numerous problems such  as manpower shortage, as there is huge gap between the number of patients coming to AIIMS and the patients who undergo treatment in AIIMS. According to the Report, year 2015-2016, witnessed outpatient attendance at 18,33,156 but only 1,02,037 fortunate patients got treated in AIIMS. This huge gap alludes to the manpower shortage in AIIMS, as per report the sanctioned faculty strength in AIIMS is 882 but in position faculty strength is 718, so there is need for 182 more faculty members to be recruited. Even number of technicians are not as per sanctioned strength, number of technicians for ECG and ventilator is also less than required which is exacerbating the situation. Even in job category A,B,C which comprises technicians and staff members other than doctors are also less than the sanctioned strength.

In the Emergency wing AIIMS, shortage of resident doctors is also affecting the services, as per report there is shortage of resident doctors who are temporarily employed, they left their job to appear in entrance examination for pursuing MD (Master in Medicine) thus creating large number of Doctors positions vacant. This is situation every six month, when tenure of resident doctors ends or when they left job to pursue higher studies.

“Within last ten years we have increased faculty strength from 300 to 600  and we are working hard to recruit more and more doctors and nurses at every level said ,” said spokesperson of AIIMS.

The central government is resorting to every available option to increase the number of beds so that more patients can be treated. Currently, AIIMS has a total bed strength of 2,500 but with further development of the trauma center, AIIMS’ bed strength will directly go up by 2,000.

“Even if we get 10,000 beds, this problem will persist,” said Gupta.

He added that states should take cognizance of the fact that referring patients to AIIMS should be the last resort. State administration should equip hospitals with the required facilities to treat patients. This will help the system to reduce the inconvenience caused to patients who are forced to spend months and years on pavements and metro stations outside the hospital.

Featured image: Picture of Hariri on Hamra Street. | Photo: Joyce Chediac

Pictures of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri line the streets in every neighborhood of this city. The large somber portraits bear the Arabic hashtag “All of us are with you.”

Just last week, Saad Hariri’s shocking, Saudi-prompted resignation as Lebanon’s prime minister and verbal assault on Hezbollah and Iran set the stage for internal strife, and gave Israel a pretext to attack. This week, all of Lebanon has united to defend Lebanese sovereignty, see Hariri as held captive by a foreign power, and are demanding his return from Saudi Arabia.

What changed, and why?

Jana Nakhal, independent researcher and Lebanese Communist Party Central Committee member, walked this reporter through these developments on Nov. 16.

“When Hariri resigned as Lebanese PM from Saudi Arabia on Nov. 4, everyone was shocked, she said. “Anything was possible—a [Israeli] bombing, assassinations,” she said. “Everyone was worried that Lebanon would become the center of an international confrontation.”

Lebanon’s unwieldy political system is easily destabilized. Put together by the French colonizers in 1925, it mandates that government posts, and parliamentary apportionment, be based upon the country’s different religious groupings. Hariri has represented the Sunnis, and Aoun the Christians, aligned with Hezbollah, the strongest group in the Shia community.

However, Hezbollah leader Sayyad Hassan Nasrullah and President Michel Aoun, while longtime political opponents of Hariri, supported him against Saudi Arabia, defended Lebanese sovereignty and called for Hariri’s release. Aoun said he would not accept Hariri’s resignation unless the prime minister came back to Lebanon and explained himself. Both Aoun and Nasrullah have pushed for a principled national unity, and the population has rallied around the call.

“Stopping the escalation was the solution. Everyone was relieved,” Nahkal added.

There were no internal clashes even though Hariri’s Future Movement, ever ready to blame Hezbollah for anything, would have started them. The crisis, she said, is seen in Lebanon as created by Saudis, and has been turned into a diplomatic problem for Riyadh.

Internal unity deters Israeli aggression

Nakhal emphasized the importance of Lebanese unity to deter Israeli aggression, as fighting among groups has often been used by Israel as a pretext to attack. For example, the entire country rallied around Hezbollah and other resistance fighters when they pushed back the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. “In 2006, we realized Israel could beat us only from the inside.”

“There will not be an attack now.” Nakhal added, “Israel wants to attack according to its own agenda.”

Some dangers remain. For example, Saudi Arabia still might be able to mount an economic blockade or an economic boycott of Lebanon. This would certainly hurt, since 350,000 Lebanese nationals work in Saudi Arabia and transfer home an average of $4.5 billion a year in much-needed revenue.

Saudi attack on Lebanese sovereignty

Why has Saudi Arabia so blatantly and openly interfered in the internal affairs of Lebanon, to the point where it would turn this tiny nation into a war zone in an attempt to confront Iran?

One of Washington’s key clients in the oil-rich Middle East, Saudi Arabia sees Lebanon not as a sovereign state but as an extension of its own interests. Riyadh has long regarded Hariri, who has dual Saudi-Lebanese citizenship and business interests in the kingdom, as “its man” in Lebanon. The Saudis were angry when Hariri entered into a coalition government with Aoun and Hezbollah last year, even though this was the first government able to bring some stability to Lebanon and to develop a national budget in 13 years.

Recent indications of a warming of relations and political agreement between the Lebanese and Iranian governments angered Riyadh enough to summon Hariri and script his resignation.

•  On August 23, Hariri told Iranian officials that “Israel and terrorism” were the two primary threats facing Lebanon—not Hezbollah and Iran, as the Saudis maintain (http://www.tehrantimes.com/news/416207/Lebanon-Iran-view-Israel-terrorism-as-threats-to-regional-stability).
• On Nov. 3, Hariri met with top Iranian advisor Ali Akbar Velayati, who afterwards  described Lebanon-Iran relations as “very good.”( http://www.tehrantimes.com/news/418151/Iran-insists-support-for-Lebanese-government).
• On the next day Aoun met Velayati,  and, according to Tehran Times, “praised Iran’s role in helping establish stability and security in the region and attached great importance to expansion of ties between the two countries.” (http://www.tehrantimes.com/news/418214/Lebanon-proved-its-competence-in-defeating-terrorists-Iran-says).

Nakhal pointed out that Hariri’s resignation speech, which revives the old “terrorism threat from Iran” line, is the exact opposite of these recent statements. One doesn’t meet with an Iranian one day, and the next day demand to “cut off Iran’s hand” in Lebanon.

The Saudis are also vehemently opposed to Hezbollah’s support to Yeminis fighting Saudi domination. Indiscriminate Saudi bombing there with U.S.-provided weapons, and the resulting hunger and disease, kill hundreds daily. Nakhal likened Hezbollah’s assistance to Yemen with Che Guevara’s and Cuba’s internationalist support for liberation struggles abroad.

Hariri changed his tone again in a Nov. 12 interview, she added. He was more conciliatory towards Lebanese opponents, and pointedly focused on Hezbollah’s assistance in Yemen as the “main problem.” This seems a revision of the Saudi line. The interview from Saudi Arabia was with Future TV, the channel of Hariri’s own political party. His claims that he was not a captive seemed so implausible that Lebanese TV stopped airing the interview.

Most recently, Hariri has said he will return to Lebanon on that country’s Independence Day, Nov. 22.

Role of Hezbollah, Lebanese CP in the resistance

The U.S. government waged its own campaign against Hezbollah as “terrorist.” Nahdal countered with a more accurate description. Hezbollah, she said, “is a component of the Lebanese community and political scene. Whenever there is an attack on Lebanon, they are the resistance.”

The Lebanese Communist party has armed contingents, and is also part of that resistance. It fought to protect the Palestinian people in Lebanon during the 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War. Their members fought along side Hezbollah’s militia to liberate southern Lebanon from 18 years of Israeli occupation in 2000, and again to successfully repel an Israeli invasion in 2006, she explained.

Most recently the Lebanese CP fought in coordination with Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army to liberate from al Nura and al Qaida 120 kilometers of Lebanese soil on the Syrian border. The combined Lebanese forces were successful in May, restoring this land to Christian and Sunni villages after a four year occupation.

Nakhal described other key issues facing Lebanon today.

The war in Syria, she said, has destroyed the economy and life style of farmers and bedouin who used to cross Lebanon’s long border with Syria to sell their produce in Syria. That border has been closed due to the fighting in Syria.

Syrian refugees in Lebanon

Additionally, Lebanon, with a population of 4 to 5 million, has more than a million Syrian refugees.

“The main problem is that the Lebanese government washes its hands of them and won’t allow them refugee status, because it would then have to support them and give them asylum.” Syrian refugees are categorized as “temporarily displaced individuals.”

Aid to Syrian refugees is monopolized by UN agencies and distributed in a way that reinforces dependency, she said. Many Syrian children in Lebanon aren’t going to school and can’t read and write.

There is also a tendency, she said, to see all Arab problems as coming from refugees. This view is not independent of class. Nobody says they are annoyed by rich Syrians. This is totally related to Lebanon’s sectarian political system, she added. This system “masks class relations.” For example,

“The Shiia are the urban poor and poor farmers.”

Sectarian political system ‘unsustainable’

The Lebanese Communist Party does not follow the sectarian pattern of defining people primarily by their religious communities. Its members and leaders come from all ethnic and religious groups in Lebanon.

“We say that [the sectarian] form of government is unsustainable,” Nakhal said. “It provides few services to the rural and urban poor. There is no education in some regions.”

The Lebanese Communist Party is currently working with women, farmers, workers, trade unions, cooperatives and with student movements.

This article was originally published by Liberation News.

The world is now at the mercy of a coalition of three of the most dangerous autocrats on the planet: Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s new absolute ruler Mohammad bin Salman, a name that will become increasingly familiar as the months go by. These three “leaders” are now collaborating in an incredibly reckless plan to permanently reshape the Middle East.

The final outcome will unfold no matter what Canada does. But unless the government of Justin Trudeau gets a grip on reality, Canada will be drawn into this potential catastrophe by virtue of foreign policy positions it has already taken. Geopolitics is getting incredibly complex and there is little evidence that the Liberal government has a clue how to navigate through the dangers. The problem is that despite all the hype about “being back”, Canada’s foreign policy under Trudeau and minister of foreign affairs Chrystia Freeland is still characterized by cynicism and ill-considered trade-offs on files within the broad spectrum of foreign affairs — including investor rights agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Obviously, a certain amount of realpolitik is inevitable and even necessary to protect Canada’s interests. But even so it begs the question of how Canada’s interests are defined. How much of the store is Trudeau willing to give away to buy favour with the U.S. on NAFTA, especially when it seems concessions like putting our troops on Russia’s border has gotten us nothing in return? With Trump and his redesigned U.S. empire, there is no quid pro quo.

The embarrassing “me too” gang-up on Russia is bad enough. The Canadian version of the U.S. Magnitsky Act is a pathetic effort to please the U.S. (EU allies in NATO are increasingly uneasy about Russophobia given their own particular national interests). And Putin can hurt Canada and Canadian businesses more than we can hurt Putin and his oligarchs — and he has promised to do so.

And the Middle East is a whole other question. Canada’s past sins, such as torture in Afghanistan, and the destruction of Libya, can be dismissed by the government as old news. Canada has thankfully avoided getting re-involved in the chaos that is Middle East politics. But with the coming to (absolute) power of the new and reckless Saudi ruler Mohammad bin Salman, Middle East policy is suddenly fraught with danger and risk for any country allied with the U.S. or with any claim to interests in the region.

The new Saudi prince (who has arrested everyone who might challenge his authority) is encouraging Israel to invade Lebanon, urging the Israelis to do what they want to do, anyway: deal a crippling blow to Israel’s most effective foe, Hezbollah. Hezbollah basically governs Lebanon and has its own well-armed force. Funded by and allied to Iran, it fought the Israeli army to a standstill in 2006. It is this fact that prompted the Saudis to force the resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri; he refused or was unable to curb Hezbollah’s political power. The Saudi government upped the ante saying the Lebanese government would “be dealt with as a government declaring war on Saudi Arabia.” It ordered all Saudi citizens to leave Lebanon.

For the Saudis, the ultimate target is Shiite Iran and its significant influence in the Middle East and presence, directly or indirectly, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. When bin Salman declared that a rocket attack on Riyadh by Yemeni rebels could be seen as an act of war by Iran, the U.S. backed him up, implicitly giving the Saudi dictator a green light for more aggressive action.

Given the political situations in the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, all sorts of case scenarios are now being speculated, with the potential for a rapid escalation of military confrontations, to the point of risking a confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. The first would be an Israeli assault on Hezbollah and Lebanon’s infrastructure. That could be followed by a Saudi-led invasion of Qatar and the removal of its government. While less likely, another confrontation could see the U.S. launch a campaign to seize Syrian territory reclaimed by the Assad regime, on behalf of Israel and risking a direct confrontation with Russia.

All of this could be a prelude to an attack on Iran itself and possibly the use by Israel of nuclear weapons. The rich potential for unintended consequences includes World War III.

If all of this sounds fantastical, consider who currently runs Israel, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu is mired in his own corruption scandal and needs a distracting war to survive. Bin Salman has already demonstrated a stunning recklessness and ruthlessness: the brutal bombing of Yemen (and now a blockade of food and medicine), the blockade of Qatar, and the house arrest of another country’s prime minister. As for Trump (and some of his generals), he seems to genuinely believe that the U.S. is invulnerable, a truly suicidal assumption. All three heads of state adhere to the doctrine of exceptionalism: the normal rules of international behaviour don’t apply to them.

If one or more of these scenarios begins to play out just what will Trudeau do? His government’s policy towards Israel is driven by political cowardice, rooted in the fear of the Israel lobby in Canada. Towards Saudi Arabia, it is driven by sales of armoured personnel carriers, and a blind eye towards gross human rights violations. With respect to the U.S. it is characterized by ad hoc efforts to predict the unpredictable.

If any of this war scenario plays out, Trudeau will suddenly be pressed to come up with principled positions in response and not just political opportunism and calculated ambiguity. And he should take note: Canadians’ attitudes towards Israel have turned very critical, with 46 per cent expressing negative views and just 28 per cent positive views of that country. As for our proposed $15 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, 64 per cent disapprove.

While these progressive attitudes lie relatively dormant at the moment another slaughter of innocents will bring them to life.  Is the prime minister prepared?

On November 14, 2017 the Environmental Defense Fund and the Citizen’s Utility Board of Illinois released the results of a study “New Smart Meter Data Shows Potential of Real-Time Pricing to Lower Electric Bills.”

The report concluded that “Ninety-seven percent of a sample of Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) customers would have saved money in 2016—without changing their electricity use—had they participated in a “real-time pricing” program in which power prices change hourly.” 

“Specifically, the paper finds real-time pricing would have trimmed bills for the average ComEd customer by $86.63 annually, or 13.2 percent less than they paid under the traditional flat-rate power pricing system. Moreover, real-time pricing would have generated savings for 97 percent of the households covered in the study, comprising total savings of $29.8 million.”

If you identify yourself as an environmentalist and have become enamored with the idea of time-of-use billing, please don’t be deluded into thinking that the Illinois report proves that smart meters will offer environmental benefits, because the report states that 97% of the customers WOULD NOT need to change their consumption patterns to “save money.”

And please don’t be fooled into believing that time-of-use billing plans implemented by investor-owned utilities will save you money, because even as demand for electricity has decreased, in the real world, rates have increased.  Some jurisdictions have implemented fixed minimal charges, so that when consumers conserve, they have to pay for electricity they are not even using.

Details about the bill impact on 3% of the population are not provided, but does this statistic potentially make a case for targeting the 3% if the purpose of time-of-use billing is to shift demand to non-peak times? Unless those customers are unable to shift their consumption, for example, if they work 3^rd shift and are not even home during the reduced rate time periods? Other customers may not be able to “shed load” if they need power for medical devices.  What percentage of the 97% of customers selected to be surveyed were simply not home during the peak pricing periods?

Had ratepayers not been surcharged for the installation of wireless utility meters in the CUB-EDF report, would ratepayers have saved MORE than the $83.63 annually?  

And, what are the undisclosed costs for future maintenance, repair, and security of the wirelessly controlled grid?  We can ask PPL customers about meter replacement cost.

 “The Allentown-based utility touted itself as a pioneer when it installed 1.3 million meters from 2002 through 2004. But those devices proved obsolete in just four years, failing to meet the minimum performance requirements of new state regulations.”

The reported total savings of $29.8 million in Illinois is determined SOLELY by the price differential between flat rates and time-varying rates, which is subject to change. Industry research has indicated if the price differential is not punitive enough, results are diminished, fueling the entitlement by utilities and regulators for even higher surcharges.

And, pricing is subject to change after meter installation. If you want to learn more about how that works, research what happened to solar producers who accepted a wireless smart meter so that they could sell their electricity back to the grid. After meter installation, compensation formulas were altered in favor of utilities, Look also into caps on solar, the favoring of utility –scale solar over rooftop, and surcharges for solar producers to access the grid to understand the bigger picture.

But here is where the rubber really meets the road.

Does data lie? And, are human rights abuses acceptable?  And, are we pursuing another wave of unsustainable economic growth under the guise of sustainability with an unsafe product? 

Does data lie? 

While the Illinois report recommends that other states adopt legislation to share anonymous energy-use data with researchers, the Illinois paper points to the dangers of outcome-oriented data interpretation by special interests.

In another example; Navigant reported that in Massachusetts, National Grid’s $45M 15,000-meter pilot program achieved a remarkable 98% retention rate. But the problem is that the pilot numbers dropped to 11,000 while the cost rose to $60M, making the math highly suspect and misleading, if not fraudulent. This scenario was compounded by the auto-enrollment program design that overran the process of community consent.

As citizens are being sold on the benefits of smart cities and big data in order to drive their acceptance of zoning overrides for 5G installations and loss of privacy protections, Navigant’s reporting and the EDF/CUB report point to the danger of decision-based evidence making.

Are human rights abuses acceptable? 

Informed environmentalists are recognizing that wireless smart utility meters have been deployed in a predatory model, without full disclosure, and fraught with unexamined risks and harm to human health and the environment.

The federal deployment myth began with the Illinois mantra that we could “modernize the grid for less than $3/month” with the promise that the “smart meters would help to integrate renewables into the grid” and “give consumers more control over their energy consumption.” When it became clear that the utilities were not actually in the business of integrating renewables, and that cost savings were not being passed on to consumers, the other side of the carrot and stick technique emerged.

Whether it was the threat of a neighborhood gas pipeline or power plant or a nuclear reactor, communities across the country were held under siege by the threat of additional fossil fuel infrastructure, loss of property values, and health damages. Then, the Hail Mary Pass of smart meters was presenting as a saving grace, with the glitter of “technological advancement” and “modernization” and “robust architecture’ and “efficiency” and “cost savings.”

The problem is that we never bothered to investigate whether or not the microwave radio frequency exposures and high voltage transients that we are adding to the grid in the name of efficiency are safe for humans or the environment, and indications are that they are not.

The justification that smart meters will address the health and environmental costs of the fossil fuel model has never been tested, and may be akin to claiming that Takata airbags will still reduce collision costs, ignoring the reality that they have in fact killed people.

As individuals around the country report the acute onset of heart arrhythmias, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, sleep disorders, and neurological symptoms associated with utility infrastructure, we have a sordid cast of tobacco scientists, psychologists with no medical training, captured regulatory agencies, and industry spokespersons doing what’s been done to women in particular for decades, – portraying a serious health condition as an imaginary psychological ailment, with resulting ridicule and dismissal.

At the same time, we have increasing rates of many illnesses and chronic health conditions that may be caused by the increasing assault of electro-smog on our biology. Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, and cancer are suspect. Lack of protections, and lack of appropriate diagnosis and treatment, while pursuing costly drug cures instead of addressing root causes has been the result.

What we could do instead, tomorrow, is monitor the radio frequency exposure and the power quality of the electricity flowing on the grid, and see if it correlates with measurable biological adverse impacts in residents reporting harm. It’s not an insurmountable scientific or medical challenge; it is an abject failure of political will.

A bullying model prevails in most smart-metered jurisdictions, with medically vulnerable ratepayers having no right of refusal, or incurring a punitive surcharge. Worse yet, replacement meters do not address the issue of polluted power quality introduced by the meter’s electronics. An un-quantified portion of residents have been threatened with loss of access to water, gas or electricity for refusal to accept a wireless meter, and some have already had their services terminated.

If you feel that the installation of smart meters will not cause hardship to certain classes of customers, calculate what the electricity rates will be under either plan (fixed or variable) for a home health aide who visits twice a week in the afternoon to vacuum, do the laundry, and run the dishwasher; or the stay at home parent with a disabled child, after they are also surcharged for grid modernization that penalizes them for their lifestyle requirements.

Are we pursuing another wave of unsustainable economic growth under the guise of sustainability?

We have no evidence that the introduction of wireless utility meters has not caused harm to human health, because we never bothered to test the meters for health effects.  What we have is an increase in chronic illness and disease, and reports of profound suffering in the EHS population due to lack of safety in their own homes.

We have no evidence that wireless smart meters did not contribute to the destruction of the recent northeast Halloween week storms, because we never bothered to determine if the wireless emissions and high voltage transients have weakened the trees themselves, making them more vulnerable to winds, pests, and viruses, even though we know that foliage interferes with wireless signaling.

And the lawsuit charging that flammable smart meters expanded the recent CA wine country fires mirrors earlier concerns raised in California that the flammable electronic meters ignite outside the home beyond detection from interior smoke detectors, already resulting in at least two deaths.

We have no evidence that wireless utility meters do not have adverse impacts on the environment, including pollinators.

So why have non-profit groups like the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and National Resources Defense Council colluded with utilities to help spin the smart meter story?  Follow the money.

As informed opposition to smart meters due to green-washing, cost, security, privacy, cost, hack-ability, fire, EMP vulnerability, and health concerns continues to be ignored, the industry itself is optimistic about the future, stating to investors that if customers demand safer technology, it will increase the meter replacement cycle, leading to increased profits and an accelerated return on investment.

As uninformed environmentalists continue to advocate for smart meters, the stark truth is that despite the installation of wireless water meters across the country, there is still lead in the water in Detroit.

Despite claims that smart meters will save energy, the always-on carbon footprint of the wireless economy wastes energy and/or electricity. If vast numbers of consumers were to implement a practice of turning the Wi-Fi on only when it is being used, we would not have empty libraries, schools, homes, and businesses wasting energy, and we would decrease our carbon footprint. We could engineer a water alarm system that only transmits a notification to the homeowner, and only when a leak is detected, instead of 24/7/365.

The problem is that the rollout of smart meters is actually designed to perpetuate the pattern of unconscious consumption that fuels the industries involved, and the system is actually designed for wide-scale data collection and not conservation of resources. The data prostitutes the ratepayer, whose private profile is continuously harvested and sold. The problem is that as Homeland Security has turned its surveillance efforts in on its own citizens, the grid has been transformed into a surveillance system, yielding vast potentials for both blackmail and bribery. The smart meter myth is a cultivated greed that is taking us on a road to nowhere, while leaving a portion of residents with no place to live.

And here’s one other overlooked factor– citizens who desire to manifest a responsible conservation lifestyle do not need punitive pricing structures because they are highly motivated and compliant. The tragedy unfolds when they are purposefully manipulated and misled.

In the season of giving, please consider giving feedback to the EDF, NRDC, and Sierra Club that you’ll be donating elsewhere.

For this precious planet, we do better.

Patricia Burke works with activists across the country and internationally calling for new biologically-based microwave radio frequency exposure limits. She is based in Massachusetts and can be reached at [email protected].

This article was originally published by Activist Post.

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has published two exclusives whose import is far greater than may be immediately apparent. They concern Israel’s bombing in 2007 of a supposed nuclear plant secretly built, according to a self-serving US and Israeli narrative, by Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Although the attack on the “nuclear reactor” occurred a decade ago, there are pressing lessons to be learnt for those analysing current events in Syria.

Porter’s research indicates very strongly that the building that was bombed could not have been a nuclear reactor – and that was clear to experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) even as the story was being promoted uncritically across the western media.

But – and this is the critical information Porter conveys – the IAEA failed to disclose the fact that it was certain the building was not a nuclear plant, allowing the fabricated narrative to be spread unchallenged. It abandoned science to bow instead to political expediency.

The promotion of the bogus story of a nuclear reactor by Israel and key figures in the Bush administration was designed to provide the pretext for an attack on Assad. That, it was hoped, would bring an end to his presidency and drag into the fray the main target – Iran. The Syrian “nuclear reactor” was supposed to be a re-run of the WMD deception, used in 2003 to oust another enemy of the US and Israel’s – Saddam Hussein of Iraq. 

It is noteworthy that the fabricated evidence for a nuclear reactor occurred in 2007, a year after Israel’s failure to defeat Hizbullah in Lebanon. The 2006 Lebanon war was itself intended to spread to Syria and lead to Assad’s overthrow, as I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations. 

It is important to remember that this Israeli-neocon plot against Syria long predated – in fact, in many ways prefigured – the civil war in 2011 that quickly morphed into a proxy war in which the US became a key, if mostly covert, actor.

The left’s Witchfinder General

Understandably, many on the left have been instinctively wary of rushing to judgment about individual incidents in the Syrian war, and the narratives presented in the western media. The claim that Assad’s government used chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun, and earlier in Ghouta, was an obvious boon to those who have spent more than a decade trying to achieve regime change in Syria.

In what has become an ugly habit with Monbiot, and one I have noted before, he has enthusiastically adopted the role of Witchfinder General. Any questioning of evidence, scepticism or simply signs of open-mindedness are enough apparently to justify accusations that one is an Assadist or conspiracy theorist. Giving house room to the doubts of a ballistics expert like Ted Postol of MIT, or an experienced international arms expert like Scott Ritter, or a famous investigative journalist like Seymour Hersh, or a former CIA analyst like Ray McGovern, is apparently proof that one is an atrocity denier or worse.

Inconvenient facts buried

Monbiot’s latest attack was launched at a moment when he obviously felt he was on solid ground. A UN agency, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued a report last month concluding that the 100 people killed and 200 injured in Khan Sheikhoun last April were exposed to sarin. Monbiot argues that the proof is now incontrovertible that Assad was responsible – a position that he, of course, adopted at the outset – and that all other theories have now been decisively discounted by the OPCW.

There are reasons to think that Monbiot is seriously misrepresenting the strength of the OPCW’s findings, as several commentators have observed. Most notably, Robert Parry, another leading investigative journalist, points out that evidence in the report’s annex – the place where inconvenient facts are often buried – appears to blow a large hole in the official story.

Parry notes that the time recorded by the UN of the photo of the chemical weapons attack is more than half an hour *after* some 100 victims had already been admitted to five different hospitals, some of them lengthy drives from the alleged impact site.

But potentially more significant than such troubling inconsistencies are the conclusions of Gareth Porter’s separate investigation into Israel’s bombing of the non-existent Syrian nuclear reactor. That gets to the heart of where Monbiot and many others have gone badly wrong in their certainty about events in Syria.

Extreme naivety

Monbiot has been only too willing to promote as indisputable fact claims made both by highly compromised and unreliable western sources and by supposedly reputable and independent organisations, such as international human rights groups and UN agencies. He, like many others, assumes that the latter can always be relied upon to stand apart from western interests and can therefore be implicitly trusted.

That indicates an extreme naivety or possibly the lack of any experience covering on the ground highly charged conflicts in which western interests are paramount.

I have been based in Israel for nearly two decades and have on several occasions taken to task Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the world’s most esteemed human rights organisations. I have shown that assessments it has made were patently not rooted in evidence or even credible interpretations of international law but in geopolitical considerations. That was especially true in the case of the month-long fighting between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006. (See here and here.) My concerns about HRW’s work, I later learnt from insiders, were shared in its New York head office, but were silenced by the organisation’s most senior staff.

Nuclear plant deception

But Porter helps shine a light on how even the most reputable international agencies can end up similarly following a script written in Washington and one that rides roughshod over evidence, especially when the interests of the world’s only superpower are at stake. In this case, the deceptions were perpetuated by one of the world’s leading scientific organisations: the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors states’ nuclear activities.

Yousry Abushady

Porter reveals that Yousry Abushady, the IAEA’s foremost expert on North Korean nuclear reactors, was able immediately to discount the aerial photographic evidence that the building Israel bombed in 2007 was a nuclear reactor. (Most likely it was a disused missile storage depot.)

The Syrian “nuclear plant”, he noted, could not have been built using North Korean know-how, as was claimed by the US. It lacked all the main features of a North Korean gas-cooled reactor. The photos produced by the Israelis showed a building that, among other things, covered too small an area and was not anywhere near high enough, it had none of the necessary supporting structures, and there was no cooling tower.

Abushady’s assessment was buried by the IAEA, which preferred to let the CIA and the Israelis promote their narrative unchallenged.

Atomic agency’s silence

This was not a one-off failure. In summer 2008, the IAEA visited the area to collect samples. Had the site been a nuclear plant, they could have expected to find nuclear-grade graphite particles everywhere. They found none.

Nonetheless, the IAEA again perpetrated a deception to try to prop up the fictitious US-Israeli narrative. 

As was routine, they sent the samples to a variety of laboratories for analysis. None found evidence of any nuclear contamination – apart from one. It identified particles of man-made uranium. The IAEA issued a report giving prominence to this anomalous sample, even though in doing so it violated its own protocols, reports Parry. It could draw such a conclusion only if the results of all the samples matched.

In fact, as one of the three IAEA inspectors who had been present at the site later reported, the sample of uranium did not come from the plant itself, which was clean, but from a changing room nearby. A former IAEA senior inspector, Robert Kelley, told Parry that a “very likely explanation” was that the uranium particles derived from “cross contamination” from clothing worn by the inspectors. This is a problem that had been previously noted by the IAEA in other contexts.

Meanwhile, the IAEA remained silent about its failure to find nuclear-grade graphite in a further nine reports over two years. It referred to this critical issue for the first time in 2011.

Chance for war with Iran

In other words, the IAEA knowingly conspired in a fictitious, entirely non-scientific assessment of the Syrian “nuclear reactor” story, one that neatly served US-Israeli geopolitical interests.

Porter notes that vice-president Dick Cheney “hoped to use the alleged reactor to get President George W Bush to initiate US airstrikes in Syria in the hope of shaking the Syrian-Iranian alliance”.

In fact, Cheney wanted far more sites in Syria hit than the bogus nuclear plant. In his memoirs, the then-secretary of defence, Robert Gates, observed that Cheney was “looking for an opportunity to provoke a war with Iran”.

The Bush administration wanted to find a way to unseat Assad, crush Hizbullah in Lebanon, and isolate and weaken Iran as a way to destroy the so-called “Shia crescent”.

That goal is being actively pursued again by the US today, with Israel and Saudi Arabia leading the way. A former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, recently warned that, after their failure to bring down Assad, the Saudis have been trying to switch battlefields to Lebanon, hoping to foment a confrontation between Israel and Hizbullah that would drag in Iran. 

Abandoning science

Back in 2007, the IAEA, an agency of scientists, did its bit to assist – or at least not obstruct – US efforts to foster a political case, an entirely unjustified one, for military action against Syria and, very possibly by extension, Iran.

If the IAEA could so abandon its remit and the cause of science to help play politics on behalf of the US, what leads Monbiot to assume that the OPCW, an even more politicised body, is doing any better today?

That is not to say Assad, or at least sections of the Syrian government, could not have carried out the attack on Khan Sheikhoun. But it is to argue that in a matter like this one, where so much is at stake, the evidence must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, and that critics, especially experts who offer counter-evidence, must be given a fair hearing by the left. It is to argue that, when the case against Assad fits so neatly a long-standing and self-serving western narrative, a default position of scepticism is fully justified. It is to argue that facts, strong as they may seem, can be manipulated even by expert bodies, and therefore due weight needs also to be given to context – including an assessment of motives.

This is not “denialism”, as Monbiot claims. It is a rational strategy adopted by those who object to being railroaded once again – as they were in Iraq and Libya – into catastrophic regime change operations.

Meanwhile, the decision by Monbiot and others to bury their heads in the sands of an official narrative, all the while denouncing anyone who seeks to lift theirs out for a better view, should be understood for what it is: an abnegation of intellectual and moral responsibility for those around the globe who continue to be the victims of western military supremacism.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

The strongman lost some muscle this week. Robert Mugabe, a leader of the liberation movement that transformed colonially pressed Rhodesia into post-colonial Zimbabwe, had issued a letter of resignation. There had been no orgy of blood, no ordering of grievances with a vast butcher’s bill – at least for now. Over 37 years Mugabe had become one of bad boys of the international scene, singled out for particular treatment by those whose scruples had been ruffled and bothered.

The admiration for Mugabe was always tempered by a sneer, one focused on tribalism, and the belief that black liberation was a monstrosity that would not amount to much. The British had been teachers on two levels, leaving the country, claims James North, “the harsh lesson that violence works, and a grotesquely unequal distribution of farmland.”[1]

Mugabe himself had been hardened by a prison term of ten years, during which his son died. The white leadership, under Ian Smith, did not feel it necessary to permit him to attend the funeral. Nor did Britain, keen to keep various other subjects in the unravelling imperium in check, feel it necessary to combat the issue on white rule in any forceful way. A white supremacist was less a problem than a rampant black freedom fighter.

In the course of Mugabe’s rule, the school of violence yielded its sanguinary lessons. To maintain rule, disgruntled dissidents led by rival nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo were massacred after attacks in southwestern Matabeleland, home to the minority Ndebele people. The carnage from that period is still unaccounted for, and estimates place the number of civilian dead at 1,500.

The other impetus for violent resolution came from efforts to redress the landowning inequalities that saw a relative handful of white farmers – some 6,000 or so – in possession of half the rural areas of the country. The situation was always an open invitation to forceful appropriation, with four million others looking on with smouldering resentment.

Talk shifted to the possibility of compensation in the 1978 Lancaster House Agreement, though the pledge repudiated by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1997 was crudely small in comparison to farmer buyouts initiated after Kenyan independence in 1963. In true New Labour fashion, Blair had decided that aspiration mattered more than concrete targets. By 2000, land invasions, initiated by veterans from the war of liberation, were taking place. White farmers were evicted and slain. Mugabe sensed an opportunity. Judgments in the western press, freed of colonial context and the wrinkles of history, proliferated.

For some years afterwards, Mugabe seemed to fall into self-parody, the African strongman keen to right the wrongs of white colonial perversions to the tune of necessary justice. “I am still,” he said in March 2003, with full intention to shock, “the Hitler of the time.”[2]

The proceedings of the Johannesburg earth summit in September 2002 were marked by Mugabe’s tirade against Blair, with whom he will always be associated. In justifying the forced evictions of white commercial farmers, Mugabe pointedly told the prime minister to “keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe”.[3]

Such comments make the remarks of UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson unremarkable, despite the note of striking disingenuousness.

“I will not pretend to regret Mugabe’s downfall. Today is a moment of hope for the people of Zimbabwe. The UK will support them.”[4]

To his credit, and eternal confusion, Johnson, when London Mayor, conceded that

“Zimbabwe was not always like this, and did not have to be like this. This [Robert] Mugabe tyranny is no accident – and Britain played a shameful part in the disaster.”[5]

Oddly lucid at times, is old Boris.

Leaders and political groups outside the country have been tiptoeing in their observation, exuding praise and, in many instances, sheer relief. Condemning the Zimbabwean leader never lacked that sense of self-accusation, the muddying of a freedom fighter’s legacy. In doing so, they would be gazing at the mirror of colonial poison and self-doubt, and post-colonial loathing.

Alpha Conde, president of Guinea and chief of the African Union, feared a carnival of violence in the country. While it had been a “shame” for this “African hero” to “leave through the back door” he was relieved that Mugabe had made a decision to resign.[6]

All too familiar espousals of the value of popular will and democratic imperatives have come, ignoring the obvious fact that the military was the body that ultimately acted as the coercive corrective. With little surprise, these have streamed from opposition figures and entities keeping a close eye on politics at home.

South Africa’s Democratic Alliance would still see, in what was effectively an overthrow, “a victory for the people of Zimbabwe who have suffered greatly under the latter years of Mugabe’s reign”. Another opposition figure, Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema, deemed the Zimbabwean change as a product of “power by the people for the people and to the people”.[7]

Such a system is hardly likely to produce a gentle hearted, rose growing pacifist. Where power is currency, the mint is bound to be stacked with the appropriate staff, creatures of the moment. The ruling ZANU-PF party was itself the progenitor of internal struggles that eventually saw military intervention.

One of those members is Mugabe’s veteran enforcer Emmerson Mnangagwa, a figure who has pressed, and hacked, the appropriate flesh over the years. His sacking as vice president on November 6 by Mugabe stimulated the taste buds of power, though the aspirant had to initially flee to South Africa fearing for his life.

The global intelligence company Stratfor was wise enough to pick The Crocodile and serial kleptocrat as a potential successor to Mugabe in a briefing note in August 2011. The suspicious death in a house fire of Solomon Mujuru, former commander of the Zimbabwean National Army and husband of deputy president Joyce Mujuru, opened “the door for top rival Defense Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa [to] secure [his] control of the succession situation in Zimbabwe”.[8] The battlelines had been effectively drawn between the Mujuru faction and Mnangagwa’s supporters among the Joint Operations Command.

In the lingering scuffle, Mnangagwa has capitalised and swooped in. However much the spirit of non-violent resistance evident in previous Zimbabwean opposition campaigns will survive his ascension to power is questionable. Against the spirit of traditionally violent resolution has been the daringly courageous work of labour leader Morgan Tsvangirai, a figure who survived three assassination attempts, and various beatings. But this is unlikely to impress The Crocodile, a true product of his time.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge and lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

Notes

The situation in the Middle East is developing. The expected conflict between the resistance axis, primarily Hezbollah, and the Saudi-Israeli block is the current center of attention.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran wants to deploy its troops in Syria on a permanent basis “with the declared intent of using Syria as a base from which to destroy Israel” and threatened that if Tel Aviv fails to receive the international support, it is ready to act “alone.” “Iran will not get nuclear weapons. It will not turn Syria into a military base against Israel,” he said.

Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq said his group is ready for any military scenario amid indications that Saudi Arabia is pushing the Israeli regime to launch a new military operation against Lebanon. He said

“The resistance movement is prepared to confront anything. It is fully capable of securing victories and repelling any aggressor.”

Hezbollah troops have been brought to the highest combat-readiness level, according to media reports.

Speaking to the Saudi newspaper Elaph, Israel’s military chief Gen Gadi Eisenkot called Iran the “biggest threat to the region” and said Israel is ready to share intelligence with “moderate” Arab states like Saudi Arabia in order to “deal with” Tehran.

The statement was followed on November 19 by an emergency meeting in Cairo between Saudi Arabia and other Arab foreign ministers, calling for a united front to counter Iran and Hezbollah. The emergency Arab foreign ministers’ meeting was convened at the request of Saudi Arabia with support from the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait to discuss means of confronting Iran. In a declaration after the meeting, the Arab League accused Hezbollah of “supporting terrorism and extremist groups in Arab countries with advanced weapons and ballistic missiles.” It said Arab nations would provide details to the UN Security Council of Tehran’s violations through the arming of Houthi forces in Yemen. The Secretary-General of the Arab League Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that the Iranian missiles are a threat to all Arab capitals:

“Iranian threats have gone beyond all limits and pushed the region into a dangerous abyss.”

Since intercepting a ballistic missile fired at Riyadh by Iran-affiliated Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Saudis punched up their anti-Iran rhetoric, even going as far as to say the missile was Iranian-made and declared the attack an act of war by the Iranians.

Reacting to the emergency meeting, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said,

“Unfortunately countries like the Saudi regime are pursuing divisions and creating differences, and because of this they don’t see any results other than divisions.”

As if to demonstrate the way the balance of power is going to look in the region, two separate summits on Syria are to be staged soon. With ISIS crushed and the so-called moderate opposition to Bashar al-Assad also in retreat, three key powers in the region – Russia, Iran and Turkey – will meet in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on November 22 to discuss how to wind down hostilities and draw up a political settlement. On the same day but separately, as many as 30 groups opposed to Assad will gather in Riyadh for three days of talks aimed at forming a broad negotiating team before the UN peace talks resume in Geneva on November 28. Russia, which holds a military advantage in Syria, appears to want to focus on a solution drawn up with the regional guarantors, Iran and Turkey. Significantly, ministers discussed the possibility of Kurdish groups being invited to the congress – something to which the Turks were until recently opposed.

These two summits, pretty much mirroring the sides of the conflict concerning Syria’s fate, are the first step towards ultimately establishing a new balance of power in the region. With the Kurdish question still looming, the Middle East without ISIS is about to change considerably.

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Scholars have wondered what “triggers” might be in the social furniture of a culture that might propel a people to embrace a bill of rights.  Australia remains proudly, and idiosyncratically, opposed. 

Previous efforts to enshrine a charter of rights have failed, accused of being totalitarian usurpations, dangerous incorporations of foreign laws, and a straightjacket on political will. Rights, in actual fact, are considered the smutty sprinklings of a suspicious mind, best modified by a fatherly obsession with obligations.

No trigger for a bill of rights will move the Australian people; no catalyst great enough to warrant a deviation from an unswerving faith in the magic of the common law, and the wisdom of British-made institutional stability.  The indefinite detention of refugees will be tolerated.  Shabby treatment of terrorist suspects will be permitted.  The advice of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation will be given greater weight than solid judicial review.

Suspicious about the abstract, fundamentalist pragmatism demands something that issues from Parliament which, the assumption goes, tends to be reasonable.  The soil, however, is due for a fresh turning. This time, it is the turn of the conservatives, who feel that that their social offensives have failed before the might of the Rainbow movement.  Conservatives, rather than accepting the findings of a postal survey on same-sex marriage, have decided to frame the problem differently.  Now, their rights are in question. 

From a position of strength, they feel weakness, vulnerability, a fear that sanitised prejudice may not be possible.  But importantly, the issue here is one of translation and political realisation: How will those conservative, religious voices find form in the parliaments across the country?

The fascinating problem here is that such conservative voices have made a category error in the legal sense.  It is not a “right” to not do (bake cakes for a gay wedding, for instance, or celebrate a wedding), but a “power” to do (in this case, refuse to serve).  It is the power to discriminate, to seek a different avenue of traditional recognition of a form of conduct, covered by that oft misused term of conscience.

Whatever the lexical problems faced by members of the Australian Christian Movement, and for that matter other religious groups, they are on to something.  The postal plebiscite may well have registered overall approval – 62 percent – but it also suggested that 38 percent of Australians are far from content with changing the heterosexual context of the Marriage Act.  The stage props are set for splinter parties and religious groups to make their political debut, most notably in those electorates where the No vote registered a majority.

In the federal seat of Blaxland, which registered the highest vote against same-sex marriage coming in at a dizzy 73.9 percent, celebrations are absent and trouble brewing.  The students at the Bankstown campus of the Western Sydney University were noted in the Huffington Post as “visibly shaken”.

The showers of analysis that have followed have had to find some coherence to such votes.  “Cultural differences” have been underlined and jotted down as culprits.  This, goes the Huffington Post, comes with “the obvious conclusion that migrants have homophobic values, spurred on by their homophobic religions.”[1]

This leads to another tendency: the pointed accusation that estranged, pontificating elites of the affluent areas enjoy a pastime that has become staple for the set: “Western Sydney bashing”.  Class divisions are blended with value divisions, creating a new political mix.

While this takes place, the conservative Australian government is suffering fits of indigestion. Many of its members were vocal opponents of same-sex marriage, and continue to be.  Opinions sent in by vote hardly matter – they were always intent on voting against the same-sex change.  Having been outgunned, another approach, most probably legislative in nature, is in order.

One concern is to trumpet religious freedom amendments that will be added to any legislation that will change the definition of marriage.  These will include provisions permitting civil celebrants to reject weddings and protections for religious charities.[2] (Interestingly enough, such entities already have considerable scope in terms of choice.)

Nationals Senator Matt Canavan is one such figure.  Suddenly, talk of rights is not obscene or questionable.  The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a document long regarded as a nuisance by Australian parliamentarians, is being seen as a guide.

Article 18 claiming that “everyone shall have the freedom of thought, conscience and religion” is being singled out for special mention.  As Treasurer Scott Morrison has insistently pushed, “There are over 4 million people who voted No in this survey who are now coming to terms with the fact that, on this issue, they are a minority.”[3]

Whatever changes occur to the Marriage Act proper, political momentum for a different type of conservatism has been generated.  It may well come from the self-designated “standing army” of the Australian Christian Lobby, or from other sources keen to foment an alternative narrative.  The political fault line, overseeing the creation of a more religious orientation keen on social and moral values, may well be in the offing.  Without realising it, those behind the same-sex marriage have become the progenitors of a new political impetus in Australia.

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

Government hypocrisy and corporate interest are two very well acquainted lovers, and they were last spotted at COP23, the annual climate conference to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, nuzzled together in the lavish space of the UK Pavilion.

Whilst this space existed to ‘showcase the UK’s role in tackling climate change’, it was grossly compromised by its sponsorship. This year, ‘supporting partner for the UK Pavillion at COP23’ was Barclays Bank, a notoriously ‘dirty’ entity that has profited hugely from exacerbating climate change.

Barclays Bank has been a key contributor to the current climate crisis, financing fossil fuel extraction to the tune of $4bn in 2016 alone, reports People and Planet.

Gross hypocrisy

Through investment and financing, they’ve dirtied their hands in fracking projects in North Yorkshire, Ryedale and the Dakota Access Pipeline, in coal, liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and extreme oil (tar sands, ultra-deepwater and Artic).

Between 2014-2016 Barclays spent $13 billion on such projects, says a joint report by RAN, BankTrack, Oil Change International and the Sierra Club, making Barclays bank by far the guiltiest bank for financing climate change. I repeat, thirteen billion dollars in the 3 years preceding 2017.

Chris Saltmarsh from People and Planet, coordinators of the #DivestBarclays campaign, say ‘it is a gross hypocrisy of both Barclays and the UK Government for them to collude like this at COP23.

“Barclays is financing the dirtiest and most violent fossil fuel extractions globally including tar sands, oil pipeline, fracking and coal mines. At the same time, the UK government is failing to reach its Paris commitments by showing no inclination to fund a just transition away from fossil fuels.”

A recent article in The Guardian crystalised a painful truth into a single headline: ‘Fossil fuel companies are undermining the Paris Agreement negotiations’.

Finance agenda

This article spoke of the infiltration of corporate influence in both negotiation spaces and outcomes. It detailed the ways in which big money had surreptitiously manipulated the rules of debate.

So to my surprise, I was shocked to see tactics a little less covert at COP 23 – the UK Pavillion was adorned with Barclays logos on its walls, literature and screens, citing the bank as the ‘supporting partner for the UK Pavillion at COP23, co-hosting the Future of Green Finance drinks reception.’

And what did Barclays have to say for itself? Not much. Via e-mail, a direct response was bypassed and I was instead directed to a page on their website. And what did the UK representatives have to say for themselves? Not much. When my UKYCC contemporaries questioned them, they were met with a firm hostility that we Brits can do so well. I myself was met with ‘no comments’.

But Barclays funding was just the tip of the neoliberal iceberg. When responding to its sponsorship, a Barclay’s representative informed me of their interest in “exploring the importance of financing in the fight against climate change, emphasizing the importance of collaboration among the financial and business community when addressing this issue.” In short, big money will solve climate change.

I recognize the importance of mobilising all sectors of economic and civil society together to effectively mitigate climate change. I recognize how the green finance agenda will and should play an important role. But perhaps it should get less air time and less credit as our climate savior (as was so painstakingly repeated at the Barclays sponsored Future of Green Finance drinks).

Relinquishing the chains

Such an arrogant narrative leaves me with one question: what kind of logic has led us to rely so heavily on market-based solutions to solve a market-based problem? We don’t need to look further than 2008 to find that markets can fail us, big bankers can fail us. Maybe it’s time for a different tact, maybe it’s time for a different voice.

I want to call out the UK Government for irresponsibly advocating a philosophy that we aren’t compromised as a country if we finance our climate solutions through dirty fossil fuel money. I want to call out Barclays, for greenwashing and dirty lending and capitalising on each respectively depending on their position in front of the doors or behind.

We cannot consent to one of the biggest companies in the UK to ‘talk the talk’ without ‘walking the walk’. Without recognizing and exposing these conflicts of interest, we have little chance in relinquishing the chains of corporate influence and moving forward with meaningful climate discussion. We must hold these faceless entities accountable.

If this issue struck a chord, then you can follow the #DivestBarclays campaign with People and Planet, and get involved with the UK’s youth platform for climate change, UKYCC (@ukycc).

Katie Hodgetts is a member of UK Youth Climate Coalition, who can be found on twitter @ukycc or @katiehodgettssx. 

Featured image is from the author.

Image: African elephant courtesy USFWS

The Center for Biological Diversity and Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Trump administration today for allowing U.S. hunters to import elephant and lion trophies from Zimbabwe. The lawsuit aims to protect animals and resolve confusion created by the administration’s contradictory announcements in recent days.

The suit comes days after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service abruptly reversed an Obama-era ban on elephant trophy imports based on catastrophic elephant population declines. Fish and Wildlife also recently greenlighted lion trophy imports from Zimbabwe, despite the controversial killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015.

After massive public outcry, including from established Republican politicians and pundits, President Trump and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced a “hold” on issuing elephant trophy import permits late Friday night. President Trump suggested on Twitter that a new big-game trophy decision would be forthcoming. Unfortunately, the new federal policies allowing imports of elephant and lion trophies — referred to as “positive enhancement findings” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act — remain in effect.

“The Trump administration must clearly and permanently halt imports of lion and elephant trophies to protect these amazing animals from extinction,” said Tanya Sanerib, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Trump’s abrupt backpedaling after public outcry, while appreciated, shows how arbitrary this deplorable decision was. These incredibly imperiled creatures need a lot more than vague promises.”

Today’s suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, notes that the Trump administration acted arbitrarily in its rush to reverse course and open the United States to Zimbabwean lion and elephant trophies in a move that is contrary to the Endangered Species Act.

“Putting trophy imports ‘on hold’ isn’t enough,” said Elly Pepper, deputy director of Wildlife Trade for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Elephants are in crisis now. If we don’t force the Administration to completely revoke its decision, President Trump could quietly start allowing these imports as soon as he stops facing criticism on Twitter.”

The Trump administration’s decision to lift the ban on these trophy imports relies heavily upon Zimbabwe having the plans, resources, funds, and staff to conserve elephant and lion populations. But, as today’s lawsuit notes, in a country where corruption is already a huge concern, a military coup that began Nov. 14 has cast further uncertainty on Zimbabwe’s rule of law. Zimbabwe scored an abysmal 22 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perception Index.

Poaching elephants for their ivory remains a significant threat in Zimbabwe. According to aerial surveys — known as the Great Elephant Census — Zimbabwe’s elephant population decreased 6 percent between 2001 and 2013, when the aerial surveys were performed. Zimbabwe’s elephant population is reportedly still in decline, largely due to poaching. Zimbabwe’s lion population was estimated at roughly 703 lions in 2014.

The Great Elephant Census of savannah elephants conducted over the past couple of years revealed that fewer than 400,000 savannah elephants (not including the smaller forest elephants in western-central Africa) remain across the continent. The census results also documented the loss of 140,000 elephants over seven years due to poaching. In 2016, the IUCN found lions in Africa to be vulnerable to extinction noting an estimated 43 percent decline of African lion populations over 21 years.

Studies show that trophy hunting is only a small portion of the funding all tourists, including those who do not deplete wildlife populations, provide in African countries that allow trophy hunting. Meanwhile, corruption in Zimbabwe raises serious concerns about where trophy hunters’ fees really go, according to assessments by the Obama administration and a 2016 report from House Natural Resources Committee.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.5 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 3 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world’s natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Bozeman, MT, and Beijing. Visit us at https://www.nrdc.org and follow us on Twitter @NRDC.​

A danger in both journalism and intelligence is to allow an unproven or seriously disputed fact to become part of the accepted narrative where it gets widely repeated and thus misleads policymakers and citizens alike, such as happened during the run-up to war with Iraq and is now recurring amid the frenzy over Russia-gate.

For instance, in a Russia-gate story on Saturday, The New York Times reported as flat fact that a Kremlin intermediary “told a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that the Russians had ‘dirt’ on Mr. Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, in the form of ‘thousands of emails.’” The Times apparently feels that this claim no longer needs attribution even though it apparently comes solely from the 32-year-old Papadopoulos as part of his plea bargain over lying to the FBI.

Beyond the question of trusting an admitted liar like Papadopoulos, his supposed Kremlin contact, professor Joseph Mifsud, a little-known academic associated with the University of Stirling in Scotland, denied knowing anything about Democratic emails.

Image: The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)

In an interview with the U.K. Daily Telegraph, Mifsud acknowledged meeting with Papadopoulos but disputed having close ties to the Kremlin and rejected how Papadopoulos recounted their conversations. Specifically, he denied the claim that he mentioned emails containing “dirt” on Clinton.

Even New York Times correspondent Scott Shane noted late last month – after the criminal complaint against Papadopoulos was unsealed – that “A crucial detail is still missing: Whether and when Mr. Papadopoulos told senior Trump campaign officials about Russia’s possession of hacked emails. And it appears that the young aide’s quest for a deeper connection with Russian officials, while he aggressively pursued it, led nowhere.”

Shane added,

“the court documents describe in detail how Mr. Papadopoulos continued to report to senior campaign officials on his efforts to arrange meetings with Russian officials, … the documents do not say explicitly whether, and to whom, he passed on his most explosive discovery – that the Russians had what they considered compromising emails on Mr. Trump’s opponent.

“J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon official who worked for the Trump campaign as a national security adviser [and who dealt directly with Papadopoulos] said he had known nothing about Mr. Papadopoulos’ discovery that Russia had obtained Democratic emails or of his prolonged pursuit of meetings with Russians.”

Missing Corroboration

But the journalistic question is somewhat different: why does the Times trust the uncorroborated assertion that Mifsud told Papadopoulos about the emails — and trust the claim to such a degree that the newspaper would treat it as flat fact? Absent corroborating evidence, isn’t it just as likely (if not more likely) that Papadopoulos is telling the prosecutors what he thinks they want to hear?

Image: Former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.

If the prosecutors working for Russia-gate independent counsel Robert Mueller had direct evidence that Mifsud did tell Papadopoulos about the emails, you would assume that they would have included the proof in the criminal filing against Papadopoulos, which was made public on Oct. 30.

Further, since Papadopoulos was peppering the Trump campaign with news about his Russian outreach in 2016, you might have expected that he would include something about how helpful the Russians had been in obtaining and publicizing the Democratic emails.

But none of Papadopoulos’s many emails to Trump campaign officials about his Russian contacts (as cited by the prosecutors) mentioned the hot news about “dirt” on Clinton or the Russians possessing “thousands of emails.” This lack of back-up would normally raise serious doubts about Papadopoulos’s claim, but – since Papadopoulos was claiming something that the prosecutors and the Times wanted to believe – reasonable skepticism was swept aside.

What the Times seems to have done is to accept a bald assertion by Mueller’s prosecutors as sufficient basis for jumping to the conclusion that this disputed claim is undeniably true. But just because Papadopoulos, a confessed liar, and these self-interested prosecutors claim something is true doesn’t make it true.

Careful journalists would wonder, as Shane did, why Papadopoulos who in 2016 was boasting of his Russian contacts to make himself appear more valuable to the Trump campaign wouldn’t have informed someone about this juicy tidbit of information, that the Russians possessed “thousands of emails” on Clinton.

Yet, the prosecutors’ statement regarding Papadopoulos’s guilty plea is strikingly silent on corroborating evidence that could prove that, first, Russia did possess the Democratic emails (which Russian officials deny) and, second, the Trump campaign was at least knowledgeable about this core fact in the support of the theory about the campaign’s collusion with the Russians (which President Trump and other campaign officials deny).

Of course, it could be that the prosecutors’ “fact” will turn out to be a fact as more evidence emerges, but anyone who has covered court cases or served on a jury knows that prosecutors’ criminal complaints and pre-trial statements should be taken with a large grain of salt. Prosecutors often make assertions based on the claim of a single witness whose credibility gets destroyed when subjected to cross-examination.

That is why reporters are usually careful to use words like “alleged” in dealing with prosecutors’ claims that someone is guilty. However, in Russia-gate, all the usual standards of proof and logic have been jettisoned. If something serves the narrative, no matter how dubious, it is embraced by the U.S. mainstream media, which – for the past year – has taken a lead role in the anti-Trump “Resistance.”

A History of Bias

This tendency to succumb to “confirmation bias,” i.e., to believe the worst about some demonized figure, has inflicted grave damage in other recent situations as well.

Image: Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5. 2003, citing satellite photos which supposedly proved that Iraq had WMD, but the evidence proved bogus.

One example is described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2006 study of the false intelligence that undergirded the case for invading Iraq in 2003. That inquiry discovered that previously discredited WMD claims kept reemerging in finished U.S. intelligence analyses as part of the case for believing that Iraq was hiding WMD.

In the years before the Iraq invasion, the U.S. government had provided tens of millions of dollars to Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, and the INC, in turn, produced a steady stream of “walk-ins” who claimed to be Iraqi government “defectors” with knowledge about Saddam Hussein’s secret WMD programs.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts — though faced with White House pressure to accept this “evidence” — did their jobs honestly and exposed a number of the “defectors” as paid liars, including one, who was identified in the Senate report as “Source Two,” who talked about Iraq supposedly building mobile biological weapons labs.

CIA analysts caught Source Two in contradictions and issued a “fabrication notice” in May 2002, deeming him “a fabricator/provocateur” and asserting that he had “been coached by the Iraqi National Congress prior to his meeting with western intelligence services.”

But the Defense Intelligence Agency never repudiated the specific reports that were based on Source Two’s debriefings. Source Two also continued to be cited in five CIA intelligence assessments and the pivotal National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, “as corroborating other source reporting about a mobile biological weapons program,” the Senate Intelligence Committee report said.

Thus, Source Two became one of four human sources referred to by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his United Nations speech on Feb. 5, 2003, making the case that Iraq was lying when it insisted that it had ended its WMD programs. (The infamous “Curve Ball” was another of these dishonest sources.)

Losing the Thread

After the U.S. invasion and the failure to find the WMD caches, a CIA analyst who worked on Powell’s speech was asked how a known “fabricator” (Source Two) could have been used for such an important address by a senior U.S. government official. The analyst responded, “we lost the thread of concern as time progressed I don’t think we remembered.”

Image: Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

A CIA supervisor added, “Clearly we had it at one point, we understood, we had concerns about the source, but over time it started getting used again and there really was a loss of corporate awareness that we had a problem with the source.”

In other words, like today’s Russia-gate hysteria, the Iraq-WMD groupthink had spread so widely across U.S. government agencies and the U.S. mainstream media that standard safeguards against fake evidence were discarded. People in Official Washington, for reasons of careerism and self-interest, saw advantages in running with the Iraq-WMD pack and recognized the dangers of jumping in front of the stampeding herd to raise doubts about Iraq’s WMD.

Back then, the personal risk to salary and status came from questioning the Iraq-WMD groupthink because there was always the possibility that Saddam Hussein indeed was hiding WMD and, if so, you’d be forever branded as a “Saddam apologist”; while there were few if any personal risks to agreeing with all those powerful people that Iraq had WMD, even if that judgment turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Sure, American soldiers and the people of Iraq would pay a terrible price, but your career likely would be safe, a calculation that proved true for people like Fred Hiatt, the editorial-page editor of The Washington Post who repeatedly reported Iraq’s WMD as flat fact and today remains the editorial-page editor of The Washington Post.

Similarly, Official Washington’s judgment now is that there is no real downside to joining the Resistance to Trump, who is widely viewed as a buffoon, unfit to be President of the United States. So, any means to remove him are seen by many Important People as justified – and the Russian allegations seem to be the weightiest rationale for his impeachment or forced resignation.

Professionally, it is much riskier to insist on unbiased standards of evidence regarding Trump and Russia. You’ll just stir up a lot of angry questions about why are you “defending Trump.” You’ll be called a “Trump enabler” and/or a “Kremlin stooge.”

However, basing decisions on dubious information carries its own dangers for the nation and the world. Not only do the targets end up with legitimate grievances about being railroaded – and not only does this prejudicial treatment undermine faith in the fairness of democratic institutions – but falsehoods can become the basis for wider policies that can unleash wars and devastation.

We saw the horrific outcome of the Iraq War, but the risks of hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia are far graver; indeed, billions of people could die and human civilization end. With stakes so high, The New York Times and Mueller’s prosecutors owe the public better than treating questionable accusations as flat fact.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon andbarnesandnoble.com).

When Yousry Abushady studied the highly unusual May 2008 CIA video on a Syrian nuclear reactor that was allegedly under construction when Israeli jet destroyed it seven months earlier, the senior specialist on North Korean nuclear reactors on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s staff knew that something was very wrong.

Abushady quickly determined that the CIA had been seriously misled by Israeli intelligence and immediately informed the two highest officials of the Vienna-based IAEA, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and Deputy Director for Safeguards, Olli Heinonen, that the CIA’s conclusions were not consistent with the most basic technical requirements for such a reactor.

But it did not take long for Abushady to realize that the top IAEA officials were not interested in drawing on his expertise in regard to the alleged Syrian reactor. In fact, the IAEA cited nonexistent evidence linking the site to a Syrian nuclear program while covering up real evidence that would have clearly refuted such a claim, according to Abushady and other former senior IAEA officials.

When Abudhsady met with Heinonen to discuss his analysis of the CIA’s case in May 2008, Abushady asked to be included on the team for the anticipated inspection of the al-Kibar site because of his unique knowledge of that type reactor.

But Heinonen refused his request, citing an unwritten IAEA rule that inspectors are not allowed to carry out inspections in their countries of origin. Abushady objected, pointing out that he is Egyptian, not Syrian, to which Heinonen responded, “But you are an Arab and a Muslim!” according to Abushady. Heinonen declined a request for his comment on Abushady’s account of the conversation.

A Curious Inspection

In June 2008, an IAEA team consisting of Heinonen and two other inspectors took environmental samples at the al-Kibar site. In November 2008, the IAEA issued a report saying that laboratory analysis of a number of natural uranium particles collected at the site “indicates that the uranium is anthropogenic,” meaning that it had been processed by humans.

The implication was clearly that this was a reason to believe that the site had been connected with a nuclear program. But former IAEA officials have raised serious questions about Heinonen’s handling of the physical evidence gathered from the Syrian site as well as his characterization of the evidence in that and other IAEA reports.

Image: Olli Heinonen, former IAEA inspector

Tariq Rauf who headed the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office until 2011, has pointed out that one of the IAEA protocols applicable to these environmental samples is that “the results from all three or four labs to have analyzed the sample must match to give a positive or negative finding on the presence and isotopics or uranium and/or plutonium.”

However, in the Syrian case the laboratories to which the samples had been sent had found no evidence of such man-made uranium in the samples they had tested. ElBaradei himself had announced in late September, three months after the samples had originally been taken but weeks before the report was issued, “So far, we have found no indication of any nuclear material.” So the November 2008 IAEA report claiming a positive finding was not consistent with its protocols.

But the samples had been sent to yet another laboratory, which had come up with a positive test result for a sample, which had then touted as evidence that the site had held a nuclear reactor. That in itself is an indication that a fundamental IAEA protocol had been violated in the handling of the samples from Syria.

One of the inspectors involved in the IAEA inspection at al-Kibar later revealed to a fellow IAEA inspector what actually happened in the sample collection there. Former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley recalled in an interview that, after the last results of the samples from the al-Kibar inspection had come back from all the laboratories, the inspector, Mongolian national Orlokh Dorjkhaidav, came to see him because he was troubled by the results and wanted to tell someone he trusted.

Negative Results

Dorjkhaidav told Kelley that all the samples taken from the ground in the vicinity of the bombed building had tested negative for man-made uranium and that the only sample that had tested positive had been taken in the toilet of the support building.

Dorjkhaidav later left the IAEA and returned to Mongolia, where he died in December 2015. A video obituary for Dorjkhaidav confirmed his participation in the inspection in Syria. Kelley revealed the former inspector’s account to this writer only after Dorjkhaidav’s death.

Image: David Albright, former weapons inspector and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security.

In an e-mail response to a request for his comment on Kelley’s account of the Syrian environmental samples, Heinonen would neither confirm nor deny that the swipe sample described by Dorjkhaidav had been taken inside the support building. But in January 2013,David Albright, Director of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., who has co-authored several articles with Heinonen, acknowledged in a commentary on his think tank’s website that the al-Kibar uranium particles had been “found in a changing room in a building associated with the reactor.”

Given the dispersal of any nuclear material around the site by the Israeli bombing, if man-made uranium was present at the site, it should not have shown up only inside the support facility but should have been present in the samples taken from the ground outside.

Former IAEA senior inspector Kelley said in an e-mail that a “very likely explanation” for this anomaly is that it was a case of “cross contamination’ from the inspector’s own clothing. Such cross contamination had occurred in IAEA inspections on a number of occasions, according to both Kelley and Rauf.

Kelley, who had been in charge of inspections in Iraq in the early 1990s, recalled that a set of environmental swipes taken from nuclear facilities that the United States had bombed in Iraq had appeared to show that that Iraq had enriched uranium to 90 percent. But it turned out that they had been taken with swipe paper that had been contaminated accidentally by particles from the IAEA laboratory.

But what bothered Abushady the most was that the IAEA report on Syria had remained silent on the crucial fact that none of the sample results had shown any trace of nuclear-grade graphite.

Abushady recalled that when he challenged Heinonen on the absence of any mention of the nuclear graphite issue in the draft report in a Nov. 13, 2008 meeting, Heinonen said the inspectors had found evidence of graphite but added, “We haven’t confirmed that it was nuclear-grade.”

Abushady retorted, “Do you know what nuclear-grade graphite is? If you found it you would know it immediately.”

Heinonen was invited to comment on Abushady’s account of that meeting for this article but declined to do so.

After learning that the report scheduled to be released in November would be silent on the absence of nuclear graphite, Abushady sent a letter to ElBaradei asking him not to release the report on Syria as it was currently written. Abushady protested the report’s presentation of the environmental sampling results, especially in regard to nuclear-grade graphite.

“In my technical view,” Abushady wrote, “these results are the basis to confirm the contrary, that the site cannot [have been] actually a nuclear reactor.”

But the report was published anyway, and a few days later, ElBaradei’s Special Assistant Graham Andrew responded to Abushady’s message by ordering him to “stop sending e-mails on this subject” and to “respect established lines of responsibility, management and communication.”

A Clear Message

The message was clear: the agency was not interested in his information despite the fact that he knew more about the issue than anyone else in the organization.

Image: Satellite photos of the supposed Syrian nuclear site before and after the Israeli airstrike.

At a briefing for Member States on the Syria reactor issue on Feb. 26, 2009, the Egyptian representative to the IAEA confronted Heinonen on the absence of nuclear-grade graphite in the environmental samples. This time, Heinonen had a different explanation for the failure to find any such graphite. He responded that it was “not known whether the graphite was in the building at the time of the destruction,” according to the diplomatic cable reporting on the briefing that was later released by WikiLeaks.

But that response, too, was disingenuous, according to Abushady. “Graphite is a structural part of the reactor core in the gas-cooled reactor,” he explained. “It is not something you add at the end.”

The IAEA remained silent on the question of graphite in nine more reports issued over more than two years. When the IAEA finally mentioned the issue for the first time officially in a May 2011 report, it claimed that the graphite particles were “too small to permit an analysis of the purity compared to that normally required for use in a reactor.”

But American nuclear engineer Behrad Nakhai, who worked at Oak National Laboratories for many years, said an interview that the laboratories definitely have the ability to determine whether the particles were nuclear grade or not, so the claim “doesn’t make sense.”

News outlets have never reported on the IAEA’s role in helping to cover up the false CIA claim of a North-Korean-style nuclear reactor in the desert by a misleading portrayal of the physical evidence collected in Syria and suppressing the evidence that would have made that role clear.

Heinonen, who was directly responsible for the IAEA’s role in the Syria cover-up, left the IAEA in August 2010 and within a month was given a position at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He has continued to take positions on the Iran nuclear negotiations that were indistinguishable from those of the Netanyahu government. And he is now senior adviser on science and non-proliferation at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank whose positions on the Iran nuclear issues have closely followed those of the Likud governments in Israel.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014. [For a previous segment of this two-part series, see https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/18/israels-ploy-selling-a-syrian-nuke-strike/]

You know life’s become a joke when the US Department of Justice starts requiring foreign media to register as foreign agents. Will the BBC be forced to issue a disclaimer with every broadcast and web posting: “Proceed with caution – British propaganda ahead”? Don’t bet the ranch on it.

Such distinctions are reserved for the current bogeyman of the moment, i.e. typically some marginal outlet with a small-to-minuscule audience, in this case RT, formerly Russia Today, and its companion web site Sputnik. Banned from advertising on Twitter, and the subject of an official investigation by both houses of Congress and a special counsel, these two relatively minor state-sponsored outlets are nonetheless credited with nearly single-handedly putting Donald Trump in the White House.

It didn’t take much to create the kind of atmosphere in which a direct assault on the First Amendment goes largely unnoticed and even implicitly supported. A mysterious Russian “troll farm” amplifying the perfidious “divisiveness” of RT/Sputnik “disinformation,” a few hundred thousand bucks in Facebook ads (mostly placed after the election), and the “expert” testimony of professional hysterics who traffic in the mythology of the new cold war. Such are the ingredients that go into the making of a new industry, or rather a revived one: Kremlinology.

Compared to the “experts” of yesteryear, today’s Kremlinologists are a crankish lot. Bereft of any real knowledge of either Russian politics or the language, their elaborate conspiracy theories are unanchored by observable facts. Instead, we are treated to a series of mysterious “links,” and seemingly ambiguous meetings, which add up to a monumental nothing. Twitter accounts that may or may not be real human beings retweet “fake news” generated and centrally directed by Vladimir Putin, and this – so they tell us – was a meaningful and even a decisive factor in the 2016 presidential election. Yes, this nonsense is now the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., where the foreign lobbies that matter, the ones with real power, rule the roost.

Since professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have done such a thorough job documenting the power and influence of Israel’s lobby in the US, the often decisive role played by AIPAC and allied groups is today largely acknowledged, even by the lobby’s partisans. If you have time or inclination, it’s worth looking into how AIPAC – surely not an insignificant force — and its predecessors were exempted from having to register under the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Senator William J. Fulbright and the lobby had quite a go-round during congressional hearings on the subject.

How many foreign-funded thinktanks in Washington are pushing an agenda dictated by the amount of cold hard cash flowing into their coffers from abroad? Shall we have the public pronouncements of the Alliance to Secure Democracy – funded by a bakers’ dozen of foreign governments – labeled with the requisite Department of Justice “disclaimer”? What about the sainted Brookings Institution, which is on the take from a couple of dubious sources? And if not, why not?

Ranked in terms of their real influence and reach, the Russians are on a par with Syria, Zimbabwe, and the office of the Orleanist Pretender to the French Throne. The lobbyists with real clout – the Saudis, the Israelis, the EU/Franco-Gerrman bloc, the China lobbies (Taiwan and the mainland), not to mention George Soros, who surely qualifies as a country – are given free rein. If the feds are now intent on strictly enforcing the FARA, there are an awful lot of folks in the Imperial City who are going to have to come out of the closet, so to speak, and admit they’re simply megaphones for foreign actors.

If we’re going to start prohibiting or even limiting the activities of foreign lobbyists, then groups like the Atlantic Council – flush with foreign cash — are going to be set back on their heels. Which is why a strict double standard is in place and will remain so.

Indeed, ordinary standards of all sort, including the rules of evidence, have been thrown underfoot in the Blame Russia stampede to such an extent that to express certain views — say, on NATO expansion, or the wisdom of carrying out provocative military exercises at the gates of Moscow – is to be labeled an “unconscious agent” of the Russian state. Which means, of course, that anyone who challenges the new cold war paradigm, and criticizes US foreign policy as hegemonist, not in our interests, and dangerous, is part of the alleged Russian conspiracy to “undermine our democracy.”

Like the Kremlinologists of the 1950s, our phony “experts” are shameless opportunists looking to cash in on the latest fad: unlike their predecessors, however, none of these people actually knows anything about Russia, foreign policy, or “Putinism,” so-called. The old school anti-Communist “experts” who solemnly testified before Congress that subversion was everywhere in our midst at least had some real experience: many of them were ex-Communists, who knew the ideology and its adherents inside out.

Not so this latest batch: their insubstantial visions of ghostly cyber-armies who somehow maneuvered not only the election of Donald Trump but also pulled off Brexit, are unconvincing. Yet propaganda, to be effective, needn’t be all that convincing: volume and the power of sheer repetition are often enough to achieve the desired result, which in this case is to demonize anyone who opposes the new cold war with Russia.

That’s why, time after time, we see the professional smear-mongers going after Antiwar.com, as well as any other “alternative” media that fails to go along with the “mainstream” script. Thus I was treated to the ridiculous spectacle of seeing the Russians blamed for the Catalonian secession movement on the grounds that I – being “reliably pro-Russian” – supported the Catalan cause!

The War Party wants to drive anyone who opposes their agenda out of the public square, and silence proponents of peace once and for all. The next phase of this witch-hunt is to go after Putin’s so-called “dupes” and “fellow travelers,” which means anyone who opposes our foreign policy of global intervention but can’t be directly tied to Russia.

The militarists don’t want a foreign policy debate: their whole modus operandi is to shut down debate, to delegitimize dissent from the bipartisan interventionist status quo as a Russian covert operation. You’ll notice that their favorite argument these days is that such-and-such is “divisive.” Brazen and quite clever, actually, this openly censorious quasi-authoritarian tone is really an act of desperation. Faced with the public’s overwhelming opposition to new wars, the War Party has decided to simply outlaw the opposition – that is, to shut it down in the name of curbing “foreign influence.”

As we have seen, however, what’s really going on here is the fierce competition of foreign interests. It’s a question of which foreign interests will gain the favor of the Empire, and thus the upper hand, at any given moment. In the Washington casino, every conceivable country and would-be country is represented with cash on the table, hoping the Wheel of Fashion will turn in their direction. Every interest has a place at the table – with a singe exception. The lobby for America, the one pressure group that puts American interests first, is nowhere in evidence. I’m afraid it’s too much to expect that US government officials are and ought to be the front line defenders of American interests narrowly conceived.

If anyone is surprised that journalists haven’t been the first ones to protest the imposition of content regulations on “foreign” media, then they are being naïve. The “liberal” media has been agitating for some form of censorship, whether governmental edicts against “hate speech” or corporate conformity compacts, and Russia-gate has been their bread and butter. Perhaps this accounts for the tepid statement of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which declared “We’re uncomfortable with governments deciding what constitutes journalism or propaganda.”

An outright assault on the First Amendment is a mere discomfort: is that the Founders I hear weeping?

The Freedom of the Press Foundation worried that the DOJ decision “opens up serious risk of retaliation for many brave journalists who work in Russia – both independent reporters who may get funding from the US and the US government’s own Voice of America.” So their big worry is what this will do to US government propaganda efforts: no hint that a far more important principle is at stake.

What’s in store for us is a full-fledged no-holds-barred all-out witch hunt, with the reincarnation and rebranding of the ill-favored “House Un-American Activities Committee,” and, worse, the revival of the hysteria that made it possible. There can’t be any compromise in a fight of this kind: the enemy is out to illegalize us. They want to make dissent the equivalent of treason. We can’t let them succeed.

It’s remarkable that whenever you read an article about Yemen in the mainstream media, the central role of Saudi Arabia and the United States in the tragedy is glossed over or completely ignored. A recent Washington Post article purporting to tell us “how things got so bad” explains to us that, “it’s a complicated story” involving “warring regional superpowers, terrorism, oil, and an impending climate catastrophe.”

No, Washington Post, it’s simpler than that. The tragedy in Yemen is the result of foreign military intervention in the internal affairs of that country. It started with the “Arab Spring” which had all the fingerprints of State Department meddling, and it escalated with 2015’s unprovoked Saudi attack on the country to re-install Riyadh’s preferred leader. Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and millions more are at risk as starvation and cholera rage.

We are told that US foreign policy should reflect American values. So how can Washington support Saudi Arabia – a tyrannical state with one of the worst human rights record on earth – as it commits by what any measure is a genocide against the Yemeni people? The UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs warned just last week that Yemen faces “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades with millions of victims.” The Red Cross has just estimated that a million people are vulnerable in the cholera epidemic that rages through Yemen.

And why is there a cholera epidemic? Because the Saudi government – with US support – has blocked every port of entry to prevent critical medicine from reaching suffering Yemenis. This is not a war. It is cruel murder.

The United States is backing Saudi aggression against Yemen by cooperating in every way with the Saudi military. Targeting, intelligence, weapons sales, and more. The US is a partner in Saudi Arabia’s Yemen crimes.

Does holding hands with Saudi Arabia as it slaughters Yemeni children really reflect American values? Is anyone even paying attention?

The claim that we are fighting al-Qaeda in Yemen and thus our involvement is covered under the post-9/11 authorization for the use of force is without merit. In fact it has been reported numerous times in the mainstream media that US intervention on behalf of the Saudis in Yemen is actually a boost to al-Qaeda in the country. Al-Qaeda is at war with the Houthis who had taken control of much of the country because the Houthis practice a form of Shi’a Islam they claim is tied to Iran. We are fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Adding insult to injury, the US Congress can’t be bothered to even question how we got so involved in a war that has nothing to do with us. A few conscientious Members of Congress got together recently to introduce a special motion under the 1973 War Powers Act that would have required a vote on our continued military involvement in the Yemen genocide. The leadership of both parties joined together to destroy this attempt to at least get a vote on US aggression against Yemen. As it turns out, the only Members to vote against this shamefully gutted resolution were the original Members who introduced it. This is bipartisanship at its worst.

US involvement in Saudi Arabia’s crimes against Yemen is a national disgrace. That the mainstream media fails to accurately cover this genocide is shameful. Let us join our voices now to demand that our US Representatives end US involvement in Yemen immediately!

On August 8^th Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He ordered the Pentagon to prepare for all military options. In the interim, he has ordered mock invasion war games with South Korea on North Korea’s borders and coasts, sent nuclear weapons-capable bombers to fly over the Korean Peninsula in a clear sign to Kim Jong Un he is prepared to follow through on his threat, and has ordered three US aircraft carrier armadas to the oceans just off North Korea’s shores, while escalating his belligerent rhetorical exchanges with his North Korean nemesis.

Hampshire College Professor Michael Klare, writing in The Nation, suggests, this extraordinary naval buildup could provide Trump with the sort of military extravaganza he seems to enjoy and/or to prepare for a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea. It may also trigger a North Korean response that will serve as a pretext for military aggression.

As if these developments were not alarming enough, the Washington Post reports that in the last week the Pentagon sent a letter to members of Congress in which it said the only way to locate and secure all of North Korea’s nuclear weapon sites with complete certainty is through an invasion of ground forces.  In the event of conflict, the generals said, Pyongyang might also resort to biological and chemical weapons, raising the specter of great American casualties.

Given the mercurial bellicose character of the Commander in Chief, and his view that diplomacy is a “waste of time”, the generals’ letter could provide Trump with just the excuse he needs to unleash US nuclear weapons on North Korea – “to save (American) lives” (as if bombing or invasion were the only alternatives available to him). ‘Saving American lives’ was a justification offered by Truman for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A single 150 kiloton nuclear armed cruise missile fired from our off-shore fleet at Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, is predicted to immediately kill a half million Koreans.  More than another million would be severely injured.  That estimate of the initial death toll alone is approximately equivalent to wiping out the population of Oakland or Tucson.

Kim Jong Un has no incentive to attack the US first unless convinced the US is about to attack North Korea. He might be provoked to preempt or answer it with an attack of its own.  With the nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missile it has already developed (assuming it can miniaturize the bomb to be carried by its ICBM) its missile could hit a U.S. West Coast city like San Francisco, where almost 225,000 would die immediately and another 330,000 would suffer horrific injuries and radiation sickness, many of whom would die later.  Seoul, South Korea, a city of 25 million people, is just 35 miles from the North Korean border. If it were targeted with a nuclear bomb, immediate casualties could easily top one million.

This is what’s at stake in the game of nuclear chicken Donald Trump seems to want to play with Kim Jong Un. We have to stop it.

Recent polling demonstrates that more than two-thirds of the American people believe that the United States should attack North Korea only if North Korea attacks first. But Donald Trump doesn’t think much of the ‘will of the people’ if our will doesn’t coincide with his ambitions or interests.

It is imperative that Congress enact a law that prevents Trump from ordering such a premeditated attack without prior consent of Congress, as required by our Constitution.

A bi-partisan letter to President Trump has been initiated by Congresswoman Barbara Lee reasserting Congress’s role in authorizing and overseeing military actions, and Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA), joined by more than 60 other members of Congress, introduced new bipartisan, bicameral legislation to do just that.  TheNo Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act of 2017 (H.R. 4140/S. 2016) restricts funds available to the Department of Defense or to any other federal department or agency from being used to launch a military strike against North Korea without the prior approval of Congress or the imperative to respond to an attack against the United States or its allies.

This legislation has been endorsed by a broad array of peace, veterans, faith, civil liberties, social justice, Korean American and other civil society organizations.

Contact your member of Congress and senators to urge them to cosponsor and vote for this critical legislation. Defense of our Constitution, our national security and global peace require members of Congress on both sides of the aisle do their duty, pass this legislation and restore the separation of powers dictated by our Constitution.

Michael Eisenscher is National Coordinator Emeritus of U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) a network of over 190 national, regional and local unions and other labor organizations.  

US President Trump has compounded tensions on the Korean Peninsula yesterday by putting North Korea back onto the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The move paves the way for the imposition of new sanctions on the Pyongyang regime that will be announced today by the US Treasury.

The sanctions themselves are unlikely to have much impact as North Korea is already one of the most isolated countries in the world. Under intense US pressure, the UN Security Council has imposed a series of punitive measures that have banned the purchase of most of North Korea’s exports and the use of North Korean guest workers and restricted energy imports. In addition, the US has imposed its own sanctions on Pyongyang and threatened secondary sanctions against any country that breaks them.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged that the practical implications of Trump’s announcement would be limited, noting that it would “close a few additional loopholes.” He rejected any suggestion that the move ended any prospect of talks with North Korea to end the standoff, saying “we still hope for diplomacy.”

However, the redesignation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism is another sign that the Trump administration has no intention of negotiating with the Pyongyang regime. As far as Washington is concerned, only North Korea’s complete capitulation will prevent the US drive to war. The US demand for the complete and verifiable denuclearisation of North Korea means nothing short of the dismantling of its nuclear and missile programs and an ever-more intrusive inspection system that will be the basis for new provocations.

The timing of Trump’s announcement is a slap in the face to China, which had just sent a top-level envoy, Song Tao, to North Korea for the first time in two years. While no details were released, the two sides “exchanged views… on the situation on the Korean Peninsula and [the] region, and bilateral relations,” according to the North Korean media.

During his Asian tour last week, Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and pressed him to step up Chinese efforts to force North Korea to submit to US demands. Trump hailed the decision to send Song to Pyongyang by tweeting:

“A big move, we’ll see what happens!”

Trump’s latest provocation against Pyongyang only adds to the pressure on China to completely isolate North Korea—a step that Beijing is reluctant to take. China’s concern is that the US would exploit a political and economic crisis in North Korea to bring the country under American sway.

The only conclusion that Pyongyang can draw is that its redesignation is further evidence that the Trump administration has no interest in negotiations in good faith.

The removal of North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Bush administration in June 2008 was part of a denuclearisation agreement reached in February 2007. Pyongyang kept its side of the bargain, shutting down its nuclear facilities and opening them up to international inspection. As a demonstration of good will, it demolished the cooling tower of its only nuclear reactor even though it was not immediately required under the agreement.

The Bush administration only reluctantly and belatedly removed North Korea from the State Department’s list, as the first step towards what was meant to be the normalisation of relations between the two countries. Just months later, in September 2008, Bush effectively sabotaged the agreement by insisting on more intrusive inspections that had not been part of the deal. The Obama administration never moved to revive talks of the 2007 agreement.

Washington’s designation of countries as state sponsors of terrorism has always been used as a tool for provocations and diplomatic pressure, as well as being utterly hypocritical. US imperialism has a long history of promoting and exploiting terrorist groups to further its interests—as is currently the case in Syria where it is using Islamic extremist organisations in a bid to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Not surprisingly, the criteria used by the US to designate a country as a state sponsor of terrorism are vague. Former State Department official Joseph DeThomas told the Washington Post yesterday that the process was “more of an art than a science” and “political and diplomatic context plays a considerable role in such designations.” In other words, branding a country as sponsoring terrorism is determined solely by US economic and strategic interests.

In his brief statement yesterday, Trump tried to justify his action by declaring:

“In addition to threatening the world by nuclear devastation, North Korea has repeatedly supported acts of international terrorism, including assassinations on foreign soil.” This is presumably a reference to the killing of the brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore in February. “It should have happened a long time ago,” Trump added.

Unlike North Korea, the United States has waged one criminal war of aggression after another over the past 25 years. Speaking in the UN in September, Trump himself threatened to use US military might, including its massive nuclear arsenal, to “totally destroy” North Korea and potentially trigger a devastating world war.

Moreover, the US is directly responsible for the murder of the Iraqi and Libyan presidents, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom bowed to American demands to give up their so-called weapons of mass destruction. The Pyongyang regime can only conclude that a similar fate is in store if it capitulates to Washington. It is an open secret that the US and South Korea are training military “decapitation units” to assassinate top North Korean leaders.

Trump’s designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism is another step towards a catastrophic war that would not only kill millions on the Korean Peninsula but could potentially draw in major powers such as China and Russia. Top Trump officials have repeatedly warned that time is running out for North Korea to accept US demands and completely abandon its nuclear and missile programs.

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. Eighth Release Order by Fourth French Judge Overturned; Hassan Diab Begins Fourth Year in Detention

2. How You Can Help

3. Notes from Visits to Hassan in Prison

4. Screening of “Rubber Stamped” Documentary at the Mirror Mountain Film Festival, December 1, Ottawa

1. Eighth Release Order by Fourth French Judge Overturned; Hassan Diab Begins Fourth year in Detention

On November 6, 2017, a fourth French judge ordered Dr. Hassan Diab’s conditional release from prison. This was the eighth release order by four different French judges. However, the French prosecutor immediately appealed, and once again the French Court of Appeal overturned the release order.

On November 20, Hassan marked his fourth Birthday in detention. He remains confined to his cell 20 hours a day, torn from his home and family in Canada, despite his innocence.

Numerous high-profile Canadians have signed an Open Letter urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to use the full force of his office to bring Hassan home. These individuals include lawyer and former politician Bob Rae; Members of Parliament Don Davies, Elizabeth May, and Kennedy Stewart; politician and broadcaster Stephen Lewis; filmmakers Atom Egoyan, Avi Lewis, and Sarah Polley; authors Naomi Klein, Yann Martel, Monia Mazigh, and Nino Ricci.

For more information about the latest developments in Dr. Diab’s case:

Article: “Trudeau urged to intervene in case of Ottawa professor jailed in France”, The Globe and Mail, November 14, 2017

Article: “French court blocks release of Ottawa academic Hassan Diab for eighth time”, Ottawa Citizen, November 14, 2017

Interview: CBC Radio “As It Happens” interview with Professor Rania Tfaily (Hassan’s wife), November 14, 2017

Interview: CBC Radio “The Current” interview with Donald Bayne (Hassan’s Canadian lawyer) and Rania Tfaily (Hassan’s wife), November 17, 2017

Interview: The Real News interview with Donald Bayne (Hassan’s Canadian lawyer)

Press Release: Diab’s Eighth Release Order Overturned; High-Profile Canadians Urge PM Trudeau to Bring Diab Home, November 15, 2017

2. How You Can Help

Dr. Hassan Diab must not be imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Please help prevent his wrongful conviction. Any bit you do will go a long way towards bringing Hassan home. Here are some ways you can help.

(a) WRITE to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other Canadian Government officials, and urge them to bring Hassan back to his home and family in Canada. Address your letters to:

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau –  [email protected]
• Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ms. Chrystia Freeland – chrystia.freeland@internatio nal.gc.ca
• Minister of Justice, Ms. Jody Wilson-Raybould – [email protected] .ca
• Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Omar Alghabra – [email protected]

A sample letter is available:

• PDF version
• Word version

Please share a copy of your correspondence with [email protected]

(b) SIGN the petition “Trudeau: Pick up the Phone, Call Macron, Bring Hassan Diab Home”, urging PM Trudeau to call his counterpart, French President Emmanuel Macron, and work with him on releasing Hassan and returning him to Canada.

To sign the petition, please visit:

https://www.change.org/p/trude au-pick-up-the-phone-call-macr on-bring-hassan-diab-home

(c) PUBLICISE Dr. Hassan Diab’s plight among your networks and on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), so more people are aware of the injustices he is facing.

3. Notes from Visits to Hassan in Prison

Hassan is immensely thankful to his supporters for standing by him over the years. Despite the setbacks, he remains hopeful he will be exonerated and reunited with his family in Canada.

Two supporters recently visited Hassan in prison in France. Here are some excerpts from notes they wrote about their visits.

Tuesday November 7, 2017:

I visited Hassan on Tuesday, 7 November 2017. Obtaining the visitor’s permit took the best part of three weeks, involving three separate bureaucratic steps. My appointment was for 9:00 am, but the ensuing security and waiting meant that the actual time with Hassan began closer to 10:00 am and lasted the regulation 45 minutes.

The meeting room (“parloir”) is a small (14’ x 6’) room with a small table and three black plastic chairs. There is a door at each end, electronically controlled, with a small window for inspection purposes. One door is for the visitor, and the other is for the prisoner who is brought in several minutes after the visitor has been let into the room and locked in. Nobody moves around any part of the prison without an escort of one or more guards.

I was feeling quite emotional about being there… Nothing prepared me for actually being there and being able to hug him and bring him greetings from everyone in his support circle. He looked tired and drawn, partly as a result of the ten-hour trip to the Palais de Justice the previous day. He told me that in the past three years he has lost about 15 kilos which, as he pointed out with a smile, is a lot for a man of relatively small stature. 

I was immensely impressed by Hassan’s resilience and courage in the face of this almost indescribable cruelty and injustice. He maintains a sense of dignity and humour, and expressed no anger or bitterness.

Tuesday November 14, 2017:

“We greeted each other with a warm hug. Hassan mentioned that not only is this the third anniversary of his incarceration, but it is also his daughter Jena’s birthday this week. Obviously, he is missing these important personal milestones and more importantly, the direct personal attachments to people he loves.

Solitary confinement has been hard on Hassan. He is only allowed to leave his cell for four hours a day. He has lost a lot of weight since I saw him last year.

He said he was so exhausted from the travel to and from the Palais de Justice on Friday (November 10). They got him up at 6:00 am and he was shuttled through a series of cells and vehicles along the way, always alone with nothing to distract him from the barrenness of this process. 

At the Appeal Court hearing which I was able to attend, Hassan had said: “I want to repeat that I am innocent. I was on strict bail conditions for six years in Canada and I did not run away. Innocent people do not run away, and I won’t be running away here. I promise to stay.”  His sincerity and moral strength were so clear in these brief words.

4. Screening of “Rubber Stamped” at the Mirror Mountain Film Festival, December 1, Ottawa

Join us for a screening of the “Rubber Stamped” documentary at the Mirror Mountain Film Festival in Ottawa. The screening will take place on Friday December 1, 7:30 pm, at the Arts Court Theatre, 2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa.  – Map

The documentary shows the impact of Hassan’s ordeal on his family. Hassan’s supporters and his Canadian lawyer, Donald Bayne, talk about the miscarriage of justice and the risk of wrongful conviction. 

The documentary is directed by Amar Wala and shot and edited by Andrea Conte. It will be shown as part of the Local Heroes collection of short films. 

https://mirrormountainfilmfest .com/local-heroes-2017

Thank you.

Hassan Diab Support Committee
[email protected]
http://www.justiceforhassandia b.org

The Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that the cooperation between Moscow and Tehran and the refusal of mutual payments in US dollars could isolate the USA and “repel the American sanctions”. The Supreme Leader added, “It is possible to cooperate with Russia in dealing with large-scale issues requiring commitment and determination, and to cooperate with it logistically”.

In this context, we should not forget that China, a large oil buyer, is the key player in the crackdown on petrodollars. Beijing has already presented a new oil benchmark in CHY (right now, two benchmark contracts for crude oil, WTI and Brent, are traded in USD) and will issue the first South-African future contract by the end of this year. Interestingly, it was announced that any oil exporter who will accept payment in CHY will be able to convert them into gold at the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SHGE) and hedge the currency value of gold at the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE). That is why China needs physical gold and it has been recently buying it on a large scale.

Undoubtedly, all oil exporters, and especially those who have poor political relations with the USA, will profit from this segregation of the Chinese future market. Because any decrease of USD influence diminishes seriously the ability of Washington to wage an economic war on select states. The introduction of the oil future traded in CHY will enable oil exporters, for example Russia, Iran and Venezuela, to avoid sanctions on their oil trade.

Thus, a plan is being commissioned to ruin the United States of America right before our eyes. Reportedly, the dollar, which is a worldwide currency (but not industry or agriculture), constitutes the foundation of American power. It is this world currency that enables the USA to rob the whole world, making its peoples to pay for the overly ambitious desires of Washington. Some time ago, the USD was secured with the gold equivalent, which was later abolished, and now the dollar is, in fact, left without safeguards. The United States forced an agreement upon Saudi Arabia which provided for the USA’s military aid to the Kingdom and the ‘protection’ of its oil fields, though it isn’t clear against whom. In exchange, the Saudis committed themselves to executing all their oil sales in USD and to investing their profits in US debt securities. By 1975, all oil-producing OPEC members were forced, under pressure from Washington, to follow suit. Consequently, the world plunged into the quagmire of petrodollars.

It is not that the leaders of oil countries could not fail to understand that it was sheer robbery by the United States but, at the same time, they could not undertake anything all by themselves because Washington crushed all such efforts, going as far as occupying the insubordinate states. Take Iraq, for example – the USA imposed unmerciful sanctions on it, making ordinary people suffer from them. The sanctions existed since 1991, and it looked like they would exist forever. However, at the beginning of the 21st century Saddam Hussein made a decision to sell oil for fresh Eurodollars on the basis of the “Oil for Food” program. There was an immediate retaliation: under the pretence of democratising Iraq, the American military occupied the country and unleashed a civil war in it, which is still ongoing. Saddam Hussein was hanged.

Another example: Moammar el-Gadhaf, leader of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, who was highly favoured by Europe and the USA, decided to introduce the gold dinar and to carry out all trade only in that currency. The punishment was instant: so-called popular unrest was organised from outside, and the Washington-imposed UN resolutions tied up, hand and foot, the Libyan leader who was brutally murdered soon afterwards.

However, the idea of getting rid of the USD stranglehold did not disappear, and right now, the powerful states who are free from American influence, i.e. Russia, China and Iran, set out to implement it. The future of one more country – Saudi Arabia – a leader in crude oil production is in danger. That is to say, the destiny of the United States, who have been taking all possible measures to keep Riyadh in its orbit, depends, without any exaggeration, on the stance of the Kingdom. That is why the current situation of the Saudi is not too great. Firstly, the tradition put in place by Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal Al Saud, founder of the kingdom, to pass power from one son to another does not exist any more. Secondly, there is an ongoing unprecedented struggle for power since Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the current King, moved aside the legitimate heir and declared his wish to pass the power to his son Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Thirdly, the new heir, deprived of sufficient experience, has already made several grave mistakes. He has misspent large funds to support the Syrian terrorist groups, unleashed a dead-end struggle against the neighbouring Yemen, he has an ambiguous personal conflict with Qatar. Additionally, the struggle for the world oil market led to a sharp increase of black gold prices, which resulted in budget deficit.

To make things worse, a crisis, which is still unresolved, arose in the Lebanon when its Prime-Minister left for Saudi Arabia and sent his letter of resignation from there. He explained his decision by the interference of Iran into the internal affairs of his country, Hizballah’s pressure on him and the information about the preparing assassination attempt on his life, about which he was allegedly notified by Saudi intelligence.

Currently, a new and fairly decisive round of struggle for power instigated by Washington unfolds in the Kingdom. Obviously, the current King, before passing power to his son, is trying to clear up his political framework and to eliminate any rivals even if they are members of the ruling Saudi family. A new Anti-Corruption Committee headed by hereditary Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud was created by a royal decree. The Committee is entitled to conduct its own investigations and make arrests, to impose travel bans, to freeze bank assets and to implement other measures within the framework of its fight against corruption.

As of November 10, two hundred and eight people were detained in Saudi Arabia as part of the initiated unprecedented anti-corruption campaign. Seven of them had been previously released without charges. The others, as Prosecutor General of the Kingdom Saud al-Mojeb told the Al Jazeera Channel, are still under arrest. Immediately after that, US State Secretary Rex Tillerson had a telephone conversation with his Saudi counterpart Adel Al-Jubeir, during which the parties discussed the situation in Saudi Arabia or, to be more exact, the Saudi foreign minister received additional American instructions. In the meantime, Washington has been skilfully and deliberately pitting the soon to be future King against other members of the Saud family so that Mohammed bin Salman ends up alone and will have to rely only on the support from the United States.

Incidentally, the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, one of the richest men in the Middle East (and who used to be head of the office of the Saudi finance minister) was also among the detainees. The Prince is the grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia and a nephew of six Saudi Kings, including the current ruler. He never sought political power and preferred investments and stock market gambling. The Prince has three academic degrees, including one in philosophy. It was for the first time in the history of the Kingdom that his daughter, a Princess, was arrested.

There is one more equally complicated issue related to oil, that is, at what currency oil should be sold to China, which is still one of the biggest trading platforms for the Saudi. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continues to demand insistently only USD currency in exchange for oil from Chinese importers. Beijing is somewhat annoyed with such stubbornness from Riyadh, for the Chinese have a wide range of oil suppliers to choose from. The Chinese authorities have been trying to bring it home to Riyadh that its dollar fanaticism can cost it quite a lot. However, the change-over from USD to CHY would deliver a blow to the United States, a key ally of the Kingdom, but Riyadh will definitely surrender sooner or later. What will happen then with the United States?

Thereupon, the refusal of several major oil producers from USD payments would deliver an irreparable blow to the United States and contribute greatly to the decline of the American empire and its hegemonistic ambitions.

Victor Mikhin, a corresponding member of RANS, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Turkey’s military in the alliance is second only to America in size. President Erdogan nominally sides with Russia and Iran on Syria.

His sincerity is another issue entirely. He’s long coveted annexing northern Syrian and Iraqi territory, especially its oil-rich areas.

His economic ties with Russia and Iran are growing. As long as he supports terrorists in Syria, trilateral relations are fraught with uncertainties.

His relations with Washington deteriorated significantly since the 2016 aborted coup attempt to unseat him.

He blamed the plot on ex-pat cleric Fethullah Gulen, living in Pennsylvania. Washington refuses to extradite him. No evidence indicates his involvement in what happened. He denies accusations against him.

Erdogan is at odds with Washington over its support for Kurdish fighters in northern Syria. He’s upset over the Trump administration treating him as both a NATO ally and Eurasian adversary.

While playing the Russia and US cards simultaneously, he’s increasingly shifting his allegiance East, away from the West – another body blow to Washington’s imperial agenda.

On Monday, Erdogan’s chief advisor Yalcin Topcu told local media

“(i)t is time to reconsider our membership in NATO.”

“We do not need an organization that displays in every possible way its hostile attitude towards its member. The issue of our presence in that organization should be urgently considered in the Turkish parliament.”

“A traitorously hostile tone sounds in regard to our country and the elected president. It is about the meanness and disgrace shown during the NATO exercises, where the photo of Ataturk and Erdogan’s name were paired with hostile intentions.”

Erdogan called it “a scandal,” adding “(t)hey know that they cannot stop our country, which is why they are putting us on a target board.”

“I hope that those who welcomed attacks against us before now understand the real face of the matter, as Ataturk was also included.”

“The issue is not a personal or party issue. The target is Turkey and the Turkish nation.” Erdogan rebuffed NATO secretary general Stoltenberg’s apology, adding:

“Yesterday, you have witnessed the impudence at NATO exercises in Norway. There are some mistakes that cannot be committed by fools but only by vile people,” showing “a distorted point of view that we have observed in NATO for a while.”

“This matter cannot be covered over with a simple apology.”

Topcu added “(i)t’s time to reconsider our membership in NATO. An organization that shows its hostile attitude to its member in every way.”

He called alliance behavior toward Ankara “brutal and dishonorable.” On Sunday, Erdogan threatened to remove US radar systems from Turkey if Washington fails to deliver F-35 warplanes purchased.

In response to Turkey buying Russian S-400 air defense systems, the Trump administration threatened to renege on the F-35 deal.

Will strained Turkish/US relations rupture? Turkey has been a NATO member since October 1951.

Will Erdogan’s anger over US treatment of Ankara get him to leave the alliance after all these years?

If so, it would be a major blow to US hegemonic ambitions.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Almost all of America’s foreign allies — such as Europe and Japan — voted “Abstain”, in order not to tar themselves, such as did the only two overtly racist-fascist nations, the two nations that voted “No” on the anti-nazi Resolution (voted to defend nazism): Ukraine and U.S.

In February 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama overthrew in a very bloody fascist coup the democratically elected President of Ukraine, and installed nazis to replace his Government, and to expel from the legislature that democratically elected President’s supporters. Soon thereafter, Ukraine’s nazis began (and they continue even today) an ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of Ukrainians who live in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, where almost everybody had voted for the man whom Obama had ousted. So, it’s very fitting that both the nazi regime in Ukraine, and the fascist Government that installed nazism in Ukraine in our time, stand alone, at the U.N., this year, in defending nazism worldwide.

On November 15th, just the day prior to the U.N. vote against nazis, some snipers in Obama’s Ukrainian coup publicly confessed, because the man who had hired these particular mercenaries to serve as snipers on the day of Obama’s Ukrainian coup, 20 February 2014, never even paid them for the killings they had committed on the employer’s behalf. (That employer was likely being paid by the CIA, but apparently had paid his men nothing.) There was no honor among these thieves. (Here’s more detail about those snipers.)

Ambassador Haley’s sub-Ambassador, Ms. Kelley Currie, explained the pro-Nazi U.S. vote on November 16th, and she opened:

Mr. Chair, the United States does not need to defend our position against Nazism. History is proof and the record is clear. The “Greatest Generation” of American blood was spilt on foreign soil fighting the Nazi regime and liberating many of the Member States with us today. The Nazis’ worst fear and greatest enemy was the United States and Allied Forces. While the Nazis stood for tyranny, oppression, and genocide, we stood for freedom, liberty, and humanity. A resolution that condemns Nazism should honor that truth.

This statement flies in the face of the U.S. CIA’s Operation Paperclip, and also of the CIA’s Operation Gladio, which set Hitler’s intelligence operation to work for the U.S. and NATO, starting when World War II was ending, and continuing even till today. The CIA-edited Wikipedia euphemistically opens its article about Gladio with the anodyne,

Operation Gladio is the codename for a clandestine North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) “stay-behind” operation in Italy during the Cold War. Its purpose was to prepare for, and implement, armed resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest. 

However, the BBC in 1992 produced an extraordinarily truthful (unlike anything today) documentary portrayal of Gladio as being instead a CIA operation that’s so far to the right it set up terrorist incidents in Europe designed so as to blame European communists for the slaughters, in order to turn European publics against the Soviet Union. Many former Nazi aristocrats participated in this operation and testified in that BBC documentary. The only reason why the BBC was honest about it back then, was that, just the year before, in 1991, the U.S.S.R had broken up into its individual nations, and the Warsaw Pact mirroring America’s NATO military alliance also ended (while NATO itself continued on though its supposed ideological enemy was now gone); and BBC executives didn’t yet know the U.S. plan, which had been introduced only privately and secretly on the night of 24 February 1990 to continue the Cold War on the U.S. side until Russia would finally be conquered, and become part of the U.S. empire.

She continued:

Since this resolution was first introduced in 2005, the United States has expressed its concerns about this resolution, each year calling for a vote, voting against the resolution, and explaining why.

This year, we are doing things differently – we are proposing an amendment that addresses every part of the resolution that violates individual freedoms of speech, thought, expression, and association. Therefore, if this amendment is adopted, the free speech concerns in the resolution would be removed.

Currie didn’t name Russia as the target of America’s refusal to condemn nazism — racist fascism — but she instead said it indirectly:

This resolution is an annual power play by one nation over its sovereign neighbors. It attempts to exert a sphere of influence over a region and strives to criminalize free speech and expression without any genuine effort to effectively combat actual Nazism, discrimination, or anti-Semitism.

That’s an utter fabrication, not only against the Resolution, but against Russia.

20-27 million Soviet citizens died fighting Hitler, but only 420,000 American citizens did — and without the Soviet Union’s support, we Americans would be living in an overtly nazi country today, instead of merely in a covertly fascist one (that’s perhaps transitioning to become overtly nazi). The main contribution to winning WW II was the Soviet Union, which beat Hitler. Britain was the second-biggest contributor to beating Hitler. The U.S. was the main contributor to beating Japan. Ever since George W. Bush, we’ve been living in an increasingly overtly fascist nation.. It’s no longer just the CIA and the NSA and the FBI etc., and the military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and DynCorp, but everything is becoming more and more an economy based upon prisons and police and soldiers and weaponry, and less and less an economy that’s based upon constructive productions and services. The U.S. is justifiably known around the world as “the biggest threat to peace” in the world — it’s the chief source of invasions and coups, destroying nations as various as Libya and Ukraine, and not only in Latin America (such as long had been the case).

Currie is Sr. Fellow at the far-right neoconservative Project 2049 Institute, whose 7 Board members include only neoconservatives, such as Ian Brzezinski, son of Zbigniew Brzezinski (Ian was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under G.W. Bush, 2001-2005); and whose Board of Advisors consists of representatives of think-tanks such as the far-right American Enterprise Institute, and also of large U.S. international corporations including Goldman Sachs.

On the day of the U.N. vote, the neoconservative and pro-apartheid Israeli American site, “Human Right Voices” bannered, “U.N. RESOLUTION THREATENING FREE SPEECH ADVANCES DESPITE U.S. ATTEMPTS TO AMEND IT” and reported:

An attempt by the United States to revise a U.N. resolution that threatens free speech failed dramatically, as U.N. member states rejected the U.S.’s proposed amendments by a vote of 3 in favor (Israel, Ukraine, and U.S.), 81 against, and 73 abstentions. Instead, the Russian-sponsored resolution, “Combatting glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related tolerance,” was adopted in its original form by the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly on November 16, 2017, by a vote of 125 in favor, 2 against (Ukraine and U.S.), and 51 abstentions.

President Trump’s joining with Obama and with Bush, in all their worst ways, is not the sort of thing that Trump’s few progressive voters chose him over Hillary Clinton to continue doing, and she might not have been as horrific a President as he is, in his ramming even more pro-rich anti-poor programs down Americans’ throats. Trump’s remaining voting-base now is purely racist fascists, but this includes lots of U..S. billionaires, and so there might be enough voters to get him a second term, since the only other viable option is an equally fascist Democratic Party — the Party that’s more of the neoliberal side than of the neoconservative side. It’s hardly a choice at all, now, for anyone who wants to live in a democracy. It’s just a dictatorship.

The fact that Trump can even be joining with Obama and with Bush at the U.N. in protecting nazis and nazism (racist fascism) (see here some of it that the U.S. Government still supports) is being hidden from the American public. Why? How long will this continue? Will the situation continue to get even worse? Are we heading into World War III?

On November 19, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), Hezbollah and Iranian-backed militias restored control over the border city of al-Bukamal after a week of intense fighting with ISIS terrorists there. The Russian Aerospace Forces actively supported the SAA advance.

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General, Qasem Soleimani, was also filmed in the city. Earlier, the Hezbollah-linked TV channel Al Mayadeen claimed that Soleimani was a commander of the entire al-Bukamal operation.

According to the Hezbollah media wing in Syria, about 150 ISIS members had fled al-Bukamal through the Euphrates River. Some of them reportedly surrendered to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

On the same day, the SAA Tiger Forces advanced further along the western bank of the Euphrates. Government troops captured the villages of Kashmah and Salihiyah and besieged ISIS units in the area between al-Mayadin and Kashmah.

The SDF captured the town of Shu’aytat and the nearby points on the eastern back of the Euphrates. Pro-government sources claimed that the SDF was able to do this thanks to a deal with local ISIS members, led by Abu Talhat al-Mohajer.

In northern Hama, the SAA entered into the villages of Shakhtir and Abu Dali and Balil Hill, which had been controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allies. An intense fighting is ongoing.

Pro-HTS sources claimed that militants destroyed a BMP-1 vehicle and a battle tank of the SAA during the clashes.

In Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, clashes continued between the SAA and Ahrar al-Sham in the Armored Vehicle Base where government troops re-established control over the command section and the section 446. Thus, the SAA reversed the key militant gains in the area.

In southern Syria, the SAA entered into the villages of Kafr Hawar, Bayt Sabir, Baytima and established control over them. HTS militants had withdrawn from the area thanks to the SAA actions and protests of the locals.

Israel responded to the SAA operations with two shelling incidents from its battle tanks. The first took place on November 18. The second was reported on November 20. The SAA suffered no casualties. Tel Aviv is upset that the Syrian government is restoring control over the areas previously seized by militants.

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Featured image is from South Front.

Today, the Nebraska Public Service Commission approved a permit to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline but rejected TransCanada’s preferred route through the state of Nebraska.

In response, Greenpeace Canada Climate and Energy Campaigner Mike Hudema said:

“Today’s decision is no guarantee that this pipeline will ever be built. Nebraska opted not to give TransCanada its preferred route through the state, so the company now has more hurdles in front of its beleaguered pipeline. Given last week’s reminder of the dangers pipelines like Keystone XL  pose, the resistance to this project will continue to grow and TransCanada will face legal challenges, and resistance to its construction plans on the land and in the banks.

Today’s decision will also have big cost implications and that should worry both existing and prospective funders of a pipeline that will never see the light of day. One after another, some of the world’s biggest banks are dropping Keystone XL and other tar sands pipelines from their lending portfolios. It’s time for banks like TD and Desjardins to follow the lead of banks like ING, BNP Paribas and US Bank who have already ditched risky tar sand pipeline funding.”

TransCanada Corp.  said in a statement Thursday 795,000 litres of oil leaked from an underground section of its Keystone pipeline near Amherst, S.D. Yesterday, the company had to send additional crews and equipment to the site. The line is expected to remain shut while it responds to the spill.

According to a report by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, nearly 200 million people are victims of modern slavery or child labor around the globe. In 2016, 40.3 million men, women and children were victims of modern slavery. Nearly one in ten children, or 151.6 million people, are victims of child labor.

The report defines “modern slavery” as “the various forms of coercion prohibited in international instruments on human rights and labour standards.” This definition includes slavery, state-imposed forced labor, forced marriage, and human trafficking. One in four victims of forced labor are children, and 71 percent of total victims are female.

On any given day in 2016, approximately 16 million individuals were forced to work in the private sector. More than half of this labor involves the domestic, construction and manufacturing sectors. On average, victims are held for 20.5 months before escaping or being released.

The study also reports that 4.8 million people are victims of forced sexual exploitation. On average, victims are held for 23.4 months before escaping or being freed. The vast majority are women and girls, and children represent more than 20 percent of the victims.

By region, Africa has the highest rate of modern slavery, with 7.6 per 1,000 people. The rate is 6.1 per 1,000 people in Asia and the Pacific; 3.9 per 1,000 in Europe and Central Asia; 3.3 per 1,000 in the Arab states; and 1.9 per 1,000 in the Americas. Countries that are or have been recently ravaged by war experience higher levels of exploitation.

The ILO does not include in its definition of child labor those working in legal forms of employment. The definition used in the study includes work that is hazardous, demands too many hours, often deprives children of play and education, and puts their well being at risk. Despite the definition’s limited scope, the study still gives a picture of the staggering level of child labor around the globe.

According to the study, slightly less than half of children in child labor (72.5 million) are performing hazardous work that places their health, safety or moral development at risk. Over 19 million children between the ages of 5 and 11; over 16.3 million between 12 and 14; and 37 million between 15 and 17 are involved in hazardous work. The hours children are forced to work are also horrendous. Approximately 63.3 percent of children between 15 and 17 that are engaged in child labor are forced to work 43 hours or more per week.

Nearly a third of children involved in child labor are outside of the education system. Those who do attend school tend to perform more poorly than their nonworking peers. The time and energy spent working interferes with the ability to benefit fully from classroom hours and impedes study time outside the classroom.

As with modern slavery, a significant proportion of child labor is located in countries afflicted by conflict and disaster. Approximately 17 percent of children in war-torn countries are involved in child labor, nearly double the global average.

The countries included in the report as being affected by armed conflict include Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Iraq, Mali, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other countries, including Syria and Libya, are not included as estimates were not available.

In Africa, one in five children is involved in child labor, making it the region where child labor is most concentrated, followed by Asia and the Pacific. However, child labor is not limited to low-income regions. In fact, over half of affected children live in lower middle- and upper middle-income countries, and 1.3 percent of children in high-income countries are child laborers.

While the percentage of children involved in child labor has fallen slightly from 2012 globally, it has actually increased in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The epidemic of slavery and child labor is one aspect of capitalist exploitation. The International Labour Organization estimates that $150 billion in profits are generated in the private sector each year from forced labor.

The issue is exacerbated in countries that are victims to neocolonial exploitation and imperialist conquest. A video released by CNN this week showed youth being auctioned off as farm laborers in Libya, a country devastated by the US-backed war launched by the Obama administration.

A 2016 investigation by Amnesty International revealed that children as young as seven are working in perilous conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to mine cobalt that ends up in smartphones, cars and computers sold to millions across the world. The mines supply corporations such as Apple, Microsoft and Vodafone.

The United Nations and leaders of industrialized countries have only taken modest measures to tackle the issues of modern slavery and child labor. This epidemic is not a question of laws and reforms, but a consequence of capitalism.

Featured image is from Infinite Fire.

In Harare, Bulawayo and smaller Zimbabwean cities, hundreds of thousands of citizens joyfully took to the streets on Saturday, November 18, approving a Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF) military semi-coup that resolves a long-simmering faction fight within the ruling party and ends the extraordinary career of Robert Mugabe at the age of 93.

Initially refusing to resign, his rambling speech the following evening revealed a man either out of touch with reality, or attempting to compel from his enemies a full-fledged coup, or – as CNN speculated – delaying to ensure legal immunity and protection of his property from confiscation. Still, he faces a parliamentary impeachment process on November 21.

After more than 37 years in power in the Southern African country he led to liberation in 1980, Mugabe is being replaced by his long-standing Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) comrade, Emmerson Mnangagwa (aged 75). On Sunday at Zanu-PF’semergency central committee meeting, Mnangagwa was made president. To ease his departure, Mugabe might be offered exile in South Africa where his family and cronies also possess abundant luxury real estate, such as a seaside mansion near Durban’s airport.

But concerns immediately arise that celebration of the coup and at least momentary popular adoration of the army will relegitimise Mnangagwa’s brutal Zanu-PF network and thus slow a more durable transition to democracy and economic justice. Aside from a mass-based uprising to carry on Saturday’s momentum, the only other safeguard would be the (highly unlikely) appointment of a genuine,all-in national unity government, one that would acquire desperately-needed cash from both China and the main Western donors in Washington and the European Union.

A coup de Grace by ‘Crocodile’ Mnangagwa

In the context of a worsening financial liquidity crunch, the November 15 coup was catalyzed by Mugabe’s political over-reach: attempting to elevate his shopaholic wife “Gucci Grace” (aged 52) to the vice-presidency with the obvious intention of succession. Marching through the capital city Harare three days later, anti-Mugabe protesters carried professionally-produced signs including the message, “Leadership is not sexually transmitted.”

Widely despised for a role akin to Lady Macbeth’s, Grace Mugabe’s faction of Zanu-PF is known as “Generation 40” (G40), implying the readiness of a younger replacement team within the ruling party. Mugabe himself was most closely aligned to this group. In contrast, Mnangagwa leads the older “Team Lacoste” faction, whose logo-based signifier is his revealing nickname, “The Crocodile.”

Mnangagwa is widely mistrusted due to his responsibility for (and refusal to acknowledge) 1982-85 “Gukhurahundi” massacres of more than 20,000 people in the country’s western provinces (mostly members of the minority Ndebele ethnic group, whose handful of armed dissidents he termed “cockroaches” needing a dose of military “DDT”);his subversion of the 2008 presidential election which Mugabe initially lost; his subsequent heading of the Joint Operations Committee secretly running the country, sabotaging democratic initiatives; as well as for his close proximity– as then Defence Minister – to widespread diamond looting from 2008-16. Mugabe himself last year complained of revenue shortfalls from diamond mining in eastern Zimbabwe’s Marange fields:

“I don’t think we’ve exceeded US$2 billion or so, and yet we think that well over US$15 billion or more has been earned in that area.”

Not only was this vast scale of theft confirmed by local anti-corruption campaigner Farai Maguwu. In order for Mnangagwa to establish the main Marange joint venture – Sino Zimbabwe – with the notorious (and now apparently jailed) Chinese investor, Sam Pa, the army under Mnangagwa’s rule forcibly occupied the Marange fields. In November 2008, troops murdered several hundred small-scale artisanal miners there. (At a massacre solidarity visit to Marange on November 10, two dozen progressive activists – including Maguwu and 21 foreigners from a People’s Dialogue network that includes Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers – were arrested for trespassing, though they were later released after each paid a $100 fine.)

Mnangagwa had fought Rhodesian colonialism in the 1970s, and soon became one of Mugabe’s leading henchmen, rising to the vice presidency in 2014. But Mugabe fired him on November 6, signaling Grace’s ruthless ascent in spite of Chiwenga’s repeated warnings since early 2016. Three years ago, with Grace egging him on, Mugabe sacked another close revolutionary-era ally, vice president JoiceMujuru (62). (Mujuru subsequently launched a new party which subsequently showed no capacity to influence events, but she was expected to eventually forge an alliance with democratic opposition forces to contest the scheduled 2018 election.)

What with both economic and political degeneration accelerating, Mnangagwa’s firing was the catalyst for an emergency Beijing trip by his ally, army leader Constantino Chiwenga (61), for consultations with the Chinese army command. Mnangagwa received military training in China during Mao’s days, and China today has substantial assets in Zimbabwe, including repeated weapon sales and stakes in tobacco, infrastructure and mining, as well as its retail imports that continue to deindustrialize Zimbabwean manufacturing.

Beijing’s Global Times, which often parrots official wisdom, was increasingly wary of Mugabe. According to a contributor, Wang Hongwi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,

“Mnangagwa, a reformist, will abolish Mugabe’s faulty investment policy. In a country with a bankrupt economy, whoever takes office needs to launch economic reforms and open up to foreign investment… Chinese investment in Zimbabwe has also fallen victim to Mugabe’s policy and some projects were forced to close down or move to other countries in recent years, bringing huge losses.” (Hongwi did not mention whether Sam Pa represents the ethos of such Chinese investors.)

The sense thatMnangagwacould be a Zimbabwean version of market-liberaliser Deng Xiaoping – following Mugabe’s Mao routine – prevails in such circuits. The big question is whether, if Mnangagwa refuses to consider a unity government scenario, China will make available hard currency of a few hundred million dollars (it has more than $3 trillion in reserves) to stem the liquidity crisis.

A sense of such new benefactors’ potential generosity must have played a role in the coup plotters’ calculations. For Mnangagwa is not only being toasted in Beijing, but also by Tory geopolitical opportunists in London. Although many Britons object, their ambassador to Zimbabwe Catriona Laing has for three years attempted to “rebuild bridges and ensure that re-engagement succeeds to facilitate Mnangagwa’s rise to power” with a reported “$2 billion economic bail-out.”

The coup calculus

Chiwenga avoided an attempted police arrest at the Harare airport upon his return from Beijing. As the coup plan – initially scheduled for December prior to Zanu-PF’s next congress – was pushed forward, on November 13 he cautioned against “reckless utterances by politicians from the ruling party denigrating the military” – whom he termed “counter-revolutionary infiltrators” – and he insisted that Mugabe’s “targeting members of the party with a liberation background must stop.” Snubbing this warning the next day, the G40 maintained control of Zanu-PF’s machinery and issued a provocative statement highly critical of Mnangagwa and Chiwenga.

For such purposes, Mugabe’s erratic spin-doctor for most of the last two decades was Jonathan Moyo, a former US-trained academic. Moyo was responsible for some of Zanu-PF’s most extreme rhetorical attacks on political opponents, including media crackdowns a decade ago. But his prolific twitter feed suddenly went quiet on November 14 once ZDF tanks rolled into the city. The army rapidly occupied Mugabe’s main office and the national broadcaster, announcing to the country that the ZDF was in command and would ‘protect’ Mugabe while searching out the ‘criminals’ surrounding him. Moyo had repeatedly angered Chiwenga, even alleging several times that his 2015 doctoral thesis in ethics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal was authored by someone else.

The only armed resistance apparently came from a few Mugabe loyalists in the police force and Central Intelligence Organisation, and from Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo’s bodyguards, one of whom was murdered by army troops during Chombo’s arrest. Moyo and another G40 leader once considered potential presidential material, Saviour Kasukuwere, were apparently picked up early on November 15 and taken to the army barracks. According to an insider interviewed by journalist SiphoMasondo,

“People are romanticising the coup and saying it was not bloody. It was damn bloody. People are being beaten badly.”

On November 16, the society’s nervousness was expressed in a tweet by TendaiBiti (aged 51), a social democrat who in 2014 split from leading opposition figure Morgan Tsvangirai (65 and undergoing cancer treatment), after having served as finance minister in the 2009-13 government of national unity: “Over the years in making the case for a National Transitional Authority, have written a lot about the possibility of an implosion in Zim. However nothing I have written or read prepared me for the surreal reality of the last two days. It has simply been a nightmare, a period of uncertainty, anxiety and doubt.”

But after the dust began to settle and a mass march was called for November 18, Biti was ecstatic:

“Today the wananchi [citizenry] bathed in freedom. She was on the street in her thousands. Today the citizen was let loose and not a single stone was thrown. Not a single window was broken. Love and solidarity were palpable. You could cut the citizens’ happiness with a hack saw. Today the tank was an instrument of resistance and not of power retention. Tomorrow might be a nightmare but today we breathe freely.”

That nightmare – Mnangagwa’s new-found ability to relegitimise Zanu-PF with army support – is now unfolding, with only an economic meltdown to compel him to negotiate.

Economic meltdown or government of national unity?

That nightmare scenario reflects the dangers of post-Mugabe Zanu-PF rulers maintaining old habits, combining state asset stripping and dictatorial repression. This is most likely, given the traditions Mnangagwa and Chiwenga represent. Explained one pro-Mnangagwa Zanu-PFleader, Patrick Chinamasa,

“We have the majority in Parliament, we can expel the President alone and we are the ruling party, so where does a coalition come in? We don’t need them.” (In fact, to impeach Mugabe,as scheduled on November 21, a two-thirds majority will be required– so technically he is wrong, but it is the ruling party’s go-it-alone attitude that worries Zimbabweans.)

If donor aid to the new regime is not forthcoming, a desperation mentality will rapidly emerge, for economic barriers to bureaucratic looting are periodically reached in Zimbabwe. For example, when the world’s worst hyperinflation (500 billion percent) wiped out the former currency in 2008, new arrangements were required: in that case, the turn to the US dollar and rand. The only other option is recovering looted wealth by Mugabe and his cronies – but such an asset search might prove highly embarrassing to Mnangagwa and Chiwenga, too.

Late last year, $200 million worth of a dubious new currency (the ‘Bond note’) was introduced by the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank. The reason was that officially-accepted US dollars and South African rands, which most Zimbabweans have used since 2009, fell into increasingly short supply, causing payment-system blockages and renewing fear of hyper-inflation.

The elites and masses alike are withdrawing cash from the banks as fast as possible. They are now limited to as little as $20 daily withdrawals from their accounts, and regulations are periodically imposed to compel electronic purchases and incentivise cash savings. Instead, hoarding scarce hard currency under the matrass represents one form of storing value during crisis, since placing such funds in formal bank accounts risks Reserve Bank seizure. Other survival strategies include rapid purchases of consumer durables each pay day. There is also raging speculation in Bitcoin, real estate and the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, which was the world’s fastest-rising bourse in 2017 despite the economic decline, until last week when the market crashed.

If fresh financial liquidity is not provided in coming weeks, the formal economy and vast informal sector will suffer worse payments freezes and the black market will flourish to the point of panic, just as in late 2008. For nearly two decades, the Zimbabwe government has been in default on more than $9 billion of international debt and today is failing to pay foreign corporations the profit remittances they are due. Even the state’s strict restriction against importing those basic goods that should instead be manufactured within Zimbabwe has failed to ease the hard-currency shortage.

It appears that in this context, only the Zimbabwe government’s full-fledged relegitimation can attract sufficient foreign aid to avoid an economic meltdown. For this purpose, an ideal-type‘national unity’ scenario – which appears unlikely, but nevertheless worth contemplating – would have Chiwenga quickly return his troops to the barracks and Interim President Mnangagwa appoint two Zanu-PF vice presidents: Mujuru and, for ethnic balance, Dumisa Dabengwa (77) from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union party. The latter party is a revival of one Mugabe had crushed and co-opted in 1987, when he unsuccessfully attempted to establish one-party rule. Another Mnangagwa ally anticipated to rise to the top tier is Sydney Sekeramayi (73).

But most importantly, the unity regime would need to include at least three recently-reunited Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leaders: Tsvangirai as prime minister (his 2009-13 role), Biti in the finance ministry to raise support from Western donors, and Welshman Ncube (56) who enjoys widespread support among the Ndebele people.

If elections are indeed held as scheduled before mid-2018, the MDC could well defeat Zanu-PF in a free-and-fair vote. But whether and how quickly a ‘fresh start’ vote can be scheduled depends upon MDC negotiating power and the sense by Mnangagwa and his military stalwarts that in such a poll, they could repeat their decisive 2013 win (due largely to army mobilisation funded by the diamond theft), or steal it, as occurred in 2008 when Tsvangirai initially defeated Mugabe by more than 10% of the vote.

Not only are donors required, international tolerance will be needed on the country’s foreign debt and profit-repatriation arrears. In addition, there must be buy-in from regional neighbours in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), led this year by South Africa’s Jacob Zuma. Unlike earlier election controversies when – aside from Botswana’s leader – all of SADC and most of the African Union’s (AU’s) leaders supported Mugabe (leading Biti to term the larger grouping a ‘trade union of dictators’), no one has objected to the coup.

Indeed, following Chiwenga’s word play, African rulers won’t even term it a “coup” since that would lead to Zimbabwe’s automatic suspension from the AU plus new sanctions. Zuma and Mugabe have historically been very close allies but tellingly, neither the South African president nor his ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma – the former AU chairperson, now campaigning to succeed Jacob as ruling party leader in next month’s internal election – stepped in to defend Mugabe from Chiwenga.

Still, a widespread sentiment evident in urban Zimbabwe is that Zuma and SADC should stay out of the negotiations, given those historic ties – reflected in Zuma’s approval of Grace’s flight from justice after she beat up a Johannesburg model in August – as well as sub-imperialist power regularly wielded by Pretoria in the region.In any event, South Africa’s fiscal crisis is rapidly worsening as further junk ratings are anticipated from credit rating agencies in coming days, so it is far less likely that Zuma can chip in financial aid.

Zuma is also criticised for not halting periodic upsurges of anti-Zimbabwean xenophobic violence in South Africa, which in 2015 led to angry protests at South Africa’s High Commission in Harare. Meanwhile on November 18 at the Zimbabwe Embassy in Pretoria and High Commissions in Johannesburg and Cape Town (as well in London), thousands of protesters marched in solidarity with the Harare and Bulawayo rallies.

Bankruptcy for capitalism –and also for democracy and social justice?

Even before a new aid package is negotiated, two of the most crucial economic decisions a national unity government will face are whether to continue introducing $300 million worth of fast-devaluing Reserve Bank currency into the banking system this month, and whether to pay a massive fine to the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin (formerly of Goldman Sachs), is demanding immediate payment of $385 million – down from an initial $3.8 billion – by the country’s largest bank, Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe, following more than 15,000 separate cases of sanctions busting that date from the Bush and Obama regimes’ punishment of Mugabe for human rights violations.

In a third financial controversy, Biti suspects that his 2013-17 successor, Patrick Chinamasa (who was reshuffled from finance last month, into a new cybersecurity portfolio), fraudulently issued Treasury Bills and backed up the new currency with illegitimate African Export-Import Bank loans. Biti is calling for a full debt audit. To make matters worse, those whose savings were in the Harare stock market discovered that the coup week’s uncertainty left them 18% poorer, as the shares’ capital value fell from $15.1 billion to $12.4 billion, caused mainly by international investor panic selling.

Meanwhile, democratic activists are concerned that what once had been a formidable set of progressive civil society organisations – trade unions, urban community groups, women and youth – back in 1999 when their “Working People’s Convention” launched the MDC, can no longer influence this transition. The last attempt in 2016, a “This Flag” meme launched by local pastor Evan Mawarire, soon ran out of steam.

Moreover, warns Maguwu in a new essay, “Dawn of a New Error!,” the MDC is a “weak, bankrupt and defeated opposition” and if it enters a national unity government, will be co-opted just as from 2009-13. He begs his readers to recall that “Zimbabweans have struggled to replace Mugabe with a popular democratically elected leader since 2000. These efforts have been dashed by the military and the entire security establishment.”

But now that celebratory citizens have given the palace coup far more legitimacy than it deserves, it becomes s even more vital for progressives committed to democracy and social justice to redouble grassroots organising and generate crystal-clear demands, especially in the urban areas. (The rural peasantry suffers far tighter systems of socio-political control by Zanu-PF, so have never been reliable allies.)

If not, says International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe leader Munyaradzi Gwisai,

“There’s a potential that the Mnangagwa, MDC elites and the military could be part of a national unity government. Ultimately they are also scared of the working class, because austerity could lead to revolts.”

As Harare activist Tom Gumede wrote me privately on November 17 just before the masses hit the streets, “This is the time for workers, students and the poor of Zimbabwe to build a formidable unity for the future beyond Mugabe. A fractured population will lose the battles of the future… Another Zimbabwe is Possible. Through mass action the resistant Mugabe will finally be dislodged. His current cover under the Constitution will be blown up when people have spoken beyond the military takeover… Viva People Power and No to Elitist Transitions.”

***

Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of Uneven Zimbabwe: A study of finance, development and underdevelopment (1998) and co-author of Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted nationalism, neoliberalism and the search for social Justice(2003).

All images in this article are from the author.

As the world focuses on isolated incidents of terrorism taking place in Western countries, the wholesale slaughter being committed by Western countries against others generally goes unnoticed unless being pinned on the victim nation. However, even with Americans and other Westerners paying scant attention to Iraq and Syria, the conflict in Yemen scarcely gets a mention except in communities of human rights activists and geopolitical commentators.

Even after Yemen has overtaken Syria as the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, most of the world has remained deathly silent about the situation unfolding there.

While not overwhelmingly involved with troops, bombing campaigns, and the like in the way that it is in Syria or Iraq, the United States is nonetheless complicit in the destruction of an entire country by providing intelligence, weapons, and political support to Saudi Arabia and the GCC in their war against the Yemeni people. In addition to that support, however, the United States has, at times, also contributed limited direct military support to the Saudi effort.

As Raf Sanchez of the Telegraph summarizes,

More than 50,000 Yemeni children are likely to die by the end of the year as a result of disease and starvation caused by the stalemated war in the country, Save the Children has warned.

Humanitarian groups estimate that around 130 children are dying each day in the Arab world’s poorest country as it grapples with famine and the largest cholera outbreak in modern history.

Around 40,000 children are estimated to have died already this year as a result of severe acute malnutrition and Save the Children projects that figure will be above 50,000 by the end of the Christmas period.

. . . . .

The calculations were made before Saudi Arabia tightened an already severe blockade on rebel-held parts of the country in response to a missile fired from rebel territory towards Riyadh airport.

The blockade has closed the port of Hodeidah, a key entry point for food, and the airport in the capital Sanaa, where humanitarian flights have been landing to deliver aid and medicine. Mr Kirolos warned that “unless the blockade is lifted immediately more children will die”.

Food shortages in Yemen have filled overcrowded hospitals with malnourished children, their skin often loose from hunger and with ribs jutting out. Malnourished children are especially vulnerable to death as a result of cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases.

But while the mainstream Western press only mentions the Yemeni crisis in isolated articles, absent are the images of the Yemeni people who are being bombed, shot, tortured, starved and otherwise suffering from malnutrition and other war-related illnesses.

“What would happen if a president ordered a nuclear strike, but the commanding general refused, believing it to be illegal? The truth is, no one knows.”

If he had lived, President John F. Kennedy would have been 100 years old this year.  At Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, his family would be raising a glass in his honor.

But as we all know, he was murdered in Dallas, Texas on this date – November 22^nd – in 1963.  A true war hero twice over, he risked his life to save his men in World War II, and then, after a radical turn toward peace-making in the last year of his life, he died in his own country at the hands of his domestic enemies as a soldier in a non-violent struggle for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world.

But we can still celebrate, mourn, and offer thanksgiving for his courageous witness.  When we gather tomorrow to give thanks, we should remember today – the profound significance of the date – and the absent presence of a man whose death, dark and bloody as it was, is a sign of hope in these dark times. For if John Kennedy had not had the spiritual conscience to secretly carry-on a back channel letter correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev, facilitated by Pope John XXIII, we very well might not be here, having been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.

Hope?  Not because he was assassinated, but why he was assassinated.

While there is much media focus on the release of more of the JFK files, they are beside the point.  They were withheld all these years to dribble out the clock on an endless pseudo-debate about who killed President Kennedy.  We know who killed him: the national security state, led by the CIA, killed him, not Lee Harvey Oswald.  It was a coup d’état purposely conducted in plain sight to send a message that every president since has heeded: Your job is to make war and threaten nuclear annihilation for the Deep State elites.  Follow orders or else.  They have followed.

If you find my assertion about the CIA audacious and absurd, first read James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a book widely regarded as the best book on the assassination and its meaning.  Read it very closely and slowly.  Check all his sources, read his endnotes, and analyze his logic.  Approach his meticulous research as if you agreed with Gandhi’s saying that truth is God and God is truth. Try to refute Douglass. You will be stymied. Then read David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government for further clarification. You will come away from these two books profoundly shaken to your core.  Be a truth-seeker, if you are not one already.

Or if you prefer, call me a “conspiracy theorist,” as the CIA wants, since it was the Agency that produced CIA Dispatch # 1035-960.  “Most Americans,” writes Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, “will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda campaign initiated in 1967.”  This program was aimed at critics of the Warren Commission.  The CIA requested that its own people and corporate media accomplices, including all its journalist assets, besmirch the good names of anyone who dared to point out the absurdities in the government claim that Lee Harvey Oswald, a man working for the CIA as a fall guy, could have killed Kennedy. Critics were branded as communists. “In the shadow of McCarthyism and the Cold War,” deHaven-Smith continues, “this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy-theory label with powerfully negative associations.”

So be careful how you use the term, if you don’t want to be working with the assassins to silence their critics.

But my intention here is not to debate the obvious. In a season of thanksgiving and hope, I want to remind you to remember and honor JFK.  Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents within his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words in JFK and the Unspeakable, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make crystal clear.  As a result, the unspeakable deep-state forces murdered him.  He knew they would, but as a man of great courage, he knew he must follow the words of Abraham Lincoln dear to his heart: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming.  If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Hope comes from facing the truth, not from fleeing from it.  The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, called our denial of the truth about JFK and his turn toward peace that led to his murder by forces within his own government, the “unspeakable”: “the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”  We are living in that abyss today.  But we can still speak; we can refuse to be silenced.  And in speaking up we will find hope.

Jim Douglass asks: “How can we take hope from a peacemaking president’s assassination by his own national security state?”

He answers:

“The story of why John Kennedy died encircles the earth.  Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed.  But he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling.  That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given us as his vision.”

His life’s story is the story of the courage to change radically and turn toward truth and peace-making no matter what the cost.

We should all raise our glasses in a Thanksgiving toast to John Kennedy.  In his story is ours; the hope he bequeathed to us through his courageous death is one of hope for life.  Our gratitude to JFK must follow with our commitment to oppose the killers in our own government who want to silence us all, now and forevermore.

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

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Contact at [email protected].

The alliance is beset by failures. Longstanding US/Israeli plans to redraw the Middle East map failed to achieve its objective so far.

Libya in North Africa remains an ungovernable cauldron of violence. Shias close to Iran run Iraq, not Sunnis like under Saddam Hussein.

US, NATO, Saudi, Israeli war on Syria failed – a major defeat for the imperial alliance.

US-orchestrated Saudi war on Yemen only achieved the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, nothing else. Houthi fighters remain strong and resilient after two-and-a-half years of aggression on the nation.

Qatar foiled the Saudi-led embargo on the country. The US, Israeli, Saudi plot to reshape the Middle East remains in place – despite consistent failures.

So what’s next? On Sunday, Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo, the session called by Riyadh to enlist support for challenging Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis, plotting greater regional war and turbulence.

“We will not stand idly by in the face of Iran’s aggression,” Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubel roared, adding:

“Iran created agents in the region, such as the Houthi and Hezbollah militias, in total disregard for all international principles” – an utter perversion of truth.

Egyptian foreign affairs minister/Arab League secretary-general Aboul Gheit sounded like a US/Israeli/Saudi puppet, saying

“Iranian threats have exceeded all boundaries and are pushing the region toward the abyss.”

Following Sunday talks, an Arab League statement said it “does not intend to declare war against Iran for the moment,” ominously warning that “Saudi Arabia has the right to defend its territory” – despite facing no external threats.

From Tehran on Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted:

“Working with Turkish & Russian counterparts to build on ceasefire we achieved in Syria & preparing for inclusive dialog among Syrians.”

“Irony is KSA accuses Iran of destabilization, while itself fuels terrorists, wages war on Yemen, blockades Qatar & foments crisis in Lebanon.”

Israeli military intelligence-connected DEBKAfile (DF) discussed London media reports, claiming Saudi king Salman intends naming crown prince Muhammad bin Salman his successor in days, perhaps this week.

DF quoted London’s Daily Mail, saying the new monarch once in power intends “start(ing) a fire in Lebanon, in the hope of Israeli military backing to crush Hezbollah, promis(ing) Israel billions of dollars if they agree.”

According to an unnamed source, the kingdom can’t confront Hezbollah without Israeli help. Washington would have to agree. Israel won’t attack Iran or Lebanon without US permission and direct or indirect involvement – a huge risk likely involving Russia, aiding Tehran like its Syria offensive against US-supported terrorists.

Aside from Israeli nuclear weapons (never used so far), Iran is likely more powerful militarily than Israel and Riyadh combined. If Washington joins their alliance, it’s another story altogether, risking Russian involvement, possibly turning greater regional conflict into global war.

According to the Daily Mail account, Saudi crown prince Salman and Netanyahu consider Iran the region’s greatest threat – despite the Islamic Republic posing none at all.

Riyadh and Tel Aviv want their major Shia run, sovereign independent rival eliminated. They disagree on strategy, according to DF, saying:

Billions of Saudi dollars won’t “persuade Israel to send the IDF to fight a war except in its direct national interest, even though Israel and Saudi leaders and military chiefs” agree about an Iranian threat – invented, not real.

According to an unnamed Daily Mail source,

“MBS (the Saudi crown prince) is convinced that he has to hit Iran and Hezbollah. Contrary to the advice of the royal family elders, that’s (his) next target. Hence why the ruler of Kuwait privately calls him the raging bull.”

“MBS’s plan is to start the fire in Lebanon, but he’s hoping to count on Israeli military backing. He has already promised Israel billions of dollars in direct financial aid if they agree.”

“MBS cannot confront Hezbollah in Lebanon without Israel. Plan B is to fight Hezbollah in Syria.”

AIPAC is involved in what’s going one, likely to enlist Trump administration support for war on Iran and Hezbollah, saying:

“For more than 30 years, Hezbollah has served as a de-facto arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Its unmatched military and political influence in Lebanon allow it to: (1) facilitate Iran’s revolutionary goals, (2) promote the spread of Iran’s anti-Israel and anti-American ideologies, and (3) ensure that the Lebanese government is unable to stop the transfer of Iranian weapons across the Lebanese-Syrian border.”

“In addition, it directly threatens Israel, props up the brutal Assad regime in Syria and jeopardizes Lebanon’s sovereignty.”

Iran and Hezbollah threaten no one. Washington, Israel and the Saudis threaten regional and global war.

Hostile rhetoric against Iran and Hezbollah from Washington, AIPAC, Israel and Riyadh may be prelude for greater regional conflict.

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At a Saturday Halifax, Nova Scotia International Security Forum, US Strategic Command head General John Hyten said all top Pentagon commanders are trained to disobey “illegal orders,” including himself, adding:

“I provide advice to the president, he will tell me what to do. And if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen?”

“I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, that’s illegal.’ And guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options, with a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”

“If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.”

Even as commander-in-chief, no US president would order a nuclear or other military strike without input and advice by and agreement from other administration officials and top Pentagon commanders.

War isn’t the prerogative of a single individual in America and most other countries. It takes months of planning to launch one. It isn’t waged ad hoc.

Hyten’s remarks sounded like the theater of the absurd. When America intends waging war, international, constitutional and US statute laws are ignored – including the US Army Field Manual 27-10, incorporating Nuremberg Principles, stating:

Any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished.

The defense of obeying superior orders is inadmissible. Provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel to the highest levels – including the president, defense secretary and joint chiefs of staff.

All US post-WW II wars were acts of naked aggression against nations threatening no one. None were waged legally.

Washington rules flagrantly violate the most important of core principles, ones relating to war and peace, attacking other nonbelligerent countries repeatedly on the phony pretexts of protecting national security, humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, and/or democracy building. Utter rubbish in all cases!

As US air force commander, Hyten is responsible for authorizing illegal terror-bombing in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia – all acts of naked aggression on the phony pretext of combating terrorism.

He’s culpable for massacring tens of thousands of civilians, destroying vital infrastructure, and turning areas targeted to wastelands – supporting terrorist groups, not combating them.

He’s a war criminal like all other Pentagon commanders at all levels, in all branches of service. So are most members of Congress for authorizing the funding of illegal wars, and all US presidents for ordering them.

America wages permanent war on humanity, the highest of high crimes. Hyten piously claiming he won’t obey an illegal war is belied by his aggressive actions.

He along with most other US government and military officials remain unaccountable for Nuremberg-level crimes.

Through its top official, Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia continues a wave of internal arrests, having seized nearly $800 billion in assets and bank accounts. A few days later, MBS attempted to demonstrate his authority by summoning Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Saudi Arabia, where he was forced to resign on Saudi state TV. Trump tweeted support for Bin Salman’s accusations against Iran and Hezbollah, and the future Saudi king even obtained Israel’s secret support. Iran, meanwhile, denies any involvement in Lebanon’s domestic affairs or involvement with the ballistic missile launched by Houthi rebels towards Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport a few days ago. Meanwhile, Trump, Putin and Xi met recently and seem to have decided the fate of the region in an exercise of realism and pragmatism.

News that upends the course of events has now become commonplace over the last few months. However, even by Middle East standards, this story is something new. The affair surrounding Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hariri generated quite a bit of commotion. Hariri had apparently been obliged to announce his resignation on Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya news channel while being detained in Riyadh. His most recent interview seemed to betray some nervousness and fatigue, as one would expect from a person under enormous stress from forced imprisonment. In his televised resignation statement, Hariri specified that he was unable to return to Lebanon due to some sort of a threat to his person and his family by operatives in Lebanon of Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese security authorities, however, have stated that they are not aware of any danger faced by Hariri.

In an endless attempt to regain influence in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has once again brought about results directly opposite to those intended. Immediately after receiving confirmation that the resignation had taken place in Saudi Arabia, the entire Lebanese political class demanded that Hariri return home to clarify his position, meet with the president and submit his resignation in person. Saudi actions have served to consolidate a united front of opposition factions and paved the way for the collapse of Saudi influence in the country, leaving a vacuum to be conveniently filled by Iran. Once again, as with Yemen and in Syria, the intentions of the Saudis have dramatically backfired.

This Saudi interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country has stirred up unpredictable scenarios in the Middle East, just at the time that tensions were cooling in Syria.

Hariri’s detention comes from far away and is inextricably linked to what has been happening over the past few months in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman, son of King Salman, began his internal purge of the Kingdom’s elite by removing from the line of succession Bin Nayef, a great friend of the US intelligence establishment (Brennan and Clapper). Bin Nayef was a firm partner of the US deep state. Saudi Arabia has for years worked for the CIA, advancing US strategic goals in the region and beyond. Thanks to the cooperation between Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Bin Nayef, and US intelligence agencies, Washington has for years given the impression of fighting against Islamist terrorist while actually weaponizing jihadism since the 1980s by deploying it against rival countries like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Iraqi government in 2014, the Syrian state in 2012, and Libya’s Gaddafi in 2011.

MBS has even detained numerous family-related princes, continuing to consolidate power around himself. Even Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, ended up caught in MBS’s net, rightly accused of being one of the most corrupt people in the Kingdom. It is speculated that family members and billionaires are detained at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, with guests and tourists promptly ejected days before the arrests began. Mohammed bin Salman’s actions are not slowing down, even after seizing $800 billion in accounts, properties and assets.

MBS is intensifying his efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, which is a drain on Saudi finances, lifting the naval blockade of the Port of Aden. Not only that, the two main Syrian opposition leaders, Ahmad Jarba and Riyadh Hijab, have been arrested by Riyadh in an effort to demonstrate to Putin the good will of MBS in seeking to resolve the Syrian conflict. Not surprisingly, King Salman, in a frantic search for a solution to the two conflicts that have lashed his reputation as well as the wealth and alliances of the Saudi kingdom, flew to Moscow to seek mediation with Putin, the new master of the Middle East.

MBS has undertaken an anti-corruption campaign for international as well as domestic purposes. At the national level, the collapse of oil prices, coupled with huge military spending, forced the royal family to seek alternatives for the future of the Kingdom in terms of sustainability, earnings and profits. MBS’s Vision 2030 aims to diversify revenue in order to free Saudi Arabia from its dependence on oil. This is a huge ask for a nation that has been thriving for seventy years from an abundance of resources simply found under its ground. This delicate balance of power between the royal family and its subjects is maintained by the subsidies granted to the local population that has allowed the Kingdom to flourish in relative peace, even during the most delicate periods of the Arab Spring in 2011. There is an underlying understanding in Saudi Arabia that so long as the welfare of the population is guaranteed, there should be no threat to the stability of the royal family. It is no wonder that after losing two wars, and with oil prices at their lowest, MBS has started to worry about his future, seeking to purge the elites opposed to him.

The Kingdom’s reality is quickly changing under MBS, the next Saudi king, who is trying to anticipate harder times by consolidating power around himself and correcting his errors brought on by incompetence and his excessive confidence in the Saudi military as well as in American backing. The ballistic missile that hit Riyadh was launched by the Houthis in Yemen after 30 months of indiscriminate bombing by the Saudi air force. This act has shown how vulnerable the Kingdom is to external attack, even at the hand of the poorest Arab country in the world.

In this context, Donald Trump seems to be capitalizing on Saudi weakness, fear, and the need to tighten the anti-Iranian alliance. What the American president wants in return for support of MBS is as simple as it comes: huge investments in the US economy together with the purchase of US arms. MBS obliged a few months ago, investing into the US economy to the tune of more than $380 billion over ten years. Trump’s goal is to create new jobs at home, increase GDP, and boost the economy, crucial elements for his re-election in 2020. Rich allies like Saudi Arabia, finding themselves in a tight fix, are a perfect means of achieving this end.

Another important aspect of MBS’s strategy involves the listing of Aramco on the NYSE together with the switch to selling oil for yuan payments. Both decisions are fundamental to the United States and China, and both bring with them a lot of friction. MBS is at this moment weak and needs all the allies and support he can get. For this reason, a decision on Aramco or the petroyuan would probably create big problems with Beijing and Washington respectively. The reason why MBS is willing to sell a small stock of Aramco relates to his efforts to gin up some money. For this reason, thanks to the raids on the accounts and assets of the people arrested by MBS, Saudi Arabia has raised over $800 billion, certainly a higher figure than any sale of Aramco shares would have brought.

This move allows MBS to postpone a decision on listing Aramco on the NYSE as well as on whether to start accepting yuan for payment of oil. Holding back on the petroyuan and Aramco’s initial public offering is a way of holding off both Beijing and Washington but without at the same time favouring one over the other. Economically, Riyadh cannot choose between selling oil for dollars on the one hand and accepting payment in another currency on the other. It is a nightmare scenario; but some day down the road, the Saudi royals will have to make a choice.

The third party to this situation is Israel in the figure of Netanyahu, Donald Trump’s great friend and supporter right from the beginning of his electoral campaign. Trump’s victory brought positive returns to the investment the Israeli leader had made in him. Ever since Trump won the election, the US has employed harsh words against Iran, turning away from the positive approach adopted by Obama that managed to achieve the Iran nuclear deal framework. Nevertheless, the Israeli prime minister has had to deal with numerous problems at home, with a narrow parliamentary majority and several members of his government under investigation for corruption.

Donald Trump pursued a very aggressive policy against Tehran during the election campaign, then went on to annul the Iran nuclear deal a few weeks ago. The decision is now for Congress to certify, with a difficult mediation between European allies (other than China and Russia), who are opposed to ending the deal, and the Israelis, who can count on the support of many senators thanks to their lobbying efforts. Israel, for its part, sees in Saudi Arabia and MBS the missing link between Saudi Wahhabism and Israeli Zionism. Various private cablegrams leaked to the press have shown how Israeli diplomats around the world were instructed to support Saudi  accusations of Iran interfering in Lebanon’s internal affairs.

The interests of MBS and Netanyahu seem to dovetail quite nicely in Syria and Yemen as well as with regard to Iran and Hezbollah. The two countries have a common destiny by virtue of the fact that neither alone can deal decisively with Hezbollah in Syria or Lebanon, let alone Iran. Rouhani himself has said that Iran fears American strength and power alone, knowing that Saudi Arabia and Israel are incapable of defeating Tehran.

Trump’s approval of the arrests carried out by MBS is based on a number of factors. The first involves the investments in the economy that will be coming America’s way. The other, certainly less known, concerns the subterranean battle that has been occurring between the Western elites for months. Many of Clinton’s top money sources are billionaires arrested by MBS, with stock options in various major banks, insurance companies, publishing groups, and American television groups, all openly anti-Trump. In this sense, the continuation of Trump’s fight with a portion of the elite can be seen with the halting of the merger of AT&T and Time Warner involving CNN.

Trump seems to be accompanying Saudi and Israeli urgings for war with multiple intentions, potentially having a plan for a broader, regional and global agreement between the parties.

At a regional level, Trump first supported the Saudi crusade against Qatar, resolved with Riyadh not getting Qatar to accede to any of its advanced demands. During the crisis, Doha approached Tehran and Moscow, who immediately took advantage of the situation to establish trade relations and commence negotiations with Qatar to tame its terrorist influence in the region, especially in the Syrian conflict. Turkey and Qatar have practically announced a military alliance, cementing a new front that includes China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Qatar, now potentially all on the same side of the barricades, opposed to Saudi dictates and Israel’s efforts to foment war with Iran.

With the US withdrawal from the region, as is increasingly evident from Trump’s reluctance to embark on a Middle East conflict, Israel and Saudi Arabia are increasing their desperate cries against Iran, observing how the gains of the resistance axis have led Tehran to dominate the region with its allies. The visit of King Salman to Russia, and the four meetings between Putin and Netanyahu, give the idea of which capital is in charge in the region. This all represents an epochal change that further isolates Riyadh and Tel Aviv, two countries that represent the heart of chaos and terror.

The Saudi attempt to isolate Qatar has failed miserably, and the continuous effort to paint Iran as the main cause of tension in the region seems to have reached a point of no return, with the latest stunt involving Hariri. Sunnis, Christians and Shiites agree on one point only: that the premier must return home. Riyadh hopes to light the fuse of a new civil war in the region, with Israel hoping to take advantage of the chaos brought about by an attack on Hezbollah. This is not going to happen, and the disappointment of the House of Saud and the Israeli prime minister will not change anything. Without a green light from Washington and a promise from Uncle Sam to intervene alongside his Middle East allies, the Israelis and Saudis are aware that they have neither the means nor strength to attack Iran or Hezbollah.

Trump is playing a dangerous game; but there seems to be some degree of coordination with the other giants on the international scene. The main point is it is impossible for Washington to be an active part in any conflict in the region, or to change the course of events in a meaningful way. The “End of history” ended years ago. US influence is on the decline, and Xi Jinping and Putin have shown great interest in the future of the region. In recent months, the Russian and Iranian militaries, together with the Chinese economic grip on the region, have shown a collective intention to replace years of war, death and chaos with peace, prosperity and wealth.

MBS and Netanyahu are having a hard time dealing with this new environment that will inevitably proclaim Iran the hegemon in the region. Time is running out for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and both countries are faced with enormous internal problems while being unable to change the course of events in the region without the full intervention of their American ally, something practically impossible nowadays.

The new course of the multipolar world, together with Trump’s America First policy, seems to have hit hardest those countries that placed all their bets on the continuing economic and military dominance of the United States in the region. Other countries like Qatar, Lebanon and Turkey have started to understand the historical change that is going on, and have slowly been making the switch, realizing in the process the benefits of a multipolar world order, which is more conducive to mutually beneficial cooperation between countries. The more Saudi Arabia and Israel push for war against Iran, the more they will isolate themselves. This will serve to push their own existence to the brink of extinction.

Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies.

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

Featured image is from the author.