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While the mainstream media focus on ISIS extremists, a threat that has gone virtually unreported is that your life savings could be wiped out in a massive derivatives collapse. Bank bail-ins have begun in Europe, and the infrastructure is in place in the US.  Poverty also kills. 

[Featured image: Head of US armed forces General Martin Dempsey, Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman Senator Lindsey Graham and US Vice President Joe Biden have all admitted that their close regional allies (especially the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey) finance ISIS.]

“It is always difficult to play a double game: declaring a fight against terrorists and simultaneously trying to use some to place pieces on the Middle Eastern chess board to pursue their own interests … [but do the] so-called moderate bandits behead people moderately?” – Vladimir Putin (2015)

Reports that US and British aircraft carrying arms to ISIS were shot down by Iraqi forces (Iraqi News 2015) were met with shock and denial in western countries. Yet few in the Middle East doubt that Washington is playing a ‘double game’ with its proxy armies in Syria. A Yemeni AnsarAllah leader says ‘Wherever there is U.S. interference, there is al Qaeda and ISIS. It’s to their advantage’ (al-Bukaiti 2015). However key myths remain important, especially to western audiences. Engaging with those myths calls for reason and evidence, not just assertion.

There is no doubt that the Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East hate the terrorist monstrosity called ISIS, ISIL or DAESH. Polling by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found that 99% of Lebanese, 94% of Jordanians and 84% of Palestinians had an ‘unfavourable’ view of ISIS. As Lebanon’s constitutional system requires sectarian identification it was also found that 98% of Lebanese Sunni Muslims rejected ISIS (Poushter 2015). That latter finding discredits the common western assertion that ISIS somehow springs from Sunni communities. Less than 1% in Lebanon, 3% in Jordan and 6% in Palestine viewed the banned terrorist group favourably. The remainder did not express an opinion. Of all Syria’s neighbours, Turkey had the lowest ‘unfavourable’ view of ISIS, at 73%; the favourable score was 8% (Poushter 2015). The aim of this chapter is to help clarify what role Washington has had in creating or turning loose this Frankenstein’s monster.

Washington maintains two closely linked myths as regards terrorism in the Middle East. Then there is a ‘fall-back’ story. The first ‘existential myth’ is that, from 2014, the US became engaged in a war against extremist terrorists, in both Iraq and Syria. This followed several years of trying to topple the Syrian Government by backing illegal armed groups, which it calls ‘moderate’. Through this myth the US claims to be playing a protective role for the benefit of the peoples of the region. The second myth is that there is a significant difference between the ‘moderate rebels’ the US arms, finances and trains, and the extremist terrorists (DAESH or ISIS) it claims to be fighting.

These claims represented a shift in the rationale for the war on Syria, from one of ‘humanitarian intervention’ to a revival of the Bush era ‘war on terror’. The ‘fall back’ story, advanced by some of Washington’s domestic critics, is that US practice in the region has created a climate of resentment amongst orthodox Sunni Muslim communities, and the extremist groups emerged as a type of ‘organic reaction’ from those communities to repeated US interventions. This story hides the more damaging conclusion that Washington and its allies directly created the extremist groups.

However there is little point in simply asserting that last version, without evidence. The ‘existential myth’ of a western war on terrorism is so insistent and pervasive, and backed by such a commitment in political capital, arms and finance, that it is very difficult for western audiences to accept this new ‘war’ might be a charade. Further, diplomacy requires that stated policy positions be pursued to their logical conclusions, and that the aims be tested. For these reasons I suggest we should document the key elements of evidence, on Washington’s relationship with the sectarian terrorists. After that we can draw better informed conclusions.

It is certainly true that prominent ISIS leaders were held in US prisons. The Afghan recruiter for ISIS, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, spent three years in the US prison at Guantanamo (Bienaimé 2015). ISIS leader, Ibrahim al-Badri (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) is said to have been held for between one and two years at Camp Bucca in Iraq (Giovanni 2014). In 2006, as al-Baghdadi and others were released, the Bush administration announced its plan for a ‘New Middle East’, a plan which would employ sectarian violence as part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ in the region (Nazemroaya 2006). While there have been claims that al-Baghdadi is a CIA or Mossad trained agent, these have not yet been backed up with evidence.

Nevertheless, according to Seymour Hersh’s article, ‘The Redirection’, the US planned to make use of ‘moderate Sunni states’, in particular the Saudis, to contain alleged ‘Shiia gains’ in Iraq brought about by the 2003 US invasion. These ‘moderate Sunni’ forces would carry out clandestine operations to weaken Iran and Hezbollah, key enemies of Israel (Hersh 2007). This plan brought the Saudis and Israel closer as, for somewhat different reasons, both fear Iran.

In mid-2012, US intelligence reported two important facts about the violence in Syria. Firstly, most of the armed ‘insurgency’ was being driven by extremist al Qaeda groups, and second, the sectarian aim of those groups was ‘exactly’ what the US and its allies wanted. The DIA wrote:

‘The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria … There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers [The West, Gulf monarchies and Turkey] to the [Syrian] opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime’ (DIA 2012).

The US also observed (and certainly did not stop) the channelling of arms from Benghazi in Libya to ‘al Qaeda groups’ in Syria, in August 2012. These arms were detailed as including 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 rounds and 400 howitzers missiles, of 125mm and 155mm calibre, all shipped to the Ports of Banias and Borj Islam, in Syria (Judicial Watch 2015). According to Michael Flynn, the former head of the DIA, and consistent with that intelligence, President Obama made a ‘wilful decision’ to support al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other ‘jihadist’ groups (Newman 2015). This all confirms motive, complicity and consistency of the process, from the early days of the Syrian conflict, building on former President Bush’s ‘New Middle East’ plan. Washington covertly approved the arming of al Qaeda groups in Syria, seeing its own advantage in that.

Probably the most convincing confirmation of US complicity with its terrorist ‘enemy’ has been the admissions from several senior officials that their main regional allies have financed ISIS. Those officials include the US Vice-President, the head of the US Armed Forces and the Chair of the US Armed Forces Committee. In September 2014 General Martin Dempsey, head of the US military, told a Congressional hearing ‘I know major Arab allies who fund [ISIS]’ (Rothman 2014). Senator Lindsey Graham, of the Armed Services Committee, responded with a justification, ‘They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t fight [Syrian President] Assad, they were trying to beat Assad’ (Rothman 2014; Washington’s Blog 2014). These were honest, if criminal, admissions.

The next month, US Vice President Joe Biden went a step further, explaining that Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia ‘were so determined to take down Assad … they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad … [including] al Nusra and al Qaeda and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world … [and then] this outfit called ISIL’ (RT 2014; Usher 2014). Once again, these were consistent and credible admissions, except that Biden sought to exempt the US from this operation by blaming key allies. That caveat is simply not credible. The Saudis in particular are politically dependent on Washington and could not mount any major initiative without US approval. Not only that, the US systematically controls, by purchase contract and re-export license, the use of its weapons (Export.Gov 2015).

Washington’s relationship with the Saudis, as a divisive sectarian force in the region against Arab nationalism, goes back to the 1950s, when Winston Churchill introduced the Saudi King to President Eisenhower. More recently, British General Jonathan Shaw acknowledged the contribution of Saudi Arabia’s extremist ideology: ‘this is a time bomb that, under the guise of education. Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money’, Shaw said (Blair 2014). He was right.

Other evidence undermines western attempts to maintain a distinction between what came to be called the ‘moderate rebels’, by 2013 openly armed and trained by the US, and supposedly more extreme groups such as Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS. While there has indeed been some rivalry, the absence of real ideological difference is best shown by cooperation and mergers. For example the collection of US-backed groups called the ‘Free Syrian Army’ fought alongside ISIS and against the Syrian Army for several months in 2013, to gain control of Syria’s Menagh air base, near Aleppo (Paraszczuk 2013). Hoff points out that one of the ISIS commanders in the Menagh operation, Chechen Abu Omar al Shisani, ‘received American military training as part of an elite Georgian army unit in 2006’ and continued to receive US support in 2013, through his FSA alliance (Hoff 2015).

Long term cooperation between these ‘moderate rebels’ and the foreign-led Jabhat al-Nusra was seen around Daraa in the south, along the mountainous Lebanese border, in Homs-Idlib, along the Turkish border and in and around Aleppo. The words Jabhat al Nusra actually mean ‘support front’, that is, foreign support for the Syrian Islamists. Back in December 2012, as Jabhat al Nusra was banned in various countries, 29 of these groups reciprocated the solidarity in their declaration: ‘We are all Jabhat al-Nusra’ (West 2012). Soon after the 29 group signatories became ‘more than 100’ (Zelin 2012). There was never any real ideological difference between these sectarian anti-government groups.

The decline of the ‘Free Syrian Army’ network and the renewed cooperation between al Nusra and the string of reinvented US and Saudi backed groups (Dawud, the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionary Front, Harakat Hazm) helped draw attention to Israel’s support for al Nusra, around the occupied Golan Heights. Since 2013 there have been many reports of ‘rebel’ fighters, including those from al Nusra, being treated in Israeli hospitals (Zoabi 2014). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even publicised his visit to wounded ‘rebels’ in early 2014. That led to a public ‘thank you’ from a Turkey-based ‘rebel’ leader, Mohammed Badie (Israel Today 2014). Semi-covertly, Israel backed all the armed groups against Syria, occasionally assisting them with its own missile attacks (Kais 2013).

The UN peacekeeping force based in the occupied Golan reported its observations of the Israeli Defence Forces ‘interacting with’ al Nusra fighters at the border (Fitzgerald 2014). At the same time, Israeli arms were captured by Syrian forces from the extremist groups (Kais 2012; Winer 2013). In November 2014 members of the Druze minority in the Golan protested against Israeli hospitals being used to help wounded al Nusra and ISIS fighters (Zoabi 2014). This led to questions by the Israeli media, as to whether ‘Israel does, in fact, hospitalize members of al-Nusra and Daesh [ISIS]’. A military spokesman’s reply was hardly a denial: ‘In the past two years the Israel Defence Forces have been engaged in humanitarian, life-saving aid to wounded Syrians, irrespective of their identity’ (Zoabi 2014). In fact, not even a humble farmer gets across the heavily militarised Occupied Golan border to retrieve a stray goat. ‘Humanitarian’ treatment for al Qaeda terrorists is different.

The artificial distinction between ‘rebel’ and ‘extremist’ groups has been mocked by multiple reports of large scale defections and transfer of weapons, to the extremists. In July 2014 one thousand armed men in the Dawud Brigade defected to ISIS in Raqqa (Hamadee and Gutman 2014; Ditz 2014). In November defections to Jabhat al Nusra from the US-backed Syrian Revolutionary Front were reported (Newman 2014; Sly 2014).

In December, Adib Al-Shishakli, representative at the Gulf Cooperation Council of the exile ‘Syrian National Coalition’, said ‘opposition fighters’ were ‘increasingly joining’ ISIS ‘for financial reasons’ (Zayabi 2014). In that same month, the Al Yarmouk Shuhada Brigades, backed and trained for two years by US officers, were reported as defecting to ISIS, which had by this time began to establish a presence in Syria’s far south (OSNet 2014). Then, over 2014-2015, three thousand ‘moderate rebels’ from the US-backed ‘Harakat Hazzm’ collapsed into Jabhat al Nusra, taking a large stock of US arms including anti-tank weapons with them (Fadel 2015a). Video posted by al-Nusra showed these weapons being used to take over the Syrian military bases, Wadi Deif and Hamidiyeh, in Idlib province (Bacchi 2015). Debka File, a site linked to Israeli intelligence, says the heavy weaponry provided to the Syrian ‘opposition’ by the USA, Israel, the Saudis, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar includes tanks, armoured vehicles, rockets launchers, machine-guns, anti-aircraft weapons and ‘at least four types of anti-tank weapons’ (Debka 2015). The scale and consistency of the ‘defections’ strongly suggests management to channel these arms, along with fighters, to make ISIS the best equipped group. A similar conclusion was noted by US Senator John Kiriakou (Sputnik 2015b).

Recruitment of fighters for ISIS was certainly a heavily financed affair, and not an ‘organic’ drift of resentful ‘Sunni’ youth. In late 2014 the Afghan Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost was said to be ‘leading efforts in northern Pakistan to recruit fighters for ISIS’ (Bienaimé 2015). Soon after this report, Syrian jihadist Yousaf al Salafi, arrested in Pakistan, said he had been hired to recruit young men in Pakistan to fight with ISIS in Syria. He says he received $600 for each fighter he sent, working with a Pakistani sheikh and using US money (Variyar 2015). Who knows what the middle-men took, but this sum is several times the salary of an average Syrian soldier. As with Jabhat al Nusra, recruits came from a wide range of countries. Cuban journalists interviewed four captured ISIS jihadists from Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. They were recruited in a larger group which had passed freely through Turkey and across the border into Syria. They were assisted to participate in this ‘holy war’ by offers of a house, a good salary and a bride. More than 300 people were killed by their car bombs (PL 2015).

ISIS had US weapons by various means in both Iraq and Syria when, in late 2014, a ‘non-aggression pact’ was reported in the southern area of Hajar al-Aswad between ‘moderate rebels’ and ISIS, as both recognised a common enemy in Syria: ‘the Nussayri regime’, a sectarian way of referring to Alawi Muslims. Some reported ISIS had purchased weapons from the ‘rebels’ (AFP 2015).

With ‘major Arab allies’ directly backing ISIS and a steady stream of fighters and arms passing to ISIS from the collapsing US-backed ‘moderate rebel’ groups, it is a small leap to recognise that US and ‘coalition’ flights to ISIS areas (supposedly to ‘degrade’ the extremists) might also have become covert supply lines. That is precisely what senior Iraqi sources began saying, in late 2014 and early 2015 (Iraq News 2014). In mid-2014 ISIS began seizing US weapons, but this was put down to incompetence on the part of the Iraqi Army (Sharma and Nestel 2014).

However, soon after that, US air drops of arms were seized by ISIS troops on the ground. Was this US incompetence or US planning? As reported by both Iraqi and Iranian media, Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said in January that ‘an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment to the ISIS group militants at the area of al-Dour in the province of Salahuddin’ (Sarhan 2015). Photos were published of ISIS retrieving the weapons. The US admitted seizures of its weapons but said this was a ‘mistake’ (MacAskill and Chulov 2014). Then in February Iraqi MP Hakem al-Zameli said the Iraqi army had shot down two British planes which were carrying weapons to ISIS in al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published of the wrecked planes. ‘We have discovered weapons made in the US, European countries and Israel from the areas liberated from ISIL’s control in Al-Baqdadi region’, al-Zameli said (FNA 2015a).

The Al-Ahad news website quoted Head of Al-Anbar Provincial Council Khalaf Tarmouz saying that a US plane supplied the ISIL terrorist organization with arms and ammunition in Salahuddin province (FNA 2015b). Also in February an Iraqi militia called Al-Hashad Al-Shabi said they had shot down a US Army helicopter carrying weapons for ISIL in the western parts of Al-Baqdadi region in Al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published (FNA 2015a). After that, Iraqi counter-terrorism forces were reported as having arrested ‘four foreigners who were employed as military advisors to the ISIL fighters’, three of whom were American and Israeli (Adl 2015). Israel’s link to ISIS seems to have passed well beyond its border areas. In late 2015 an Israeli Colonel Yusi Oulen Shahak was said to have been arrested with an ISIS group in Iraq.

The Iraqi Government linked militia said Shahak, from the Golani brigade, was a colonel who ‘had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations’ (FNA 2015c). Six senior Iraqi officials have been cited detailing US weaponry and intelligence support for ISIS. Captured ISIS fighters said the US had provided ‘intelligence about the Iraqi forces’ positions and targets’ (FNA 2015d). The western media avoided these stories altogether, because they are very damaging to Washington’s ‘existential myth’ of a ‘War on ISIS’. However they certainly help explain why Baghdad does not trust the US military.

In Libya in 2015 a key US collaborator in the overthrow of the Gaddafi government announced himself the newly declared head of the ‘Islamic State’ in North Africa (Sputnik 2015a). Abdel Hakim Belhaj was held in US prisons for several years, then ‘rendered’ to Gaddafi’s Libya, where he was wanted for terrorist acts. As former head of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then the Tripoli-based ‘Libyan Dawn’ group, Belhaj was, in the past, defended by Washington and praised by US Congressmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham (Sputnik 2015a).

Evidence of the covert relationship between Washington and ISIS is substantial and helps explain what Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mikdad called Washington’s ‘cosmetic war’ on ISIS (SANA 2015). The terrorist group was herded away from the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq but allowed to operate freely in Eastern Syria, against the Syrian Army (Fadel 2015b). The extremist group is used to justify a foothold Washington keeps in the region, weakening both Syria and Iraq. But Washington’s ‘war’ on ISIS has been ineffective. Studies by Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgent database showed that ISIS attacks and killings in Iraq increased strongly in the months after US air attacks began (Lestch 2014). The main on-the-ground fighting has been carried out by the Syrian Army, with its allies, and the Iraqi armed forces, with support from Iran (Lister 2015).

All this has been reported perversely in the western media. The same channels that prominently report (virtually celebrating) the ISIS killing of Syrian soldiers have also claimed the Syrian Army was avoiding or ‘not fighting’ ISIS (Richter 2014; Vinograd and Omar 2014). That alleged ‘unwillingness’ was part of the justification for US bombing inside Syria, another false pretext. While it is certainly the case that Syrian priorities remained in the heavily populated west, multiple media reports make it clear that, well before the strikes by the Russian air force in October 2015, the Syrian Arab Army was the major force engaged with ISIS (YNet 2014; al Arabiya 2014; Reuters 2015), as also suffering the worst casualties from that terrorist group (Webb 2014). When it comes to avoiding ISIS, the reverse has been the case. The evidence tells us that Washington’s lack of will against ISIS is linked to the fact that the terrorist group remains a key tool against the Syrian Government. That also explains why the US refuses to coordinate with the Syrian Army against ISIS (King 2015). This is consistent with the central ongoing aim of ‘regime change’ in Damascus or, failing that, dismemberment of the country. Such an aim was rejected by the US and others at a Vienna conference (Daily Star 2015); but US practice speaks louder than its words.

The contradictions of the US position – of claiming to fight ISIS while covertly protecting it – were thrown into sharp relief when in late September 2015 Russia decided to add air power to the Syrian Army’s efforts, against all the terrorist groups. When the US refused to cooperate with Russia, Washington’s media and NGO cheer squads immediately shifted their chorus of Syrian Government ‘killing civilians’ to that of Russia ‘killing civilians’. That had little effect on matters. At the time of writing, with that powerful Russian assistance, ISIS and the others are retreating and the Syrian Arab Army and its allied militia are gradually reclaiming areas that have been occupied for some time (AFP 2015).

Closer cooperation between Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah threaten to seriously degrade US dominance in the region. In the Iraqi military’s recent offensive on ISIS-held Tikrit, the Iranian military emerged as Iraq’s main partner. Washington was sidelined, causing consternation in the US media. General Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force was said to have been a leading player in the Tikrit operation (Rosen 2015). Not least amongst the new developments has been the creation of an intelligence centre based in Baghdad and shared by Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran plus Hezbollah (4+1). This signals a new measure of independence for the Baghdad government, long thought to be a puppet captured by Washington (Boyer and Scarborough 2015).

This article has presented sufficient evidence for us to safely draw these conclusions.

First, Washington planned a bloody wave of regime change in its favour in the Middle East, getting allies such as the Saudis to use sectarian forces in a process of ‘creative destruction’.

Second, the US directly financed and armed a range of so-called ‘moderate’ terrorist groups against the sovereign state of Syria while its key allies the Saudis, Qatar, Israel and Turkey financed, armed and supported with arms and medical treatment every anti-Syrian armed group, whether ‘moderate’ or extreme.

Third, ‘jihadists’ for Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS were actively recruited in many countries, indicating that the rise of those groups was not due to a simple anti-western ‘Sunni’ reaction within the region.

Fourth, NATO member Turkey functioned as a ‘free transit zone’ for every type of terrorist group passing into Syria.

Fifth, there is testimony from a significant number of senior Iraqi officials that US arms have been delivered directly to ISIS.

Sixth, the ineffective, or at best selective, US ‘war’ against ISIS tends to corroborate the Iraqi and Syrian views that there is a controlling relationship. In sum we can conclude that the US has built a command relationship with all of the anti-Syrian terrorist groups, including al Nusra ISIS, either directly or through its close regional allies, the Saudis, Qatar, Israel and Turkey. Washington has attempted to play a ‘double game’ in Syria and Iraq, using its old doctrine of ‘plausible deniability’ to maintain the fiction of a ‘war on terrorism’ for as long as is possible.

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Nazemroaya, Mahdi Darius (2006) Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ‘New Middle East’, Global Research, 18 November, online: http://www.globalresearch.ca/plans-for-redrawing-the-middle-east-the-project-for-a-new-middle-east/3882

Newman, Alex (2014) ‘“Moderate” Rebels Armed by Obama Join al-Qaeda, ISIS’, New American, 21 November, online: http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/19583-moderate-rebels-armed-by-obama-join-al-qaeda-isis

Newman, Alex (2015) ‘U.S. Defense Intel Chief: Obama Gave “Wilful” Aid to Al-Qaeda’, New American, 11 August, online: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/21384-u-s-defense-intel-chief-obama-gave-willful-aid-to-al-qaeda

Paraszczuk, Joanna (2013) ‘Syria Analysis: Which Insurgents Captured Menagh Airbase — & Who Led Them? EA Worldview, 7 August, online: http://eaworldview.com/2013/08/syria-feature-which-insurgents-captured-the-menagh-airbase/

PL (2015) ‘Yihadistas revelan cómo se reclutan militantes para el Estado Islámico’, CubaDebate, 25 June, online: http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2015/06/25/yihadistas-arrestados-en-siria-revelan-como-ee-uu-recluta/#.ViwjaSv9iF_

Poushter, Jacob (2015) ‘In nations with significant Muslim populations, much disdain for ISIS’, Pew Research Centre, 17 November, online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/17/in-nations-with-significant-muslim-populations-much-disdain-for-isis/

Putin, Vladimir (2015) ‘Who are Syria’s moderate rebels?’ Daily Star, 24 October, online: http://www.thedailystar.net/world/who-are-syrias-moderate-rebels-161989

OSNet (2014) ‘Syrian rebels in the Golan defect to ISIS’, OS Net daily, December, online: http://osnetdaily.com/2014/12/syrian-rebels-golan-defect-isis/

Reuters (2015) ‘Syrian air strike kills two Islamic State commanders’, 7 March, online: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/03/07/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-islamicstate-idUKKBN0M30F320150307

Richter, Greg (2014) ‘Syrian National Coalition President: Assad, ISIS Not Fighting Each Other’, NewsMax, 30 September, online: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/syrian-coalition-assad-isis/2014/09/30/id/597645/

Rosen, James (2015) ‘Quds force leader, commanding Iraqi forces against ISIS, alarms Washington’, Fox News, 5 March, online: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/03/05/iran-quds-force-leader-commanding-iraqi-forces-against-isis-alarms-americans/

Rothman, Noah (2014) ‘Dempsey: I know of Arab allies who fund ISIS’, YouTube, 16 September, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA39iVSo7XE

RT (2014) ‘Anyone but US! Biden blames allies for ISIS rise’, 3 October, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11l8nLZNPSY

SANA (2015) ‘Mikdad: US Turkish agreement to arm and train terrorists means failure of de Mistura initiative’, Syrian Arab News Agency, 21 February, online: http://www.sana.sy/en/?p=29385

Sarhan, Amre (2015) ‘American aircraft dropped weapons to ISIS, says MP’, Iraqi News, 4 January, online: http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/american-aircraft-airdropped-weapons-to-isis-says-mp/

Sharma, Versha and M.L. Nestel (2014) ‘Terrorists Seize U.S. Weapons in Iraq’, Vocativ, 16 June, online: http://www.vocativ.com/world/iraq-world/terrorists-seize-u-s-weapons-iraq/

Sly, Liz (2014) ‘U.S.-backed Syria rebels routed by fighters linked to al-Qaeda’, Washington Post, 2 November, online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-backed-syria-rebels-routed-by-fighters-linked-to-al-qaeda/2014/11/02/7a8b1351-8fb7-4f7e-a477-66ec0a0aaf34_story.html

Sputnik (2015a) ‘US Ally in Libya Joins ISIL and Leads Its Forces in the Country – Reports’, 3 May, online: http://sputniknews.com/news/20150305/1019074958.html

Sputnik (2015b) ‘US Congress Arms ISIL in Syria Via ‘Moderate’ Opposition – ex-CIA Officer’, 7 October, online: http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20151007/1028130762/US-congress-arms-ISIL-in-syria-via-moderate-opposition.html

Usher, Barbara Plett (2014) ‘Joe Biden apologised over IS remarks, but was he right?’ BBC News, 7 October, online: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29528482

Variyar, Mugdha (2015) ‘Funds for ISIS Recruitment Came From US, Says Pakistani ISIS Commander’, IB Times, 29 January, online: http://www.ibtimes.co.in/funds-isis-recruitment-came-us-says-pakistani-isis-commander-621906

Vinograd, Cassandra and Ammar Cheikh Omar (2014) ‘Syria, ISIS Have Been ‘Ignoring’ Each Other on Battlefield, Data Suggests’, NBC News, 11 December, online: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/syria-isis-have-been-ignoring-each-other-battlefield-data-suggests-n264551

Washington’s Blog (2014) ‘Top U.S. Military Official: Our Arab “Allies” Support ISIS’, 16 September, online: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/09/top-u-s-military-official-arab-allies-support-isis.html

Webb, Sam (2014) ‘Up to 70 Syrian army chiefs beheaded by ISIS after jihadis make advance on second city of Idlib that has been held by Assad’s forces for more than a year’, Daily Mail, 28 October, online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2810598/Up-70-Syrian-army-chiefs-beheaded-Isis-jihadis-make-advance-second-city-Idlib-held-Assad-s-forces-year.html

West, Diana (2012) ‘Syrian Rebels: We Are All Jabhat Al Nusra (Al Qaeda)’, Free Republic, 12 December, online: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2967671/posts

Winer, Stuart (2013) ‘Syria says it captured Israeli weapons from rebels’, Times of Israel, 21 August, online: http://www.timesofisrael.com/syria-says-it-captured-israeli-weapons-from-rebels/

YNet (2014) ‘Syrian strikes on ISIS stronghold kill 29’, 6 September, online: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4568098,00.html

Zayabi al, Adib (2014) ‘Syrian rebels increasingly joining ISIS: Coalition ambassador’, Asharq al-Awsat, 25 December, online: http://english.aawsat.com/2014/12/article55339780/syrian-rebels-increasingly-joining-isis-syrian-national-coalition-ambassador

Zelin, Aaron Y. (2012) ‘Rally ‘Round the Jihadist’, Washington Institute, 11 December, online: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/rally-round-the-jihadist

Zoabi, Hiba (2014) ‘Israel said to treat wounded members of IS and radical Syrian groups’, i24News, 10 November, online: http://www.i24news.tv/app.php/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/50457-141110-israel-said-to-treat-wounded-members-of-is-and-radical-syrian-groups

The protracted conflicts in Syria and many parts of West Asia have been a fertile ground for the rise of extreme militants professing their own barbaric distortion of the Islamic Faith. The involvement of two major powers in what can only be described as a cold war of attrition against these militants further highlights the complexity of the issue and the many secret hands that are exploiting the conflict in Syria in particular as a means to their own ends.

Whichever side of the fence one may be aligned to, it cannot be denied that these issues are in many ways connected, and even crafted.

From the rising trend of Islamophobia that has blighted the Western world through many burgeoning right –wing groups, to the aforementioned war in Syria that has sparked one of the most catastrophic human tragedies of the 21^st century, these issues are all connected in some form or another, weaving a tale of a perpetual conflict reflective of a grand strategy which seeks to dominate the world through the exercise of power and hegemonic influence.

Daesh and Geopolitics.

Daesh, also known as IS or ISIS or ISIL, has risen to become the new face of terrorism in the modern world, outshining Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

While the group claims to be Islamic, their practice and rhetoric strikingly resembles the caricatures of Islam in medieval Europe to the point that it is almost cartoonish in nature, perfectly fitting the bill of the stereotypical evil Muslim bogeyman.

Daesh has struck with remarkable efficiency in many corners of West Asia and North Africa (WANA). Libya, Iraq and Syria have seen swathes of their territories fall under its occupation, and the group, having established a sophisticated media network, training camps and even administrative structures, continues to exert authority and control. From a military standpoint, the terrorist group has been able to hold on to its conquest — though it has in recent weeks lost some land to the US led coalition bombarding the areas it controls in Iraq and Syria.

However, the real challenge to Daesh particularly in Syria is not from the US but Russia. The effective air-cover afforded by the Russian air force since September 2015 has enabled the Syrian army of Bashar Al-Assad and its ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah to regain control over significant parts of Homs, Latakia and parts of Aleppo from Daesh and other terrorist outfits closely linked to either Saudi Arabia, or Turkey or Israel or the US and other Western powers. It is because outfits linked to them are losing control of parts of Syria that some Western and Turkish leaders have launched a massive propaganda war against Russia. The downing of the Russian military plane in Syrian airspace by the Turkish air force in November 2015 should be viewed in this context.

Indeed, the battle-lines are clearly drawn now with Syria as the battlefield in a new confrontation between the US, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. In a sense, this is the first major conflict between the two protagonists of the 40 year Cold War that ended in 1989. On the side of the US are other Western powers such as Britain and France, backed by their regional allies such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. On the side of Russia, is of course the Syrian government, Iran, the Hezbollah and increasingly, the Iraqi government in Baghdad which feels that Russia is more sincere in fighting the terrorism that threatens Iraq and the region than the US or Turkey.

The conflict involving these two sides, which unfortunately also exhibits a Sunni-Shia dimension,   could potentially engulf the whole of WANA and indeed the world in a huge conflagration leading to even a world war. For the time being that danger has been checked by the UN Security Council Resolution on a Syria Peace Plan adopted unanimously by the Council in December 2015.  Resolution 2254 (2015) not only calls for a ceasefire and negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition but also expresses its support for free and fair elections within the framework of a sovereign, independent, and territorially united Syrian nation.

If it is implemented successfully, the death and destruction that has been Syria’s fate for the last four years may come to an end. It will certainly bring to an end the tragic sight of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing hearth and home, trying to reach safer shores in Europe.

From another perspective, it is this refugee crisis which also includes Iraqis, Libyans, Afghanis, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, apart from Somalis, Malians and Nigerians, among others, that is now impacting upon politics in Europe and the United States.

The Refugee crisis, Right Wing Politics and Donald Trump

In the initial stages Germany was the most open among European countries to the refugees from WANA and other parts of Asia and Africa. Chancellor Merkel garnered much praise among the international community for Germany’s “Willkommenskultur” (Open Door Policy). This charitable endeavour was short lived however. Almost overnight, border control measures were implemented, train services to Germany were temporarily halted, and tens of thousands of refugees found themselves stranded in other European countries.

Still, the situation in Germany was not as bad as in the rest of Europe. The border control measures of countries like Hungary had left 170,000 refugees stranded, sparking diplomatic tensions with its neighbours, such as Croatia and Slovenia. This had also sparked criticisms from the international community many of them condemning the reprehensible manner in which the Hungarian government had treated the refugees.

Countries like France, on the other hand, had opened their borders to the refugees. Nonetheless, there has been criticism of France’s policy seen as discriminatory since it allegedly favours only the Christian groups who are viewed — wrongly — as being more persecuted than other religious groups.

This discriminatory attitude is obviously directed against Muslim refugees who are in the majority. It is a reflection of the growing anti-immigrant sentiment fuelled by a number of radical right-wing groups in Europe in recent years. There is perhaps a historical root to this. It is embedded in Islamophobia, an irrational fear of Islam, which has been part of the European consciousness for more than a thousand years.

What has exacerbated Islamophobia especially in France is the 13 November terror attack by Muslim extremists in Paris which resulted in the death of 130 innocent civilians. Because it happened on the heels of the refugee crisis, it has also led to renewed fears about Muslim migrants. Politicians and media analysts are now speculating that some of these refugees may be “terrorists”.

Such senseless speculation has only strengthened popular sentiments against Muslims. Unpleasant incidents that target Arab looking males or hijab clad females have become more rife and rampant. It has further widened the chasm between the communities.  Right-wing activists are even pushing for a movement to stem the “Islamization of Europe.”

In the US, Islamophobia is having a direct impact upon the presidential elections. The front-runner in the Republican camp has been quite candid about his fears of Muslim immigrants and the threat of Muslim terrorism. He has called for the outright ban of Muslims from entering America, for mosques to be torn down or monitored, and for Muslims in America to have special IDs.

Trump, it is apparent, has an audience. His anti-Muslim rhetoric resonates with a big segment of the middle and lower income White population. Victims of economic and social stagnation in the last two decades, scapegoating “the other” in this manner appeals to these Whites because they feel that once these “threats” are dealt with, “America will be great again”, which is Trump’s slogan, and their own situation will improve tremendously.

Thus we see how the exploitation of domestic fears rooted in the socio-economic situation by politicians seeking high office can actually serve the hegemonic agenda of a superpower. The Trump slogan of making America great again has widespread appeal within the populace since American dominance of the world is accepted as a given, as something good for humanity. Both Republican and Democratic aspirants recite this mantra about America’s leadership of the planet.

TPPA and Economic Hegemony

In what can be considered the other side of the world, there is another event which highlights another part of the grand strategy to assert the hegemonic power of the United States of America.

The controversial Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is a “trade” agreement among 12 Asia-Pacific countries helmed by the US which has negative ramifications for copyright laws, health care costs, local industries and national sovereignty. The TPPA excludes China, the Asia-Pacific’s most important economic power in every sense. This is why the TPPA is not so much about trade or economics. It is essentially about power and politics. It is a well-orchestrated strategy to contain and curtail the rising power and influence of China within its own neighbourhood. Two important signatories to the TPPA, Australia and Japan, have recently declared openly that they support the US “pivot to Asia” to contain “China’s aggressive influence and posturing.”

The TPPA may mask itself as a trade deal (and a bad one at that), but it cannot disguise its ulterior geopolitical motive. It is a motive that may subject its signatories, including Malaysia, to external hegemonic agendas that may undermine the interests of our own people.

Conclusion

The tentacles of the hegemon are spread across two fronts. One, in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) where it is determined to maintain its dominant power and influence. The stakes are high. It is not just oil and gas. It is the only region in the world where three continents meet and where some of the world’s most vital waterways are situated. But most of all, WANA is where Israel is. No other country is as important to the US and the West. The US is prepared to confront a big military power like Russia and a middling regional power like Iran in order to perpetuate its hegemony in the region.

Two, in the Asia-Pacific region where the hegemon seeks to contain and curtail the ascendancy of the world’s most dynamic economic power. For the US, the economic challenge posed by China has political and military significance in the medium and long-term which is why it wants to ensure that its own economic clout in the Asia-Pacific region which is still considerable will remain and expand.

For the hegemon, WANA and the Asia-Pacific are two regions where its right to rule the world has come to the fore. It will not allow anyone to question, let alone challenge, that right.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

Hassanal Noor Rashid is Program Coordinator of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). Malaysia.

A Turkish court on Dec. 5 arrested an Israeli organ trafficking suspect, who was sought by Interpol’s red notice and detained at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport on early Dec. 4.

He was reportedly in Turkey to convince struggling Syrian migrants to sell their organs.

Boris Walker was detained over alleged “organ trafficking” and “fraud” at 2:40 a.m. immediately after he arrived in Istanbul on a flight from Bangkok.

A court ruled for Walker’s arrest for 40 days, after which he is expected to be extradited to Israel.
According to a report by daily Vatan, Walker wanted to expand his illegal business in Turkey, targeting struggling Syrian migrants.

According to the report, the international organ trafficker had already contacted some Syrian migrants in Istanbul to buy their organs, while he was also making arrangements to have the illegal operations in some small private hospitals in Turkish cities.

This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal, it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba.

The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and  is based on a talk given by Peter Dale Scott.

Scott is the popularizer of the expression, “Deep Politics,” and a virtuoso when it comes to what sometimes seems like grabbing smoke — capturing proof, however elusive, of motives and objectives that could explain  the machinations of US intelligence agencies — and then analyzing the residue.

Not all of the chicanery Scott describes is subtle. For example, in an apparent attempt to bring the Russians into the picture, someone delivered to the FBI’s Dallas office a purported audiotape of Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. That failed, though, when FBI agents decided that the voice did not seem to be Oswald’s.

Then,  two days later, the FBI got on board the subterfuge by falsely reporting that “no tapes were taken to Dallas.” Because of this lie, an investigation more than a decade later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations would erroneously declare that there was no “basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.”  (The existence of an Oswald impersonator in the months before the president’s murder would in and of itself have been prima facie evidence of a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.)

And then there was the attempt to set up a Soviet agent…

You will probably not be able to keep up with each tall tale, nor does it matter. They have a cumulative effect, one that explains why it is impossible to study these documents without coming away believing in conspiracy.

There is dark humor here — reminiscent of the television sit-com of the 1960’s, “Get Smart” —

about a secret agent who was always telling one lie after another, blissfully unaware that each new lie not only undermined the last one, but any new one that came after:

Smart:      I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it? Seven.

Mr.Big:     I find that pretty hard to believe.

Smart:      Would you believe six?

Mr.Big:     I don’t think so.

Smart:      Would you believe two cops in a rowboat?

Would you believe that the US intelligence community has been telling us the truth all of these years?

Essay based on talk given by Peter Dale Scott at Third Annual JFK Assassination Conference in Dallas, 2015. (Produced by TrineDay Books, Conscious Community Events, and the JFK Historical Group.)

—WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor

(This is Part 2 of a three-part series. For Part 1, please go here, and for Part 3, go here.)

Helms’s Rationale for Committing Perjury

We can begin to understand Helms’s behavior from his repeat performance in the Watergate era, when he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended sentence of two years in jail, for failing to tell the Senate Foreign Relations committee about CIA operations in Chile. As the Washington Post reported at the time, Helms’s oath to the committee to tell the truth was at odds with an earlier oath he had taken when he was CIA director never to divulge classified information.

Helms had no hesitation in choosing to protect the CIA and its secrets, rather than serve the goals of truth and law and an open society. After exiting from the court, Helms promptly “described the conviction to the media as ‘a badge of honor.’”[1]  (Although the Post did not mention this, the CIA was also charged by the National Security Act of 1947 with the protection of its “sources and methods”.)

Helms faced the same legal dilemma after he swore to the Warren Commission to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (5 AH 121). Helms was then asked “Can you tell the Commission as to whether or not you have supplied us all the information the Agency has, at least in substance, in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald?” Helms’s answer was, “We have, all” (5 AH 122).[2] This was, I submit, both perjury, and obstruction of justice.[3] In 1964 the CIA secrets he protected concerned an operation involving the name of the man reported to have been the president’s assassin.[4]

I am certain that lawyers had prepared the qualified question about “all the information the Agency has, at least in substance.” It echoes Helms’s earlier lawyerly language about “substantive developments… in the matter of Lee Harvey Oswald,” that had bearing “on the substance of the Commission’s request.”[5] From the CIA’s perspective, it was was not a “substantive” fact that the CIA, five weeks before the assassination, was engaged in an operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald. But for those seeking a solution to the assassination, this fact was, and still is, not only substantive, but crucial.

This can be said confidently on the basis of records since released. But there is also strong evidence that there were still more CIA records regarding Angleton’s Oswald operation than the ones up to October 16 that the CIA chose to release in CD 347. A classified memo of 1975 from Angleton’s newly appointed successor, George Kalaris, noted that “subsequently [to these records] there were several Mexico City cables in October 1963 also concerned with Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, as well as his visits to the Soviet and Cuban Embassies.”[6] However, as of 2015, the CIA has not yet released any cables which talked of Oswald in the Cuban embassy.[7]

As John Newman has noted, Win Scott, the CIA Chief in Mexico City, later wrote that he had sent cables on Oswald’s contacts “with both the Cuban Consulate and with the Soviets.”[8] But Ed Lopez of the HSCA staff stated in the Lopez Report that if any such cable was sent, “it is not in the files made available to the HSCA by the CIA.”[9] In a 1994 interview, Newman asked Helms if it would be fair to say that in fact there hadbeen “several cables” about Oswald’s being in “both the Soviet and Cuban places.” Helms’s nonchalant reply was, “Sure.” Helms’s nonsensical explanation of their non-release: “they [sic, “they,” not “I”] didn’t want to blow their source.”[10]

James Jesus Angleton Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy fromNational Counterintelligence Center / Wikimedia

It will be most interesting to see if the CIA will finally release such cables in 2017, as required by law. Almost certainly, I believe, they would throw more light on the Angleton operation involving Oswald. Almost certainly, also, some key mysteries will probably remain.

Was the Lee Harvey Oswald of Dallas also the man identifying himself as Lee Oswald in Mexico City; or was the latter, as I strongly believe, an impostor who spoke broken English as well as broken Russian?

Was the Lee Oswald in Mexico City himself part of the Angleton operation, or was he someone sent by the assassination plotters to blackmail the CIA into a cover-up?

Did the Lee Oswald in Mexico talk in the Cuban Consulate about assassinating President Kennedy, as many have independently alleged, including former FBI director Clarence Kelley?[11]

Answers to these three questions would, I believe, lead us much closer to understanding both the assassination in 1963, and the cover-up ever since.

Even if we ignore the alleged missing cables, Helms was guilty of perjury that had a major political consequence. If he had told the truth, I doubt very much that the American public, already doubtful, would have been satisfied with the Warren Commission’s banal assurance that it “found no evidence that…Lee Harvey Oswald… was part of any conspiracy” (WR 21). Helms’ behavior, while understandable and even predictable given his institutional loyalty, was part of what I would have to call a systematic obstruction of justice.

Obstruction of Justice by Others in the CIA

 For Helms was assuredly not alone in concealing relevant information about Oswald. According to an FBI Report, CIA Counterintelligence Officer Birch D. O’Neal, on November 22, 1963, told the FBI that “there is nothing in CIA file regarding Oswald other than material furnished to CIA by the FBI and the Department of State.”[12] John Newman’s book, Oswald and the CIA, gives examples of CIA dissembling and outright falsehoods extending over the subsequent decades.[13]

Here is another relevant example. To obscure the outright CIA lie about “Latest HDQS info was… dated May 1962,” someone rearranged the order of documents in the file prepared for the Warren Commission.

One cannot tell that from Warren Commission Document 692, “CIA Helms Memo to Rankin of 06 Mar 1964 with CIA’s Official Oswald Dossier,“ at least not in the hopelessly garbled form of CD 692 that was deposited in the National Archives in 1975.

Here pages have been randomly shuffled, so that, for example, one page of a 1961 Moscow Embassy dispatch is page 93 of the file, and the next is page 108. The first UPI story about Oswald in Moscow, which should have been page 2 of CD 692, is instead page 122.[14]

We could not know the true order of the file prepared for the Warren Commission until it was re-released by the CIA in 1992. Then it became clear that the September 24 FBI report on Oswald’s arrest had been relocated out of chronological order, to make it appear that it had been received after, and not before, the cable about “latest HDQS info.”

This deception was compounded by an outright falsification, if not forgery. The FBI report had actually been read in the CIA in September and October.[15] However it was now preceded by an FBI cover slip from another report (the so-called de Brueys report), dated November 8.[16] To the November slip was added the CIA’s label of the September report, DBA 52355.[17]

I would submit that whoever falsified the cover slip was also part of a systematic obstruction of justice.

Moreover the October 10 cable to the FBI made a significant omission, one that demands explanation. Ostensibly the message was to inform the FBI and other agencies that “an American male, who identified himself as Lee Oswald,” had “contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City.”[18]

One would expect that what the FBI most urgently needed to know was that the contact had perhaps been with Kostikov, whom the FBI believed was from the “wet” or assassination section 13 of the KGB. Yet the cable, inexplicably, suppressed any reference to Kostikov, while transmitting misleading details about the American’s age and height.

This omission is highly suspicious. If the FBI had known about Kostikov, one would normally expect Oswald to be, at a minimum, placed on the Security Index and put under surveillance by the FBI in Dallas, and for the Secret Service to be warned about him.[19] If these events had happened, the events in Dallas would have been different; and Oswald could not have served as (what I believe him to be) the “designated culprit” in the assassination plot.

(The whole process is very reminiscent of the CIA’s culpable failure, in 2000, to notify the FBI of the presence in America of two al-Qaeda members, Mohamed al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi, who would later be two of the alleged hijackers, or “designated culprits,” on 9/11.)[20]

It would appear that the Angleton operation, for whatever reason, wanted Oswald not to be surveilled or detained. We cannot leap to the conclusion that the intention was for Oswald to be a free man in Dallas on November 22; the ostensible purpose could well have been, for example, to protect the behavior of “Lee Oswald” in Mexico.

But here the illicit assassination plot may have been piggy-backed on the Angleton operational plot. For it is clear that, if there was an assassination plot against Kennedy with Oswald as designated culprit, Oswald needed to be free of detention or surveillance in Dallas on November 22.

The three cables suppressed and lied about by Helms were most relevant to an investigation of the assassination. Shortly before it the FBI had intercepted a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, allegedly from Oswald. The letter referred to “my meetings with comrade Kostin” and noted that “had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business.”[21]

Whether you believe this letter to be genuine or (as I do) false, it is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy – either a conspiracy involving Oswald and the Soviets (if true), or a conspiracy to frame Oswald (if false).

The Warren Commission came up with an elaborate explanation that the letter was both genuine and innocuous, by relying on a belatedly discovered “draft” of the letter that I believe to be even more demonstrably false than the letter itself.[22] To sum up, this conspiratorial letter from Oswald should have been more fully investigated, and it was inextricably linked to the cables suppressed by Helms.

I believe that some of those involved in all of this, possibly including Angleton, may have been culpably involved, not just in the cover-up, but in preparations for the assassination itself. And Helms may have known this, for he certainly took deliberate steps to protect whatever machinations CI was up to with the suppressed CIA cables.

We know that after the assassination, contact with the Warren Commission was initially assigned to John Whitten of the CIA’s Mexico desk, one of the signers of one of the October 10 cables. Then Helms, according to Whitten, transferred this responsibility to Angleton and the CI staff.[23]

We have a CIA memo written after a meeting chaired by Helms in March 1964, reaffirming “the CI staff’s responsibility for coordinating all aspects of the Agency’s work on the Oswald case.”[24] A key person assigned to this task was Ann Egerter of CI/SIG, the Counterintelligence Special Intelligence Group.[25]

Ann Egerter had previously been one of the three people who signed off on both of the two mutually contradictory cables on October 10. In other words, those we know to have been responsible for lying about Oswald (in the two conflicting cables of October 10) were among those picked out by Helms to be in charge of the CIA’s response to the Warren Commission.

.Notes

[1] Timothy S. Robinson, “Helms Fined $2,000, Term Suspended,” Washington Post, November 5, 1977.

[2] Helms’s reply requires the belief that all the substantive information in the cables was contained in the CD 347 summary. I submit that the most important information was not transmitted: the suppressed evidence that information that Oswald’s name was being used in an operation was not only substantial, it was most pertinent to determining Oswald’s status in the weeks before the assassination.

[3] In lying to the Commission, Helms may have been mindful of a decade-old agreement with Eisenhower’s Attorney General, exempting the CIA from reporting crimes of which it was aware to the Justice Department. This agreement was so secret that for almost two decades successive Attorneys General were unaware of it. See Scott,Dallas ’63, 11; citing Dorothy J. Samuels and James A. Goodman, “How Justice Shielded the CIA,” Inquiry (October 18, 1978), 10-11. Samuels and Goodman summarized a little-noticed Report from the House Committee on Government Operations that I (even with the help of university librarians) have been unable to locate in Congressional Research Service indices. I have however located a second, follow-up report: U.S. Cong., House, Committee on Government Operations, Justice Department Handling of Cases Involving Classified Data and Claims of National Security. 96th Cong., 1st Sess.; H. Rept. No. 96-280. Washington: GPO, 1979.

[4] In lying to the Commission, Helms was following the precedent of Allen Dulles, who in the early 195os had “lied to Congress about the agency’s operations in Korea and China” (Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 107).

[5] Warren CD 692, 3.

[6] Confidential Memorandum of September 14, 1975, for Executive Assistant to the DDO, from George J. Kalaris, Chief, CI Staff, re Lee Harvey Oswald, NARA #104, 20051-10173; in Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 462.

[7] Here, and elsewhere in this talk, one must keep in mind that Angleton allegedly had his own communications network. This was established for the legitimate purpose of counterintelligence, which amounted in practice to spying on the CIA itself.

[8] Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 416.

[9] Lopez Report, 176; Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 417.

[10] Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 417-18; citing interview with Richard Helms, August 23, 1994. The source for the missing records was presumably the same as for the records released.

[11] Scott, Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics, 93-99; citing Clarence Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1987), 268-69.

[12] Warren CD 49, FBI Graham Report of 02 Dec 1963 re: Oswald/Russia, 22. In addition to the cables, the 201 file also contained a CIA memo on “Oswald, Lee Harvey” CD 692, p. 112 (in Newman, 470, cf. 466)]

[13] E.g. the February 1995 reply to Jefferson Morley from the CIA Public Affairs Office concerning the October 10 cable discussed in this talk: “The cable referred to in your letter appears to focus only on the status of Oswald’s citizenship” (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, 404).

[14] The order of documents in the NARA serial sequence 104-10015- (where records from the Oswald 201 file are deposited) is also garbled.

[15] Cover slip for FBI Letterhead Memorandum of September 23, 1963, NARA #104-10015-10046.

[16] That November 8 is the date for the de Brueys report can be learned from the Russ Holmes work file, 104-10406-10096. In CD 692, the de Brueys report lacks its cover slip, which has been moved.

[17] Oswald 201 File, Pre-Assassination File, September 1992 release, p, 177; Warren CD 692, p. 72.

[18] NARA #104-10015-10052.

[19] Without giving any reasons, the Church Committee categorically denied this in 1976: “It is important to note, however, that under the procedures then in effect, the inclusion of Oswald on Security Index would not have resulted in the dissemination of Oswald’s name to the Secret Service“ (Church Committee, “Final Report, Book V – The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies,” 51n29. One would like to know the process by which they arrived at this unexplained conclusion.

[20] Scott, The American Deep State, 86-95.

[21] Warren Report, 309; Warren CE 15, 16 WH 33; Scott, Deep Politics and he Death of JFK, 39-40.

[22] See my argument in Dallas ’63, 26-28.

[23] Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination(New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2013)..

[24] Memo for the Record by Lee Wigren, C/SR/CI/R, March 16. 1964, NARA #104-10007-10205: “Dooley also mentioned a meeting with Mr. Helms…. Dooley [C/CI/R&A] reiterated the CI staff ‘s responsibility for coordinating all aspects of the Agency’s work on the Oswald case.”

[25] See e.g. “Office of Security Report Re Lee Harvey Oswald Address Book,” Memo for the Record of 31 January, 1964, by Ann Egerter, CI/SIG, NARA # 104-10021-10009.

Israel has announced the construction of a new, Jewish-only road that will connect two Jewish colonies, according to a report by the Middle East Monitor.

“The new proposal includes banning the Palestinians from using the road,” said Hannna Sweed, director of the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning.

Sweed added that Jewish-only roads already exist in the occupied West Bank.

The proposal comes as no surprise to scholars well versed in the supremacist ideology of Judaism, on which the state of Israel is founded.

According to the Talmud, all intermixture between Jews and non-Jews is strictly forbidden by divine law, except in cases in which Jewish men rape non-Jewish children, a behaviour explicitly permitted in the Talmud.*

In Talmudic belief, non-Jews are made only in the “likeness” of humans. They were created, says the Talmud, for the sole purpose of serving Jews, as it is beneath the dignity of a Jew to be served by anything that looks like an animal. Since non-Jews are not humans, they are not protected by divine law. It is even permissible to kill non-Jews. The Jewish Encyclopaedia quotes the Talmud as stating, “Even the best of the goyim [non-Jews] should be killed”.

It is thus not by accident that segregation is openly practiced by the Israeli government; that Palestinians are regularly murdered by Jewish settlers; and that over 50% of Palestinian children that have been sent to Israeli detention centres claim to have been sexually molested by Israeli police officers. Racial supremacism, genocide and child molestation are all behaviours that follow inevitably from Jewish ideology, as explicated in the Talmud.

Notes

* The reasons given are threefold: 1. Children cannot produce offspring; 2. Even Jewish toddlers are not yet humans, and therefore may be freely molested. 3. Non-Jews are not humans. Since toddlers and non-Jews are not humans, according to Judaism, they cannot receive the protection of divine laws; a Jew can therefore use them for his own sexual gratification.

On January 1, 2016 the bilateral ceasefire between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples Army (FARC-EP) comes into effect. A final peace accord by March 23, 2016 is, however, unlikely due to the complicated final issues that have to be resolved after more than five decades of civil war. 

Colombia has had peaceful Christmas holidays, as much without fear as it is possible in a country that has experienced more than five decades of civil war. The relative calm during the holidays is widely regarded as a positive sign, suggesting that the bilateral ceasefire may come into effect and be kept. Both the government and the FARC-EP agree that the most serious threat to security is posed by ultra-right-wing militants.

Jesus Santrich, member of the FARC-EP‘s peace negotiators in the Cuban capital Havana stressed, however, that expectations that a final peace accord would be reached by March 26, 2016, as agreed, may be overly optimistic. In statements aimed at the public both the government and the FARC-EP position one another as being responsible for stalling the peace process. The matter of fact is that there remain a number of immensely complicated issues that cannot be easily resolved. Issues which cannot be rushed without risking a backlash.

The final point that is currently being negotiated pertains the end to the conflict, and among the issues that need to be resolved are:

The logistics of the disarmament of the FARC-EP. Both sides recognize that the issue is complicated and that the disarmament of FARC-EP units makes both FARC-EP members as well as populations in FARC-EP controlled areas vulnerable to violence and atrocities committed by right-wing militants. There are practical issues which cannot be rushed without risking serious unintended consequences – besides the fact that there is need for trust-building. The government insists that the FARC-EP guerrilla surrender their weapons to the State while the FARC-EP insists that the weapons be surrendered to a third-party.

The FARC-EP also stresses the need for decisive government action with regard to dismantling right-wing neo-paramilitaries which were established after the demobilization of the AUC between 2003 and 2006.

Fmr Colombian President Uribe. Will his house of cards come down?

The government and the FARC-EP have agreed to maximum prison sentences for war crimes committed during the over five decades-long civil war. One point of serious contention, however, is that President Juan Manuel Santos is seeking presidential immunity as part of the final peace accord.

This immunity would not only exempt Santos from eventually facing justice. More importantly, it would exempt former president Alvaro Uribe who stands accused of involvement in or responsibility for massacres committed in 1997.

Another issue is economic compensation for the victims of the conflict. The FARC-EP insists that it does not have the finances to pay economic compensation. International experts have recommended a government-funded compensation fund as a possible solution. Tax revenues from now FARC-EP controlled regions could in part finance the fund.

One further and important issue is the interference of foreign NGO’s like Human Rights Watch who insist that the final peace accord should follow the Anglo-American understanding of justice rather than an approach based on Colombian initiatives and concepts of justice. Human Rights Watch accused the government and the FARC-EP of “agreeing on impunity” to find a solution to end the civil war and recommended that both Colombia’s Constitutional Court and the International Criminal Court (ICC) carefully review the situation.

Ironically, HRW would not mention any of the atrocities committed by the United States, which include child sexual abuse, thousands of rapes and other serious war crimes. No US citizen is subject to prosecution by the ICC. Internationalizing the peace process according to an Anglo – American concept of international justice would, according to several experts in conflict resolution – the author included, complicate actual justice and reconciliation after more than five decades of civil war where crimes and atrocities have been committed by all of the conflicting parties.

Christof Lehmann – Dr. Christof Lehmann is the founder and editor of nsnbc. He is a psychologist and independent political consultant on conflict and conflict resolution and a wide range of other political issues. His work with traumatized victims of conflict has led him to also pursue the work as political consultant. He is a lifelong activist for peace and justice, human rights, Palestinians rights to self-determination in Palestine, and he is working on the establishment of international institutions for the prosecution of all war crimes, also those committed by privileged nations. On 28 August 2011 he started his blog nsnbc, appalled by misrepresentations of the aggression against Libya and Syria. In March 2013 he turned nsnbc into a daily, independent, international on-line newspaper. He can be contacted at nsnbc international at [email protected]

Since 1991, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 678, which authorized the US-UK attack on Iraq, which, in the words of Marti Ahtissari  “destroyed the infrastructure necessary to support human life in Iraq,” the United Nations has been dragged into destructive “adventures” that have literally created the crises it is now trying to resolve. 

In 2011, the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized NATO’s attack on Libya.  The attacks and sanctions in Iraq and Libya have so devastated both countries that it is impossible to resurrect a viable government in either country, and both remain incubators of terrorism which is spreading throughout the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

While Syria and Iran have been demonized by US-NATO powers, and until December 18, and the adoption of SC Resolution 2254, relentless efforts were made by US-NATO to repeat the same pattern of ravaging Syria by a military approach which resembles the scourge of Attila the Hun, the recognition of the limits of hegemonism is  beginning to be shared by UN member states witness to this ill-advised militarism.  This was stated, explicitly, when the Security Council celebrated the success of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which confirmed Iran’s commitment to eschew efforts to construct a nuclear weapon.  The Security Council meeting 7488, July 20^, 2015, announcing this success was not, however, free of the contentious accusations and counter-accusations which characterize many important Security Council meetings.  The Iranian delegate pushed back eloquently, stating:

“It is ironic that the Ambassador of the United States accused my government of destabilizing the region and of terrorism.  The country that invaded two countries of our region and created grounds favorable to the growth of terrorism and extremism is not well placed to raise such accusations against mine.  The feckless and reckless actions of the United States in our region over many years are at the root of many challenges that we are now facing in our neighborhood.”

On November 25, the Security Council held a meeting that addressed some of the tragic and deadly consequences of destructive UN authorized interventions in the Middle East.  The meeting, 7566 on Peace and Security in Africa:  Report of the Secretary-General on the Progress Towards the United Nations Integrated Strategy for the Sahel (S/2015/866) described the menace to surrounding countries and throughout the entire area that Libya has become following the US-NATO attack authorized by UNSC Resolution 1973.  Following UN authorized “regime change,” Libya is an incubator of terrorism so lethal that the representative of Chad stated:

“The major source of the terrorist threat in the Sahel is Libya, which is engulfed in total chaos and where a multitude of heavily armed terrorist groups find safe haven and flourish.  Moreover, the absence of a government of national unity that is capable of restoring security in the country is fueling the threat to security in the Sahel.  In that regard, Chad is deeply concerned by the establishment and entrenchment of a Daesh stronghold in Southern Libya.”

Venezuela’s representative, Mr. Ramirez Carreno stated:

“These efforts should be focused on sustainable development in the region and not purely a military vision.  It is only with sustained attention to the root causes of conflict – such as poverty, lack of access to basic services and education, can we ensure strong and sustainable peace and security.”

Ms. Hiroute Guebre Sellassie, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General to the Sahel powerfully addressed the root cause of the problem in her report:

“Up to 41 million young people under 25 years of age in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and the Niger alone face hopelessness and are at risk of radicalization or migration.  If nothing is done to improve access to education and increase employment, integration and opportunities for young people, the Sahel, I am afraid, will become a hub of mass migration and recruitment and training of terrorist groups and individuals, which, as Council members know, will ultimately have grave consequences for global peace and security.”

The United Nations is at a crossroads.  There is increasing recognition of the disastrous consequences of the UN Security Council authorization of the US-NATO instigated military onslaught on Iraq and Libya.  This is undeniable even by the US-NATO countries themselves, and even had there not been the Benghazi attack on the US Embassy, which led to the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, and three other personnel.  Prior to the US-NATO attack, both Iraq and Libya were implementing progressive social programs, in many areas, and had viable state infrastructure, albeit somewhat independent of multinational corporate control.  Both countries are now in a devastated condition that may be beyond repair.

The three Russian-Chinese vetoes of US-NATO’s attempt to gain Security Council authorization for yet another abhorrent military adventure, this time blowing up Syria, were sanctimoniously deplored by the West, as the cause of inactivity and paralysis at the Security Council.  Now, with the December 18 adoption of Security Council Resolution 2254, affirming the imperative of a political solution as the only acceptable method of resolution of the crisis in Syria, the wisdom of the Russian-Chinese vetoes must be obvious.  With Russia’s, China’s and Iran’s participation, it may be possible to salvage what was once an important country, Syria, and prevent the further noxious spread of chaos and terrorism throughout the region.  Russia’s and China’s principled opposition to wanton militarism, opposition hitherto deplored  by the West, may have served to halt the deadly march toward World War III.

Last weekend, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies continued their counter-attack at the Al-Sina’a District (Industrial District) in the Deir Ezzor province’s capital, striking ISIS militants at east of this area. According to the ground reports, the Syrian forces advanced at the Al-Sina’a District, capturing several buildings including the welding and sewing factories. The clashes are continuing.

The Syrian forces have continued offensive operations in the Deir Hafer Plains in the Aleppo province. Since last Friday, the pro-government forces seized the villages of Jarouf, Tal Al-Sharbi, and ‘Umm Kharwah and continued their advance towards Al-Bab. Additionally, the SAA is adancing in the direction if the city of Deir Hafer.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which include Syrian Kurds supported by separate Arab units have been continuing military operations to capture the area of the Tishreen Dam which links the Aleppo and Al-Raqqa provinces. By Dec.26 the SDF has captured the Tishreen Dam and continued offensive operation in the direction of the Aleppo province. Separately, the SDF took contol of several villages in the province including Al-Waysi located near the vast Euphrates River, in few kilometers from the Turkish border.

The most possible aims of the SDF in East Aleppo are the ISIS stronghold of Menbeij near the Turkish border and the Jarabulus border-crossing. Thus, the US-backed forces are clearly threatening Ankara’s interests in Syria. It could lead to a new phase of cooling of the US-Turkish relations. Also it provokes Turkey into additional militarybuild-up and into increasing its support of terrorists on Syrian territory.

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2015 has proven to be a monumental year full of geopolitical surprises, with Russia’s anti-terrorist intervention in Syria being chief among them. The old world order is changing at a rapid pace as rising multipolar forces push outwards against the resistant unipolar establishment. Just as much as Russia, China, and Iran are endeavoring to change the global system, the US and its Lead From Behind proxies are ferociously fighting to retain it, and this engenders a serious escalation of geopolitical tensions that can appear to be largely unpredictable to many. Nevertheless, while accounting for unexpected developments that are always guaranteed to pop up, it’s still possible to identify some of the most impactful international processes that are currently reshaping the world and use them as the starting point for forecasting upcoming events.

The exercise is formatted whereby all of the Eurasian supercontinent is analyzed in five separate chapters. The first part of each section begins by describing the overall state of play there before pinpointing a couple key trends that have defined the past year there. Afterwards, it then segues into a forecast about where the aforementioned processes are headed and lists a few disruptions that could occur to offset the course of events. Whenever possible, it also highlights key geopolitical fault lines and hot spots that interested individuals can monitor throughout the coming year.

I Europe: State Of Play

The homeland of Western Civilization has seen its fair share of turbulence and destabilization throughout the past year, largely owing to the large-scale and purposefully intended geopolitical blowback of the US’ regime change operations in the Mideast. The overwhelming “refugee” crisis has unbalanced the origin, transit, and destination states, and in each instance, it works out to the US’ grand strategic advantage. Concurrent with the internal weakening of Europe via the ambitious demographic transformation that the US has been engineering over the past year, American control over the continent was also promulgated via the direct form of NATO expansionism. The establishment of NATO command centers in the Baltics, Eastern Europe, and the Eastern Balkans were a move in entrenching Washington’s supremacy over the EU. So as to safeguard its full-spectrum hegemony for decades into the future, the US also made progress in pushing forward the TTIP, a coercive ‘economic governance’ tool designed to prevent Brussels from ever negotiating any independent trade agreements outside of Washington’s explicit purview. In more ways than one, 2015 can be described as the year that the US made one of its strongest power plays against Europe ever since the end of World War II.

The “Refugee” Crisis:

This US-designed and Turkish-assisted operation aims to demographically plant the seeds for long-term identity conflict in key EU states, most of all Germany, so that Color Revolution-like social conditions can be manufactured upon demand as a form of ‘bottom-up’ pressure against any forthcoming uncompliant administrations. Along the way, the disruption that this created in the Balkans upset the social and political equilibrium (already tenuous as it was) in Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia, thus furthering the chaotic conditions under which American influence is best promoted.

Schengen Shutdown:

In a surprising about-face, Germany, the EU’s most fervent guardian of the organization’s supposedly ‘cherished’ principles, essentially dismantled the Schengen Zone in one swift move when it re-established ‘temporary’ border checkpoints with Austria. This was a direct repercussion of the “refugee” crisis and served to demonstrate the enormous pressure that it had placed on the EU if even its most staunch advocate and de-facto leader would be compelled to retreat somewhat from part of its long-standing ideological convictions.

Hyper Liberalism Is On The Run:

All told, Germany’s relative backtracking from hyper-liberal policies set the stage for its affiliated ideological adherents to do so as well. Sweden reintroduced border checks and said it would no longer follow its blanket-acceptance policy for “refugees”, while Denmark went as far as order the confiscationof money and valuables from “refugees” as compensation for their taxpayer-provided accommodation in the country. Tellingly, there’s no denying at this point that hyper liberalism is on the run and that EU-member states are generally tempering their previously blind conviction to such radical ideals.

Anti-Establishmentarianism Grows:

Growing elements of the public in some of the most key EU states are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their leaders and the former manner of handling affairs. This in turn has supported the rise of anti-establishment parties and voices all across Europe, with Le Pen’s National Front being the most recent posterchild. Syriza had the potential for manifesting such strongly held sentiment in Greece, but it discouragingly proved itself to be an alternative (albeit electorally exciting and rhetorically innovative) form of conventional establishment politics, showing that such movements can successfully be hijacked. The anti-establishment fraud of Viktor Orban is an excellent case in point as well.

Russophobia Is Revived In Full:

Ironically, while some Western, Southern, and Central Europeans are pushing back against the EU establishment (whether sincere in these efforts or fraudulently doing so like Orban and Syriza), their Eastern European and Eastern Balkan counterparts have fully embraced the historical hate of Russophobia and are actually playing a vanguard role in lobbying the rest of the establishment to follow their lead. Nowhere is this more evident than in US-occupied Ukraine, the Baltics, and Romania, but it’s also powerfully felt in Poland as well. Finland and Sweden have jumped on the bandwagon as of late, too, although they’re slightly (key word) less obsessive than their peers.

Europe: Where It’s Headed

Broadly speaking, Europe is becoming even less independent than it’s ever been before. Internal divisions between the elite and the electorate, and “Old Europe” and “New Europe” are evident in all ways, and it’s clear that the continent is undergoing a systemic transformation. The institutional (normative, political, economic, etc.) monopoly that Germany used to have over its subordinates is now lessening to a degree, and this is creating opportunities for other aspiring leaders to assert themselves in their respective historical spheres. The consequence of this process is the fulfillment of the Intermarum project of dividing Europe from Russia by means of a contiguous belt of Russophobic and German-skeptic states stretching from Sweden to Romania, and considering recent developments, one can even include Turkey into this geopolitical construction. The Intermarum has already succeeded in cancelling South Stream and suspending Balkan Stream, and it’s thus predicted to strike at the third and last large-scale prospective energy project that remains, and that’s Nord Stream II. Poland, now equally Russophobic and German-skeptic under the PiS leadership, is leading the Intermarum’s charge against this pipeline, and while it’s uncertain whether or not they’ll full succeed, it’s already self-evident that it’s created a polarizing problem that is turning anti-Russian “New Europe” even further away from their “Older” peers.

The “New Europe”-“Old Europe” Divide Widens:

For the reasons explained above, the Intermarum members of the EU will continue moving progressively further away from Germany and Western Europe. Normatively speaking, they will publicly espouse of a form of “conservatism” that stands at odds with “Old Europe’s” traditional liberalism, and the attractive appeal that this has will pressure the latter to continue moderating its policies so as to ideologically compete in this changing ‘values-based’ environment (which includes promotion of the Russophobic “value” as well).

France Splits From Germany:

Paris has largely been seen as the junior partner to Berlin for quite a few years already, but that’s all beginning to change nowadays. While Germany will clumsily try to ‘balance’ between progressive and so-called ‘conservative’ ‘values’ and embarrassingly fail in doing so, France will bunker down in support of the liberal rhetoric that normatively endears it to the general public in the PIGS states of Southern Europe. France wants to carve out its own sphere of influence along the Mediterranean, but this of course isn’t anything new in fact.

What’s changing, however, is that France is differentiating itself from Germany in rhetorical, economic, and military manners, with the latter evidenced by its enthusiastic role in the Wars on Libya and Syria. Paris’ recent moves against Syria are the reason why Berlin felt compelled to up its aggression there as well and play catch-up, in probably the first-ever observable instance in a very long time of Germany undoubtedly following France’s lead. Although far-sighted as of now, there is of course the potential for this to create an intra-EU division between the bloc’s two leaders that would hamper its already-derailed efficiency and inadvertently facilitate the continued rise of the Intermarum.

The Underbelly Bursts:

The Balkans are under tremendous and unprecedented pressure as a result of the “refugee” crisis and the chain reaction of distrust that this unleashed between most of its regional states. The only two that are not presently in some sort of spat with one another are Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia, the geo-critical members of the Central Balkans that incidentally are the key transit points for China’s Balkan Silk Road project. They are, however, exceptionally vulnerable to internal destabilizations within their borders, brought about by a combination of Color Revolution technology, “refugees”, and Islamic-affiliated terrorism (most likely practiced by the Albanian ethnicity). Macedonia’s upcoming early elections at the end of April 2016 present a perfect scenario for reheating the frozen Hybrid War attempt from last May via a renewed Color Revolution/Albanian Unconventional War combination.

Montenegro’s people are also presently struggling to free themselves from Djukanovic’s yoke, urgently realizing that the longer they reside under his decades-long rule, the more their traditional spiritual and geopolitical identity is being eroded. The protest movement in this country could potentially escalate into a civil war if excessive state brutality continues to be used. It’s not for sure that this will happen, but it can’t of course be discounted. Montenegrins know that they absolutely must act before their country formally joins NATO in order to preserve their Orthodox Christianity and historically fraternal ties with Russia, while similarly the ruling clique understands how imperative it is for them to make sure NATO membership happens so as to destroy these two forms of national identity. The friction between the two could realistically give way to all-out conflict between both parties, ergo the fears of civil war.

Finally, Bosnia is being pushed into an unbearable domestic crisis, with Sarajevo obsessively doing whatever it can to infringe on Republika Srpska’s sovereignty. The country is currently in its worst crisis since the end of the 1994 civil war, as the Serbian representatives proudly cut ties with SIPA, the nation-wide court and prosecution organ, in protest after the latest blatant infringement against their entity’s sovereignty. The US is pushing the country back to the brink of warfare, seeing the incitement of regional violence as dually accomplishing the goals of sabotaging China’s Balkan Silk Road project through the enticement of Serbian involvement and the resultant geopolitical consequences this will entail and weakening the EU via an explosion of conflict and a renewed humanitarian crisis. As with the previous forecasts, it’s not for sure that this will fully transpire as feared, but the signs are undoubtedly there that this is a trend that should surely be monitored in the coming months. In all three instances, the use of terrorism could be strategically applied in order to set off a domino chain of destabilization.

Europe: Disruptors

The following are three events that could change the game in Europe:

Belarussian Backstabbing:

Lukashenko has been cozying up quite close to the West over the past year, having gained enough of their approval to even have some of the sanctions suspended against his country. It’s not known whether there’s a link between the two, but it was also around that time that Belarus began fussing about the air base that Russia had purportedly wanted to open up there. While Moscow publicly appears unmoved by the stalemate, it’s bound to have resulted in the Kremlin reconceptualizing the nature of relations that it has with its nominal “ally”. The West wants nothing more than to drive a wedge between the two and Russia is fully aware of this, hence why it doesn’t publicly respond to Lukashenko’s ego-tripping outreaches to Europe, but it’s possible that the Belarussian leader might overstep his position one day and disastrously himself in a situation where the West prompts him to choose sides. Predictably, he may let his ambitions of personal glory get the best of him and opt to join forces with the West if the economic price is right, and doing so would completely disrupt Russia’s post-Soviet integrational projects with the Eurasian Union and the CSTO.

Ukrainian Uprising 2.0:

First written about in August, the author still holds true to the thesis that Ukraine is progressively becoming more susceptible to a legitimate people’s revolution against the Kievan authorities. Whether it’s of Neo-Nazis turning on their former patrons, the country’s disparate regions pushing for federalization, or average citizens that have just plain had enough of the economic and physical destruction of the past two years, it’s more likely than ever that some sort of domestic disruption aside from a renewed civil war against Donbass (which is also a possibility) could occur. No matter which form it takes, this would instantly become Europe’s number one foreign affairs priority and would temporarily reorient (or rather, disorient) attention from the Mideast back to Eastern Europe. The effects that this would have on the New Cold War are dependent on the circumstances under which this event transpires, so if it’s a civil war against Donbass, it would be to Russia’s disadvantage, but if it was a patriotic rebellion against the Western-controlled government, then it would play to Russia’s benefit.

Croatian-Serbian Conflict:

The last disruption that might (but does not necessarily mean it will) happen would be a Croatian-Serbian War provoked by a breakdown of stability in Bosnia and exacerbated by both sides’ current missile race. For the moment, this isn’t doesn’t seem to be a likelihood for 2016, but the odds could turn against this forecast’s favor if unexpected developments (i.e. Western-supported terrorist attacks) break out in the country and quickly unravel the peace between all parties. A domestic destabilization in Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and/or the Republic of Macedonia (separately or in some sort of combination) would be unsettling enough for the EU and would already greatly undermine whatever remaining independence (mostly in name only at this point) it retains, but a conventional state-on-state conflict between two Balkan nations would maximize the respective effects even more.

II Eurasia: State Of Play

In this context, Eurasia refers to the former Soviet space and concerns Russia’s reintegration efforts over this wide region. Belarus and Ukraine were already mentioned in the previous section, so this one speaks on the Russian Federation itself, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Overall, one can see that Moscow has successfully consolidated its position, although two significant holdouts refuse to enter into pragmatic cooperation with it. These are Georgia and Uzbekistan, with the latter engaging with Russia through the SCO but not at all in the formerly close nature that it once did when it was part of the CSTO. These two states are the US’ ideal points of strategic entry in their respective regions, and more progress has been made on this front with Tbilisi than Tashkent. Other than the competing institutionalism between the Eurasian Union and EU in the Caucasus and Uzbekistan’s stubbornly ‘independent’ position, things in general have been very positive for Russia. The Pivot to Asia is proceeding apace, although of course this is a long-term strategic complementary diversification to Russia’s foreign policy and will take a lot more than a single year or two to physically actualize. That said, the commencement of the first-ever Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok was a welcome sign, and Russia looks to be advancing towards the fulfillment of the “Asian Sea Arc” project in enhancing maritime trade with ASEAN.

Eurasian Union Enlargement:

2015 was important for the Eurasian Union because it saw the formal incorporation of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan into the economic bloc. This gave the group a presence in the South Caucasus and expanded its position along the Chinese border, along with bequeathing it with the institutional experience necessary for managing future enlargements. The fact that both of these cases proved to be a success without any notable problems or bottlenecks demonstrates that the Eurasian Union is working effectively at its highest levels.

Tbilisi’s Intransigence:

Armenia is formally a member of the Eurasian Union and CSTO and rival Azerbaijan has been moving a lot closer to Russia over the past year, but Tbilisi has yet to improve its ties with Moscow. President Putin said during his yearly press conference recently that he’s ready to move forward with this process, provided that his Georgian counterparts seize the moment and move forward with him, but despiteformally agreeing to his visa-abolishment proposal, they seem unwilling to moderate their pro-NATO stance. Earlier this year, the military bloc even opened up a joint training base in the country, demonstrating the extent of influence that Brussels has over Tbilisi at the moment. When speaking of Brussels, that can be taken in more ways than one, since Georgia still wants to join the EU, which has the distinct possibility of creating a customs crisis in the Caucasus in the future.

CSTO/SCO Security Interplay In Central Asia:

Both integrational organizations rehearsed their contingency planning for dealing with a breakout of terrorist violence in Central Asia. ISIL’s expansion to Afghanistan and the Taliban’s latest propensity for renewed offensives raises the risk of chaos spilling across the borders and into the former Soviet periphery. Thankfully, as The Saker noted in his detailed piece from May, Russia has hardened her southern border and is prepared for dealing with most conventional scenarios that could transpire. China’s involvement vis-à-vis the SCO is important as well, since Beijing has enormous energy and forthcoming market interests there that it is eager to have defended.

The Caspian Takes Central Stage:

Complementing Russia’s anti-terrorist intervention in Syria, the Caspian Flotilla has played a very strategic and supportive role, one which transcends its counter-terrorist success and sends larger statements to the rest of the world. Russia is signaling that the inland lake, previously written off by Western military ‘experts’ as near-useless in the modern-era, is actually quite an advantageous position for launching operations in the Mideast and potentially even Central Asia. The munitions that were used surprised and the accuracy with which they were fired surprised Western observers and proved just how wrong they were in earlier harking on about Russia’s ‘decrepit’ naval resources.

The Pacific Pivot:

Russia has resolutely shifted a large amount of its formerly European-concentrated attention towards entering into tighter relations with the Pacific economies, specifically in ASEAN. Working with China is wonderful, but by itself it cannot function as a full-on pivot unless diversified to other partners as well. Vietnam forms the lynchpin of Russia’s ASEAN strategy, but even this could be endangered due to its partner’s cooperation with the US-led TPP. Be that as it may, Russia has clearly demonstrated its intent to engage the Pacific states and re-establish a mild presence in the region, be it in the diplomatic,military, and/or economic senses.

Eurasia: Where It’s Headed

The present security configuration in Central Asia is disproportionately dependent on the continued and stable rule of the countries’ leaders, but with transitions being inevitable sooner or later due to the advanced age of the various Presidents, it’s possible that everything Russia has worked for could become undermined if this changing of the guard descends into a bloody inter-factional battle. This isn’t so much a risk in Kazakhstan, and one could even perhaps say in Tajikistan (which has the memory of a recent civil war behind it), so much as it is in Uzbekistan, where the clan-based nature of society is prime for external manipulation. There are only two ways in which power transfers can take place in these three states, and that’s through de-facto ‘succession’ (the predecessor appoints a political heir before passing and/or stepping down) and/or a Color Revolution, both of which could intertwine once a ‘successor’s’ legitimacy is put to vote afterwards. These destabilization scenarios could occur at any time, not just next year, but because they the situational trip wire might be broached with one of the elderly statesmen’s passing, it’s worthy to have offered those view words about the possibility.

The Russian-Iranian Strategic Partnership Integrates Azerbaijan:

Long seen as the West’s prized partner in the Caspian, 2015 saw a remarkable cooling of Azeri-Western relations over the latter’s strong criticism of Baku’s human rights record. While political and non-energy economic ties (e.g. EU membership) appear to be at a standstill, oil and gas still flow unimpeded through its territory, and Azerbaijan is expected to be the main source for the EU’s anti-Russian Southern Energy Corridor. Interestingly enough, Azerbaijan has moved considerably closer to both Russia and Iran in the past year, excitedly raising the prospects that a trilateral partnership between the three (perhaps via the North-South Corridor) could neutralize the unipolar intentions of the US and EU and flip Baku into a becoming a multipolar pump of energy influence towards the West. Of course, the US would never allow Azerbaijan to become a strategic weapon against it, Turkey, or Israel’s interests (the latter of whichreceives 40% of its oil needs from the country) without some sort of Color Revolution disruption first, so as this realignment scenario moves forward, one can simultaneously expect more Western hostility towards Azerbaijan and friendly outreaches towards Armenia.

Barbarians At The Turkmen Gates:

The author wrote a prognosis in summer 2014 about the institutional vulnerability that Turkmenistan has towards any ISIL-like offensive streaming across its joint border with Afghanistan, and the assessment is still very relevant going into 2016 (and it could also affect Uzbekistan and Tajikistan too, especially if they’re in the midst of their own domestic crises at the time). Just in October there was an incident with the Taliban being caught in no-man’s land along the Turkmen border, and as the terrorist group regroups for what seems to be an imminent series of offensives earlier next year, it’s likely that their presence will only increase along the shared frontier. Any spillover of terrorist bedlam into Turkmen territory could quickly lead to a spike in global energy prices, principally because the world’s second-largest gas field in Galkynysh is very close to Afghanistan and could be affected by the turmoil. Even if the terrorists don’t occupy or destroy any of its facilities, but simply make a move in that direction, it’s predictable that gas prices (and in turn, perhaps even the oil prices to which they’re pegged) could increase, since speculators might prepare for Beijing to commence the emergency purchase of LNG to substitute for any forthcoming disruptions from its main foreign energy supplier. Although the LNG sales would take time to finalize and deliver, if a China made a large enough play in this market at a single, concentrated time, then it would inevitably have an impact on price.

Russian-Japanese Outreaches:

While it may seem unlikely to many, there’s a strong chance that the two sides will engage in behind-the-scenes diplomacy to pragmatically rectify their outstanding bilateral issues (if they haven’t begun such talks already). Shinzo Abe is indisputably a pro-American stooge that’s currently overseeing one of the US’ most cherished Lead From Behind proxies, but there are still apolitical non-governmental interests that are eager to intensify ties between the two. Russia’s Pivot to Asia needs foreign investment and management experience in order to be fully successful, hence the reason why Vladivostok and the nearby environs were recently declared a free port in order to assist with this. It’s not to suggest that a breakthrough needs to be reached on the Kuril Islands issue in order for this to happen either, as the only thing that needs to occur is for the profit-minded business elite in Japan to successfully lobby their government backtrack on their unreasonable anti-Russian policies out of economic motivations, convincing them that there is more self-interested gain in working with Russia than working against it.

From the Russian perspective, aside from the Far Eastern foreign investment interests that it has, Moscow would like to strategically and pragmatically diversify its Asian Pivot beyond China and to the Pacific’s third-largest economy, Japan. Additionally, some in the Russian establishment conceivably hope that progress could be made in exporting the country’s resources to the energy-deprived island chain. On a grander level, the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership tacitly implies that both sides can cooperate with the other’s rivals (in this case, Russia working with Japan just as it does with Vietnam and India) out of the shared vision of using its newfound position to promote its partner’s interests wherever possible. This policy doesn’t always work as theorized and isn’t infallible, but the general concept is that each of the two trusts the other enough so as not to be perturbed by their external dealings and to never suspect treacherous intentions from them. If anything, such interactions can boost the cohesiveness of the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership, but this is only because of the unique nature of their bilateral relations. The same template, for example, can’t be superimposed on Russian-Belarussian relations, as was earlier discussed.

Eurasia: Disruptors

Other than the Hybrid War regime chance scenarios touched upon earlier, here are several ways in which the ongoing trends in Eurasia could severely be disrupted:

Nagorno-Karabakh Continuation War:

This was previously elaborated upon by the author before, but it still remains an ever-present possibility. The specifics of a 2016 scenario would probably be a bit modified than what was earlier written, making due for the changed geopolitical position of both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia’s Eurasian Union and CSTO ally is moving towards the West at the same time that the West’s energy-exporting bastion is looking towards Russia and Iran. While Azerbaijan routinely threatens Armenia and continuously boasts about its military potential, it realistically doesn’t seem inclined to provoke Russia, which has a contingent of troops based there. It’s possible that a second hurrah of Western influence and/or false-flag provocations could be used to lure Baku into this anti-Russian trap, but it’s more feasible that a second round of Color Revolution fervor would hit Armenia and destabilize its government. In the event that it falls to Ukrainian-style hard-core nationalists, then the presumably pro-Western authorities that would take their place could likely initiate the catastrophic scenario on their own, thereby opening up a new anti-Russian hot front in the New Cold War and potentially turning Moscow and Baku against one another.

Uzbekistan Goes Full-On Rogue:

Islam Karimov has been somewhat courting President Putin’s approval over the past year, trying to convince him that Uzbekistan isn’t going to totally turn against Russian interests and actively disrupt them in the region. The Russian leader visited the Central Asian state in December 2014 and wrote off some of its debt, and he even invited Karimov to visit Russia after the two met in Ufa over the recent summer. Still, these friendly and welcome outreaches don’t change the fact that Uzbekistan is looking to warm up its military relations with the US and potentially becomes its Lead From Behind partner in the region in exchange. Uzbekistan might even be under some form of implicit blackmail, getting the hint that failure to work with the US would guarantee that a Hybrid War scenario breaks out after Karimov’s passing. Whatever the reason may be, there’s plenty of reason to suspect that Uzbekistan could one day play a similarly anti-Russian position as its unipolar Ukrainian and Turkish counterparts presently do.

Japanese-Russian Naval Tensions:

Disturbingly, it appears as though the world has entered a renewed era of naval tensions, with the East China Sea, South China Sea, and Turkey’s foreboding potential in the Bosporus being the prime examples. In a similar vein, it’s possible for the US to command its Japanese satellite to enact a comparable provocation against Russia just as it does against China at the moment. It’s not guaranteed that Japan would fall for this bait, but Abe might be tempted to go along with this in order to create the ‘convincing’ justification that Japan needs to unreservedly and immediately revise its pacifist constitution. Staging some kind of stunt in the Kuril Islands would create the global fanfare necessary to ride the anti-Russian wave into general international (Western) acceptance of his actions, and it might even be enough to scare the Japanese population into largely accepting his dictates on this matter. The media-manipulated and absolutely false perception of Russia and China ‘teaming up’ against Japan would also excite American military planners into beefing up their presence in archipelago on the fabricated grounds of ‘protecting an Asian democracy’.

III Mideast: State Of Play

The latest year was one of the most historically transformational for the region ever since the 2003 US War on Iraq, with the argument perhaps being made that 2015 was even more impactful because it heralded Russia’s long-awaited return to the Mideast and the formal (key word) end of the US- and Israel-manufactured Iranian nuclear ‘scare’. There’s no debating that the entire regional paradigm was turned upside down by these two developments, and the author’s earlier analysis about “The New Middle East: Russian Style” goes in-depth by explaining what’s changed and what it will likely lead to. Therefore, this section is mostly a reiteration of that research, albeit partially modified for the specifics of the 2016 Trends Forecast. Other than these two globally renowned events whose impact doesn’t require any further explanation beyond the afore-cited link, there were three other developments that marked the key Mideast processes of 2015:

The War On Yemen:

Saudi Arabia fell into a tantalizing trap after it decided to invade its poorer and comparatively weaker neighbor to the south. The Ansarallah had been waging a liberation struggle against the pro-Western and Saudi-imposed proxy that was controlling the country, but the Saudi establishment fell for their own prejudices and sincerely thought that this was some sort of covert Iranian conspiracy against their interests. That definitely wasn’t the case whatsoever, but the fact remains that this paranoid fear is what prompted the Kingdom to enter into what could indisputably be labeled as a quagmire right now. In the over 9 months since their bombing campaign and invasion started, Saudi Arabia and its contracted GCC allies and other mercenary partners have not been able to achieve their main objective of defeating the Ansarallah and regaining total control over the country. In response, the Saudis felt pressed to further internationalize the War on Yemen under the pretext that it’s a subsect of the larger “War on Terror”, hence the recent creation of the Riyadh-led “anti-terrorist coalition” (examined in-depth by the authorhere). Going into the new year, there’s no concrete indication yet of whether or not this will change the Saudis’ disastrous fortunes and be enough to turn the tide of the war to their favor, although it will likely fulfill some role in trying to do so.

Kurdistan Calling:

Having been predicted years ago and previously with much Western backing (although now with possible Russian-Iranian support as well), it now looks like the time has come for “Kurdistan” to take on a heightened international role (even if sub-national and spread across Syria-Turkey-Iraq). The Iraqi Peshmerga and Syrian-based Kurdish militias have been very successful in fighting against ISIL, and this has won them international approval from all forces except Turkey, which is fearful that this sizeable minority group (estimated to be around a quarter of the country’s population) may rebel against Ankara once more for increased rights, representation, and perhaps even autonomy or independence. It was this fear, combined with Erdogan’s catastrophic electioneering efforts, that led to Turkey provoking the Kurds into restarting their military operations against the state, all with the intent of sparking a preplanned offensive to cripple that ethnic community. The resultant Turkish Civil War that followed and Erdogan’s divisive efforts to split the transnational community by buying out their Iraqi counterparts will obviously be major factors in determining the legal status of transnational “Kurdistan” in the coming future.

Turkey Backstabs Russia:

One of the most dramatic events to happen ever since the end of the Old Cold War occurred when Turkey shockingly shot down a Russian anti-terrorist bomber over Syria. This unparalleled aggression was especially jaw-dropping given that the two sides, despite their disagreements over Syria, were steadily moving towards a pragmatic partnership with one another. In the aftermath that followed, Russia maturely resisted the legitimate urge for war that it had and patiently set about planning the long-term destabilization of Erdogan’s government, with travel and trade sanctions being but the first counter-salvo in what is expected to become a protracted proxy struggle between both sides. The US ultimately benefits from this, but curiously enough, it also seems inclined to passively turn a blind eye to what Russia might be planning against Turkey, with the afore-cited link providing more details about this interesting development.

Mideast: Where It’s Headed

The Mideast will continue its geopolitical transformation in the coming year, with ongoing events helping to reshape its overall contours. This next year will be but one in a series of several coming more that will determine what will then be the lasting status of the Mideast. This transitional time is turbulent and racked with violence, and it can be said to have begun in earnest in 2014 with the rise of ISIL. It’s not known exactly when this period will end, but the region could realistically stabilize by 2018 or 2019, depending of course on whether or not key pillars (Turkey and Saudi Arabia) implode, which in that case could indefinitely prolong this history-making era.

Reaching A Syrian Settlement:

The dynamic interplay of various global forces that have converged over Syria is totally unparalleled in recent history but also completely untenable in its present form. There are now three coalitions nominally fighting terrorism in Syria (with only the Russian one being sincere in its stated objective, while the US- and Saudi-led ones actually support terrorism) and a slew of foreign aircraft flying over its skies. The accelerated diplomacy that’s been happening as of late indicates that all sides want to see some sort of settlement soon, likely agreed to by the middle of next year, in order to de-escalate and pull back from the brink of all-out conflict. Each side will probably resort to non-conventional means to support their given side(s) after the conventional de-escalation begins, meaning that any possible surface indication of a settlement might be illusory and misleading. Nonetheless, it seems like an agreement between most of the Great Powers currently involved in the war in one capacity or another will come sooner or later, and it’s very probable that 2016 will be the year they finally hammer the details out.

It’s impossible at this moment to fully articulate a post-conflict vision for Syria since so much is dependent on the Race for Raqqa. The respective coalition that gains control over ISIL’s ‘capital’ will have a deciding voice in stipulating the constitutional direction of the country afterwards, and with that document’s legal revision being a central element of the UNSC’s conflict resolution efforts, it means that control over this city will be pivotal. The US would ideally like to create a transnational sub-state “Sunnistan” (likely through a ‘federal’ model) between eastern Syria and western Iraq in order to revive the Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline that had originally been at the root of the war in the first place, while Russia and Syria want to preserve the unity of the state. It’s appropriate at this moment to remind the reader that Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Iraq was likely meant to further the goal of a “Sunnistan” in that theater in anticipation of a complementary unit being constructed in Syria.

Turkish Turmoil:

The author has written about this on many occasions before, but the gist is that Turkey is leaping towards an all-out domestic crisis as anti-government sentiment spikes and the Civil War wages on. With Russia now opposed to Erdogan’s government, it’s likely that it will take some moves to increase the level of domestic dissent against the authorities (e.g. sanctions and potential gas disruptions), but it must be reminded that Turkey’s present turmoil is all Erdogan’s fault. A dangerous cocktail of destabilization is now brewing inside the country, and it’s very probable that the civil war could spill over out of the southeast and into the heartland and/or coastal areas. It doesn’t even have to be Kurdish-inspired in this case, as if the legitimate institutional opposition continues to feel oppressed to the strong degree that they presently do, some of their members might peacefully organize against the government. If the state brutally crushes their demonstrations (which is all but guaranteed), some of the protesters might resort to taking up arms against the government, with a few possibly linking up with radical left-wing militants in the process. As violence spreads across the land, Erdogan might feel compelled to enact a wide-ranging martial law decree, but doing so would also place the military in a heightened position to enact a coup against him if they were both inclined to do so and physically capable of it (after Erdogan ‘cut their wings’ in the past). It doesn’t look like things will calm down anytime soon in Turkey, and even if they appear to do so, there’s a definite level of intense discontent lying just below the surface that could be reactivated at any time.

The Saudis’ Sinking Ship:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has never been in such dire straits before. The country is embroiled in an unnecessary, bloody, and ever-expanding quagmire in Yemen, and its own borders are now being threatened by the blowback overspill that it unintentionally engendered. The Saudis can’t even fight the war they started on their own and have been pressed into assembling an “anti-terrorist” coalition (in reality a ‘legitimated’ and integrated mercenary marketplace) to provide the necessary backup support that its forces need to sustain their aggression. Concurrent with this, falling energy prices have forced the Kingdom into its largest-ever deficit that raises serious questions about the potential for social unrest in the future. Along with that, there’s also the prospect of a broad Shiite uprising in the Eastern Province if the Kingdom’s authorities continue to blatantly disregard that minority’s basic human rights and interests. All told, the Saudi ship appears to be sinking, but it doesn’t mean that its problems can’t theoretically be patched up. As difficult as it might be, they may find a way to avert what looks to be a looming disaster, although at present it’s unknown exactly how they could realistically do this (but they never tire the world with their ‘surprises’). Therefore, the Saudis’ forecast for 2016 is unusually grim, and it’s predicted that one or more of the aforementioned destabilizing factors will contribute to a larger systemic crisis inside the country, perhaps culminating in a royal and/or military coup attempt (whether or not it succeeds is another matter).

Mideast: Disruptors

The Saudis Win The War On Yemen:

This does not seem all that possible at this given point, but if the Saudi’s “anti-terrorist” coalition is somehow able to provide the necessary personnel and firepower support that Riyadh so desperately needs, then it’s conceivable that it might irreversibly change the balance of power there and lead to a full-out ethnic cleansing campaign against Shiites and northern-based Yemenis. That’s probably the only way that the Saudis could ever secure their ‘win’ over Yemen, and they know they can only do it if they have multilateral support and partners in crime. Doing it by themselves, which they’re theoretically capable of it, isn’t something that they want to do primarily since they want to forge a ‘blood bond’ between their mercenary forces in committing them to further anti-Shiite genocidal campaigns afterwards. A Saudi ‘win’ in the War on Yemen would be a loss for the multipolar world and would immediately raise the chances that the “anti-terrorist” coalition is redirected northwards against Syria and Iraq with full force. These two targets might see some low-scale, light-intensity engagements prior to this, but the real nightmare would occur after the ‘problem’ in Yemen is ‘dealt with’ according to the Saudis’ vile designs.

Omani Sultan Qaboos Passes Away:

The leader of Oman, the most pragmatic and non-radical member of the GCC, has been sick for years and is already of advanced age. He will eventually pass away, whether it’s next year or sometime afterwards, but there’s no apparent heir or elaborated successionist process for what will come next. The author wrote about the possible scenarios in an earlier piece for The Saker, but to concisely summarize, one of three possibilities will happen – succession will occur unimpeded and Oman will remain a pro-Saudi (albeit pragmatic) kingdom; the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to sabotage the leadership transition; or Islamic Republicanism (in the vein of the Iranian manifestation) takes hold among the populace and becomes a rallying cry for change. The latter two events would likely result in some form of a Saudi military intervention, whether unilaterally or through the “anti-terrorist” coalition (minus the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting states of Qatar and Turkey). This is a whole new can of worms that the Saudis definitely do not want to deal with at the moment, and it could be the decisive straw that breaks the camel’s back. On the other hand, if a rabidly pro-Saudi ruler comes to power in Qaboos’ wake, it’s possible that he may reorient the Kingdom’s foreign policy away from its pragmatic base and more towards the unipolar subservient status of his royal peers, which would thus have direct consequences for bilateral ties with Iran (including in the energy sphere).

Muslim Brotherhood-Wahhabist Fallout 2.0:

Most of 2014 was marked by a the Gulf Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Qatar that was finally ended when the latter strategically surrendered to Riyadh and was forced to kick the Muslim Brotherhood outto Turkey. Since then, however, and with Saudi Arabia’s relative weakening over the past year, Qatar has moved so close with Turkey (the new formal patron of the terrorist movement) that it’s going to host a military base for Erdogan in the coming future. This is obviously aimed at making sure that the US doesn’t ever sell Qatar out to Saudi Arabia in whatever forthcoming Mideast realignment it may be planning, so Emir Thani is trying to proactively secure his survival in the face of changing American strategic priorities. Remarkably, both Turkey and Qatar are part of Saudi Arabia’s “anti-terrorist” coalition, but sooner or later, it’s all but certain that the two ideological strands of competing Islamic terrorism will come to blows again, perhaps in the abovementioned Omani scenario. No matter how it eventually plays out, the stakes are a lot higher now than they were in 2014, since Qatar is now aligned with Turkey, which foolishly doesn’t understand when it’s necessary to back away from a flawed policy (the aggression against Russia being the premier case in point). Erdogan’s arrogance would play out to the advantage of the multipolar world, however, since a Turkish-Saudi conflict (whether physical or played out via a region-wide Cold War) would further weaken the US’ two pillars of regional support and create unprecedented opportunities for the Resistance Bloc. It might even speed up one or both of their internal disintegrations if the scenarios proceed along a certain trajectory.

IV South Asia: State Of Play

The situation in South Asia has changed dramatically over the past year, although most people likely have been oblivious to this owing to the relative lack of global news coverage that all but the most dramatic events receive. Mostly everyone is aware of the Taliban and its steady advances in the Afghan countryside, as are they knowledgeable about India and Pakistan’s ascension to the SCO, but comparatively less people heard about the Indian-Chinese Cold War that’s progressively unfolded throughout 2015 or about the heated proxy rivalry between the two over Nepal. These interconnected events are very important, yet they regretfully didn’t receive the widespread exposure that they deserve. Along the same vein, Bangladesh’s rising Islamic terrorist problem has also been swept under the rug, despite clear indications that it is turning into ISIL’s latest frontline state.

When assessing the year in review as it relates to South Asia, one mustn’t also forget to speak about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, perhaps one of the most critical spokes of the New Silk Road, nor must the stunning pro-Western electoral reversal in Sri Lanka go undescribed either. The Hybrid War threat in the Maldives only made the news because the island chain is a popular and elite tourist getaway, but aside from that, most people would never have heard about developments in this geostrategic Indian Ocean state. Last but not least, the long-held dream of constructing a pipeline from Turkmenistan to India (what some have suggested was partially behind the US’ decision to occupy Afghanistan) finally moved forward for the first time in its history with the project’s official consecration in early December.

It’s worthwhile to shed some additional light on these neglected geopolitical developments in order to educate the reader about their existence and significance, and also to set the stage for explaining how they’ll impact on the region in the year to come.

Taliban On The March:

To refresh everyone’s memory, the US and NATO severely decreased the size of their occupation forces in Afghanistan at the end of 2014, meaning that 2015 was bound to see an increase in Taliban activity one way or another. To clarify, the West did not fully withdraw their forces, but merely reduced their presence out of strategic considerations, but this was enough to embolden the terrorists later on in the year. During the fall, the Taliban shocked the world by temporarily capturing their first provincial capital since the 2001 invasion ousted them from power. This dramatic event captured global attention and proved that the Taliban was significantly more powerful (both in terms of physical forces and intelligence networks) than was previously thought, and their follow-up attacks all throughout the country at the end of December took most experts off guard. After all, the Taliban previously ‘hibernated’ during the winter, with the spring and summer being routinely identified as the traditional ‘fighting season’, but it seems as though the group is switching up its strategy so as to score unexpected battlefield ‘points’.

It’s incontestable that the Taliban are in the process of undertaking a nationwide offensive aimed at finally overthrowing the Kabul government, but this has significantly destabilizing consequences for all of Afghanistan’s neighbors. As was discussed in the earlier section about Eurasia, there’s the real risk of terrorist violence spilling over into Central Asia, especially in the event that any of the border countries experience their own separate forms of destabilization. Likewise, the violence could also spill across into Pakistan, which has traditionally felt the brunt of the Taliban’s wrath over the past decade. And, making matters even more complicated, ISIL has finally established a presence in the country and is lethally competing with the Taliban. It’s very probable that if these two groups don’t cooperate (and even if they do so, it would be under ISIL’s leadership, not the Taliban’s), then they’ll savagely be at each other’s throats in a bloody terrorist civil war.

This could create the opening needed for Afghanistan’s anti-terrorist forces to eliminate both groups in one fell swoop, but unfortunately the national forces are largely corrupted and trained to insufficient standards to take advantage of this opportunity, and more than likely the two terrorist sides would fight to the death with one another. If ISIL emerges victorious, then the territorial expansionism that’s been trademarked by the group in Syria and Iraq will likely become transplanted in the Afghan theater, raising the very real risk that that a transnational ‘caliphate’ could emerge between Afghanistan and Central Asia (perhaps making its first inroads in Turkmenistan and/or Tajikistan), Afghanistan and Pakistan, or between all three regions in connecting Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhstan, Afghanistan’s Wakkhan Corridor and nearby environs, and Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. If the Taliban is really as divided as some rumors speculate, then it’s possible that ISIL could gain the upper hand against them in any prospective conflict and take steps to actualize these transnational terrorist plans.

Pakistan And India Join The SCO:

This was a huge move and one that should likely reverberate for years to come. The two regional nuclear-armed rivals began their ascension into the Russian- and Chinese-led organization during the SCO Summit in Ufa back in July. On paper at least, this was supposed to herald a new political-strategic order in Eurasia, with all of the continent’s primary forces (save for the EU, of course) party to the group in one capacity or another. It still remains to be seen whether the optimistic assessments about the SCO will bear any major fruit, as the Indian-Chinese Cold War (which will be described shortly) threatens to put all of that on hold for the indefinite future except for select publicly presentable statements and cooperative efforts (like multilateral humanitarian and social programs. On the other hand, India and Pakistan’s joint ascension to the SCO may have played a role in New Delhi trusting Islamabad enough to go forward with the TAPI Pipeline project, which in and of itself is a very historic development.

TAPI:

This far-reaching project has finally seen the light of day after its formal beginning at the start of December. If everything goes according to plan (a big “if”, of course), then the gas pipeline from the world’s second-largest field should go online by 2019. TAPI’s saliency cannot be overstated, since not only would it bring Turkmen gas on to the global market via LNG near Gwadar, but it would also make India partially dependent on Pakistan’s goodwill in supplying its partial energy demands. Never before have the two rivals agreed to cooperate so closely, which of course harbors well for the future stability of the subcontinent. Anything can come up between then and now, however, so it’s not a guarantee that the project itself will be completed or that India and Pakistan will enjoy the level of trust necessary to actualize their envisioned energy plans, but the idea itself is unprecedented and certainly deserves mention in this end-of-the-year review of South Asia.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor:

One of the largest economic announcements made in 2015 came from President Xi Jinping’s proclamation that his country would be investing $46 billion in constructing the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) between the two countries, thus confirming China’s desire to fully integrate its decades-long Pakistani ally into its New Silk Road dreams for the supercontinent. Importantly, the successful completion of this project would not only add to the development of Xinjiang (already the hub of Chinese-Central Asian trade and through which Chinese-Pakistan trade would also pass), but it would de-facto give China an Indian Ocean presence in the southern port of Gwadar. Strategically speaking, although being a long-stretched overland detour, this would partially (but not fully) ease China’s dependence on the US-controlled Strait of Malacca and increasingly unipolar-crowded South China Sea, thus signaling that CPEC is of the highest significance for Beijing. Somewhat for this reason, it can be expected that the US will do its best to continue the destabilization of Pakistan, but in a way so that the Indian-destined TAPI isn’t that negatively affected. Considering these self-imposed situational constraints, it’s possible that the Province of Balochistan (the location of Gwadar) might undergo a renewed period of unrest sometime in the future.

The Indian-Chinese Cold War:

In speaking about unrest and destabilization, it’s timely to raise general awareness about the Indian-Chinese Cold War. The author meticulously explored the details of this South Asia-wide proxy rivalry in anearlier piece for Oriental Review, but the overall idea is that the two Asian Supergiants are fiercely competing in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and that while neither of them makes this fact public, it’s impossible for objective observers to deny the existence of their mutual geopolitical tension in these areas. Due to the rapidity in which the competition spread (four countries over the course of only one year), it’s logical to conclude that this state of strained relations will carry over into at least the next couple of years, if not outright develop into a ‘formal’ Asian Cold War sometime in the future. The relevant article mentioned above has information about the specifics of the how this power struggle has played out in each of the aforementioned states.

Bangladesh Turning Into Bangla-Daesh:

As was spoken about in the lead-in, Bangladesh is quickly turning into a frontline state in the War on Terror, with ISIL feverishly working to build a few nests within the country. It’s relevant to note that Bangladesh is the world’s most densely populated country and is overwhelmingly almost entirely Muslim, meaning that not only could ISIL wrack absolute havoc with even the most ‘small-scale’ terrorist attack, but that there’s bound to be a statistically significant percentage of the population that sympathizes with the group.

Even if this is only 1% of them, in a country of over 150 million people, that’s still one and a half million people, which is a wildly uncontrollable number of terrorist supporters to have in general, let alone in the same country at the same time. Bangladesh is critically located between India’s state of West Bengal and its ‘Seven Sisters’ in the Northeast (whose stability is a prerequisite for India’s “Act East” towards ASEAN), thus translating into the country having a unparalleled importance on India’s geostrategic security as well.

Any large-scale terrorist chaos inside Bangladesh, not to mention if this produces a massive humanitarian crisis and hundreds of thousands of refugees, would directly have a destabilizing impact on these Indian territories, and thus, on India’s own national security. The quirk here is that despite India being so vulnerable to Bangladeshi-originated destabilization, it is almost powerless to directly determine the course of events there and remains somewhat of a ‘geopolitical hostage’ to whatever transpires. It goes without saying that this fact is obviously understood by outside powers as well, and it can’t be precluded that the US might seek to take advantage of it in order to increase the leverage that it has over India in the future.

South Asia: Where It’s Headed

The Asian Cold War Heats Up:

India and China are not expected to significantly improve their bilateral relations in the coming year. Of course, they might make highly publicized statements of rhetorical support for one another in one of the two major multilateral organizations that they’re a part of (BRICS and the SCO), but bilaterally, little will probable change between the two. Furthermore, the Cold War between them isn’t going to go away on its own, and both sides are increasingly viewing the other as an emerging security threat to their respective interests. The Indians likely harbored this sentiment ever since their defeat in the 1962 war with China, but it’s only this year that those feelings have returned front and center for both camps. The way that the Indians see it, China is encroaching in their traditional sphere of civilizational interests in South Asia (Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives), while China sees the latter three states as essential nodes in its One Belt One Road (“New Silk Road”) policy. Inevitably, given these competing interests (India wants China out of South Asia, China sees a pressing need to boost its presence there), the two Asian Supergiants are bound to continue their Cold War no matter what.

Pakistan Becomes More Multipolar, India Goes Unipolar:

As a consequence of the Indian-Chinese Cold War, it’s likely that Pakistan will move closer to the multipolar camp at the same time as India drifts towards the unipolar one. The reason for this is obviously, and it’s that there will probably be a direct correlation between a worsening of Indian-Chinese ties and Indian-Pakistani ones, with China and Pakistan correlating their actions as per the strategic partnership between them. Nobody wants to see South Asia become a flashpoint in the New Cold War, and it’s not to say that it’ll become a ‘hot spot’ necessarily, but that each of the two sides (China/Pakistan and India) will progressively diverge in their strategic visions until it becomes clear after a few more years that India is a lot more closely aligned with the US and Japan (foreseeably in containing China, perhaps even in the South China Sea) than it is with China and Russia in BRICS. India will probably still remain in BRICS and the SCO, and ties with Russia might be largely unaffected by everything, but it’s the bilateral issues between India and China that will be disruptive for the world.

As a strong example in proving the direction that India’s headed, Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe, probably the most anti-Chinese leader in the world today, visited New Delhi earlier this month and signed a raft of strategic agreements with his Indian counterpart, Modi. As a result, Japan will now be supplying India with military technology, cooperating with it in nuclear energy projects, and building its first high-speed railroad. In one quick move, India demonstrated to the rest of the world that it was unreservedly siding with Japan (and by implied extension, the US) against China, even going as far as directly addressing“freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea in a euphemistic swipe against Beijing. The Indian establishment has made its choice and charted its future for the next couple of years at least, so there’s no use speaking about any substantial Indian-Chinese détente in the coming future. It doesn’t mean that they’ll come to direct blows or have a dramatic falling out akin to the Sino-Soviet one of the Old Cold War (although that’s certainly possible with time, with India becoming the West’s ‘China’ in this neo-era of containment), but that their cooperation in BRICS and the SCO is predicated solely on the least common denominator of self-interest and that all other pretenses of ‘friendship’ and ‘cooperation’ are mere illusions.

Nepal Cracks:

Concerning Nepal, the circumstances of the Indian-Chinese Cold War are slightly different and take on a unique form. The only reason that China has been able to make sure strategic headway in the Himalayan state over the past couple of months is because of the flat-out failure of India’s foreign policy there. New Delhi enacted a de-facto blockade in support of the culturally, religiously, and ethnically similar Madhesi group that was protesting against the country’s new constitution, ostensibly on the grounds that it dilutes their political power. India, likely wanting to institutionally deepen its grip over its proxy, sought to aggressively blockade goods (and especially fuel) from entering the state, hoping that this would pressure the government enough that it would quickly backtrack and amend the constitution. Long story short, Kathmandu pushed back and quickly pivoted to China to help, which has now formally broken the decades-long monopoly that Indian fuel suppliers had over the Nepalese market, thus irreversibly taking the former Kingdom out of India’s full sphere of influence. Even if Nepal does tactically backtrack on the constitution and implements the pro-Madhesi ‘reforms’ that India supposedly wants (which is whatappears to be happening), then that still can’t shake off the strategic hold that China has now gained.

Instead, a resolution of the Nepali Constitutional Crisis according to India’s vision could paradoxically prompt a civil war inside the country. If the Madhesi use their possibly newfound powers to obstruct state mechanisms and/or make a pro-Indian power play against the government, then Kathmandu would be forced to fight back in one way or another. Similarly, if the Madhesi are successful in carving out their own ethnic-based federal state, then this would inspire other, smaller groups to do the same thing, thus potentially catalyzing the Somali-like decentralization of the country along ethnic-regional lines. The federal forces probably wouldn’t let it get to that point, and the other ethnic groups have weaker economic levers to pull in pressuring Kathmandu, but all the same, the destabilization would have to be dealt with, and the course of events that could predictably ensue might exacerbate domestic tensions even more push the country further along the path to another civil war, albeit this time ethno-regional based as opposed to a Maoist ideological struggle.

Bangladesh Begins Its Descent:

Barring a miracle (which can of course happen), it doesn’t seem likely that Bangladesh will pull out of the destabilization trap that it’s seems to inevitably be descending towards. The political crisis between the ruling government and the ‘opposition’ has already led to an increase in tension between both camps, and the involvement of ISIL-related terrorism is one of the most inopportune developments that could happen to the country at this critical time. The pace and intensify at which Bangladesh slips into chaos is dependent on the following factors: the level of violent Islamist infiltration and sympathy levels in the country (no reliable quantitative data exists although it’s presumed that the ‘opposition’s’ supporters are favorable towards these ideologies); the ‘opposition’s’ desire to seize power and possibly resort to violent means in doing so; and the involvement of the US in destabilizing the present Bangladeshi government (which, while being pro-India at the moment, is ‘uncomfortably’ too ‘pro-Chinese’ for Washington). It already seems as though all of the criteria are reached to some degree or another, meaning that it’s quite likely that Bangladesh will experience a wave of destabilizing events sometime next year, with Saudi Arabia and/or Qatar fulfilling the necessary Lead From Behind roles in clandestinely supporting the Islamist ‘opposition’ (be it ‘legitimate’ political figures or outright terrorists).

Struggling With The ‘Seven Sisters’:

India’s seven Northeast Provinces are the most unstable region in the country, located in a geographically inconvenient area for the central government to enforce and comprised of many different (and oftentimes, feuding) ethnicities. While there are many ethnic-based insurgencies and terrorist groups active in the region, two of the most notorious are the Bodo and the Naga. The author wrote extensively about the former one year ago when they launched their last high-profile attack, while the latter were discussed in June after India staged a cross-border raid into Myanmar as a reprisal for the group’s last anti-government ambush. While both groups have laid low ever since their respective headline-grabbing attacks, it doesn’t mean that they’ve technically gone anywhere, and the threat that each of them represents is still very real. The Nagas are particularly dangerous because they are part of an umbrella separatist/terrorist organization called the United Liberation Front of West South East Asia (UNLFW). The author also examined this topic in-depth in an earlier piece for Oriental Review, with the main conclusion being that the union of ethnic anti-government forces represents a very destabilizing development in Northeast India that New Delhi must neutralize at all costs. Failure to do so would absolutely undermine its Act East strategy and stall any forthcoming effectiveness of the ASEAN Highway to Thailand.

It might not necessarily be next year, but there’s a high probability that the ethnic cauldron that’s brewing in Northeast India will naturally overflow sometime soon, and if large-scale inter-ethnic fighting commences, it might be very difficult for the central government to quell. The Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, and Naga might become entangled in a horrific humanitarian catastrophe if the armed groups among them experience a falling out, although for now everything seems relatively stable between them owing to the existence of the umbrella UNLFW. This is yet another reason why the situation is so particularly tricky for New Delhi: on the one hand, it needs to defeat the separatists/terrorists, but on the other, by breaking the militant bonds that unite each of these disparate ethnic groups, it might unintentionally prompt a nightmare scenario where they turn against one another in a deadly blame-game and start wantonly killing each other’s civilian population. One of the only ways to preempt this, aside from militarily squashing the groups, is to place a heightened military focus on the area and commence renewed anti-insurgent operations for rooting out these movements and their supporters, but that might unintentionally provoke even more endemic anti-government suspicion that could serve to further legitimize the demands of the separatist non-terrorist voices there. All in all, India’s Northeast is definitely it’s most vulnerable region, and one could go as far as saying that it’s perhaps the entire country’s Achilles’ heel it not properly dealt with.

Sri Lanka Stays The Course:

While not as “sexy” of a forecast to make as any of the earlier ones, it should still be documented that the author believes that Sri Lanka will not drift from its current pro-Western course. Rajapaksa’s political comeback was sorely squashed earlier this year in a clear sign that the current administration has largely succeeded in blackening his name and maligning his reputation ever since they came to power. However, there is also the possibility that the present leadership might be convinced to pragmatically reengage with China in developing select projects, but they’d have to walk an extraordinarily fine line in doing so in order to not anger their new Indian and American patrons. For the most part, despite China’s earlier plans for Sri Lanka to be a its Indian Ocean ‘jewel’, it’ll now likely only be a routine stop-over point with much less of a strategic significance than was previously assumed. The only thing that could change this is a worsening of Indian-Sri Lankan ties and/or a revival of the Sri Lankan nationalist movement, but both don’t seem to be on the horizon going into 2016.

The Maldives Move To The Middle Of A Saudi-Chinese Rivalry:

It may come off as surprising to some, and it will be admitted that the author himself also didn’t quite see it coming until after the fact, but the Maldives are now smack dab in the middle of a Saudi-Chinese rivalry. In explaining how this came to be, it’s relevant to quote the author’s latest article from Katehon that touches on why the island nation decided to join the Saudis’ “anti-terrorist” coalition:

“The Maldives are another member of the Saudi-led coalition, and its incorporation is equally controversial for how it raises questions about the country’s strong partnership with China. The author exhaustively elaborated on the Maldives’ geopolitical role and relationship with China in a previous three-part series for Oriental Review, but to summarize, Beijing has made rapid and strategic inroads in the island chain nation that have resulted in a close geostrategic partnership between both countries.

All of that’s being endangered now because of the Saudis’ outreaches to the archipelago, and it’s very probable that the forces behind the assassination conspiracy that earlier wracked the country might have made one of their demands to stop conditional on the government moving away from China and closer to Saudi Arabia instead.

Riyadh announced in early 2014 that it would invest $100 million in the country and it opened its first-ever embassy in the Sharia-adhering state back in August. Almost right after the assassination scare suddenly ended, the two states signed an agreement to boost religious ties (i.e. institutionalize Wahhabist influence) and the Maldives then asked Saudi Arabia to develop a special economic zone in the country.  All told, just like in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia is wrestling with China for influence in a state that had hitherto been under Beijing’s sway.”

When one thinks about it, this makes for a very interesting dynamic, as Saudi Arabia and China have never previously entered into a proxy competition anywhere, let alone out of both of their respective home theaters. It’ll be curious to see how this develops in the future. The Saudis are obviously ingraining themselves deep enough in the Maldives so as to make their future departure all but impossible without massive bloodshed and a spree of terrorist attacks, but at the same time, the Chinese are such prized partners of the island nation’s elite primarily because they present an alternative to otherwise inevitable Indian domination.

If the Chinese ever got dislodged, perhaps through a similar neck-and-neck pro-Western electoral shift like in Sri Lanka or an outright Color Revolution, then the Saudis could easily compensate for the lost capital investment, thus meaning that Chinas’ only real anchor in the country is the loyalty that certain elite have towards it. One would like to believe that the Maldivian elite fear Saudi Wahhabism just as much as they do Indian domination, but that regretfully doesn’t seem to be the case, and Riyadh might just gradually push Beijing out with the wink-and-a-nod approval of their newest bought-and-paid-for lackeys there. It’s still too early to tell if this is exactly what can happen, but all indications seem to point in this direction, thereby making it worthwhile for the interested observer to casually monitor events in this geo-strategic island nation.

South Asia: Disruptors

“The Asian Frown”:

The author’s neologism refers to the shape of the northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal between the Indian state of West Bengal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar’s Rakhine State. This patch of territory is also inhabited almost completely by ethnic Bengalis, with the exception of Rakhine State where they form a substantial and much-publicized minority otherwise known as the “Rohingya”. It’s not the aim of this piece to debate the merits of Myanmar’s citizenship law and this group’s lack of legal status in the country, but simply to raise awareness of the potential for Islamic radicalization among them. As regards Bangladesh, this has already been elaborated upon earlier, but there’s also the eventuality that a transnational ‘patriotic’ movement forms between Bangladesh and the majority Bengali/”Rohingya”-inhabited borderland areas of Rakhine State in the future, whether in response to any Buddhist nationalist-driven violence or a state-directed crackdown (no matter if it’s provoked or unprovoked). If this demographic is pushed or tricked into taking up arms against the state, then there’s a high likelihood that cross-border supporters in Bangladesh will be assisting them to some capacity (even if they are not state-sanctioned), thus internationalizing what otherwise would have been a local and largely isolated domestic crisis into something much larger.

West Bengal is included in the analysis because of the ethnic and of course civilizational similarity that it has with Bangladesh proper. The key difference, however, is that most West Bengalis are Hindu, not Muslim, and that with Bangladesh on the edge of descending into an Islamic pit, it’s possible that some of the ‘anti-infidel’ violence might predictably migrate cross-border against the Hindu-espousing Bengalis. For convenient reference, Wahhabis fiercely hate Hindus more than any other group because they believe in multiple gods, thus making them infinitely higher level of ‘evil’ than Christians, Jews, or Shiites/Alawites/other Muslim minorities that believe in the same God from the Holy Books. Hindus are even seen as worse than atheists who plainly reject god, as they believe it is worse to worship multiple gods than to reject the one true God. The ethnic similarities but confessional discrepancies between the people of West Bengal and Bangladesh might spur Wahhabi-affiliated terrorists in the latter (or even indigenous to West Bengal) to go on a fierce jihad against their compatriots. Bengali-on-Bengali violence (prompted by Wahhabi-on-Hindu motives) would present yet another domestic headache for India to deal with and could lead to the rapid deterioration of positive relations that it the Modi government has thus far cultivated with Bangladesh.

Additionally, as regards all of the preceding “Asian Frown” scenarios, a crisis in one could lead to a humanitarian crisis in the others with Bengali refugees fleeing for safety in one direction or the other, and these resultant human flows could further exacerbate domestic tensions in the host area and trigger the said conflicts that were just discussed. For example, a large-scale outbreak of terrorism in Bangladesh could lead to Muslim Bengalis flooding into majority-Hindu West Bengal or Bengali/”Rohingya”-minority Rakhine State, disrupting the present balance and enflaming sectarian/ethnic tensions there. Likewise, if the Bengalis/”Rohingya” in Rakhine State were pushed out towards Bangladesh, Bengali nationalists would allege ethnic cleansing and possible genocide and these non-state actors might intervene in the situation and contribute to its spiraling deterioration. In West Bengal, if Hindu nationalists get on the ascent, any anti-Muslim violence or provocations linked to them could trigger pro-Islamist sympathies among the minority population or even the entirety of Bangladesh, undermining bilateral relations and raising the chances of identity (and perhaps even state) conflict.

A Serious Security Dilemma Between India and China/Pakistan:

This disruption possibility isn’t that likely in 2016, although it may become an eventuality further down the line, but since it’s theoretically possible given the current trend of proxy hostility in Indian-Chinese relations, it should at the very least be mentioned in this analysis. It doesn’t see all that likely, barring an unforeseen event such as a state-sponsored terrorist attack (even if the state sponsoring it isn’t native to the region, such as the US), that India and Pakistan will naturally deteriorate the recovering relations between them, especially since so much money and strategic benefit depends on their positive cooperation in TAPI.

Therefore, it looks more probable that Indian-Chinese relations would be the ones that lessen to the point of creating a massive security dilemma between the two parties, possibly even involving border buildups or outright skirmishes. In any event and regardless of which party is responsible, China is predicted to call upon its Pakistani ally in coordinating its supportive response, and it’s very likely that Islamabad will be there to assist its ally out of decades-long loyalty, no matter if this might temporarily endanger its own self-interest through TAPI.

Beijing wouldn’t’ call upon this ‘favor’ unless it was serious about sending a message because it understands the strategic benefit that TAPI indirectly provides to it by having its ally control part of India’s energy flow, so only under certain circumstances would it ask Pakistan to join it and basically freeze the project as a result. Should it happen, though, that India gets into a serious security dilemma with China/Pakistan, then it would only accelerate New Delhi’s unipolar shift and result in the Indian-Chinese Cold War going public. At this stage, it would become all but irreversible and might even lead to India’s full-fledged and formalized membership in the China Containment Coalition.

Even though India is already a de-facto member (especially after Abe’s visit), it hasn’t yet sent its forces to the South China Sea or engaged in any of the border provocations that Japan and its ASEAN allies (Vietnam and the Philippines) have, which it theoretically could do along the disputed frontier that it has with China. On the other hand, it might even be for these reasons (border provocations as a means of proving loyalty to the Chinese Containment Coalition) that India decides to initiate conventional tensions with China and set the whole security dilemma into stage-managed motion. In such an event, the US would surely find a way to strategically capitalize off of it and might even try to have India host some of its military forces.

The Maldives Get Mangled By Hybrid War:

It looks for now like the Maldives’ political crisis (earlier discussed in full here) has subsided for the time being, with the earlier-cited Saudi-affiliated deal probably having something to do with it. Even though things appear calm on the surface, there’s always the risk that the Saudis have a seemingly unexpected trick up their sleeve and might be plotting the islands’ full-scale destabilization this very moment. One of the reasons might be to drive out all Chinese investment and replace it with capital from the Saudi royal family. Another possibility might be that India wants to support the already existing Color Revolution forces there out of the general uneasiness that the ‘pro-Chinese’ leadership makes it feel. At any rate and no matter the motivation, India and/or Saudi Arabia could each initiate their own or joint destabilization, with New Delhi focusing more on the Color Revolution aspect and Riyadh on the Unconventional War one. Put together in a chaotic continuum, then this creates the perfect recipe for Hybrid War. Not only would this probably succeed in dislodging the Chinese from their geostrategic Indian Ocean outpost, but the resultant fight for the spoils might even put Saudi Arabia and India directly at odds with one another, thereby increasing the chances that the Kingdom supports Wahhabi terrorism in West Bengal or elsewhere.

V ASEAN: State Of Play

Southeast Asia didn’t just experience another year of robust economic growth (as it always does), but this time it saw the US doubling down in its “Pivot to Asia” and tangibly affecting the regional security architecture there. Although not a geographic part of the region, Japan began to take on an enhanced role there through its militant revision of the pacifist constitution. It now seems likely that Tokyo will deepen its military partnership with the Philippines and perhaps even expand it to Vietnam as well, witharms sales expected to play a leading role in Japan’s “Pivot to ASEAN”. Speaking of the former American colony, the US and the Philippines inked a deal euphemistically called the “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement”, which basically heralds the formal return of military occupation to the island chain under the auspices of ‘countering China’.

Parallel to this, the US has sought to expand its strategic dealings with the other side of the South China Sea by pledging $18 million worth of patrol boats to Vietnam. A symbolic and insubstantial gesture to be sure, but one which indicates that the two formerly bitter enemies are now close enough in their shared anti-China policies to enhance their cooperation to further unprecedented heights in the coming year. Taken together, the US-supervised gathering of Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam composes the core of the China Containment Coalition (CCC), a proto-‘Asian NATO’ that it hopes will become the proxy vanguard force in offsetting Beijing. In a more asymmetrical sense, the US’ ‘electoral coup’ in Myanmar via the victory of Aung San Suu Kyi advances Naypyidaw’s several-years-long policy of moving away from China, representing yet another emerging geopolitical complication for the People’s Republic.

Economically speaking, there’s also been a lot of activity in ASEAN that quite naturally takes on New Cold War contours. India and Japan are ‘tag-teaming’ China in the Greater Mekong Subregion (the Tokyo-led Asian Development Bank’s neologism for mainland ASEAN) through a series of complementary East-West infrastructure projects. India is making progress on the trilateral highway with Myanmar and Thailand (referred to by the author as the ASEAN Highway) while Japan is clinching deals to build a high-speed rail network along the East-West and Southern Corridors (map of all projects here, with the ASEAN Highway being referred to as the Western Corridor). At the same time, however, China is rushing to break out of the containment trap being set up against it and is streamlining the North-South Corridorthrough Laos and Thailand in order to connect to Singapore, possibly even planning to detour the route to Thailand’s Indian Ocean coast if unforeseen disruptions occur (Southern Thai terrorist insurgency, Malaysian Color Revolution) that prevent it from linking with its terminal destination. As part of this overall grand strategy, China and others are deepening their partnerships with Thailand, the anticipated infrastructure hub for the Greater Mekong Subregion.

The final big move that happened in ASEAN over the past year was on the institutional front. The TPP made significant headway in growing acceptance among the Vietnamese, Bruneian, Malaysian, and Singaporean members of the US-controlled trade pact, showing that American influence is deeply is about to become deeply entrenched in part of the overall trade bloc. This bodes quite ominously for ASEAN as a whole, since the entire organization is integrating into the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and may try to ‘standardize’ its trade pacts by applying the TPP to each of its members. While the AEC has the potential to become a multipolar, or at the very least, relatively neutral actor in the New Cold War, this possibility becomes more diminished as the TPP continues to make inroads throughout the bloc.

The Empire Of The Rising Sun Returns:

Up until this year, it wasn’t guaranteed that Japan would return to its militaristic pre-1945 roots, but Shinzo Abe made it his primary objective to make sure that this revisionist objective was achieved. Not only has Japan unilaterally ‘reinterpreted’ its pacifist constitution to enable international military operations, but it’s also lifted its self-imposed moratorium on arms exports as well. These two historic decisions mean that Japan is taking determined steps to assert its military presence abroad, most likely with the intent being to focus on ASEAN (which it had formerly colonized in full during World War II) and the South China Sea. Already, Japan has partaken in provocative joint exercises with the Philippines and signed a new military deal with it back in November. Similarly, Tokyo has moved a lot closer to Hanoi as well, showing that its vision of an ‘ASEAN Pivot’ has concrete policy applications to back it up. Last but not least, Abe just returned from a visit to India where he signed a bunch of agreements with Modi, erasing all doubt that an Indian-Japanese anti-Chinese partnership is definitely in the works.

The US Is Back In The Philippines:

The Pentagon was ingloriously kicked out of it colony in 1991, but it made a stunning return in 2015 with the so-called “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement”. The specifics are that the US isn’t allowed to have its own sovereign base in the country, but that it can ‘rotate’ troops in and out of at least 8 different Filipino facilities. For all intents and purposes, this amounts to the exact same thing as basing rights and should accordingly be treated as such. The US knows that the Philippines is by far the weakest of the anti-Chinese states, but the opportunity that this provides Washington is to sell it battered, second-hand military wares that other states would ashamed to purchase. It also gives the US the opportunity to retrain the Filipino Armed Forces ‘from the ground up’, thus providing them with valuable experience in ‘nation building’ from the military-structural sense. As a final point, the Philippines present the perfect convergence point for all the other elements of the China Containment Coalition (CCC) to coalesce, and any preplanned provocation on that country’s part (carried out at the US’ behest, of course) could be the trigger that’s necessary to kick the CCC into high, formalized gear in Southeast Asia just as Ukraine’s aggression against Donbass was for NATO in Eastern Europe.

The Chinese Containment Coalition Takes Shape:

The author explored this geopolitical project in a recent publication for Oriental Review and will elaborate on it more specifically in an upcoming article, but to briefly rehash the idea, the US has assembled a diverse array of Asian states in jointly working to contain China. For the most part, it involves Japan and India as the Lead From Behind partners , Vietnam and the Philippines as the geopolitical proxies, and Australia and Indonesia as auxiliary support members. The general concept is that Vietnam and the Philippines, as the two South China Sea states having the strongest maritime disagreements with China, form the vanguard component of this undeclared alliance, and the US, Japan, and to a degree, India, support them to varying degrees, with the first two providing military equipment while the latter seems poised to diplomatically enter the fray sometime soon. Australia’s contribution is more symbolic than substantial, and Indonesia’s role is expected to only be purely economic and as an emerging regional counterweight to China. As was said, this will be described more in a forthcoming Oriental Review piece, but for the meantime, it’s simply important to understand that 2015 was the year in which the CCC finally began to take significant shape and dole out its envisioned roles among the selected participants.

Myanmar Moves Westward:

This process was in the works ever since the 2010 election, but it uncontrollably accelerated with Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory. It’s still not yet 100% sure that Myanmar will completely abandon its formerly close ties with China (Beijing courted Suu Kyi over the summer in an unprecedented outreach to a foreign “opposition” candidate), but it can be safely assumed that the relationship is irreparable and that the country has ‘opened up’ to a wide enough degree that Chinese businesses are being dislodged and replaced by their Western, Indian, Japanese, and ASEAN competitors. China still has its oil and gas pipeline corridor running through the country and which opened only in January, but with all of the political changes that have taken place since it was originally conceived of a years ago and the rate at which it’s happened, it looks to be an insurmountable challenge for China to convert this into a full-scale economic corridor akin to India’s ASEAN Highway. So long as the pipeline infrastructure remains secure, then China doesn’t have too much to seriously fret about, but if Suu Kyi’s government starts trying to blackmail Beijing by using this infrastructure project as a vulnerable soft target, then bilateral relations could suddenly deteriorate to the point where Naypyidaw formally joins the CCC (which might be the predetermined point of any provocation).

The Indo-Japanese ‘Tag-Team’ Arrangement vs. The ASEAN Silk Road:

India and Japan are entrenching themselves into mainland ASEAN through the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects meant to promote their interests. India’s ASEAN Highway is slated to be completed in 2019 and will intensify New Delhi’s influence in this neighboring region, while Japan just completed the East-West and Southern Corridors earlier this year. Taken together, these two Lead From Behind partners in the CCC are aiming to branch ASEAN’s trade off to the west and east, respectively, in an effort to siphon it off from its conventional northern route in order to economically compete with China. As it stands, China is currently the number one trading partner for ASEAN, but the whole point of the Indian and Japanese ‘tag-team’ arrangement is to change that through the construction of facilitative infrastructure, thereby presenting an asymmetrical containment of Beijing’s influence predicated on stopping or diminishing the impact of the ASEAN Silk Road from Kunming to Singapore.

Concerning China’s ambitious designs, it just began the first step of its project by breaking ground in Laos, with further plans to link the envisioned road to Thailand, Malaysia, and finally to Singapore. Theoretically speaking, it’s possible for the unipolar (the Indo-Japanese ‘tag-team’ arrangement) and multipolar (ASEAN Silk Road) projects to peacefully coexist in the same region, but the US has a strategic interest in seeing China’s be stopped dead in its tracks. India and Japan’s projects can’t directly do that (only a regime change or Hybrid War in the transit states is capable of this), but they could possibly become so lucrative that they shift Thailand’s decision-making priorities and lead to the North-South Corridors indefinite stalling. It doesn’t look like this will happen right away, but it’s certainly on the mind of strategists in Tokyo and New Delhi.

All Roads Lead Through Thailand:

Continuing off of the analysis above, it’s clear that Thailand is at the literal center of every non-regional Great Powers’ interests. The US is furious that it’s previously preeminent position was downgraded after the military coup against its proxy designate, and China knows that this is the precise window of opportunity for it to deepen its full-spectrum relations with this geostrategic state. Similarly, India and Japan recognize Thailand’s importance in also accommodating their respective regional infrastructure visions and thus can’t be too publicly harsh on it for Bangkok’s warm ties with Beijing. Russia’s even involved in this to a minor extent, with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev offering Thailand a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Union during his visit to the country last April. No commitment was made at the time, but the two sides agreed to study it further in the future.

Intermixing The TPP With The AEC:

Some of the most crucial regional developments to occur in Southeast Asia took place at the tail end of the year, with the four regional TPP-party states agreeing to move forward with the US-led project and the entire ASEAN organization finally making the decision to integrate into the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Like with many of the most important stories of 2015, the author also analyzed both of this in yet another of his Oriental Review articles, with the earlier warning that the TPP might take over the AEC being the dominant theme throughout. Without a doubt, the US’ efforts to integrate the rest of the AEC into the TPP (using the organizational states already party to the agreement as valuable instruments) will become a defining theme in the coming years.

ASEAN: Where It’s Headed

The State Of Play section located just above touched heavily upon the direction that the existing regional trends are headed, but to expand slightly on what was mentioned, the following is necessary:

The CCC Gets Stronger:

The interaction between the US, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines is expected to become one of the most defining elements of Southeast Asia’s political development in the next year. Both regional states (Vietnam and the Philippines) will predictably feel more emboldened by the international support that they’re receiving, especially since it’s coming from such big-name actors as the US and Japan, and might even take more aggressive moves in asserting their South China Sea claims. Bilateral, trilateral, or quadrilateral military drills could take place here, too, and this would definitely be done in as flamboyant of a manner as possible so as to irk China to the maximum. All of the sides will continue coordinating their policies in ‘containing’ China, and the CCC is expected to get stronger as a result.

This will make it a lot easier for Australia and India to play more active roles when they’re ready, and some quasi-formalization of this military bloc might also occur next year as well. With the US now back in the Philippines and Japan’s pacifist constitution ‘reinterpreted’ and allowing for arms sales to these two states and perhaps even a military presence in the Philippines, the two Pacific Powers won’t be able to help themselves and will exploit the situation as much as they can. China, as anyone could predict, will be very upset by all of this and will begin to fully feel the pressure of containment in the South China Sea, thereby prompting it to accelerate its plans for the ASEAN Silk Road as a suitable ‘escape plan’ from the maritime containment belt being built around it.

Vietnam Retraces Its Cold War Sphere Of Influence:

Buoyed by the support it’s receiving from the US and Japan, Vietnam will feel confident enough to reassert itself in its Cold War-era sphere of influence in Laos and Cambodia. Hanoi is still a strong actor in each, but its influence has been on the decline since the end of the Cold War and each of its two neighbors’ strategic and economic realignment towards China. However, these two are also part of the East-West and Southern Corridors, both of which are financed by Japan, so Vietnam has the potential to use its East Asian ally’s infrastructure investments as a springboard for reinserting its pecuniary influence into these states. In relation to this, Vietnam just announced a “Development Triangle” between itself and its two neighbors, and this trend of Hanoi’s shift to the west will definitely grow stronger in the next year. The whole point of it, one must remember, is to compete with China to the point of making both countries ‘contested’ geopolitical territory between the two and hopefully offset the viability of the ASEAN Silk Road through Laos. Concerning Cambodia, Vietnam would like for the government to be wooed away from China and brought closer to India, Japan, and itself, with the Southern Corridor being envisioned vehicle for doing so.

Myanmar Continues Its Pro-Western Pivot, Relations With Military Get Tense:

There’s no way that Aung San Suu Kyi will not behave as the West’s most vehement advocate in mainland ASEAN, but the only question is the pace and degree to which she pivots away from China. It’ll probably be that she takes moves to restrict China’s resource extraction businesses in the frontier regions, but she might even do more than that by trying to quickly seal trade deals with other parties, all as part of a larger effort to replace Chinese investment with that of her new patrons. The one thing that needs to be watched is how she interacts with the military and how pliable they are to her rapid foreign policy shifts. Of course, they were the ones who took the decision to ‘democratize’ and move away from China in the first place, but it could be that they naively underestimated the quickness with which certain changes would be made once they formally lost control of the government. If they feel themselves being sidelined too much (and the self-enrichment that their highest leaders have made since ‘opening up’ isn’t satisfactory ‘compensation’ to ‘stand down’), then they might make an attempt to push back. It probably won’t take the form of a coup (there’d be too much international condemnation and they’d lose all the ‘progress’ they believe they’ve made so far), but they could possibly take to ‘playing the game’ in parliament to undermine anything Suu Kyi wants to pass through.

Additionally, there’s always the lingering threat of a military conflagration between the warring ethnic parties along the periphery. The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (analyzed here) that was signed in October didn’t have the full participation of several key anti-government groups, and the nightmare scenario would be if these parties team up to take on the military and/or government. More than likely, if they do in fact coordinate past the nominal sense, they’d fight back against the military, but it would make for an interesting development if some of them, feeling ostracized by the new authorities or unhappy with Suu Kyi’s lack of progress in ‘reforms’ (a keyword for federalization, and potentially stonewalled by the military via the previously mentioned scenario), could revolt against her government. Even more curiously would be if the military refused to squash the rebels as they normally would be accustomed to doing and instead allowed the crisis to spiral more out of control in order to delegitimize Suu Kyi and pave the way for a forthcoming return to martial law. The chances for this aren’t likely, but developments in Myanmar’s civil war are always difficult to predict, and with scant reliable information coming out of this theater, observers should be prepared to read between the lines and decipher what may be truly going on behind the scenes. Nonetheless, Myanmar’s Civil War, the longest-running domestic conflict in the world, didn’t go away just because Suu Kyi won, and it should continue to be monitored going into the next year.

Thai Tumult:

Things might not go so smoothly for Thailand next year, but it wouldn’t be because of lack of trying on its part or that of its partners. If anything, despite being geopolitical rivals, China and Japan & India want to see the crucially located infrastructure hub remain stable and peaceful for the years to come, owing to each of their respective investments (quite literally) in its key transit role status. The only actor that would be content with its destabilization is the US and it already looks to be testing the water. 2015 saw a suspicious instance of Uighur terrorism occur in Central Bangkok and Shinawatra’s “Red Shirts” seem ready for a renewal of their ritual destabilization. Interested readers are strongly suggested to follow Tony Cartalucci’s writings, since this Thai-based journalist has done an unparalleled job at exposing the US’ destabilization mechanisms in his host country. Keeping in mind that the US both wants to punish Thailand’s military leaders and create the conditions to where China’s ASEAN Silk Road is unviable, it’s conceivable that it’ll resort to its tried-and-tested tactics of Uighur terrorism, Color Revolution incitement, and Hybrid War threats.

To very briefly elaborate on the last one, the northeast province of Isan is known as a bastion for the Shinawatra clan and its “Red Shirt” cronies, and it could become the center of a concentrated anti-government push. The distinct regional identity (somewhat more comparable to Thailand’s civilizationally similar Laotian neighbor than the rest of Thailand itself) could be used as a rallying cry for encouraging “separateness” and enflaming (NGO-riled up) ‘grassroots’ anger against the authorities. This same template can be used by regime change-supporting NGOs in the country’s south, albeit much more violently. The Muslim and ethnic Malay population there already feels sidelined from the rest of the state for a variety of reasons, although terrorist attacks there haven’t been as frequent as in years past. However, with the rise of ISIL in the region, it’s possible that the group’s template of transnational territorial-administrative expansion might transplant itself along the Thai-Malay border if the structural conditions are amenable. Transnational ethnic-affiliated terrorism would be a major destabilizing force in the region and could seriously jeopardize bilateral relations between Thailand and Malaysia, especially as neither government wants any part in this pandemonium.

Ultimately it would be the US that would benefit from either (or both) of these scenarios if they come to fruition, since it wants to undermine the military government so as to return the “Red Shirt” proxies to power, whether they are led by a Shinawatra figurehead or some ‘new blood’. The US is also not beyond sabotaging its Lead From Behind allies’ infrastructure projects if they become ‘necessary’ collateral damage to fulfill the regime change goal and stop China’s ASEAN Silk Road.

ASEAN: Disruptors

Each of the three regionally disruptive scenarios mentioned below involved Indonesia, the ‘rising giant’ upon whose shoulders ASEAN’s macroeconomic stability depends. The author endeavors to explain some of these scenarios and their strategic impact in a more detailed fashion later on next year:

The Mindanao-Sulawesi Arc:

The author raised awareness of this geopolitical concept as part of a larger article written back in June, but it was originally articulated at the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier in the year when a participant voiced nervousness that terrorists might seek to exploit this regional ‘blind spot’. To succinctly bring the reader up to speed, the tristate maritime region between the southern Philippines, the Malaysian state of Sabah, and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi has a comparatively lesser governing and security presence than anywhere else in insular Southeast Asia, and there’s already the precedent of Filipino terrorists trying to storm Sabah in 2013. Malaysian authorities were on alert for a repeat of this scenario just at the end of November, showing that the threat still remains. Additionally, the island of Sulawesi might provide terrorists (be they Filipino, native Indonesians, or non-regional ones) with a relatively unrestricted access point to the rest of the Indonesian archipelago owing to proximity of this location to Mindanao and Sabah, so it’s possible that a tristate terror threat might take shape in this region one day.

A Sumatra-Java Terror Spree:

While being geographically large, the vast majority of Indonesia’s population is concentrated mostly on the neighboring and densely concentrated islands of Sumatra and Java. Australia has voiced concernabout ISIL trying to establish a caliphate here and Indonesia is “keeping an eye open” for terrorist returnees from the Mideast. Russia has even raised the terror alert for its citizens at the end of December, fearing an imminent attack. All of these factors, including the countless soft targets available around Jakarta, point to a terrorist incident occurring sometime next year in Indonesia, with it mostly be a matter of time before one of the many threats is actually carried out in practice. It was earlier analyzed that Bangladesh might become the next front line state in the War on Terror, but the same could likewise also be said about Indonesia, although mostly in this sense restricted to Sumatra-Java and northern Sulawesi (with the former being more likely than the latter). An eruption of terror in one of the most population dense places in the world and the economic engine of ASEAN/AEC would easily have global repercussions.

West Papua Revolts:

The West Papua conflict is decades-old but is one of the world’s least well-publicized issues. Basically, it boils down accusations that the local population is being oppressed (and sometimes outright killed) so that the Indonesian state can continue harvesting valuable mineral deposits from their land. It’s an unfortunate twist of fate that both Papuas (Indonesian-controlled West Papua and the independent state of Papua New Guinea) are dirt poor despite their well-endowed mineral wealth, but it can largely be attributed to poor governmental planning. Jakarta has progressively taken steps to split the western part of Papua into three separate states so as to dilute the formerly unified identity there, but that hasn’t fully quelled the separatist movements endemic to the area.

Without outside patronage, they’ll likely never achieve any substantial victories, but if an outside force decides to support it and throws their full weight behind it (such as the US, foreseeably in that case using Australia as the Lead From Behind actor), then it could severely unbalance the Indonesian military at the precise time that they need to be concentrating on Wahhabist terrorist threats. It’s therefore not forecasted that a renewed revolt in West Papua would occur in isolation, but that it could be provoked so as to distract the Indonesian authorities from a forthcoming terrorist offensive in order to create maximum destabilization. That being said, there’s no clear indicators that this could happen next year or even at all, which is why it’s in the disruptor category and not the previous one, but interested individuals should still keep an occasional eye on developments in this part of ASEAN for next year.

Foreign and Expatriates Ministry on Monday sent two letters to the UN Secretary-General and President of UN Security Council regarding the persistence of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist organizations in committing crimes against civilians in Syrian cities.

The Ministry said that terrorist organizations are targeting Syrian cities with suicide bombing and arbitrary shelling in a bid to disturb the state of tranquility and stability which had prevailed in several Syrian cities that witnessed successful national reconciliation efforts in recent days.

The letters asserted that this terrorism is the result of the open and generous support in funds, arms, and munitions provided to terrorists by states like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, who are complicit in the terrorist attacks carried out against the Syrian people.

Foreign Ministry went on to say that on Monday, terrorist explosions took place in the cities of Aleppo and Homs, claiming the lives of many civilians, while the terrorist gangs of so- called “Jaish al-Islam”, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, targeted Damascus city with different forms of mortar and rocket shells.

The ministry added that on Monday morning, terrorists blew up an explosive device in a car in al-Zahraa neighborhood in Homs city; saying that the explosion was followed by another attack with an explosive belt that went off amid the crowds of civilians and members of civil defense and medical teams who rushed to the place to rescue the wounded civilians.

The two explosions claimed the lives of 19 civilians while 43 others were injured.

The letters affirmed that today’s attacks come after many terrorist bombings, most recently, an explosion which targeted medical clinics on Saturday December 12^th, killing 16 civilians and injuring 54 others and causing massive material damage to private and public properties.

The ministry said that the terrorists on Monday also targeted Aleppo city with various shells, killing 11 citizens, including a child and injuring more than 40 others, 11 of them are in a critical condition.

It added that Government of the Syrian Arab Republic affirms that terrorism which has targeted Syrian cities and villages for more than four years, is an outcome of support provided by countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to terrorist organizations, in a flagrant violation of UN Security Council resolutions, mainly No. 2170, 2178, 2199 and 2253.

The ministry said that the continuation of US, Britain and France, which are permanent member states at UN Security Council, in preventing the council from adopting stances that condemn those terrorist crimes encourage terrorists to mount their attacks and reflect the non-seriousness of these countries in the fight against terrorism.

It concluded by saying that the Syrian government, while affirming its commitment to combat terrorism and assume its constitutional and legal duties to protect its people and sovereignty, calls on Security Council and UN Secretary-General to condemn the terrorist acts and assume responsibilities in combating terrorism.

“‘Trust Me’ might be just the most manipulative thing a politician can say.  It means leave me alone in secret to operate without proper challenge.” Tom Watson, UK Deputy Labour Leader, Dec 18, 2015

Many government policies are advertised as useful for broader safety – till they are reversed to apply to the very officials who create them.  The UK Home Secretary is very much of that school. Readers will be aware what Theresa May has done her invaluably bit to undermine privacy on the broader pretext of protecting security.

Central to this is the Home Office’s insistence on the Investigatory Powers Bill that seemingly insists on more intrusion than investigation.  The bill, in rather futile fashion, will compel phone and web companies to retain records of every citizen for at least a year, providing a data pool which police and security services could access when required.  The legislation goes further, enrolling the relevant service providers in a pseudo-police role that will override encryption if needed.

May has found herself having to sugar coat the bill with some decent premise, and has decided to go the cyber bullying card, a view she outlined to South Suffolk MP James Cartlidge.[1]

The tactic is standard: if people are misbehaving on the internet, those on facilitating its use should be made responsible for moral behaviour.  Accordingly, “Internet connection records would update the capability of law enforcement in a criminal investigation to determine the sender and recipient of a communication, for example, a malicious message such as those exchanged in cyberbullying.”

The response by The Independent has been an attempt to pull the history of Theresa May’s browsing history for the last week of October, a freedom of information request that purposely excludes any information directly concerned with security matters.

What is good for the goose of inquiry is also grand for the gander placed under the scrutinising eye of the state.  In short, if you are going to be equal before the law, then by golly even ministers should have their browsing history on the internet made available for the public gaze.

Not so, according to the Home Office.  The FOI request has been dismissed as vexatious. In other words, the request was dismissed on grounds of an action “brought without sufficient grounds for winning, purely to cause annoyance to the defendant.”

The Home Office’s response, drawing upon section 14(1) of the Act, insisted that the department had “decided that your request is vexatious because it places an unreasonable border on the department, because it has adopted a scattergun approach and seems solely designed for the purpose of fishing for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The response provides a suitable template for critics of the surveillance state, if only because it demonstrates the hopeless rationale for the entire metadata retention regime.  If the request by The Independent was, by its nature, scattergun, one could hardly assume that the security state’s behaviour in this regard is anything but scattergun.

This legal excuse remains one of the least convincing in the area of information law.  It is, however, used repeatedly by states who have freedom of information regimes, providing slivers when asked, but generally withholding the bulk of what is deemed too sensitive for release.

The point is often the same: we will have a regime to allow information for the public precisely because we are intent on disallowing much of it. Regulation, in other words, is constriction, measured in the name of protecting that great, inscrutable fiction known as the public interest.  You are kept in the dark because ignorance is necessary bliss.

In the case of the Home Office, there could be few things more fundamentally vexatious than a metadata retention regime premised on the nonsense of combating trolls and bullies on the world wide web.

The efforts on the part of The Independent have at least demonstrated to British citizens that this regime has other purposes, managing to get some egg onto the faces of Home Office officials.  It is by no means the only quarter targeting the potential consequences of the bill.  Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson has argued that the bill’s supposed self-guarding mechanisms and oversight simply do not go far enough in protecting privacy.

In Watson’s mind, there was merely a “very limited review of the Home Secretary’s warrants by a judge appointed by a Commissioner who is appointed by the prime minister.”  It was a “false choice to say that these massive extensions of state power must be introduced without checks and balances.”

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook finds its provisions similarly repellent for privacy.  “We believe it would be wrong,” went a company statement, “to weaken security for hundreds of millions of law-abiding customers so that it will also be weaker for the very few who pose a threat.”[2]Given this government’s supposed love of the corporate sector, big business and all, David Cameron and his Home Secretary have their work sharply cut out for them.

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

Notes

I wonder how many Americans find themselves in the same predicament as I do:—there’s an election next week and we have little idea about the issues being debated there and whom we might vote for.

Yes, elections are happening all across this country now. But would we know about it from our mass media? No.

In my upstate New York district, it’s not always apparent which candidate is Democrat and which is Republican. Some places have legislative elections; some don’t; my county has a state senate seat up for election, but I don’t vote there. Elsewhere (in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi) important races for governorships and some US senate seats are being contested. If it weren’t for Rachel Maddow’s discussion on national TV http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-2015-gubernatorial-races-enter-the-home-stretch , out-of-staters wouldn’t know about them at all.

Meanwhile, through this bizarre American system of early party primaries, Iowa and New Hampshire, both small states, seem to dominate and skew our current democratic process. Ignoring local races which affect our daily lives (this mythical middle-American family beloved by all politicians), tens of millions of Americans obsessively watch, debate and quote statements by presidential candidates, men and women whose success down the road will have little to do with this week’s nationwide elections.

Who are those residents of Iowa and New Hampshire who get so much attention from the big parties and our media and the political analysts? Why do two low population (IA with 3,100,000 and NH with barely 1,300,000)  http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/population.shtml arguably marginal states, define our presidential nominees? If they really do. Outside of these presidential campaigns every four years, one hears little from them. How could their views of presidential contenders be as critical to the rest of us as the fierce competition underway suggests they are? And why can’t the major parties assign some of the tens of millions in their campaign coffers to local contests?

Two weeks ago, lawn signs began to appear on roadsides in my neighborhood; they were announcing candidates for local judgeships, and for town mayors, councilmen and road supervisors. Thus I learn an election is imminent.

I normally vote by party, but none of those candidates’ flyers specify party affiliation. What about information from a local paper? I find only personal ads in this week’s edition. So I turn to my county Board of Elections webpage; on its home page appear the names of a bunch of committee heads. I click the link to my town but information is sparse. On the ballot I’ll mark next Tuesday are 12 candidates running for 9 posts. Six of these candidates, all on the Republican ticket, are unopposed. None are from my party. I’ve not found even a resume of any candidate.

A neighboring county held a public candidates’ night with the local radio station airing contestants’ statements and Q&As from the public. Some of those candidates are running for seats in the county legislature. Hmmm, I consider jealously: what about my county legislature? There is none, I learn. We have what’s called a Board of Supervisors. So are those seats up for election this week? It’s uncertain.

Can you blame me for turning to the national scene? I’ve been watching the Republican presidential debates (the Democratic too) for the past 2 months–it seems like longer– followed by hours comparing my responses to the endless musings of our multitude of talk show pundits. (They keep themselves gainfully employed through this process.) The candidates –we all know the handful of four or so who stand out– are certainly entertaining and at times infuriating, even frightening, to any non-Republican. And if they can’t provide the level of comedy we need, corporate media will find a way to arouse us. And however outrageous, limp or impoverished these candidates may be, it’s our income-generating media that will keep this circus spinning for another year, all 365 of it.

In case I become excited over someone to cast my vote for, from among the finalists who survive through to next autumn, I’ll be told that the outcome for the post of the “most powerful person in the world” will be in the hands of residents of the “swing states”-Florida, Pennsylvania and perhaps Colorado or Virginia–where competition is always close. We in the remaining 46 states will not count much. So, our costly, time-consuming election process comes down to media offerings. It’s good entertainment, I give our democracy that.

Image: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave birth to a dangerous American ideology called neoconservativism. The Soviet Union had served as a constraint on US unilateral action. With the removal of this constraint on Washington, neoconservatives declared their agenda of US world hegemony.  America was now the “sole superpower,” the “unipower,” that could act without restraint anywhere in the world.

The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows:

“We have overwhelming global power. We are history’s designated custodians of the international system. When the Soviet Union fell, something new was born, something utterly new–a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a stagering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. Even Rome was no model for what America is today.”

The staggering unipolar power that history has given to Washington has to be protected at all costs.  In 1992 top Pentagon official Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which became the basis for Washington’s foreign policy.

Paul Wolfowitz

The Wolfowitz Doctrine states that the “first objective” of American foreign and military policy is “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat [to US unilateral action] on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” (A “hostile power” is a country sufficiently strong to have a foreign policy independent from Washington’s.)

The unilateral assertion of American power begin in ernest during the Clinton regime with the interventions in Yugoslavia, Serbia, Kosovo, and the no-fly zone imposed on Iraq.  In 1997 the neoconservatives penned their “Project for a New American Century.”  In 1998, three years prior to 9/11, the neoconservatives sent a letter to President Clinton calling for regime change in Iraq and “the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.”  Neoconservatives set out their program for removing seven governments in five years.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran/5166

The events of September 11, 2001, are regarded by informed people as “the new Pearl harbor” that the neoconservatives said was necessary in order to begin their wars of conquest in the Middle East.  Paul O’Neil, President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, has stated publicly that the agenda of President Bush’s first meeting with his cabinet was the invasion of Iraq.  This invasion was planned prior to 9/11. Since 9/11 Washington has destroyed in whole or part eight countries and now confronts Russia both in Syria and Ukraine.

Russia cannot allow a jihadist Caliphate to be established in an area comprising Syria/Iraq, because it would be a base for exporting destabilization into Muslim parts of the Russian Federation. Henry Kissinger himself has stated this fact, and it is clear enough to any person with a brain.  However, the power-crazed fanatical neoconservatives, who have controlled the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, are so absorbed in their own hubris and arrogance that they are prepared to push Russia to the point of having their Turkish puppet shoot down a Russian airplane and to overthrow the democratically-elected government in Ukraine that was on good terms with Russia, substituting in its place an American puppet government.

With this background, we can understand that the dangerous situation facing the world is the product of the neoconservative’s arrogant policy of US world hegemony.  The failures of judgment and the dangers in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts are themselves the consequences of the neoconservative ideology.

To perpetuate American hegemony, the neoconservatives threw away the guarantees that Washington gave Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch to the East. The neoconservatives pulled the US out of the ABM Treaty, which specified that neither the US nor Russia would develop and deploy anti-ballistic missiles.  The neoconservatives re-wrote US war doctrine and elevated nuclear weapons from their role as a retaliatory force to a pre-emptive first strike force.  The neoconservatives began putting ABM bases on Russia’s borders, claiming that the bases were for the purpose of protecting Europe from non-existent Iranian nuclear ICBMs.

Russia and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, have been demonized by neoconservatives and their puppets in the US government and media.  For example, Hillary Clinton, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, declared Putin to be “the new Hitler.”  A former CIA official called for Putin’s assassination.  Presidential candidates in both parties are competing in terms of who can be the most aggressive toward Russia and the most insulting toward Russia’s president.

The effect has been to destroy the trust between nuclear powers.  The Russian government has learned that Washington does not respect Washington’s own laws, much less international law, and that Washington cannot be trusted to keep any agreement.  This lack of trust, together with the aggression toward Russia spewing from Washington and the presstitute media and echoing in the idiotic European capitals, has established the ground for nuclear war. As NATO (essentially the US) has no prospect of defeating Russia in conventional war, much less defeating an alliance of Russia and China, war will be nuclear.

To avoid war, Putin is non-provocative and low-key in his responses to Western provocations. Putin’s responsible behavior, however, is misinterpreted by neoconservatives as a sign of weakness and fear.  The neoconservatives tell President Obama to keep the pressure on Russia, and Russia will give in.  However, Putin has made it clear that Russia will not give in. Putin has sent this message on many occasions.  For example, on September 28, 2015, at the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, Putin said that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world. Two days later Putin took command of the war against ISIS in Syria.

The European governments, especially Germany and the UK, are complicit in the move toward nuclear war. These two American vassal states enable Washington’s reckless aggression toward Russia by repeating Washington’s propaganda and supporting Washington’s sanctions and interventions against other countries.  As long as Europe remains nothing but an extension of Washington, the prospect of Armegeddon will continue to rise.

At this point in time, nuclear war can only be avoided in two ways.

One way is for Russia and China to surrender and accept Washington’s hegemony.

The other way is for an independent leader in Germany, the UK, or France to rise to office and withdraw from NATO.

That would begin a stampede to leave NATO, which is Washington’s prime tool for causing conflict with Russia and, thereby,  is the most dangerous force on earth to every European country and to the entire world.  If NATO continues to exist, NATO together with the neoconservative ideology of American hegemony will make nuclear war inevitable.

The US Department of Homeland Security is preparing to unleash widespread raids on Central American immigrants, mainly women and children, once the new year begins, according to unnamed Obama administration officials who spoke with the press last week.

It would be the first ever program of mass deportations to target Central American refugees specifically. Most are women and children who have sought to escape gang attacks, drug-related violence and brutality by US-backed security services in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Raids are expected in Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles and the Washington, DC area, which have the largest concentrations of Central American immigrants. Other cities are likely to be targeted as well.

The DHS has begun adding capacity to handle increased detentions during the raids, since those arrested will be held in federal facilities in the days preceding their deportation. The agency recently opened two new “shelters”—actually detention centers—in Texas, one with 700 beds and the other with 300 beds. A third, 400-bed facility is being readied in California as well.

The Washington Post first reported the mass deportation plan on December 24, noting that hundreds of immigrants facing current deportation orders would be targeted for arrest and returned to the countries from which they have fled.

According to the Post,

“The ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] operation would target only adults and children who have already been ordered removed from the United States by an immigration judge… The adults and children would be detained wherever they can be found and immediately deported. The number targeted is expected to be in the hundreds and possibly greater.”

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen issued a statement in response to the Post report reiterating that it was DHS policy to focus on individuals “who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.” The reference to “border security” amounts to targeting anyone who crosses the border without US government permission, including women and small children fleeing violence, rape and the threat of death.

A follow-up report in the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the campaign of repression will begin early in 2016, once it receives the expected final approval by the Obama administration. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson was said to be pushing hard for the decision.

“Starting early next month, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS unit, plans to start rounding up hundreds of families that entered the US illegally and who have ignored a final order to leave the country,” the Journal reported.

According to the press accounts, there are two immediate factors behind the new campaign. First is the series of court defeats for the Obama administration over the brutal conditions in which Central American women and children have been held at recently opened camps in Arizona and Texas.

A federal district judge in August ordered DHS to begin discharging women and children who have been detained in violation of a consent decree issued during the Clinton administration barring the imprisonment of children, whether held with or without adult companions. The Obama administration is complying with the order pending appeal, but apparently intends to rearrest those released and deport them as soon as possible.

The second factor is the sharp increase in the number of new refugees from Central America crossing the US border in Texas and Arizona during October and November, up 173 percent from the same period a year ago. While the overall refugee flow does not yet compare to the summer of 2014, when tens of thousands crossed the border each month, the number of unaccompanied minors from Central America topped 5,000 a month for October and November, reaching half the level of 2014.

More significant than these factors, however, is the political context in which the decision has been made to unleash sharply increased repression against Central American refugees. The Obama administration has been under fire from right-wing critics in both the Republican and Democratic parties over its plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to the United States in the coming year. A measure aimed at banning Syrian refugees won overwhelming bipartisan support in the House of Representatives earlier this month.

On December 15, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas National Guard troops to remain at the Mexico border, extending a deployment ordered by his predecessor Rick Perry during the refugee influx in the summer of 2014. Both Perry and Abbott are Republicans.

Billionaire Donald Trump has forged a significant lead in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination based on racist diatribes against immigrants and refugees, first smearing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, then denouncing Syrian refugees as likely terrorists, finally calling for a ban on any Muslim entering the US.

The DHS move against Central American refugees is a green light to Trump and other ultra-right anti-immigrant forces, and Trump quickly embraced the proposed raids as a triumph for his campaign. Immigrant rights groups, for their part, pointed out that it made no sense to proclaim sympathy for Syrian refugees fleeing violence and brutality, while locking up and deporting Central American refugees seeking to escape similar conditions.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley all issued for-the-record statements opposing the planned escalation of repression against Central American immigrants. But Clinton has previously demanded in 2014 that the unaccompanied migrant children from Central America “should be sent home.” All the Democrats are jointly responsible for the atrocious record of the Obama administration, which has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other in American history.

According to a report released earlier this month, during the 2015 fiscal year (October 1, 2014 through September 30, 2015), the ICE deported 235,413 people and the Border Patrol apprehended 337, 117 people nationwide. Both figures, while staggering in terms of mass repression and individual suffering, were actually the lowest since Obama entered the White House in 2009.

The Obama administration has a cumulative deportation total of nearly 3 million people, plus several million more who were “returned”—detained and forced back across the southern border. Those figures alone make nonsense of the claims that the Democratic Party represents any alternative to the anti-immigrant racism of the Republicans, spearheaded by Trump.

Desde hace más de un mes, miles de cubanos que desean viajar a Estados Unidos, cuya legislación favorece la emigración procedente de la isla, se encuentran varados en Costa Rica.

Cerca de 6.000 cubanos, candidatos a la emigración hacia Estados Unidos, se encuentran varados en Costa Rica sin posibilidades de proseguir su viaje hacia el Norte. Tras viajar a Ecuador, entonces único país de América Latina que no exigía visado a los cubanos, emprendieron un largo periplo a través del continente para ir a La Florida. Pero tuvieron que detenerse en Costa Rica. Los países de América Central, de Nicaragua a México, se niegan a dejar pasar a los migrantes, blancos de las redes criminales, y exigen una respuesta política de Washington, principal responsable de la situación.[1]

En efecto, los cubanos que entran ilegalmente a Estados Unidos son acogidos con los brazos abiertos, mientras que los clandestinos de otras naciones son inmediatamente arrestados y expulsados a su país de origen. Esta especificidad se debe a la voluntad histórica de Estados Unidos de usar la problemática migratoria para socavar la Revolución Cubana.[2]

Desde su llegada al poder en 1959 Estados Unidos manifestó su hostilidad hacia el Gobierno de Fidel Castro. Abrió las puertas a los herederos del antiguo régimen militar de Fulgencio Batista, incluso a las fuerzas de seguridad implicadas en crímenes de sangre. Washington también acogió a la elite económica del país y favoreció la salida del personal altamente cualificado con la meta de desestabilizar la sociedad.

El impacto fue duro para Cuba. En un sector tan vitad como la salud, cerca de la mitad de los médicos cubanos, o sea 3.000, escucharon la llamada de las sirenas estadounidenses que les prometían una vida mejor. Ese episodio hundió al país en una grave crisis sanitaria. Las autoridades estadounidenses también incitaron a otros profesionales altamente cualificados a abandonar la isla para ofrecerles oportunidades económicas más lucrativas en Florida[3].

En su guerra contra Cuba, Washington decidió usar la problemática migratoria para desestabilizar el país. En 1966 el Congreso adoptó la Ley de Ajuste Cubano, única en el mundo, que estipula que todo cubano que emigre legal o ilegalmente, pacíficamente o por la violencia, el 1 de enero de 1959 o después, obtiene automáticamente el estatuto de residente permanente al cabo de un año y un día, distintas ayudas sociales (vivienda, trabajo, cobertura médica, etc.) así como la posibilidad de conseguir la ciudadanía estadounidense al cabo de cinco años. [4].

Se trata de una formidable herramienta de incitación a la emigración ilegal. Así,  desde hace más de 50 años el país más rico del planeta abre sus puertas a la población de un pequeño país del Tercer Mundo, con recursos limitados y víctima además de sanciones económicas sumamente severas. La lógica exigiría que la embajada de Estados Unidos en La Habana concediera una visa a todo candidato a la emigración en virtud de esa ley. Pero no es el caso. Al contrario, Washington limita severamente el número de visas otorgadas cada año a los cubanos con el fin de estimular la emigración ilegal y peligrosa e instrumentalizar las crisis con fines políticos. Así, sin visa, los cubanos que desean emigrar a Estados Unidos tienen que arriesgar la vida a bordo de embarcaciones de fortuna, con la esperanza de no ser interceptado por los guardacostas, o realizar largos periplos a través del continente a merced de los traficantes de personas y bandas criminales de toda índole.

El New York Times lanzó un llamado a favor de la abrogación de la Ley de Ajuste Cubano:

“Es tiempo de acabar con esta política, una reliquia de la Guerra Fría, que constituye un obstáculo a la normalización de las relaciones entre Washington y La Habana […] Este sistema hace el negocio de los traficantes de personas en América Latina y ha creado graves problemas a los países de Ecuador a México […] La administración de Obama debe negociar un nuevo acuerdo con el Gobierno cubano para que la emigración ordenada sea la norma […] Las autoridades estadounidenses son incapaces de explicar el tratamiento especial reservado a los cubanos, el cual contrasta con la fuerza que usa Estados Unidos contra los centroamericanos, incluso menores, cuando muchos de ellos huyen de su país para preservar su vida”.[5]

Por otra parte, desde hace cerca de 10 años, Washington aplica también una política destinada a saquear a Cuba –país reconocido mundialmente por la excelencia de su sistema de salud– de sus médicos. En 2006 la administración Bush adoptó el Programa Médico Cubano cuyo objetivo es favorecer la emigración de los profesionales de la salud cubanos a Estados Unidos, ofreciéndoles la posibilidad de ejercer allí su trabajo. Este programa se dirige particularmente a los 50.000 médicos cubanos y otro personal sanitario que ejercen su profesión en las regiones rurales de 60 países del Tercer Mundo, brindando ayuda a las poblaciones desheredadas. El presidente Obama, en el poder desde 2009, no ha eliminado dicho dispositivo, a pesar de sus declaraciones favorables a una normalización de las relaciones con Cuba.[6]

La abrogación de la ley de Ajuste Cubano y del Programa Médico Cubano es indispensable para alcanzar una relación apaciguada entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. Washington no puede esperar un entendimiento cordial con La Habana manteniendo legislaciones hostiles que ponen en peligro la vida de ciudadanos cubanos.

Así, a un año del acercamiento histórico del 17 de diciembre de 2014 entre Cuba y Estados Unidos, quedan muchos puntos de discordia entre ambos países. A guisa de ejemplo, el presidente Obama, a pesar de sus declaraciones positivas, todavía no ha usado sus prerrogativas para poner término a las sanciones económicas. Éstas afectan a las categorías más vulnerables de la población cubana y constituyen el principal obstáculo al desarrollo de la isla.

Salim Lamrani 

Fuente de la foto : sputniknews.com

Doctor en Estudios Ibéricos y latinoamericanos de la Universidad Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, Salim Lamrani es profesor titular de la Universidad de La Reunión y periodista, especialista de las relaciones entre Cuba y Estados Unidos. Su último libro se titula Cuba, parole à la défense !, Paris, Editions Estrella, 2015 (Prólogo de André Chassaigne).

Contact : [email protected] ; [email protected]

Page Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/SalimLamraniOfficiel

Financial Times, September 24, 2015 title:  “Rise in World Bank Poverty Threshold Set to Push Millions More Below the Line”

With great fanfare, last September the United Nations adopted the “Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda,” a seemingly laudable agenda containing 17 goals from “End Poverty in All Its Forms Everywhere,” through Goal 16, “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels,”  Goal 17:  “Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.”

These 17 ambitious goals, if achieved, would lead to a paradise on earth.  However, there is an elephant in the room that the architects of these post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals are ignoring, and which will, if left unaddressed, prevent the attainment of these goals.  Under the section entitled:  “Means of Implementation and the Global Partnership,”  is stated:

“5.  ‘We note the critical importance of private finance and we call on businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to engage as partners in the development process.’”

The document enumerates resources for achievement of these post 2015 Development Goals, which include, vaguely worded,

“domestic public resources, private business, philanthropists and foundations, parliaments, local authorities and other stakeholders, etc.”

These enumerated “resources” for implementation of these development goals are disparate and not necessarily reliable or adequate sources of financing for implementation of this new  Post-2015 Development Agenda.  Conspicuously ignored is the huge and  greatest potential source of financing, which is contained in the astronomically large investment many countries are making in their military budget.  There is absolutely no mention of the military budgets as a potential source of financing of this development agenda.  In fact, 5% of the world’s military budget could completely fund the entire Post-2015 Sustainable Development goals.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for 2015, world military expenditure for 2014 is estimated at $1776 billion, an almost inconceivably huge amount.  Armaments and the military-industrial complex are among the most profitable of all industries, and constitute an enormous investment in destruction, human agony and mass murder.  This is, obviously, the virtual annihilation of any possibility of achieving the “Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”

At a UN press briefing I raised the question of this dilemma which confronts the architects of the Post 2015 Development Agenda:  while the UN is attempting to build sustainable infrastructure to provide decent lives for all global citizens, the massive investment in the military, and war profiteering, leads to war, and  the destruction of entire nations, and, indeed civilizations, so that while the UN is attempting to construct and create, a ruthless war industry is simultaneously destroying innumerable nations, making the task of construction and reconstruction endless.

This is a mutually exclusive situation, a win-lose dilemma, which ultimately renders futile and  unattainable the entire Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.  Wu Hongbo, Under-Secretary General For Economic and Social Affairs,  added that wars also cause enormous environmental destruction, which prevents the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals # 13, 14 and 15, which focus on protection of the environment.

The United States heads the list of main exporters of major weapons, with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon topping the list of the 10 largest weapons producing companies.  While the UN Post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals are admirable, the method and possibility of their implementation remains precarious as long as certain of the most powerful and influential member states of the UN are based on an economy driven by profit-maximization as their paramount concern and overriding interest.  And war is one of the most profitable of all activities.

Unless the UN can prevail upon all their member states to restrain investment in the military, and transfer these destructive and wasteful  investments to support human development, poverty will continue, failed states will continue, terrorism will increase, and the global quality of life will deteriorate even further.   There is no mechanism within the UN, nor any attempt being made to confront these mutually exclusive “interests.”  The success of the Post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals will require a restructuring of the global economic architecture, a restructuring currently opposed by the United States and other capitalist powers.

Carla Stea is Global Research’s Correspondent at the United Nations headquarters in New York

Michael Springmann was Chief of the Non-Immigrant Visa Section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from 1987 to 1989. In his position in Jeddah, he was routinely overruled by superiors when he denied VISA applications submitted by unqualified travelers to the United States.

The events of September 11th gave him a more profound understanding of the troubles he experienced in that job. He is the author of “VISAs for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World – An Insider’s View”. He describes the American VISAs For Terrorists Program and the Arab-Afghan Legion.

Transcript:

This is Guns and Butter.

I think it’s bigger than I even suspected. I had thought originally that it was a small, rogue operation and as time went by and I talked to people and started researching the book I saw that it was bigger than ever. Given the pushback and the blocking of people, I really think that it goes wider and deeper than even I suspect. I think one of the reasons for this is that nobody wants to believe the entire government is corrupt from top to bottom, that you can talk about Edward Snowden or Tom Drake or William Binney and the very focused, very tightly organized situations for a particular person for a particular item. What I’m saying is that the United States of America and all of the branches – the executive, the judicial, and the legislative – know about this and are covering up essentially state sponsored terrorism, and nobody wants to hear this. Nobody wants to go any deeper in it than I’ve got.

I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, J. Michael Springmann. Today’s show: Visas for Al Qaeda.

Michael Springmann is a former diplomat in the State Department’s Foreign Service, with postings to Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in Washington, D.C. He was Chief of the Non-Immigrant Visa Section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from 1987 to 1989. In his position in Jeddah, he was routinely overruled by superiors when he denied visa applications submitted by unqualified travelers to the United States. The events of September 11th gave him a more profound understanding of the troubles he experienced in that job. He is the author of Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World – An Insider’s View. His articles on national security themes have been published in Covert Action Quarterly, Unclassified, Global Research, OpEd News, The Public Record and Foreign Policy Journal. He is now an attorney in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area.
* * * * *
Bonnie Faulkner: Michael Springmann, welcome.

Michael Springmann: Thank you. I’m pleased and honored to be able to talk to you and talk to your listeners.

Bonnie Faulkner: Your book, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts that Rocked the World – An Insider’s View, is a blockbuster starting from the first page. I’d like to read the dedication of your book. “This opus is dedicated to the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Russia, Syria and Yugoslavia. I offer it as a small commemoration to both the living and the dead of those unfortunate countries, particularly those who were murdered in their millions by the United States of America.”

According to what you write, you’ve come a long way in your thinking about American foreign and now domestic policy. You are a former US diplomat having worked in many foreign posts, most significantly as a visa officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from 1987 to 1989. How did you come to work in the Foreign Service and what different posts were you assigned to?

Michael Springmann: I had gotten very much interested in foreign affairs when I was in high school. I had read Lederer and Burdick’s book, The Ugly American, and thought the State Department needed somebody who wasn’t quite so hide-bound and wearing blinders.

So after I went to Georgetown University School of Foreign Service I graduated and tried to take the Foreign Service exam, passing the written test but failing the oral. Unfortunately, I drew the former ambassador to Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, who was a war hawk and when they asked me, “What kind of foreign policy problems do you see in the world today?” I mentioned Vietnam and said that the American government was keeping its actions in Southeast Asia from the American people but the folks in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians, they all knew they were being bombed to hell. And boy, the interview went downhill from there. I wasn’t the right kind of person they wanted.

So over the next few years I kept re-taking the exam and always passing the written but never the oral. I sort of wondered sometimes whether I was the right person since I didn’t come from the upper-class, Ivy League educated elite that normally goes into the Foreign Service, the folks from Harvard and Yale and come from big money. So in my situation, I went abroad with the State Commerce Exchange Program, which was a program set up to give Washington assignments to State Department people who needed to be in DC for some reason, and in return, Commerce Department employees got positions as Foreign Service officers abroad. I was sent to Stuttgart.

Later, when they created the Foreign Commercial Service, taking it away from the State Department, I went to India as commercial attaché in New Delhi. Then eventually, presumably citing my background in the State Commerce Exchange Program and the Foreign Commercial Service, I eventually got through the oral exam and then was commissioned to Foreign Service officer, and as a reward, was sent to Saudi Arabia, which was not on any of my lists of perspective assignments and, in fact, I had been told I was going to the embassy in what was then East Berlin.

Bonnie Faulkner: In your introduction, “What is this about?” you discuss al Qaeda. What is al Qaeda?

Michael Springmann: Well, al Qaeda is one of the brand names for the American visas for terrorists program. Initially, they were the mujahedeen, the people who recruited around the world and sent to the US for training and to Pakistan for training and then sent to Afghanistan to shoot things down and blow things up, hopefully with Soviet soldiers inside.

They then became al Qaeda in another brand change, but it was basically the same fanatical Muslims who were doing America’s bidding in destabilizing first Yugoslavia and then Iraq and then Libya and then Syria. And now they’re calling them ISIL or ISIS or Daesh and it’s the same people. It’s the Arab Afghan Legion, it’s the guys originally recruited as the mujahedeen 25 years ago or more.

They’re not as organized as the Marine Corps but they are crazy people that have been recruited and trained by the Americans and supplied by the Saudis and the Gulf states and others, and they’re turned loose to destabilize, de-house, de-culturalize and destroy countries the United States doesn’t like or governments the United States doesn’t like.

They did it in Iraq, they did it in Yugoslavia, they did it in Libya, which had one of the highest standards of living in all of Africa, and they’re doing it to Syria, which I think is in a worse condition now after four years of American-sponsored war than Iraq was or is. There are at least a million dead in Iraq and still four million people as refugees or internally displaced, and Syria has the same problem. There are four million people outside the country.

Bonnie Faulkner: One of your introductions is entitled “Why did I write this book?” Why did you write this book?

Michael Springmann: Well, I wrote the book because more than 20 years of speaking out against what was being done to me and the rest of the world, analyzing the disastrous American foreign policy, the imperial American foreign policy, and not getting a whole lot of response, I said, well, all right. I had done Freedom of Information Act requests with the State Department and got nowhere. I did that in 1992 when I was fired and wanted to find out why, and when State stalled me for two years and gave me no information I filed a lawsuit in US District court. It was sealed and shut down as a threat to national security – and I still wonder why finding out what was going on about my firing was a threat to national security, but I think now we know.

The second impetus to this was several years ago when I filed another Freedom of Information Act request and again got stonewalled by the State Department. I wanted the original visa applications I had refused years ago and had been repeatedly overruled by Jay Freres who I believe to be a CIA official. And he was the driving force behind all of these illegal visas, people had no ties to their own country or Saudi Arabia yet wanted to go to America for reasons none of them could articulate. That was shut down because the State Department claimed, “Well, we can’t find any of these records. They’ve all been shredded.” I said, “Well, that’s not true because we interviewed 45,000 applicants a year and we had, when I was there, filing cabinets filled to overflowing with applications 5, 10, 15 years old. If they had been shredded,” which I doubted, “I want to know the names of the people who shredded them, their rank and the dates they were shredded.” State would never do this and Reggie Walton, the judge who was also on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, simply closed down my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit as having used up all of my administrative remedies.

So I said, all right. I’ve had enough. I’m going to write a book. I’m going to try and tie this all up together and I’m going to get it out to people who really need to know about this. And that’s what I’ve been doing since February 6th.

Bonnie Faulkner: Is that February 6th of this year?

Michael Springmann: Of this year, that’s right. I closed down the research in December of last year, 2014, and said I can’t do this. I’m going to keep going on forever. This book is timely, it’s important, people need to know about it and sent it off to the printers and was done with it February 6th and it was on the street I think later that month.

Bonnie Faulkner: What kind of people does the US government hire to formulate and manage its imperialist foreign policy?

Michael Springmann: Idiots, and they’re generally people who do not work for the Department of State. State claims it wants the best and the brightest, but some of the ones I’ve met aren’t the best and the brightest anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, most of the people who work for the State Department work for the intelligence services. I had a former chief of station and a real Foreign Service officer, Jay Hawley, tell me that the average is about one in three Foreign Service officers work for one of the American intelligence services. There was a former ambassador, who’s now died, he said about half of the people in many Foreign Service posts work for the intelligence services. When I was in Jeddah, out of 20 Americans there were only 3 people, myself, Mike Springmann, Lonnie Washington, the only State Department communicator, and Jim Page, an administrative officer, we were the only people who had no ties professional or familial with any of the American intelligence services.

According to a book that was published in Canada that ran about 12 pages, that I’ve not yet seen but found on Namebase.org, two-thirds of the people who work for the State Department as Foreign Service officers are really intelligence officers. These are the people who are incredibly arrogant, self-centered and contemptuous of everybody else in the world.

Bonnie Faulkner: With regard to some of your experiences in Jeddah, didn’t you discover things yourself going on there that the US government itself wasn’t even aware of?

Michael Springmann: Yes and no. When I was in Jeddah I was getting some really strange people as visa applicants and later found out they were sent to me by the intelligence services. But in one instance my ability to make contacts and talk to people brought in a major revelation. The Saudis, beginning about 1988, had been very much interested in buying Chinese made silkworm missiles. These were intermediate range ballistic missiles. I was going out to dinner with some Europeans one day and they came over to the house for a couple of beers before we went out and this guy said, “Well, you know, I’m working down at the port and you know those Chinese silkworm missiles?” I said, “Yeah.” “Well, they’re bringing them in. they’re unloading them and they’re moving containers around to block the sight lines.”

As luck would have it, the air attaché was down from Riyadh and I called him up the first thing the next morning and told him what I had gotten from the fellow, and he said, “That’s news to me. I’m not down here about this. I came down to do scuba diving.” So he went and got pictures taken either through a satellite, overhead imagery, or through a flyover with a reconnaissance plane, and the National Security Agency hadn’t heard about that, and the CIA, Karen Sasahara, the case officer whose diplomatic cover was political officer, she didn’t know about it. The State Department’s secretary for the consul general who had once worked with the CIA, she was mad because she had to come in on her day off and write the cable about this. As a footnote, Karen Sasahara is now deputy chief of mission in Sana’a and she’s working with her husband, Michael Ratney, who had been consul general in Jerusalem and is now American ambassador to Syria. So they’re keeping terrorism and warfare in the family.

Bonnie Faulkner: What’s it like in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia?

Michael Springmann: Well, Lonnie Washington, the communicator, said that, well, the Saudis put a lot of restrictions on everybody and the Americans put restrictions on top of them. You had to take your liquor bottles and beer cans to be crushed so the Saudis wouldn’t know you were drinking beer even though Saudis came to American functions on the compound where everybody was drinking and they drank, too. The place was amazing. If you had the right connections, if you had what the Arabs call “wasta,” you could get almost anything done you wanted. I had dinner at a high-level Saudi fellow’s house and he said before dinner, “Mike, would you like whiskey before dinner or would you want an apéritif of some kind? We can get you sherry or you name it, we’ve got it.” I said, “Wow.”

But it was an amazing place. You could do anything if you kept it hidden. If you went out and influenced Muslims to drink you’d get tossed in jail and lashed and deported, but if you had the right connections you could do anything you wanted. They had undercover priests saying mass at J. Phillip Frerer’s house. He was the American consul general and supposedly a devout Catholic. It was kind of like Europe at the time of Henry VIII. You had hidden priests posing as travel agents, doing their ministry there. You had Protestants having religious services on the American consulate compound. It was absolutely astonishing.

Bonnie Faulkner: You talk about how the US Foreign Service was professionalized and merged with the Central Intelligence Agency. You’ve started to talk about this. How does the CIA operate within the Foreign Service?

Michael Springmann: They have people called “under official cover.” They are supposedly real Foreign Service officers with black diplomatic passports. There were two CIA case officers in my A-100 class, the class teaching you how to be a Foreign Service officer, when I was hired by State. They simply go out and they’re given assignments in the political section, the economic section, the commercial section, the administrative section, but they don’t necessarily work full time in those sections. For example, Andy Weber, who is now assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, he was a CIA case officer in Jeddah supposedly assigned to the consular section, but he worked there maybe half a day and we really only had him in there full time when we had a flood of visa applicants after the end of major holidays in Saudi Arabia.

Bonnie Faulkner: I tend to think of terrorist training as taking place in foreign countries, such as Jordan or Turkey or wherever. In fact, a lot of the training of terrorists took place right here in the United States. What was or is the visas for terrorists program?

Michael Springmann: That’s essentially what I called what I was being told to do in Jeddah. It was the mujahedeen recruits that they were brining from all over the Middle East and even as far as East Asia. They were people who wanted to be taught to shoot things down and blow things up. They brought them by the thousands to the US to be taught in US military training facilities, either in North Carolina with the Navy or near Williamsburg, Virginia with the CIA organization called The Farm. They’re also being fought in Jordan now. There are a number of American bases there that are teaching them how to do this. There are apparently bases in Turkey that are giving them the full treatment on how to destroy Syria and before, how to destroy Libya. It’s amazing. You would have thought they would have done it easier and cheaper abroad but who knows what goes on in these people’s minds?

Bonnie Faulkner: In your chapter “Enter the Patsy,” I assume that you were the patsy.

Michael Springmann: Exactly. Had they told me what they wanted me to do, I probably would have been dumb enough at the time to say, “Yeah, we work for the same government. Yeah, you want a visa for a guy to overthrow the evil, godless Soviet empire? Sure. I’ll stamp the visa for you.” But they never did that.

I had this bizarre conversation with the then American ambassador, Walter Cutler. I was in Area Studies at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. They were training an education arm. I got a call from one of the desk officers for Saudi Arabia, the people who follow what goes on in the country and are essentially the State Department’s embassy in Washington for Saudi Arabia or India or Germany or whatever country you’re talking about. He said, “Cutler’s in town. Do you want to meet him?” I said, “Yeah, sure.”

I figured it would be a five-minute hello and goodbye session, and Cutler kept me there for 45 minutes talking about all the problems my predecessor, Greta Holtz, had created for him and the embassy in Riyadh. She was refusing visas to servants for rich Saudi women who couldn’t travel to the US without seamstresses, hairdressers and other factotums. I said, this is the most bizarre thing. He’s telling me my predecessor is an absolute incompetent and a trouble maker and he wants me to do something but I can’t quite figure what it is he wants me to do or what message he’s trying to get across.

Once it was over, I asked the desk officer who was there with me, “What was that all about?” He said, “Well, I don’t know. Cutler was just a queer duck.” Well, Greta Holtz, who refused to answer three letters asking about what was life in Jeddah, what she wished she had known before she got there and so forth, told me on the phone one day after I was out of the Foreign Service, “Oh, I was so upset I couldn’t tell you about this.” I found this really peculiar because Greta Holtz is now American ambassador to Oman, and if she had all these problems how is it that she’s in the Foreign Service still and I’m out, when all I was doing was my job, which was essentially to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

So far as I’ve seen in my career in the State Department and since then, the only enemies there are around are domestic enemies, and they generally work for the United States government.

Bonnie Faulkner: Now, what were the three recruiting offices in Saudi Arabia? You worked in Jeddah. Weren’t there two other centers?

Michael Springmann: There was one in Dhahran at the consul there, but I’ve never been able to figure it out, and one in Riyadh. Nobody’s been able to tell me their exact addresses. It was just, yeah, the cities, they were there, but they never really gave me any concrete information. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anybody who would tell me otherwise.

Bonnie Faulkner: The problem that you ran up against professionally in your job is that you were actually denying visas. Isn’t that right?

Michael Springmann: Yeah. With a visa application you’ve got to establish some kind of connection to the place of application or your own country. You have a job, you’re going to school, you’re running a business, you have an investment, whatever that’s going to be strong enough to bring you back from the United States for whatever reason you’re going here. For example, people go for tourism, to visit relatives, to sign a contract with a business in the United States, whatever. Then they can’t stay here. They have to go back to managing their own business, they have to graduate from their university, they have to manage their job, they’re either a manager in a company and they just can’t go away and leave it.

None of these people had any of those ties. They were people that couldn’t name the city they were going to, couldn’t tell me why they were going there, had absolutely no information available to me as to what they were doing or why they were going. I thought once I had yelled and screamed and filed lawsuits that this had all stopped. Yet after September 11th, and in researching the book, I found that Shayna Steinger had been the consular officer in Jeddah who had issued 11 visas to people who were participants in the September 11th attacks, and I was thunderstruck at this. Shayna Steinger, who from my research on the Internet had given equivocable answers to the 9-11 Commission, she still has a job and has gotten promotions.

Bonnie Faulkner: You’re saying that 11 of the, what, 19 …

Michael Springmann: Twenty. I think 19 or 20. 15 got their visas in Saudi Arabia and 11 of the 15 got them in Jeddah.

Bonnie Faulkner: I see, at the very office where you worked.

Michael Springmann: Exactly.

Bonnie Faulkner: You complained because you were being overruled when you denied visas, right? Who did you complain to?

Michael Springmann: I complained first to Justice Stevens, and Justice is the given name. He was head of the consular section. I complained to Jay Frerers. I complained to Stephanie Smith, who I have since found out is a CIA official. When she was counsel for consular affairs in Riyadh and she told me, “This is a very bad thing. When you go back to Washington, tell the Bureau of Consular Affairs about this,” which I did and they had absolutely no interest.

Once I was out of the State Department I complained to the Government Accounting Office, as it was known at the time. I complained to the Justice Department and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They told me after September 11th, after I called office after office at headquarters, to call the Washington District office and when I did, they said, “Well, we’ll get back to you. That was 15 years ago and I’m still waiting.

Bonnie Faulkner: So how massive would you say the cover-up is?

Michael Springmann: I think it’s bigger than I even suspected. I had thought originally that it was a small, rogue operation and as time went by and I talked to people and started researching the book I saw that it was bigger than ever. Given the pushback and the blocking of people, like Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow! and Tom Devine at the Government Accountability Project, I really think that it goes wider and deeper than even I suspect.

I think one of the reasons for this is that nobody wants to believe the entire government is corrupt from top to bottom, that you can talk about Edward Snowden or Tom Drake or William Binney and the very focused, very tightly organized situations for a particular person for a particular item. What I’m saying is that the United States of America and all of the branches – the executive, the judicial, and the legislative – know about this and are covering up essentially state sponsored terrorism, and nobody wants to hear this. Nobody wants to go any deeper in it than I’ve gotten, and I think there’s a lot more to be uncovered if you can ever find the right person to talk.

Bonnie Faulkner: You write, “What I was protesting was in reality an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.”

Michael Springmann: Exactly. They went all in with the mujahedeen. They had recruited them, they had trained them, and along the way I think they realized that, hey, we’ve got a cadre of people who are really good at destroying governments and countries. Why don’t we apply this group to other countries where we have an interest in having an unstable government with a failing economy? And I think they brought them to Yugoslavia first. They had Osama bin Laden and 5,000 or more Saudis there. They had people that they had trained and had worked with NATO in Yugoslavia to destroy the country, and according to this guy, John Schingler, who had been with the National Security Agency and the Naval War College in Providence, Rhode Island, they got a lot of help from the American government to get them there, to keep them there, and provide them with intelligence and weapons and training and so forth.

After that, they sent them to Iraq and we’ve all seen what’s happened to Iraq. It’s been split into virtually three pieces with no functioning government and no functioning economy. They moved them to Libya. They had more arms amongst the so-called rebels in Libya than they had in the British Army’s inventory. Once they had gotten these people there and had killed the American ambassador because he was apparently in the middle of their efforts to move weapons from Libya to Syria to help destabilize the country there, they had this great opportunity to just shift people and weapons to other countries they wanted to get rid of, and the Turks are helping. The Turks ship planeloads and shiploads of arms and ammunition. They were shipped in Saudi aircraft, as well. They were shipped in Turkish aircraft and Jordanian aircraft.

Bonnie Faulkner: President Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, authorized, at the urging of the CIA, the secret American backing for Afghans resisting the Soviet support communist government in Kabul. This then triggered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was predicted by Brzezinski, so the arming of the mujahedeen was not in response to a Soviet invasion but the cause of it. Isn’t that right?

Michael Springmann: That’s right. They were working on this before the Soviets invaded on, what was it, December 24th 1979 or thereabouts – or earlier. Anyway, yeah. They drew them in and this was the beginning of the mujahedeen and the visas for terrorists program, which is now called ISIL, after another brand change.

Bonnie Faulkner: How would you characterize what you refer to as the Arab Afghan Legion, and what was its origin?

Michael Springmann: These are the people – I picked the name up after looking at this perhaps as something of a clever play on words, but it’s basically the terrorists the Americans recruited along with the help of the Saudis and the Pakistanis to fight in Afghanistan. There were these people called the Afghan Arabs. They were not Afghans but they were Arabs and other people from other countries such as Indonesia or the Philippines who were brought into Afghanistan and were trained to fight the Soviets. They were thought to be easier to work with than the Afghans, and they sort of gave them the sobriquet The Arab Afghans, which I turned into the Arab Afghan Legion.

But it’s the same crowd of really fanatical Arabs and Muslims and Arabs who, as Cheryl Benard, the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, the former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations, we went out, and saw the only way to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan was to find the wildest, most fanatical crazies we could and that’s why there are no moderates in the country, that’s why there are no left-wing people in the country, that’s why all we have in Afghanistan is a bunch of fanatical Muslims.

Bonnie Faulkner: Isn’t it also a fact that certain countries actually emptied their jails and sent the criminals there?

Michael Springmann: Exactly right. They did that in Egypt and I would imagine other places as well. You want wild men? You want troublemakers? Well, we’ve got whole prisons full of them.

Bonnie Faulkner: Who is Abdullah Azzam, cofounder of the Services Office, and what was his role in creating international terrorism?
Michael Springmann: He was the guy who worked with Osama bin Laden. In fact, he was Osama’s mentor, as I recall. I’m trying to remember his ethnic identity. I want to say North African but I’m not sure. He was a fellow who worked with Osama bin Laden to create the support for the Arab Afghan Legion, to support the people who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Bonnie Faulkner: What is the Services Office that he cofounded?

Michael Springmann: That was basically an administrative office that handled recruiting, it handled publicity. He had said in one of his newsletters that the people who have the money are in the United States. The people who don’t have the money are in poor Arab and Muslim countries around the world, and that we want help from these people, and the best way to get help is to get it from the US.

Bonnie Faulkner: I recall from your book, didn’t he also publish some sort of a jihad magazine?

Michael Springmann: Yeah, that’s right. That circulated all over the world, and in various languages. They set up the Services Office to manage recruitment, training and weapons, and they handled the Arab Afghan transfer to Bosnia, for example. He was their think tank. He set up the Al Kifah center in Brooklyn at the mosque there that worked also with Bosnia to recruit people for the war in the Balkans.

Bonnie Faulkner: What is Operation Cyclone, and what role does it play in the Arab Afghan Legion?

Michael Springmann: According to John Pilger, the Australian journalist, CIA director William Casey had given his backing to this crazy plan produced by Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence agency to recruit people from all around the world to join the Afghan jihad. In addition to training them in Pakistan, they trained also people here at the CIA camp in Virginia at Camp Perry, or The Farm, which is near Williamsburg. That was Operation Cyclone, and it continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989.

Bonnie Faulkner: As far as you know, is Operation Cyclone still in existence?

Michael Springmann: Well, I would imagine so, given that they’re training people in Jordan by the CIA’s paramilitary arm, along with the US military forces and they’re doing this in Turkey, so I think it’s still going on. They just gave a different name for it maybe and they’re probably doing it now more abroad than here, but until somebody comes clean we’re never going to really know.

Bonnie Faulkner: Where were the terrorists trained in the US and who trained them? Now, you mentioned one place.

Michael Springmann: At Camp Perry, yeah. They trained in them in North Carolina at military facilities, as well, and I would imagine the Blackwater people were somehow involved, and they operated out of North Carolina.

Bonnie Faulkner: Who else do you think was training them? Didn’t you mention the Green Beret in your book?

Michael Springmann: Yeah. The US Special Forces were involved in that. I think that they would have the skills and abilities to disrupt a given government using small group forces, much like T.E. Lawrence did in Saudi Arabia.

Bonnie Faulkner: You write, “Not even Adolph Hitler and the Nazis brought terrorists to Germany trained them thoroughly and then allowed them to operate against the German people. The United States did, though, and used its foreign ministry and intelligence service to help, and then covered it up and still works very hard to keep the lid on.”

Michael Springmann: Yeah, I think that’s unfortunately true. Adolph Hitler is not the world’s kindest, most gentlest person but I think that he kept the fanatics out of Germany. But the Americans brought them here, trained them, and then used them against American interests around the world. I think it’s outrageous. I’ve met real live Nazis during my five years in Germany and I swear to God, some of the ones I met were a lot better than people I dealt with in the American government.

Bonnie Faulkner: What do we know about taking the Afghan war into the former Soviet Union?

Michael Springmann: That’s another bit of craziness. The guy involved in that was a fellow who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, and his daughter married the uncle of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamilan Tsarnaev. His daughter, Samantha, married Ruslan Tsarnaev, their uncle. These were the guys who supposedly were responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombing.

But Graham Fuller, the CIA officer, he managed the attacks on the Muslim republics in the Soviet Union. They sent the crazies across the Amu Darya River and they trained them and funneled the CIA’s supplies for scattered strikes against various military installations, factories and storage tanks in the old Soviet Union. I think that’s remarkably dangerous given that the Soviets had half the supply of the world’s atomic bombs.

Bonnie Faulkner: You also point out in your book the similarities between the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR in that they both contained a very diverse population, ethnically, religious-wise, so then I guess it would have been easier to stir up trouble in these areas.

Michael Springmann: Oh, yeah. For example, in Yugoslavia the Americans set the Orthodox and the Catholics against the Muslims and the Slovenes and the Croats against the Serbians. You pick your nationality and minority group and the Americans were backing somebody on the other side. When Germany, I guess with the encouragement of the United States, recognized the two most economically viable sections of Yugoslavia, such as Slovenia and Croatia, to secede and form their own country, that helped immensely with the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Michael Parenti in his article about the breakup of Yugoslavia talked about how even the American government got Congress to block funding for any organization that still adhered to the old Yugoslav government and didn’t declare themselves an independent country, which I think is absolutely madness.

Bonnie Faulkner: What is the Maktab al-Khidamat?

Michael Springmann: That’s the Arabic for the Services Office that Abdullah Azzam and Abdul Anas were running to support the Arab Afghans, the people they recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan who were not Afghan nationals.

Bonnie Faulkner: Didn’t Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik, himself get a tourist visa to come to the United States?

Michael Springmann: Yes, indeed.

Bonnie Faulkner: And what role had he been playing with the CIA?

Michael Springmann: Well, nobody really talks about what he was doing. He supposedly was this bad boy, yet traveled on American visas all around the world and in going in and out of the United States despite being on a watch list. The interesting thing is that when he got the visa in the Sudan the deputy chief of mission at the time was the fellow who gave me such problems in Saudi Arabia, Joseph P. O’Neill Jr. He had gotten his job there through a CIA family and according to his statement in the Georgetown University Oral History Project, there was another CIA agent like the blind sheik who got a visa and nobody talks about him. And O’Neill blamed the local staff for doing this when it was a CIA case officer who was there who supposedly didn’t bother to check the microfiche lookout book for names of terrorists and other bad boys.

Bonnie Faulkner: It seems to me with regard to the blind sheik that we often see the people that work with the government then become the enemy, and they turn around and attack them or accuse them of something. I mean, the blind sheik is doing life, isn’t he?

Michael Springmann: Yeah. He’s down in, I think, Texas. He had been at the al Farouk mosque in Brooklyn at the al Kifah center and they just simply let him go back and forth with no problem whatsoever. The thing of it was the blind sheik isn’t by himself. Osama bin Laden was another CIA recruit, and he suddenly became on their outs when he had served his purposes.

I once interviewed this Toto Constant, this murderer, war criminal and human rights violator in Haiti that was one of the CIA people in place down there, and when they were tired of him they threw him in jail. So they’re like Kleenex. You use them to blow your nose and when that’s done you throw them away.

Bonnie Faulkner: How was the al Farouk mosque in Brooklyn used?

Michael Springmann: It was a transfer point for recruits. It was a transfer point for money. They sent them funds and operatives to Bosnia. They found this out after the war in Yugoslavia was over. And it’s by and large a way station. They got money from the US, Muslims and Arabs in the United States, they laundered it there and they sent it on to Afghanistan and to Bosnia and to other places in the former Yugoslavia.

Bonnie Faulkner: Are the Arab Afghan Legion, al Qaeda and ISIS all one in the same?

Michael Springmann: Pretty much. They’re rebranded. You’ve got roughly the same fanatical people that are recruited and trained and armed with American, Saudi, Gulf, Turkish, Jordanian and Israeli help. These are the same people. They may not be the guys they recruited 25 years ago but they may be the people that they trained, or people that they trained who then later trained somebody else.
I put that question to former Senator Mike Gravel from Alaska, and also to retired Army officer, Colonel Tony Shaffer. I said to them, “Are these the same guys that we trained here who are now fighting American soldiers?” and both of them said, “Yes, these are the same folks.” They’ve been rebranded, they changed their name, they’ve got different people. I won’t say it’s as organized as the United States Marine Corps but they are a pretty good shotgun. You load them and you aim them and fire in the general direction of something you want to hit and sooner or later, you fire enough pellets, you’ll hit something.

Bonnie Faulkner: You write that the visas issued in Jeddah for the mujahedeen and ultimately al Qaeda and ISIS were not a one-off program. Could you explain that? Were there other centers doing this and continue to issue these visas?

Michael Springmann: I think that at the time I thought it was an original, one-time deal and then I began hearing about the recruiting offices in Dhahran in the eastern province and I said, “Wait a minute.” And then as time went by and I was out of the State Department and started hearing about al Qaeda, I said, “Well, this is still going on.” And when I read about Shayna Steinger binger at the CIA’s Jeddah consulate issuing visas to 11 of the 20 hijackers for September 11th I said, “My God, it’s still going on.” When I read in John Schindler’s book, Unholy Terror, he had drawn links between Bosnia and Afghanistan and the September 11th people. He names names in his boo,k which I repeated in mine, of people who were tied in with the September 11th planning and execution. I said, “My God, this is still going on,” and from what I could see in the daily newspapers, they haven’t given up recruiting these characters.

Bonnie Faulkner: So then, is the Arab Afghan Legion still marching?

Michael Springmann: I think they are. They just have a different brand name. They’re no longer the mujahedeen and they’re no longer al Qaeda. They’re now ISIL or ISIS or IS or Daesh, pick it.

Bonnie Faulkner: The US has supported Muslim fundamentalists and opposed Arab secular nationalism. What has been the overall effect of this foreign policy?

Michael Springmann: Disaster. Who was it, Robert Dreyfuss wrote in his book, The Devil’s Game, that originally the Americans saw Islam as a shield against the godless communists. And then they came around to the idea of, well, you know, let’s use them as a sword against the godless communists. And up until the Afghan war, using these people as a sword and as a shield was kind of an ad hoc thing. If you wanted to try and get rid of the government of Egypt and try and get Gamal Abdel Nasser assassinated in Damascus, well, you hired somebody to do this. If you wanted to destabilize Syria because it was too socialist you tried to hire someone in the intelligence services there to overthrow the government.

But that was a catch as catch can thing. It was a one-off business, but with the creation of the Arab Afghan Legion, the many rebrands of the mujahedeen, you’ve now got a cadre of people available any time, any where the United States government wants to de-house, destabilize,
de-culturalize a country.

Bonnie Faulkner: Michael Springmann, thank you so much.

Michael Springmann: Well, thank you. I am honored and delighted and quite happy to have helped to get the word out to people who are interested in hearing it.

** * * *

I’ve been speaking with J. Michael Springmann. Today’s show has been: Visas for Al Qaeda. Michael Springmann is a former diplomat in the State Department’s Foreign Service, with postings to Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in Washington, D.C. He was Chief of the Non-Immigrant Visa Section in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from 1987 to 1989. He is the author of Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked The World – An Insider’s View. He is the published author of several articles on national security themes, particularly those dealing with relations between the CIA and the Department of State.  He is now an attorney in private practice, admitted to the bars of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Contact him at [email protected]. Visit his website at www.michaelspringmann.com .

Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Email us at [email protected]. Visit www.gunsandbutter.org to sign up for our email list and receive our newsletter. Guns and Butter online now includes a new website, an active Twitter feed, show archives and a blog. Follow us at #gandbradio. 

The transcript is made available through Global Research.

Links and Resources:

• Full Transcript
• Michael Springmann’s website
• Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s View

GR Editor’s Note: This incisive article with foresight by author Frank Morales originally published by GR in 2003 describes a process which is now culminating in the militarization of law enforcement in the US and the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act.

*    *    *

To further prepare for new “law enforcement” missions for the military within America, overseen by the Northern Command, the Center for Law and Military Operations, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, recently published the legal rationale for these developments.

Entitled, Domestic Operational Law Handbook for Judge Advocates, the document reflects the growing momentum towards the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act. Virtually unreported in any media, and published prior to 911, the document states that although “the Founding Fathers’ hesitancy to raise a standing army and their desire to render the military subordinate to civilian authority” is “rooted in the Constitution,”

“exceptions to the restrictions on employment of federal armed forces to assist state and local civil authorities are also grounded in the Constitution, which provides the basis for federal legislation allowing military assistance for civil disturbances.”

(See Domestic Operational Law Handbook for Judge Advocates, https://www.jagcnet.army.mil/JAGCNETInternet/Homepages/AC/CLAMO-Public.nsf )

The JAG handbook attempts to solidify, from a legal standpoint, Pentagon penetration of America and it’s “operations other than war,” essentially providing the U.S. corporate elite with lawful justification for its class war against the American people, specifically those that resist the “new world law and order” agenda.

Militarization of law enforcement (right)

The handbook notes that “the Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan, named GARDEN PLOT, provides guidance and direction for planning, coordination, and executing military operations during domestic civil disturbances.”

Operation Garden Plot, originating in 1968 and continually updated, is according to the JAG handbook, tasked with the mission of conducting “civil disturbance operations throughout the United States,” providing “wide latitude to a commander to use federal forces to assist civil law enforcement in restoring law and order.”

And it’s exactly this type of “wide latitude” that we’ve witnessed at recent protests [2003] in NYC and Oakland.

United States Army Field Manual 19-15, entitled Civil Disturbances, issued in 1985, is designed to equip soldiers with the “tactics, techniques and procedures” necessary to suppress dissent. The manual states that “crowd control formations may be employed to disperse, contain, or block a crowd. When employed to disperse a crowd, they are particularly effective in urban areas because they enable the control force to split a crowd into smaller segments.”

(See  http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/19-15/CH8.htm )

Sound familiar?

If you were at the February 15 [2003] NYC Peace Rally it certainly does. The manual goes on to state that “if the crowd refuses to move, the control force may have to employ other techniques, such as riot control agents or apprehensions…”

The Army’ “civil disturbance” manual, correlated to present day realities, also makes the point that “civil disturbances include acts of terrorism,” which “may be organized by disaffected groups,” who hope to “embarrass the government,” and who may in fact “demonstrate as a cover for terrorism.”

The sophistry involved in turning a peace rally into a pro-al Qaeda rally is precisely the logic that is operative within Pentagon driven civil disturbance planning situated within the broader context of so-called “homeland defense.” In fact, rather than protest being the occasion of “terrorism,” the “war on terrorism” is the cover for the war on dissent. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to what the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center spokesman Mike Van Winkle had to say recently to the Oakland Tribune (5/18/03):

“You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest…You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

(See http://fact.trib.com/1st.lev.inquisitionUSA.html )

Eleven Years Ago: December 26, 2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami. Why did the Information Not Get Out? Was There a Hidden Agenda?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 27 2015

One of the most destructive and powerful earthquakes in recorded history, more than a quarter of a million recorded deaths, local economies destroyed, the lives of entire communities shattered, and no serious investigation into the flaws of the global seismic warning system is contemplated.

Declassified Documents Reveal Pentagon’s Planned Nuclear Holocaust: “Systemic Destruction” and Annihilation of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow … Beijing

By Wayne Madsen, December 27 2015

Du Communiqué de Genève à la Résolution 2254- Les relations Washington-Moscou

Par Thierry Meyssan, 25 décembre 2015

Les termes de la Résolution 2254 confirment pour l’essentiel ceux du Communiqué de Genève adopté il y a trois ans.

Par Selma Benkhelifa, 25 décembre 2015

Par Bruno Adrie, 26 décembre 2015

Pablo Iglesias laisse clairement entendre qu’il n’est plus question de quitter l’Alliance. Son projet consiste maintenant à « reformuler les fonctions de cette organisation ». Il souhaite dorénavant doter l’Europe et l’Espagne d’une « plus grande autonomie stratégique » au sein de l’organisation « en approfondissant la Politique européenne de sécurité et de défense (PESC) pour faire face aux relations avec notre voisinage et aux problématiques globales depuis une perspective exclusivement européenne ».

GR Editor’s Note

Publicly available military documents confirm that pre-emptive nuclear war is still on the drawing board  of the Pentagon.

Compared to the 1950s, the nuclear weapons are more advanced. The delivery system is more precise. In addition to China and Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea are targets for pre-emptive nuclear war.  

Let us be under no illusions, the Pentagon’s plan to blow up the planet using advanced nuclear weapons is still on the books. 

Should we be concerned?  Blowing up the planet through the use of nuclear weapons is fully endorsed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who believes that nuclear weapons are instruments of peace-making. Her campaign is financed by the corporations which produce WMDs. 

Scientists on contract to the Pentagon have endorsed the use of tactical nuclear weapons: they are “harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground.”

The people at the highest levels of government who make the decision regarding the use of nuclear weapons haven’t  the foggiest idea as to the implications of their actions. 

Michel Chossudovsky, December 27, 2015

*        *       *

Recently-declassified nuclear targeting documents from 1959 describe how Washington planned to obliterate the capital cities of what are now America’s NATO allies in Eastern and Central Europe. The revelation casts doubt on Washington’s Cold War commitment to the protection of what it referred to as «captive nations» in Europe. The documents are contained in a report titled, «SAC (Strategic Air Command) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959».

The US Air Force study called for the «systematic destruction» of such major population centers as Warsaw, East Berlin, Prague, Bucharest, Tallinn, and others, as well as Peiping (Beijing), Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and Moscow.

Excerpt of list of 1200 cities targeted for nuclear attack in alphabetical order

Atomic bombs eight times to destructive force of that dropped by the United States on Hiroshima were trained on a number of targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There were 179 «designated ground zeros» for atomic bombs in Moscow and 145 in St. Petersburg.

US atomic weapons would have laid waste to Wittstock, just upwind of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hometown of Templin in Brandenburg in the former East Germany. It is most certain that had the US launched an atomic attack on Europe, Merkel, her parents Horst and Herlind Kasner, and brother Marcus would have been vaporized in the massive pre-targeted strike on East Berlin and the regions surrounding it.

Budapest would have been completely destroyed after the US hit the Tokol military airfield on the banks of the Danube River with one of its «city-busting» nuclear weapons. The blast would have rendered the Danube a radioactive drainage ditch and anyone exposed to the poisonous Danube waters downriver would have succumbed to an agonizing death from radiation sickness. Adding to the misery of anyone living alongside the Danube was the fact that Bratislava, also on the banks of the Danube, was also targeted for nuclear annihilation. The first major urban center casualties outside of Hungary and then-Czechoslovakia from the radioactive Danube would have been in Belgrade, the capital of neutral Yugoslavia.

The nuclear targeting of Vyborg on the Finnish border would have brought death and destruction to the border region of neutral Finland. Four atomic bombs were targeted on the former Finnish city: Koyvisto, Uras, Rempeti airfield, and Vyborg East.

Nuclear weapons, as the United States knew in 1959 and very well knows today, are not «precision-guided munitions».

For all of its propaganda beamed to Eastern Europe on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States was willing to sacrifice the very peoples it proclaimed to want to «free» from the Soviet bloc. America’s «mutually assured destruction» policy was based on increasing the «mega-death» count around the world by having the ability to hit the enemy with more nuclear «throw weight».

Increasing the mega-death count was why the United States targeted such large population centers as Peiping (Beijing), Shanghai, Mukden (Shenyang), and Tientsin in China. The pummeling of metro Moscow with atomic bombs was also designed to increase body count. The formerly Top Secret nuclear targeting document lists the following areas of Moscow for nuclear bombardment: Bykovo airport, central Moscow, Chertanovo, Fili, Izmaylovo, Khimki, Kuchino, Lyubertsy, Myachkovo airport, Orlovo, Salarevo, Shchelkovo, and Vnukovo airport.

Eighteen nuclear targets were programmed for Leningrad: Central Leningrad (including the historic Hermitage), Alexandrovskaya, Beloostrov, Gorelovo, Gorskaya, Kamenka North, Kasimovo, Kolomyagi, Kolpino, Krasnaya Polyana, Kudrovo, Lesnoy, Levashovo, Mishutkino, Myachkovo, Petrodvorets, Pushkin, Sablino, Sestroretsk, Tomilino, Uglovo, and Yanino.

Bucharest, Romania, was the target for three city busters aimed at Baneasa, Otopeni airport, and Pipera. Ulan Bator, the capital of the present America-idolizing Mongolia, would not have been spared. The Pentagon nuclear target list does not even list Mongolia as a separate country. The entry for the nuclear strike reads: «Ulaan Baatar, China».

Two uncomforting facts stand out from the disclosure of the targeting list. First, the United States remains as the only country in history that used nuclear weapons in warfare – hitting the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Second, some Pentagon officials, notably Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer, called for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. In fact, while the USSR, China, and France rejected the first use of nuclear weapons, NATO and the United States, on the other hand, chiseled in stone the first use of tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But, as seen with the wishes of LeMay, Lemnitzer, and others, a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and its allies, including China, was on the wish list of the Pentagon’s top brass.

Because the Soviet Union had virtually no intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 1959 and hinged its nuclear warfare capabilities on strategic bombers, the Pentagon brass wanted to hit the Soviet Union in a pre-emptive strike before they reached missile parity with the United States. At the heart of the crazed Pentagon reasoning was what the nuclear warfare champions called the «missile gap».

There is not much of a leap from the «black comedy» nuclear Armageddon film «Dr Strangelove» to actual Cold War era meetings on pre-emptive nuclear strikes held in the White House and Pentagon. Attorney General Robert Kennedy walked out of one such meeting in disgust while Secretary of State Dean Rusk later wrote: «Under no circumstances would I have participated in an order to launch a first strike». In 1961, President John F Kennedy questioned the motives of his generals and admirals after one such nuclear war pep talk from the Pentagon brass by stating, «And we call ourselves the human race».

Kennedy and his brother Robert had every reason to be fearful that the Pentagon would circumvent civilian authority and launch a nuclear strike either against Cuba, the Soviet Union, or both during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, Robert Kennedy told Soviet ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin during the height of the crisis that «the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American military could get out of control».

Today, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe continue having their love affair with NATO and the Americans. Yet, it was the same NATO and the forefathers of the present gung ho military interventionists in Washington who once wanted to rain nuclear fire upon the cities of Warsaw (six ground zeroes: Ozarow, Piastow, Pruszkow, Boernerowo, Modlin, and Okecie), Prague (14 designated ground zeroes at Beroun, Kladno, Kralupy nad Vltavou, Kraluv Dvor, Neratovice, Psary, Radotin, Roztoky, Slaky, Stechovice, Velvary, Kbely, Ryzyne, and Vodochody), Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia (three ground zeroes: Bozhurishte, Kumaritsa, and Vrazhdebna),  Bratislava, Kiev (three nuclear targets: Bortnichi, Post-Volynskiy airport, and Svyatoshino airport), Leipzig (where seven atomic bombs were targeted on Altenhain, Boehlen, Delitzsche, Grimma, Pegau, Wurzen, and Brandis), Weimar, and Wittenberg.

Also not to be spared nuclear annihilation were Potsdam, Vilnius (five nuclear ground zeroes: Novo Vilnya, Novaya Vileyka, Vilnyus (Center), Vilnyus East, and Vilnyus Southwest), Lepaya (Latvia), Leninakan (Gyumri) in Armenia, Alma Ata (Kazakhstan), Poznan, Lvov (three ground zeroes: Gorodok, Lvov Northwest, and Sknilov), Brno, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Riga (four ground zeroes: Salaspils, Skirotava, Spilve, and Riga West), Ventspils in Latvia (two targets: Ventspils South and Targale), Tallinn (two ground zeroes: Lasnamae and Ulemiste), Tartu, Tirana, Vlone (Albania), Berat/Kucove (Albania), Kherson (Ukraine), Baku/Zabrat, Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Republic, Syktyvkar in the Komi Autonomous Republic, Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic on the Iranian border, Osh in Kyrgyzstan, Stalinabad (Dushanbe) in Tajikistan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and Tbilisi (seven ground zeroes at: Tbilisi central, Agtaglya, Orkhevi, Sandar, Sartichala, Soganlug, and Vaziani).

NATO and neo-conservative propagandists continue to paint Russia as an enemy of the peoples of central and eastern Europe. However, it was not Russia that had nuclear weapons once trained on the cities of the Eurasian land mass but the United States. Had the Pentagon generals and admirals had their way, today the eastern front of a rapidly expanding NATO would have been nothing more than a smoldering and radioactive nuclear wasteland, all courtesy of Uncle Sam’s nuclear arsenal.

Israeli occupation planes have sprayed crop-killing chemicals on farmlands across besieged Gaza Strip, killing off crops in the coastal enclave.

It is the third time the Israeli occupation planes have targeted Gaza farms, killing massive amounts of crops,

An estimated 371 acres of farming land in central Gaza and 50 acres of land in eastern Khan Younis have been affected.

Farmers in Johr al-Deek, south of Gaza city, Al-Qarara town, north of Khan Yunis, and Wadi Al-Salqa agricultural town, south of Deir al-Balah, complained of the effects of the Israeli unknown chemicals on their crops.

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ,  original source (Russian, Vz.ru)

The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution demanding Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources under Israeli occupation. 

The draft solution, “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources,” was adopted with 164 votes in favor and five against.

Member states that voted against the measure included Canada, Federated States of Micronesia, Israel, Marshall Islands, and the United States. Ten other states abstained from the vote. 

For decades, and again this year, the United States votes “no” on most United Nations General Assembly resolutions supporting meaningful disarmament and economic justice. 

In fact, it has a consistent record of votes contradicting its professed rhetoric of concern for peace and human rights, as the UN General Assembly votes to adopt resolutions crafted to address the urgent need for disarmament, and for a more equitable global economic architecture. 

US Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has supported the adoption of many of these resolutions, and his voice, along with the majority of the member states of the developing world has gone unheeded. 

The huge and growing economic inequality both within and among nations is contributing to global destabilization, deadly conflicts, terrorism, the refugee crisis, now threatening to disrupt the core of Europe itself, and an escalation of barbaric violence which threatens to turn the clock of civilization back to the stone age. 

Nevertheless, the US continues to vote in opposition to many, if not most of the resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, where the developing world holds a majority of votes, and the US vote does not hold veto power,  as it does in the Security Council, and cannot therefore prevent the adoption of these resolutions.   

The resolutions, however, have no enforcement power, as do Security Council resolutions.  The US “no” vote is, however, a barometer of how and where it will use its influence to obstruct or prevent actual implementation of these resolutions in any meaningful way, in those venues where the US does have decisive influence.  While paying lip-service to “democracy,” “human rights,” etc., the US “no” vote in these numerous developing world sponsored resolutions betrays its actual contempt for these values in any meaningful sense.

An examination of this year’s voting patterns in the UN General Assembly’s First, Second and Third Committees illustrates this pattern, which is a greater indicator of the causes of the stalemate or paralysis at the United Nations than has been the inaction at the UN Security Council, so deplored by the US-NATO faction.

For almost 10 years, China and the Russian Federation have co-sponsored a treaty in the First Committee on Disarmament, on the “Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space.”  The US has consistently opposed this treaty, and on November 3, 2015, in the First Committee 70^th session Plenary Meeting, Resolution A/C.1/70/L.47 on “No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space,” was adopted by a majority vote of 122 member states, including China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran, Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Angola, Kenya, Nigeria and a majority of other member states.  China’s vote is consistent with its declaration that it will not be the first to initiate a nuclear attack.  The US voted “no” on this resolution, along with only 3 other states, including Ukraine and Israel, which is alarming, since it indicates that the US reserves for itself the “right” to place its weapons in outer space, despite the fact that most other nuclear states, including India, Pakistan, China, the DPRK and The Russian Federation have eschewed the “right” to place weapons in outer space.

The related resolution A/C.1/70/L.3 entitled:  “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space” has an equally interesting recorded vote, with 173 UN member states voting “yes,” including all states which supported the resolution on “No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space,” and the US, Israel and Palau abstained.  It seems probable that, although most nuclear weapon states pledged not to be the first to place weapons in outer space, and the US reserved to itself the “right” to be the first to place weapons in outer space, the US is hedging its bets, and in the event that another state first places weapons in outer space, the US reserves to itself the “right” to engage in an arms race in outer space.

The very idea of placement of weapons in outer space, or an arms race in outer space, is insane, yet this is consistent with the US military doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which asserts the US right to “Control of land, sea, air and outer space.”

On November 5^th, the First Committee adopted Resolution A/C.1/70/L.18 on “Implementation of the Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace.”  The resolution was adopted by a majority of 116 member states, and opposed by only four countries, the US, UK, France and Tuvalu.  As usual, the EU abstained, voting as a bloc.  This voting pattern reflecting diametrically opposed interests was similarly repeated throughout the entire spectrum of UN General Assembly resolutions from disarmament to development.

On November 23, at the Third Committee Plenary, Resolution A/C.3/70/L.30 “Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order” was adopted by a majority vote of 121.  The US which espouses the rhetoric of “democracy” more than any other state, voted “no.”  The European Union, voting as a bloc, also voted “no” in opposition to most countries of the developing world, including China, the Russian Federation, the DPRK, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Argentina, etc.

On November 24, the Third Committee adopted Resolution A/C.3/70/L.37/Rev.1 on “The Right to Development.”  The resolution was adopted by a majority vote of 136.  Only 4 nations voted “no,” including the USA, the UK, Canada and Israel.

On November 23, the Third Committee Plenary adopted Resolution A/C.3/70/L.58 on the “Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self Determination.”  The resolution  was adopted by a majority vote of 121.  The US, Ukraine and most of the Europeans voted “no,” which is an appalling revelation of their willingness to adopt unscrupulous measures to suit their perceived “interests,” or the interests of their ruling “elites.”

This is merely a sampling of the voting record of the US and often the EU, which reveals their readiness to violate the economic, social, civil and political rights of the “developing world,” which comprises the majority of member states belonging to the United Nations.  Scrutiny of the majority of resolutions adopted by the General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament, Second Committee on Economics, Third Committee on Human Rights reveals the same pattern of the US and EU consistently voting in opposition to the will and the interests of the developing world, many of whose states are former colonies of the EU states, and are currently in a form of “debt bondage” to the US and the West, trapped by IMF demands for “structural adjustment,” “conditionalities,” and other onerous and exploitative arrangements.

These UN General Assembly Resolutions without enforcement mechanisms merely express the gross contradiction between the “interests” of the West’s “1%” and the needs of the huge populace of the other “99%” of humanity.  As the income inequality increases, as described by French economist Thomas Piketty and US Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, these voting patterns will most probably continue unchanged, absent a global insurrection to eliminate the gross injustice in the distribution of power and resources that is currently entrenched, globally, and which the huge disparities in these votes reflects.

Carla Stea is Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York 

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. president George H. W. Bush through his secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation on German reunification, the Cold War era NATO alliance would not expand “one inch” eastwards towards Russia. Baker told Gorbachev: “Look, if you remove your [300,000] troops [from east Germany] and allow unification of Germany in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch to the east.”

In the following year, the USSR officially dissolved itself. Its own defensive military alliance (commonly known as the Warsaw Pact) had already shut down. The Cold War was over.

So why hasn’t NATO also dissolved, but instead expanded relentlessly, surrounding European Russia? Why isn’t this a central question for discussion and debate in this country?

NATO: A Cold War Anti-Russian Alliance 

Some challenge the claim that Bush’s pledge was ever given, although Baker repeated it publicly in Russia. Or they argue that it was never put in writing, hence legally inconsequential. Or they argue that any promise made to the leadership of the Soviet Union, which went out of existence in 1991, is inapplicable to subsequent U.S.-Russian relations. But it’s clear that the U.S. has, to the consternation of the Russian leadership, sustained a posture of confrontation with its Cold War foe principally taking the form of NATO expansion. This expansion hardly receives comment in the U.S. mass media, which treats the entry of a new nation into NATO much as it does the admission of a new state into the UN—as though this was altogether natural and unproblematic.

But recall the basic history. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April 4, 1949, initially consisting of the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Portugal, as a military alliance against the Soviet Union, and principally the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

It was formed just four years after the Soviets stormed Berlin, defeating the Nazis. (As you know, Germany invaded Russia six months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor;  the U.S. and USSR were World War II allies versus the fascists; the key victories in the European war—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk—were Soviet victories over the Nazis; that U.S. soldiers only crossed the Rhine on March 22 as the Red Army was closing in on Berlin, taking the city between April 16 and May 2 at a cost of some 80,000 Soviet dead. If you don’t know these things, you’ve been denied a proper education.)

In the four-year interim between Hitler’s suicide and the formation of NATO, the two great victors of the war had divided Europe into spheres of influence. The neighboring Soviet Union had contributed disproportionately to the fascist defeat: over eight million military and over 12 million civilians dead, as compared to the far-off U.S., with losses of around 186,000 dead in the European theater and 106,000 in the Pacific.

It might seem strange that the lesser hero in this instance (in this epochal conflict against fascism) gets all the goodies in the battle’s aftermath: the U.S. created a bloc including Britain, France, Italy, most of Germany, the Low Countries, Portugal, and most of Scandinavia, while the Soviets asserted hegemony—or tried to—over their generally less affluent client states. But the Soviets were not in any case interested primarily in drawing the richest nations into their fold; were that the case, they would not have withdrawn their troops from Austria in 1955.

Rather Russia, which had historically been invaded many times from the west—from Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, France, and Germany multiple times—wanted preeminently to secure its western border. To insure the establishment of friendly regimes, it organized elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere. (These had approximately as much legitimacy as elections held under U.S. occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan in later years, or at any point in Latin America). They brought the Eastern European “people’s republics” into existence.

The U.S. and British grumbled about the geopolitical advances of their wartime ally. In March 1946 former British Prime Minister Churchill while visiting the U.S. alluded to an “iron curtain” falling across Europe. (Perhaps he was unwittingly using the expression that Josef Goebbels had used just thirteen months earlier. The German propaganda minister had told a newspaper that “if the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets…would occupy all of Europe…An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory…”) Very scary.

But the U.S. was working hard at the time to consolidate its own bloc in Europe. In May 1947 the U.S. CIA forced the Italian and French governments to purge Communist members of cabinets formed after electoral successes the previous year. (The U.S. had enormous clout, bought through the $ 13 billion Marshall Plan begun in April 1947, designed to revive European capitalism and diminish the Marxist appeal.)

The CIA station chief in Rome later boasted that “without the CIA,” which funded a Red Scare campaign and fomented violent, even fatal clashes at events, “the Communist Party would surely have won the [Italian] elections in 1948.” (Anyone who thinks Soviets rigged elections while the U.S. facilitated fair ones as a matter of principle is hopelessly naïve.)

Meanwhile—before the establishment of NATO in April 1949—the U.S. and Britain had been fighting a war in Greece since 1946 on behalf of the monarchists against the communist-led forces that had been the backbone of the anti-fascist movement during the World War II. The Communists had widespread support and may well have won the civil war if the Soviets had only supported them. But observing the understanding about spheres of influence agreed to at Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin refused appeals for Soviet aid from the Greek (and Yugoslav) Communists. The Greek partisans surrendered in Oct. 1949, six months after the formation of NATO. (But NATO was in fact not deployed in this military intervention in Greece, seen as the first Cold War U.S. military operation under the broadly anticommunist “Truman Doctrine.”)

Just a month after NATO was formed, the pro-U.S. leaders in west Germany unilaterally announced the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. (The pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic was declared only six months later. As in Korea, the Soviets promoted reunification of occupied sectors. But the U.S. was intent on establishing client states, and dividing nations if necessary to stem Soviet inroads. This was also the case with Vietnam.)

Four months after the creation of NATO the Soviets conducted their first successful nuclear test. The Cold War was underway in earnest.

NATO was thus formed to aggressively confront the USSR and exploit fears of a supposed threat of a westward Soviet strike (to impose the Soviet social system on unwilling peoples). That threat never materialized, of course. The Soviets cordoned off East Berlin from the west by the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent embarrassing mass flight.  But they never invaded West Germany, or provoked any clash with a NATO nation throughout the Cold War. (Indeed, in light of the carnage visited on Europe since 1989, from civil wars in the Balkans and Caucasus to terrorist bombings in London, Madrid and Paris to the neo-fascist-led putsch in Ukraine last year, the Cold War appears in retrospect as a long period of relative peace and prosperity on the continent.)

Comparing U.S. and Russian/Soviet Aggression during the Cold War

NATO expanded in 1952,  enlisting the now-pacified Greece and its historical rival, Turkey. In 1955 it brought the Federal Republic of Germany into the fold. Only then—in May 1956, seven years after the formation of NATO—did the Soviets establish, in response, their own defensive military alliance. The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance (Warsaw Pact) included a mere eight nations (to NATO’s 15): the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Albania.

Warsaw Pact forces were deployed only once during the Cold War, to crush the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. (They were not used during the suppression of the “Hungarian Revolution” of 1956, occurring five months after the founding of the alliance. That operation was performed by Soviet troops and loyalist Hungarian forces.) The Czechoslovakian intervention occasioned Albania’s withdrawal from the pact, while Romania protested it and refused to contribute troops. Thus practically speaking, the Warsaw Pact was down to six members to NATO’s 15. The western alliance expanded to 16 when Spain joined in 1982.

Between 1945 and 1991 (when the Warsaw Pact and the USSR  both dissolved themselves), the U.S. had engaged in three major wars (in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf); invaded Grenada and Panama; and intervened militarily in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries.

During that same period, the Soviets invaded eastern European nations twice (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), basically to maintain the status quo. Elsewhere, there was a brief border conflict with China in 1969 that killed around 150 soldiers on both sides. And the Soviets of course invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to shore up the secular regime faced with Islamist opposition. That’s about it. Actually, if you compare it to the U.S. record, a pretty paltry record of aggression for a superpower.

That Islamist opposition in Afghanistan, as we know, morphed into the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the group founded in Iraq by one-time bin Laden rival Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that’s now called ISIL or the Islamic State. Referred to—almost affectionately—by the U.S. press in the 1980s as the “Mujahadeen” (“those engaged in jihad”), these religious militants were lionized at the time as anti-communist holy warriors by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Brzezinski told the president six months before the Soviets sent in troops that by backing the jihadis the U.S. could “induce a Soviet military intervention.” The U.S., he declared, had “the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War” and could now “bleed” the Soviets as they had bled the U.S. in Vietnam.

(Linger for a moment on the morality here. The Soviets had helped the Vietnamese fight an unpopular, U.S.-backed regime and confront the horrors of the U.S. assault on their country. Now—to get back, as Brzezinski out it—the U.S. could help extreme Islamists whose minds are in the Middle Ages to “induce” Soviet intervention, so as to kill conscript Soviet boys and prevent the advent of modernity.)

The anti-Soviet jihadis were welcomed to the White House by President Ronald Reagan during a visit in 1985. Reagan, perhaps already showing the signs of Alzheimer’s disease, trumpeted them as “the moral equivaent of America’s founding fathers.” This is when the great bulk of U.S. (CIA) aid to the Mujahadeen was going into the coffers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious warlord now aligned with the Taliban. One of many former U.S. assets (Saddam Hussein included) who had a falling-out with the boss, he was the target of at least one failed CIA drone strike in 2002.

Thus the Soviets’ one and only protracted military conflict during the Cold War, lasting from December 1979 to February 1989 and costing some 14,000 Soviet lives, was a conflict with what U.S. pundits have taken to calling “Islamist terrorism.”

The Soviets were surely not facing anticommunists pining for “freedom” as this might be conceptualized in some modern ideology. The enemy included tribal leaders and clerics who objected to any changes in the status of girls and women, in particular their dress, and submission to patriarchal authority in such matters as marriage.

The would-be Soviet-backed revolutionaries faced religious fanatics ignorant about women’s medical needs, hostile to the very idea of public clinics, and opposed to women’s education, (In fact the Soviets were able to raise the literacy rate for women during the 1980s—a feat not matched by the new occupiers since 2001—but this was mainly due to the fact that they maintained control over Kabul, where women could not only get schooling but walk around without a headscarf.)

Those days ended when the Soviet-installed regime of Mohammad Najibullah was toppled by Northern Alliance forces in April 1992.  Things only became worse. Civil war between the Pastun Hekmatyar and his Tajik rivals immediately broke out and Hekmatyar’s forces brutally bombarded the capital—something that hadn’t happened during the worst days of the Soviet period.

As civil war deepened, the Taliban emerged, presenting itself as a morally upright, Sharia-based leadership. Acquiring a large social base, it took Kabul in September 1996. Among its first acts was to seize Najibullah, who had taken refuge in the UN compound in the city three years earlier, castrate him, and hang him publicly, denying him a proper Muslim burial.

Just as the neocons were crowing about the triumph of capitalism over communism, and the supposed “end of history,” the Frankenstein’s monster of Islamism reared up its ugly head. There were no tears shed in western capitals for Najibullah. But the Taliban were viewed with concern and distaste and the UN seat remained with the former Northern Alliance regime controlling just 10% of the country.

How the Cold War Encouraged “Radical Islam”

Surely the U.S.—which had packed up and left after the Soviet withdrawl, leaving the Pakistanis with a massive refugee problem and Afghanistan in a state of chaos—had bled the Soviets, and anyone daring to ally with them. And surely this experience contributed to the realization of Brzezinski’s fondest wish: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it also produced Islamist terrorism, big time, while the U.S.—having once organized the recruitment and training of legions of jihadis from throughout the Muslim world to bleed the Soviets—was and is now obliged to deal with blow-back, and in its responses invariably invites more terror.

Is it not obvious that U.S. military actions against its various “terrorist” targets in the “Greater” Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya have greatly swelled the ranks of al-Qaeda branches as well as ISIL?

And does not the course of events in Afghanistan—where the Kabul government remains paralyzed and inept, warlords govern the provincial cities, the Supreme Court sentences people to death for religious offenses, much of the countryside has been conceded to the Talibs and the militants are making inroads in the north—convince you that the U.S. should not have thrown in its lot with the jihadis versus the Soviet-backed secular forces thirty-five years ago?

In a 1998 interview by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn Brzezinski was asked if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future [Islamist] terrorists.”

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

In other words, winning the contest with Russia—bleeding it to collapse—was more important than any risk of promoting militant Islamic fundamentalism. It is apparent that that mentality lingers, when, even in the post-9/11 world, some State Department officials would rather see Damascus fall to ISIL than be defended by Russians in support of a secular regime.

NATO to the Rescue in the Post-Cold War World

Since the fall of the USSR, and the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, what has NATO been up to? First of all, it moved to fill a power vacuum in the Balkans. Yugoslavia was falling apart. It had been neutral throughout the Cold War, a member of neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. As governments fell throughout Eastern Europe, secessionist movements in the multiethnic republic produced widespread conflict. U.S. Secretary of State  Baker worried that the breakup of Yugoslavia’s breakup would produce regional instability and opposed the independence of Slovenia.

But the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl—flushed with pride at Germany’s reunification and intent on playing a more powerful role in the world—pressed for Yugoslavia’s dismantling. (There was a deep German historical interest in this country. Nazi Germany had occupied Slovenia from 1941 to 1945, establishing a 21,000-strong Slovene Home Guard and planting businesses. Germany is now by far Slovenia’s number one trading partner.) Kohl’s line won out.

Yugoslavia, which had been a model of interethnic harmony, became torn by ethnic strife in the 1990s. In Croatia, Croatians fought ethnic Serbs backed by the Yugoslav People’s Army; in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs quarreled over how to divide the land. In Serbia itself, the withdrawal of autonomy of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina produced outrage among ethnic Albanians. In 1995 images of emaciated Bosniak men and boys in Serb-constructed prison camps were widely publicized in the world media as Bill Clinton resolved not to let Rwanda (read: genocide!) happen again. Not on his watch. America would save the day.

Or rather: NATO would save the day! Far from being less relevant after the Cold War, NATO, Clinton claimed, was the onlyinternational force capable of handling this kind of challenge. And thus NATO bombed, and bombed—for the first time ever, in real war—until the Bosnian Serbs pleaded for mercy. The present configuration of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a dysfunctional federation including a Serbian mini-republic, was dictated by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his deputy Richard Holbrooke at the meeting in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995.

Russia, the traditional ally of the Serbs, was obliged to watch passively as the U.S. and NATO remapped the former Yugoslavia. Russia was itself in the 1990s, under the drunken buffoon Boris Yeltsin, a total mess. The economy was nose-diving; despair prevailed; male longevity had plummeted.  The new polity was anything but stable. During the “Constitutional Crisis” of September-October 1993, the president had even ordered the army to bombard the parliament building to force the legislators to heed his decree to disband. In the grip of corrupt oligarchs and Wild West capitalism, Russians were disillusioned and demoralized.

Then came further insults from the west. During Yeltsin’s last year, in March 1999, the U.S. welcomed three more nations into: Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, and Poland. These had been the most powerful Warsaw Pact countries aside from the USSR and East Germany. This was the first expansion of NATO since 1982 (when Spain had joined) and understandably upset the Kremlin. What possible reason is there to expand NATO now? the Russians asked, only to be assured that NATO was not against anybody.

The Senate had voted to extend membership to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1998. At that time, George Kennan—the famous U.S. diplomat who’d developed the cold war strategy of containment of the Soviet Union—was asked to comment.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” averred the 94-year-old Kennan. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever… It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expansion advocates] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are–but this is just wrong.” 

NATO Versus Serbia

In that same month of March 1999, NATO (including its three new members) began bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade, the first time since World War II that a European capital was subjected to bombardment. The official reason was that Serbian state forces had been abusing the Albanians of Kosovo province; diplomacy had failed; and NATO intervention was needed to put things right. This rationale was accompanied by grossly exaggerated reports of Serbian security forces’ killings of Kosovars, supposedly amounting to “genocide.”

This was largely nonsense. The U.S. had demanded at the conference in Rambouillet, France, that Serbia withdraw its forces from Kosovo and restore autonomy to the province. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic had agreed. But the U.S. also demanded that Belgrade accept NATO forces throughout the entire territory of Yugoslavia—something no leader of a sovereign state could accept. Belgrade refused, backed by Russia.

A “senior State Department official” (likely U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) boasted to reporters that at Rambouillet “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. . . . The Serbs needed a little bombing to see reason.”Henry Kissinger (no peacenik) told the press in June: “The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, and excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.”

The U.S. had obtained UN approval for the NATO strikes on Bosnia-Herzegovina four years before. But it did not seek it this time, or try to organize a UN force to address the Kosovo problem. In effect, it insisted that NATO be recognized as the representative of “the international community.”

It was outrageous. Still, U.S. public opinion was largely persuaded that the Serbs had failed to negotiate peace in good faith and so deserved the bombing cheered on by the press, in particular CNN’s “senior international correspondent,” Christiane Amanpour, a  State Department insider who kept telling her viewers, “Milosevic continues to thumb his nose at the international community”—because he’d refused a bullying NATO ultimatum that even Kissinger identified as a provocation!

After the mass slaughter of Kosovars became a reality (as NATO bombs began to fall on Kosovo), and after two and a half months of bombing focused on Belgrade, a Russian-brokered deal ended the fighting. Belgrade was able to avoid the NATO occupation that it had earlier refused. (In other words, NATO had achieved nothing that the Serbs hadn’t already conceded in Rambouillet!)

As the ceasefire went into effect on June 21, a column of about 30 armored vehicles carrying 250 Russian troops moved from peacekeeping duties in Bosnia to establish control over Kosovo’s Pristina Airport. (Just a little reminder that Russia, too, had a role to play in the region.)

This took U.S. NATO commander Wesley Clark by surprise. He ordered that British and French paratroopers be flown in to seize the airport but the British General Sir Mike Jackson wisely balked. “I’m not going to have my soldiers start World War III,” he declared.

I think it likely this dramatic last minute gesture at the airport was urged by the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin, a Yeltsin advisor soon to be appointed vice-president and then Yeltsin’s successor beginning in December 1999. Putin was to prove a much more strident foe of NATO expansion than his embarrassing predecessor.

Cooperation Meets with Provocation

Still, recall how two years later—after 9/11, 2001, when the U.S. invoking the NATO charter called upon its NATO allies to engage in war in Afghanistan—Putin offered to allow the alliance to transport war material to Afghanistan through Russian territory. (In 2012 Foreign Minister Lavrov offered NATO the use of a base in Ulyanovsk to transport equipment out of Afghanistan.) This Afghan invasion was only the third actual deployment of NATO forces in war, after Bosnia and Serbia, and Moscow accepted it matter-of-factly. It even muted its concerns when the U.S. established military bases in the former Soviet Central Republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia.

But in 2004, NATO expanded again—to include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which had been part of the USSR itself and which border Russia. At the same time Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia were admitted, along with Slovakia, which had become separate from the Czech Republic. Russians again asked, “Why?”

In 2007 the U.S. began negotiating with the Poles to install a NATO missile defense complex in Poland, with a radar system in the Czech Republic. Supposedly this was to shoot down any Iranian missiles directed towards Europe in the future!  But Moscow was furious, accusing the U.S. of wanting to launch another arms race. Due largely to anti-militarist sentiment among the Poles and Czechs, these plans were shelved in 2009. But they could be revived at any time.

In 2008, then, the U.S. recognized its dependency Kosovo, now hosting the largest U.S. Army base (Camp Bondsteel) outside the U.S., as an independent country. Although the U.S. had insisted up to this point that it recognized Kosovo as a province of Serbia (and perhaps even understood its profound significance as the heartland of Serbian Orthodoxy), it now (through Condoleezza Rice) proclaimed Kosovo a “sui generis” (one of a kind) phenomenon. So forget about international law; it just doesn’t apply.

In this same year of 2008, NATO announced boldly that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO.” ThereuponGeorgia’s comical President Mikheil Saakasvili bombarded Tskhinvali, capital of the self-declared Republic of South Ossetia that had resisted integration into the current Republic of Georgia since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this instance Russia defended South Ossetia, invading Georgia. It then recognized the independence, both of South Ossetia and of the Republic of Abkhazia, from Georgia. (This may be seen as a tit-for-tat response to the U.S.’s decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence from Serbia six months earlier.)

It was a six-day war, resulting in about 280 military fatalities (including 100 on the South Ossetian-Russian side) and about 400 civilian deaths. And there has been no Russian war since. Crimea was not “invaded” last year but simply seized by Russian forces in place, with general popular support. And there’s little evidence that the regular Russian military is confronting Ukrainian state forces; ethnic Russians are doing so, receiving no doubt support from cousins across the historically changeable border. But the charge of a “Russian invasion of Ukraine” is a State Department talking point—propaganda automatically parroted by the official press sock-puppet pundits, not a contemporary reality.

Georgia’s Saakasvili perhaps expected the U.S. to have his back as he provoked Moscow in August 2008. But while he received firm support from Sen. John McCain, who declared “We are all Georgians now,” he received little help from the George W. Bush State Department wary of provoking World War III. Georgia was not yet a NATO member able to cite the NATO charter’s mutual defense clause

Saakasvili left office in 2010 and is now under indictment by the Georgian courts for abuses in office. After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy in 2014, he acquired Ukrainian citizenship—losing his Georgian citizenship as a result—and (as one of many examples of how crazy the current Kiev leadership including Yatsenyev and Poroshenko can be) was appointed governor of Odessa last May!

Given the debacle of 2008, countries such as Germany are unlikely to accept Georgian admission any time soon. They do not see much benefit in provoking Russia by endlessly expanding the Cold War “defensive” alliance. Still, Croatia and Albania were added to NATO in 2009, in the first year of the Obama administration—just in time to participate in NATO’s fourth war, against Libya.

Again there was no reason for a war. Colonel Gadhafy had been downright cordial towards western regimes since 2003, and closely cooperated with the CIA against Islamist terrorism. But when the “Arab Spring” swept the region in 2011, some western leaders (headed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, but including the always hawkish Hillary Clinton) convinced themselves that Gadhafy’s fall was imminent, and so it would be best to assist the opposition in deposing him and thus get into the good graces of any successors.

The UN Security Council approved a resolution to establish a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians from Gadhafy’s supposedly genocidal troops. But what NATO unleashed was something quite different: a war on Gadhafy, which led to his brutal murder and to the horrible chaos that has reigned since in Libya, now a reliable base for al-Qaeda and ISIL. Russia and China both protested, as the war was still underway, that NATO had distorted the meaning of the UN resolution. It’s unlikely that the two Security Council permanent members will be fooled again into such cooperation.

We can therefore add the failed state of Libya to the dysfunctional states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, to our list of NATO achievements since 1991. To sum up: Since the collapse of the USSR,  the U.S. and some allies (usually in their capacity as NATO allies) have waged war on Bosnian Serbs, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, while striking targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere with impunity. Russia has gone to war precisely once: for eight days in August 2008, against Georgia.

And yet every pundit on mainstream TV news tells you with a straight face that Putin’s the one who “invades countries.”

What Is the Point of NATO Expansion?

So while NATO has expanded in membership, it has showing a growing proclivity to go to war, from Central Asia to North Africa. One must wonder, what is the point?

The putative point in 1949 was the defense of “Western Europe” against some posited Soviet invasion. That rationale is still used; when NATO supporters today speak in favor of the inclusion of Lithuania, for example, they may state that, if Lithuania had remained outside the alliance—the Russians would surely have invaded by now on the pretext of defending ethnic Russians’ rights, etc.

There is in fact precious little evidence for Russian ambitions, or Putin’s own ambitions, to recreate the tsarist empire or Soviet Union.  (Putin complained just a few days ago, “We don’t want the USSR back but no one believes us.” He’s also opined that people who feel no nostalgia for the Soviet Union—as most citizens of the former USSR young enough to remember it say they do—have no heart, while those who want to restore it have no brains.)

As NATO expanded inexorably between 1999 and 2009, Russia responded not with threats but with calm indignation.

Putin’s remarks about the dissolution of the Soviet Union being a “geopolitical tragedy,” and his occasional words addressing the language and other rights of Russians in former SSRs, do not constitute militarist threats. As always the neocons cherry-pick a phrase here and there as they try to depict Putin as (yet) “another Hitler.” In fact the Russians have, relatively speaking, been voices of reason in recent years, Alarmed at the consequences of U.S. actions in the Middle East, they have sought to restrain U.S. imperialism while challenging Islamist terrorism.

In August 2013 Obama threatened to attack Syria, ostensibly to punish the regime for using chemical weapons against its people. (The original accusation has been discredited by Seymour Hersh among others.) Deft intervention by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the refusal of the British House of Commons to support an attack (insuring it would not, like the Iraq War, win general NATO endorsement), and domestic opposition all helped avert another U.S. war in the Middle East.

But it’s as though hawks in the State Department, resentful at Russia’s success in protecting its Syrian ally from Gadhafy’s fate, and miffed at its continued ability to maintain air and naval facilities on the Syrian coast, were redoubling their efforts to provoke Russia. How better to do this than by interfering in Ukraine, which had not only been part of the Soviet Union but part of the Russian state from 1654 and indeed was the core of the original Kievan Rus in the tenth century?

NATO had been courting Ukraine since 1994—five years before the alliance expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Kiev signed the NATO Membership Action Plan in 2008 when Viktor Yushchenko was president, but this was placed on hold when Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010. Enjoying the solid support of the Russian-speaking east, Yanukovich won what international observers called a free and fair election.

Yanukovich did not want Ukraine to join NATO: he wanted a neutral Ukraine maintaining the traditional close relationship between the Ukraine and Russia. This infuriated Victoria Nuland, the head of the Eurasia desk at the State Department, who has made it her life’s project to pull Ukraine into NATO. This would be NATO’s ultimate prize in eastern Europe: a country of 44 million well-educated people, the size of France, strategically located on the Black Sea historically dominated by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. An ethnically divided country, with a generally pro-Russian and Russian-speaking east, and a more western-oriented Ukrainian-speaking west with an unusually vigorous and fiercely anti-Russian neofascist movement—just there waiting to be used.

Nuland, a former Cheney aide whose neocon worldview drew Hillary Clinton’s favorable attention, resulting in her promotion, is the wife of neocon pundit and Iraq War cheerleader Robert Kagan. (Kagan was a founding member of the notorious Project for a New American Century “think tank”.)  The couple represents two wings of incessant neocon plotting: those who work to destroy Russia, and those who work to destroy the Middle East, consciously using lies to confuse the masses about their real goals.

At the National Press Club in December 2013, Nuland boasted that the U.S. (through such “NGOs” as the National Endowment for Democracy) had spent $ 5 billion in Ukraine in order to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations.”  This deliberately vague formulation is supposed to refer to U.S. support for Kiev’s admission into the European Union. The case the U.S. built against Yanukovich was not that he rejected NATO membership; that is never mentioned at all. She built the case on Yanukovich’s supposed betrayal of his people’s pro-EU aspirations in having first initialed, and then rejected, an association agreement with the trading bloc, fearing it would mean a Greek-style austerity regime imposed on the country from without.

From November 2013 crowds gathered in Kiev’s Maidan to protest (among other things) Yanukovich’s change of heart about EU membership. The U.S. State Department embraced their cause. One might ask why, when the EU constitutes a competing trading bloc, the U.S. should be so interested in promoting any country’s membership in it. What difference does it make to you and me whether Ukraine has closer economic ties to Russia than to the EU?

The dirty little secret here is that the U.S. goal has merely been to use the cause of “joining Europe” to draw Ukraine into NATO, which could be depicted as the next natural step in Ukraine’s geopolitical realignment.

Building on popular contempt for Yanukovich for his corruption, but also working with politicians known to favor NATO admission and the expulsion of Russian naval forces from the Crimean base they’ve had since the 1780s, and also including neo-fascist forces who hate Russia but also loath the EU, Nuland and her team including the ubiquitous John McCain popped up at the Maidan passing out cookies and encouraging the crowd to bring down the president.

It worked, of course. On Feb. 22, within a day of signing a European-mediated agreement for government reforms and new election, and thinking the situation defused, Yanukovich was forced to flee for his life. The neofascist forces of Svoboda and the Right Sector served as storm troops toppling the regime. Nuland’s Machiavellian maneuverings had triumphed; a neocon Jew had cleverly deployed open anti-Semites to bring down a regime and plant a pro-NATO one in its place.

It seemed as though, after 14 years of expansion, NATO might soon be able to welcome a huge new member into its ranks, complete the encirclement of Russia and, booting out the Russian fleet, turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake.

Alas for the neocons and “liberal interventionists”—the new regime of Nuland’s chosen Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his Svoboda Party allies immediately alienated the eastern Russian-speaking population, which remains up in arms making the country ungovernable, even as its economy collapses; and the notion of expelling the Russians from Sevastopol has become unimaginable.

But what do NATO planners want? Where is all the expansion and reckless provocation heading?

Russia:  an “Existential Threat”?

First of all, the NATO advocates, however often they repeat that “We’re not against Russia, this isn’t about Russia,” do indeed posit an enduring Russian threat. Thus General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, the most senior British officer in NATO, stated last February that Russia poses “an obvious existential threat to our whole being.” Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command told the Aspen Security Forum in July that “Russia could pose an existential threat to the United States.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) warned Obama to sign a military appropriations bill because Russia poses “an existential threat” to the U.S.  Philanthropist George Soros (who likes to finance “color revolutions”) wrote in the New York review of Books in October that “Europe is facing a challenge from Russia to its very existence.”

These are wild, stupid words coming from highly placed figures. Isn’t it obvious that Russia is the one being surrounded, pressured and threatened? That its military budget is a fraction of the U.S.’s, its global military presence miniscule in relation to the U.S. footprint?

But anyone watching the U.S. presidential candidates’ debates—and who can perceive the prevalence of paranoia about Russia, the unthinking acceptance of the “Putin as Hitler” theme, and the obligatory expression of determination to make America more “strong”—can understand why the expansion of NATO is so horribly dangerous.

People who do not think rationally or whose minds are twisted by arrogance can look at the maps of NATO expansion and think proudly, “This is how it should be! Why would anyone question the need for nations to protect themselves by allying with the United States? It’s alliances like NATO that preserve peace and stability in the world.”

(Some are able to believe that, perhaps, but the fact is the world has become less peaceful and far less stable than it was during the Cold War when the two superpowers checked one another’s moves. Thereafter the U.S. emerged as what a French diplomat has called an “hyper-puissance” or hyper-power intervening with impunity in multiple countries and producing new, often ugly forms of resistance.)

People looking at the NATO map of Europe can mentally color in Montenegro too. A tiny republic on the Adriatic with under 650,000 people, it was formally invited by NATO to submit its membership application on December 2. What other countries have yet to sign?

As mentioned, in 2008 NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would join. But their cases actually seem to be on hold. Belarus, wedged between Poland and Russia, has been under the self-styled “authoritarian” President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994. The regime, considered close to Moscow, was targeted by an abortive U.S.-funded “color revolution” in March 2006. The U.S. favored Mikhail Marynich, a former ambassador to Latvia and proponent of NATO membership. (He participated in a closed-door NATO “War and Peace” conference in Riga in November 2006.)

Then there is Moldova, the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic located between Rumania and Ukraine. To its east is the breakaway republic of

Transnitria, where ethnic Moldovans are a minority and Russians and Ukrainians make up almost 60% of the population. It is a “frozen conflict” zone. The neocon dream is to ultimately change all their regimes and draw them all into the warm embrace of NATO.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them

One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

in the Land or Mordor where the shadows lie

What do you do after you complete the western encirclement of Russia? Why, you destabilize the country itself, hoping to slice it up! Russia remains a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation. There are tensions and secessionist movements to exploit in the Caucasus particularly, but also on the Karelian Peninsula and in Siberia.

If Russia is an existential threat, its own existence is a threat, right? So why not cut it up?

Doesn’t the logic of NATO expansion require an enemy, and doesn’t America lead the world in defeating enemies?

Or if not, isn’t NATO itself the real threat?  (After all, didn’t it, in its last major project, totally wreck the modern state of Libya, and as a result destabilize Mali?)

Shouldn’t we welcome tensions within NATO, and failures of member states to devote the required 2% of GDP to military expenses? Shouldn’t we welcome resistance to further expansion, complaints about U.S. arm-twisting, and calls for cooperation with Russia rather than confrontation and destruction?

One baby out of eight is being born in a war zone this Christmas.  Almost all of these wars were spawned by the ‘west’, lead by the Land of the Free.  Many mites come in mothers’ arms by inflatable boat to Greece.  Pity dear babies, specks in the  ‘migrant crisis’ unless Angela is your guardian angel.

As the war for the residues of glorious empire was drawing to a close amid the mud, blood, brains and limbs, the scheming slid nicely along.  Cordite Weizmann and fractional-reserve banker Rothschild were invited to produce some words.  These totalled 126 on a half A4 piece, the Balfour declaration of the 2nd of November 1917.  The only Jew in the cabinet, Edwin Montague opposed it.  His elegant, prescient and humane letter says it all. (1) 

The fuse was set and intent recorded.  Balfour stated in private and perfidious correspondence that

‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country …. The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’. 

The ‘Middle East’ was to be set alight.

And after another war to end wars, and the killing of over 700 British soldiers enforcing the mandate rules, came the Palestinian nakba, the ethnic cleansing by armed force and terror of 800, 000 Palestinians, four fifths of their population.

How many little mites died in that cold spring?  The slow, slow, quick, quick slow of genocide continues to this second.  (‘Genocide’ was coined by Lemkin, a Polish Jew, before WW2.)  Over fifteen babies have been born to Palestinian mothers, in the open at checkpoints. Read of Mohammad Khalil.  (2)

The dominance of Zion excluded peace.  With escalating state ‘terrorism’ came the ‘terrorism’ of the trodden, ‘the boot on the face forever’ of George Orwell.  In 1982,  Oded Yinon prepared a paper for Mossad one can presume.  The subject was the decimation of all Arab states and entities into small ones.  The language was ruthless.  Of course, it took no account of how many babies would be decimated too. (3)  Then came Project of the New American Century signed by over four dozen Zionist Jews, with the ‘Clean Break’ to follow and the black Perle in the vanguard.  Iraq was first for the final solution.

The skeletons of over 500,000 children lie in Iraqi soil due to the draconian sanctions imposed by the US, UK and France following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait which had been slant drilling Iraqi oil reserves.  They are at peace now but their suffering in life from thirst, dysentery, cholera and hunger can only be imagined by those with hearts.  Madeleine Albricht thought it was a ‘price worth paying.’  Maybe she sleeps poorly.

Afghan families fled in killing cold in October 2001 to the mountains to escape bombs raining down from B52s at 30,000 ft.  How many tiny sticks were put with the parents’ tears into snowy graves?  The plans were laid in July 2001.  You knew that?  (4)  The pretext was the false flag of the 11th of September 2001, Cheney’s Pearl Harbour.  That phantom, Bin Laden, was supposed to have planned it all from a cave at Tora Bora,  such are the wonders of IT and satellite communication.  The war, still bleeding, opium sap still flowing, US surrogates still ‘governing’ a tribal society, has lasted three times longer than WW2.

 Bush and Blair, the psychopathic pair, with many thousands sharing the same very dangerous personality trait, then focused on that cradle of civilization, a fine irony.  It was in April 2002 when the blood brothers sealed the fate of Iraq in Crawford, Texas. (5)  As always there was a pretext, ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.  Vilification of Saddam Hussein ran parallel.  And so on the 18th March 2003, a large force of Australian SAS troops invaded Iraq.  On the 22nd, the formal destruction of Iraq for ever, with massive bombardment and rapid invasion was started.  Mr Blair of the FaithFoundation might tell how many children lost their lives, their limbs, their sight and their minds when they were ‘shocked and awed’?

Symbolic of the Satanic cruelty of these schemers who never see action, is the case of Ali Abbas.  This is the sixth time I have written about him but I have had only ONE comment in response.  His village, Zafaraniya, lay between the Al Rashid military base and Baghdad airport.  Around the tenth day of ‘shock and awe’ there was a tremendous battle for the airport, a bridgehead.  His arms were incinerated and so was his Mum and Dad, and ten other relatives in the house. (Images in 5)  I believe these terrible injuries and the deaths of his relatives were caused by an ‘Enhanced Radiation Weapon’, in this case a neutron shell.  In other words, a WMD was used, the pretended casus belli for the destruction of Iraq and its government.  It is likely that Dr David Kelly was aware of this dynamite.  The ‘sofa cabinet’ would have sat with less comfort and less wine. (6)

Libya was next and the pretext was an ‘opposition’ in Benghazi which was threatened with extinction by Ghaddafi’s planes and bombs.  There was the customary vilification by the free western press of a leader who had gained power from a puppet in a bloodless coup.  There was a ‘news’ blackout as NATO forces ‘pounded’ who knows what and where. (7) Up to 50,000 humans were killed, and especially in Sirte.  The leader was killed against international law, and in the most evil manner.

And so to Syria and the vilification of Dr President Bashar Assad.  Syria was number 2 on Yinon’s plan.  As with Iraq and Libya, it is a secular country but showed respect to the confessions, including its 20% of Christians.  The ‘free’ press, and especially the BBC, has pumped out a vast, black stream of propaganda.  The BBC showed a picture of many dozens of dead children under shrouds in a communal grave.  It was implied they were victims of ‘Assad’.  It turned out it was taken by an Italian photographer in Iraq in May 2004! (8) How many children have been killed since guns were first fired by ‘rebels’ four years ago?  Given there are 5 million ‘displaced’ humans, at least 2 million children have fled their homes.

Two years ago, Cameron sought the support of MPs in the House of Commons for a bombing campaign of Syrian government installations.  ‘Butcher Assad had to be deposed’.  Happily he failed, and the Conservative Mr John Baron was central in the opposition.   Mr Alistair Burt MP, a fervent Christian, insisted the British government “knew exactly what would happen if there was not a strike against Assad over chemical weapons. He goes on. And the only thing that would deflect this man and this regime is if they fear they are going to end up in a storm drain with a bayonet up their backside. If they don’t fear that, they will go on killing as many people as they need to stay in power.”   Such is the psychopath.  The incestuous nature of this seat of power defeated my efforts in unseating this cruel and ignorant man. (9&10)  Now Cameron has won support for bombing IS, a loose and equally evil structure that is supported by a large cabal of nations, mostly within NATO.  The sense of MPs like Leigh, Lewis and Baron was swept away with a ‘rousing’ speech from Mr Hilary Benn.  But he has dual loyalty; he visited ‘Israel’ two weeks ago for three days.  Why?

Cameron’s intention, and many with him including ‘Israel’, remains the violent and unlawful overthrow of President Assad and the destruction, the Yinonization, of yet another Arab country.

*     *     *

Extracts from Christmas messages:

Cameron  – “As a Christian country, we must remember what his birth represents: peace, mercy, goodwill and, above all, hope.”

Archbishop Welby – Caught between the Devil and the Sea, the desperate and hungry, make their way through unimaginable peril. Palestine was very much like that. It was not a place of safety, but of danger, and like those millions today, Jesus himself was carried by anxious parents to the safety of another land. (11)

Catholic Archbishop Nichols – We pray especially for our Christian brothers and sisters who suffer grievously for their faith in Jesus as their Lord, losing life and belongings, suffering torture and unspeakable cruelty for his sake… No to all violence against the innocent!  (12)

The politician and the two men of God persist in picturing the whitey and the Christian as the victim, when instead the Muslim has been crucified from the time of 9/11.  One piece of holy and anti-Muslim propaganda was ‘Christian celebration’ banned in Brunei.  Not so! (13)

O, little town of Bethlehem – A subdued Christmas will only compound an already difficult year for Palestinian Christians, who have suffered the full brunt of Israel’s policies, most notably land seizures and, for those in Jerusalem, the revocation of residency rights. (14)

The Queen’s address – universal and moving in her 90th year.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mzor6Hf1tY  A contrast to the previous.  And listen, at the end, to fine singing by boys from round our wonderful world.

Britain will take 25,000 careful selected refugees over 5 years.  I salute the German nation who has embraced over 800,000.  Bombs R Us but Refugees R Not Us.

David Halpin is a retired orthopaedic and trauma surgeon who knows the suffering of the Palestinian people.  He and Sue have 3 girl grandchildren.  He is not a pacifist but believes strongly in international law which is constantly pushed aside.  All life is sacred, but especially the child’s.  He says ‘No mother and child should be in the least harmed anywhere in our still beautiful world’.

Web sites  http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/    http://www.doveanddolphin.com/  

Notes:

1.  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Montagumemo.html

2.  http://www.doveanddolphin.com/news_detail.asp?ID=166

3.  www.globalresearch.ca/greater-israel-the-zionist-plan-for…/5324815

4.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm

5.  http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/41-articles/blair/104-blairs-journey-questions-before-charge

6.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JBYAy1eyZI

7. http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/24-articles/libya/112-the-buzzard-the-vulture-and-the-cuckoo-perfidious-albion-in-libya 

8. http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/05/bbc-caught-using-iraq-mass-grave-photo-as-syria-propaganda-2198570.html

9. http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/2-articles/correspondence-with-politicians/158-letter-to-standards-and-privileges-committee-of-the-house-of-commons

10. http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/2-articles/correspondence-with-politicians/159-a-complaint-about-a-barbarous-statement-made-by-mr-alistair-burt-mp

11. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5654/archbishop-justins-ecumenical-christmas-greeting

12.  http://rcdow.org.uk/cardinal/homilies/christmas-midnight-mass-2015/

13.  http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/my-account-of-christmas-in-brunei

14.  http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=769191

Image: Cecil Rhodes

“The university and its students should prefer improving today’s orthodoxies to imposing them on our forebears.” – Tony Abbott, former PM of Australia The Independent, Dec 23, 2015

The following text is an English transcript (translation) of an RT Berlin Interview in German regarding an apparent secret agreement between the European Central Bank (ECB) and individual Euro countries’ central banks issuing large amounts of government bonds. The discovery flared up just before the FED raised its base interest rate by a quarter percent on 16 December 2015, signalling the end of zero-interest in 9 years.

Response Peter Koenig:

What some Euro central banks are doing, i.e. buying government bonds, is nowadays in the times of fiat money nothing extraordinary (Fiat money is government issued legal tender for which there is no backing). The US Fed (Federal Reserve Bank) is doing this since years. It’s called QE – for Quantitative Easing, it’s a euphemism for electronically producing new money whenever needed, for example to finance new wars and massive mind-bending propaganda programs. Of course the real reasons are never revealed.

Today ECB does exactly the same, by allowing euro country central banks to buy government bonds within the limits given by the ECB. This, however, risks increasing the euro debt exponentially, if not controlled, as is the case in the US.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the FED, once answered the question of a journalist how the US thinks paying back its astronomical debt: “We will never suffer from the pressure of debt. We can always produce new money.”

Since 2012, this form of more or less ECB watched-over and organized money production has officially produced some 800 billion euros. But in addition and in parallel, but especially in the last year, another 500 billion euros were produced semi-clandestinely, apparently mostly by Italy and France; and this clearly to balance the state budget.

Every sovereign non-euro country produces money as it sees fit, without the intervention of an outside ‘watch-dog’ like the ECB.

Some background: The ECB was founded on 1 June 1998 in the context of the ‘Treaty of Maastricht’ as the successor of the European Monetary Institute (EMI). The ECB reports to a ‘Governing Council’ – which in turn is composed of representatives of the 19 euro-countries. The ECB became effective in 1999 with the introduction of the euro.

The ECB is not subjected to an independent audit, following exactly the same pattern of ‘privilege’ as does the FED – which is a 100% private banking institute.

The ‘secret agreement’ is the so-called ANFA (Agreement on Net Financial Assets), an agreement between the 19 Euro-countries. It allows countries to purchase government bonds within a certain framework. How the rules of the framework are set is not quite clear. But it appears that not all countries have the same rights. Central Banks of individual member countries may buy the debt of other countries, or their own debt, thereby helping balancing their over-extended budgets. The debt is sold to private banks, thereby increasing the monetary mass – and the banks’ exposure (risk).

Interestingly, on 10 December a journalist asks ECB President Draghi a direct question, ‘how come that central banks of individual EU members are buying government bonds (producing money), independently and outside the ECB rules’. Draghi reacts unruly, suggesting the journalist should ask the countries concerned directly. The same day, the ECB published on internet a vague explanation on what ANFA represents; a complex construct of who, how and under what circumstances has which rights.

As far as I know, all Euro countries have kept their sovereignty, when they signed the Maastricht Treaty. There are certain ECB rules, but none of them are above the sovereignty of a country. Therefore, every Euro nation has the right to buy its own government bonds, i.e. producing their own money which is the euro, to reduce their debt and increase liquidity. And so would Greece, no matter whether or not this pleases the ECB or other Euro-countries. As we are just experiencing, money printing by individual central banks is already done, ‘half-clandestinely’ – by those with more privileges than were given to Greece

Years ago, me and other economists have advised the Greek government to do what now France and Italy – and probably others are doing; i.e. to refinance her debt through Greece’s own central bank – and to on-lend these funds at low interest rates to newly nationalized Greek public banks with the purpose of revamping the Greek economy.

Would this have happened, Greece today would not stand at the edge of a bottomless abyss; to the contrary, she would be on the way to recovery.

But Syriza and Tsipras didn’t want to hear any of it. – Why – is a mystery to me. Possibly the Greek government was criminally blackmailed and coerced into accepting the troika rules. Given the many governments which have fallen when they didn’t accept the Master’s rule, such a scenario is entirely plausible.

Perhaps Mr. Draghi became nervous over the journalist’s question, because the autonomous production of money by certain central banks could incite others to do the same, including Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal – countries which so far are beholden to the fangs o the troika.

RT:  According to Michael Fuchs, German CDU Deputy, “Euro countries’ central banks are forbidden to refinance their government debt” – in which case the ECB has committed an infraction – which may be the reason for Draghi’s lack for words when faced by the journalist. How is it possible that in the case of some countries, Draghi looks the other way, tacitly giving some countries the privilege to do what is against the rules. What legal consequences could this have?

PK: As explained before, there is no real ban on sovereign nations money production – the Maastricht Treaty is not binding – as it stands not above the sovereignty of member countries. The nine non-euro countries are EU members, but have decided not to join the Euro. – They decide their own monetary policy without any interference of the ECB.

What Mr. Fuchs fears is that countries which owe Germany and German banks a lot of money will produce their own money, thereby increase the euro monetary mass and devalue the debt. Inflation is always a risk. – Today, Euro inflation is widely hidden behind false statistics.

Another risk are European banks which are already indebted to their neck and which are getting deeper into debt with an increasing money mass. Some of them may go broke.

What this would mean for the European average citizen who keeps his money in a bank account is bad news: In July this year, the EU / EC have issued an edict, totally illegal and without consultation of the people of Europe, or even the parliaments of European countries, that in the future banks shall no longer be ‘rescued’ by ‘bail-outs’, i.e.by tax payers’ money, but instead by ‘bail-ins’, meaning the banks would refinance themselves with money stolen from depositors and shareholders. Who doesn’t believe this, may recall Cyprus, where in March 2013 the ‘bail-in’ was tried out. Some 10 billion euros were taken from depositors to salvage the broken Cypriot banks.

By now we know: Banks never lose.

But this is not all. With excess liquidity, the ECB and some individual euro-country central banks will further enhance their negative interest rate policies. To prevent the natural reaction of the people – a run on the banks – governments lobbied and pressured by their banks will gradually introduce a no-cash consumer society. This is currently being tested by shops and department stores in Sweden, where purchases may only be paid electronically, by credit or debit cards.

Like in the case of ‘bail-ins’, is the no-cash consumption being tested. Depending on the reaction of the ever-so-docile and to the edges manipulated people, the new cash-free system could be introduced rather quickly. And we, the 99.99% are again sitting in a trap, a trap invented form the greed masters, our western fraud-driven banking system which is selling the new system by buying politicians and duping the populace with media propaganda and indoctrination.

I’m sorry to say this – we are so deeply mired in this corrupt western, especially European monetary system that I believe there is no way back, no possible way of reform. As I see it, there is only one solution – exit the euro and start afresh with our own currencies, the Deutsch Mark, French Franc, the Italian Lire, the Greek Drachma – and so on. After all, the euro has been in circulation only for 15 years. Why is it so difficult to imagine a world without the euro, especially recognizing how corrupt the system has become?

The signpost for the decay of the euro was set when the euro was first introduced for a so-called union of countries, a union which is actually a non-union with no solidarity and which was never conceived as a political union, like is the case with the federal states of the US, or the federal cantons of Switzerland. Without a political union, a common currency is not sustainable, cannot survive.

Nowhere in the Maastricht Treaty or the subsequent Lisbon Treaty is there a reference to a future political union. The masters behind the so-called EU, the Masters of Maastricht, knew exactly what they wanted – a Europe as a trading partner, but not an equal partner, not a strong Europe. Should Europe become too strong, it needed to be weakened – divide to conquer.

Thus, were added to the EU core group of 15 in 2004 and 2007 another 13 countries which have in fact little or nothing in common with the 15 core countries. To the contrary, most of them came from the realm of the former Soviet Union and are fiercely anti-socialist and pro-American. The only liking of the EU they have is the massive subsidies they met get to quickly adapt to the new EU standards.

In addition, the euro-economy strengthens and may threaten the dollar as a reserve currency in the reserve coffers of the world, as has happened in 2007, when the FED-Wall Street gang had to fabricate an economic crisis which punishes the European economy with austerity. By now the tools they are using, the ECB, the EC and the IMF (the troika) are well known. The current so-called crisis exists since 2007/2008, with ups and downs, but there is no end in sight.

This fits exactly the picture of the currently secretly ongoing negotiations, behind closed doors in Brussels, over the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) – which, in case it will succeed – would turn Europe into an American production and trade fiefdom, with a low-wage policy. Though I don’t want to mix-up the ‘crisis’ with the TTIP, it is undeniable that the two are intimately linked.

The elite groups behind this ball game to enslave Europe are primarily non-Europeans, but FED, Wall Street, IMF, BIS (Bank for International Settlement). The dollar hegemony must be maintained, come hell or high water.

It is not a coincidence that Mario Draghi, the ECB President is a former Goldman Sachs Executive. To be exact, Goldman Sachs dictates the European economic and financial policies.

How many European politicians are aware of this?

RT: Is the ECB subjected to any supervisory body? – And if so, what purpose wold these measures serve?

PK: The ECB is not subjected to a supervisory body per se, other than then “Governing Board’ – which is a gang of insiders, as mentioned before. The ECB is not subordinated to an independent audit. The ECB is not even a real central bank that lends money to favourable terms to member countries in need. The ECB lends money to large private and investment banks at low or zero interest; the banks ‘on-lend’ the funds to countries at risk, like Greece, with high risk-interests of 5% to 7%, the difference being cashed in by the banks as profit.

This is why Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland are highly indebted countries. In fact, new loans are directly used to cover the debt service. Not one euro flows into the economy, say, of Greece, to refinance the badly needed social program, health, education, welfare. – And that’s why – oddly and absurdly the Greek debt has more than doubled since the onset of the crisis, and since the “rescue package’s” first loan was contracted by Athens in 2011.

Which international law is ruling over the ECB? – Hard to say. Is there any legal authority in today’s world of ‘dog-eats-dog’ that is independent enough to dare resisting the pressures from the mighty?

The good news is that man, still free-thinking man, is relentlessly creative. Several countries are already working on alternatives to the current western and fraudulent monetary system, as they are keen to delink from the dollar, including Iceland, Ecuador, Russia, China. The BRICS / SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) countries, have already adopted international payments systems that function completely delinked from the dollar-based SWFT.

So – there is hope!

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

According to Russian Television on December 25th, Russian intelligence has counted “up to 12,000” tanker trucks filled with oil “on the Turkish-Iraqi border,” and “the final destination remains to be Turkey.” In addition, some of those trucks are still heading into Turkey from Syria, but their number is “decreased” because Russia’s Syrian bombing campaign, which started on September 30th, has, ever since they began bombing the oil trucks on November 18th, destroyed “up to 2,000” of those trucks, that were in Syria heading into Turkey.

According to the news report, Russia is requesting help from the U.S. coalition to bomb the “up to 12,000” trucks that are in Iraq carrying ISIS oil into Turkey. ISIS drives them there so that ISIS can become self-sustaining by the oil-sales. ISIS, which had long been supported by America’s allies the Arab oil potentates — all of whom are fundamentalist Sunnis — aims to be self-sustaining now on the sales of this stolen oil through Turkey, which is operating the black market in ISIS’s stolen oil. That’s why Russia wants to stamp out this market. “However, so far, Washington says that it is not ready for such a move,” the report says.

Whereas Russia had begun on November 18th to bomb those trucks en-route into Turkey, and eliminated around 500 of them at that time, the U.S. coalition hadn’t bombed any such trucks until later that day, November 18th, in order to pretend to be competitive with what Russia had been doing since it started on 30 September 2015, to bomb in Syria. Before the U.S. bombed the 116 trucks it destroyed, it warned the drivers 45 minutes in advance.

Here was the shocking admission that was made by the U.S. Defense Department’s press-spokesman at his 18 November 2015 presentation, in which he voluntarily acknowledged that, throughout all of the 14 months during which the U.S. had been bombing in Syria and in Iraq, the U.S. hadn’t previously destroyed any  of the tens of thousands of oil tank-trucks that had been transporting ISIS’s stolen oil out from Iraq and from Syria — the stolen-oil sales that bring $2B per year into ISIS coffers — and that the U.S. had warned 45-minutes in advance:

This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike. We did a show of force, by — we had aircraft essentially buzz the trucks at low altitude.

So, I do have copy of the leaflet, and I have got some videos, so why don’t you pull the leaflet up. Let me take a look at it so I can talk about it.

As you can see, it’s a fairly simple leaflet, it says, “Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them.” A very simple message.

And then, also, “Warning: airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life.”

And so, these are the leaflets that we dropped — about 45 minutes before the airstrikes actually began. Again, we combine these leaflet drops with very low altitude passes of some of our attack aviation, which sends a very powerful message.

So: not only had the U.S. previously avoided destroying ISIS’s main current source of income (besides the multimillion-dollar donations made by members of the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait — all of whom are protected by the U.S.) (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had urged all of them on 30 December 2009 please to stop funding their terrorists), but, when the U.S. now started to bomb those tank-trucks filled with stolen oil, the U.S. warned in advance the drivers, who were also assets to the jihadist cause the U.S. pretended to oppose, and thus were enemies of the public (and were participants in the evils of ISIS). The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) wanted to protect them — not  to kill them. That was done “to minimize risks to civilians.” Wow!!

After the U.S. history of slaughtering millions of civilians in wars, and torturing many, including complete innocents in Iraq and elsewhere, we’re now protecting ISIS’s drivers? Can any hypocrisy exceed this? If the United States were a democracy, its press would have been focusing on this issue for a week. The U.S. protecting ISIS’s financial base, and assets, has mind-boggling implications. On what side are ‘we’ — and who are “we,” and who are “them”? We are not the aristocracy. The aristocracy are them. It includes the top stockholders in firms such as Lockheed Martin. Warren Buffett said in 2006 “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” That’s shocking honesty.

Did any of the major U.S. news media, all of which have reporters attending those press conferences, report the U.S. Government’s open admission  there, that the U.S. Government had protected ISIS all along, not bombed any  of ISIS’s oil tank-trucks (until Russia did)? Those trucks providing $2B per year to ISIS terrorists? None  of them reported it. None of them conveyed to their audience this astounding information — essentially, that the U.S. was protecting the money-flow to the jihadists in Syria, and was even protecting their truckers, and its ‘press’ were protecting them.

Another major revelation at this same press conference was that “we right now have no plans to conduct coordinated operations with the Russians” in Syria. And this was reconfirmed on December 25th from the Russian side, as being still the U.S. policy. In other words: the U.S. President is so hostile toward Russia, that, even months after Russia’s request to Washington on September 30th to cooperate in killing all jihadists in Syria, Obama still refuses to work together with Russia, or even just to “coordinate operations with the Russians,” to kill the jihadists. (And, in the Democratic debate on 19 December 2015, Hillary Clinton insisted that eliminating the jihadists in Syria mustn’t have higher priority than, nor occur before, Bashar al-Assad is permanently removed from Syria’s leadership. Her position is at least as anti-Russian as Obama’s.)

The jihadists had flocked into Syria to oust the non-sectarian leader of that country, Assad, and to replace him with an Islamist leader, a Sharia-law Sunni, whom the U.S. Government, and the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait, approve of as being better than the non-sectarian Assad (who is personally a Shiite, but runs a decidedly unsectarian, secular, government). The jihadists work for the American alliance.

Russia’s position on the matter is that no foreign power possesses the right to determine whom the President of Syria will or won’t be; only the Syrian people do, in an election. Russia insists that it be determined in internationally monitored and overseen elections. However, polls taken by Western polling firms indicate that Assad would overwhelmingly win any such election; so, U.S. President Barack Obama has rejected democracy for Syria. And yet, the U.S. accuses Putin of being dictatorial, and claims itself to be ‘democratic.’ And the U.S. President demands that Syria’s legal President be removed from power and excluded from any possibility of ever again becoming that nation’s President. This is America’s version of ‘democracy’ in Syria.

The DOD spokesperson, Steve Warren, spoke contemptuously of Russia. He said that in Russia’s war against jihadists in Syria, “the Russians are using dumb bombs. Their history has been both reckless and irresponsible.” This statement was being made by a military spokesman for the same Government that in the most “reckless and irresponsible” manner had invaded and destroyed Iraq in 2003. However, his statement here was also, itself, simply false. Russia’s bombings have been with both precision-guided weapons and unguided munitions that are under no control after being fired.

Warren there was reaffirming a reporter’s question which had asserted: “Getting back to Raqqa, as we all know, the Russians are not using precision munitions. Any sense of any increased civilian casualties in Raqqa as a result of that?” So, Warren was here reaffirming a reporter’s (or actually, a press-appointed government stenographer’s) falsehood — reaffirming an assertion that was either unprofessionally ignorant, or else a knowing lie. On September 30th, when Russia had started its air strikes, the U.S. had said that they were “doomed to failure.” That, too, seems increasingly likely to have been false (that it was “doomed to failure”). (And any such pretended foresight is also a lie when it comes from an official source such as a government. It was mere propaganda.)

Instead of the mainstream U.S. press reporting that the U.S. Government lied there (and this Government does it routinely, because the ‘press’ never report that a lie by the President is  a lie), only a small number of only non-mainstream sites, all online-only, picked up anything from this stunning press conference, regarding any of the important and much-discussed issues that it addressed; and the first such site to do so was a fundamentalist Christian one, which is obsessively pro-Israel, and generally hard-rightwing Republican. Bridget Johnson at PJ Media headlined, on the same day as the press conference (the only site to report at all upon it that day, November 18th), “ISIS Oil Tankers Hit for First Time – With 45-Minute Warning.” This was an admirable reporting coup (though it wasn’t really “for First Time,” since Russian bombers  had already done it), because it covered all of the main points, including the shocking admissions by Mr. Warren. Her news coup had over 1,400 reader-comments.

Paul Joseph Watson, at the generally conservative Republican site InfoWars, bannered on November 23rd, “WHITE HOUSE GAVE ISIS 45 MINUTE WARNING BEFORE BOMBING OIL TANKERS,” and he placed these matters honestly into their geostrategic context, of the Obama Administration’s placing a higher priority upon defeating Russia than defeating jihadism. As is so often the case with the terrific journalist Watson, he penetrated deeply into these matters, and was not at all shy to acknowledge, for example, the following stark contrast, which U.S. ‘news’ media hide:

Compare the Obama White House’s approach to fighting ISIS to that of Russia.

While it took the U.S. fifteen months to even begin targeting ISIS’ oil refineries and tankers, air strikes by Moscow destroyed more than 1,000 tankers in a period of just five days.

In comparison, Col. Steve Warren said that the U.S. had taken out only 116 tanker trucks, the “first strike” to target ISIS’ lucrative black market oil business, which funds over 50 per cent of the terror group’s activities.

So: this, too, like Bridget Johnson’s report, was honest and first-rate news-reporting, from another non-mainstream Republican site. (Note, however, that the mainstream  Republican news-sites, such as Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and Rush Limbaugh, were no more forthcoming on this matter than all of the Democratic Party sites were.)

The aristocracy’s control over all the mainstream ‘news’ is ironclad — and this includes the political magazines, such as National Review, and The Nation;  as well as ‘intellectual’ magazines, such as Harpers  and The Atlantic.  American ‘news’ media stifle democracy in America; they’re not part of  democracy, in America. They’re like poison that’s presented as being ‘medicine’ instead. Suckers don’t just swallow it; they come back for more of that propaganda.

The next day, November 23rd, “Tyler Durden,” the pseudonymous genius behind his own Zero Hedge blog, headlined “‘Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away’: US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes,” and he reported using some of the same sources as the others, but supplementing it with additional good sources. He had around 400 reader-comments.

In addition, there were some trashy news-reports at far-right Republican sites, such as one, on November 19th, crediting Bridget Johnson’s news report the day before as its source, “The Obamization of the military, pt. 243.” This was by J.R. Dunn, at the fundamentalist Republican, American Thinker, blog. He pretended that Obama was being bad here because Obama was too concerned to avoid bloodshed: “You see, the important thing isn’t hurting ISIS. No – the important thing is not hurting civilians.” Picking up from the standard Republican meme that torture should be used against ‘bad people’ in order for ‘good people’ to be kept safe, and that civilians in ‘enemy’ nations are okay to be victims of American military attacks, Dunn took Bridget Johnson’s news-report merely as confirmation of his own bigotries and hatreds. He had about 150 reader-comments. Typical was this one: “The Left in America has known that in order to succeed with their agenda the US military had to be infiltrated, compromised, and weakened.” For such suckers, the ‘source’ of America’s problems wasn’t America’s aristocracy; it was America’s Democrats.

On November 24th, Michael Morell, Obama’s CIA Director during 2011-2013, said on the trashy PBS Charlie Rose show (hosted by Mr. Rose, who is such an incompetent interviewer that he’s beloved by aristocrats for his reliably softball interviews), “We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure.” Of course, Mr. Rose avoided drilling down there to find out why the U.S. Government treats jihadists as being such a minor matter — especially after all of the environmental damage the U.S. routinely does in its invasions, such as the depleted uranium that contaminates today’s Iraq, from the U.S. attacks. And, of course, almost all of the news-media that picked up on that stunning admission from Obama’s former CIA Director, were Republican sites, such as Daily Caller, Washington Times, Breitbart, Real Clear Politics, and American Thinker. In addition, there were a few high quality journalistic sites reporting it, such as Zero Hedge, The Hill, The Economic Collapse, and Moon of Alabama. In other words: only very few Americans came to know about this jaw-dropping stunning admission from an Obama official — and most who did were people who hate Obama for his being such things as ‘against torture’ (in other words: Republican stooges of the aristocracy).

Basically, in America, only marginal, and mainly right-wing, audiences were being informed even badly, regarding the sensational things that were revealed — and in some instances proudly  revealed — at the November 18th DOD press conference, and also in the November 24th TV interview of Morell. What is traditionally viewed as being America’s “news media” were entirely absent from their job of reporting even one of these two important statements by U.S. Government officials. And none of the news-reports on that astounding DOD press conference, and of that Morell interview, reached Democratic Party voters at all. Republicans hate Obama because he’s a communist Islamic Kenyan, while Democrats love Obama because the wacko Republican Party lies about him constantly and because Obama is to the left of those blithering wackos.

A press like this makes it impossible for there to be intelligent, informed, rather than misinformed and/or stupid, voting in national political elections in the United States.

Perhaps the biggest scandal in America is its rigid aristocratically controlled ‘press,’ which is really nothing more than a whored propaganda-operation that’s run by and for the nation’s aristocracy. The owners of America’s ‘news’ media know that the way for the press to make money in this type of dictatorship is to sell to the aristocrats’ corporations access to the public, and to ‘report’ only ‘news’ that the corporate sponsors don’t mind the public’s knowing about.

So: this is how the public get suckered, in America.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the American Government didn’t hypocritically claim to be a ‘democracy.’ That’s just piling it on, with a shovel.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

The threat of war against Iran is not just about its natural resources, strategic control and supposedly to protect Israel, it is also about the US dollar being used for its oil trades. Iran is moving forward to replace US dollars for its foreign trade with Russia in rials and Russian rubles. This past January, Iran made a significant move by “stopping mutual settlements in dollars with foreign countries.”

According to RT news

“the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has said. “In trade exchanges with foreign countries, Iran uses other currencies, including Chinese yuan, euro, Turkish lira, Russian ruble and South Korean won,” Gholamali Kamyab, CBI deputy head, told the Tasnim state news agency. Iranian and Russian delegates have met to discuss new trade agreements. The Iran Daily just published a report that Iran and Russia are in the process of “establishing a joint bank account with Russia to facilitate trade between the two countries in their own currencies.”The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) governor Valiollah Seif stressed the importance of connecting their banking sectors to bolster trade between Iran and Russia. Seif says that a special committee is needed to overcome any obstacles (U.S. sanctions) and to provide lines of credit.

The Iran Daily reported what Iran’s ambassador had said in January regarding Iran and Russia’s trade in their own currencies:

Iran’s Ambassador to Russian Mehdi Sanaei said in late January that Tehran and Moscow are working on a plan to switch their bilateral trade to national currencies for which he said the two countries will create a joint bank or a mutual account. “Both sides plan to create a joint bank, or joint account, so that payments may be made in Rubles and Rials and there is an agreement to create a working group [for this],” said Sanaei

This past March, Iran and Russia signed an agreement to jointly create a regulation committee to “oversee interbank financial transactions between the two countries.” The positive outcome of the agreements is to avoid any future sanctions Washington and its crony allies use as a financial weapon against its adversaries. The Iran daily concluded what the outcome would achieve in the long term:

The agreement – that was signed between the Iranian and Russian central banks – took both countries one step closer toward the establishment of the promised joint bank – which is believed to have been specifically designed to help dodge the effects of US-led sanctions on the two countries

That is why Washington is desperate to overthrow the Assad government and that is to weaken Iran’s influence in the region. If Assad is successfully removed, Israel would then concentrate on Hezbollah with an all-out attack. If Syria and Hezbollah is defeated militarily, then Iran would be threatened with a joint Israel-US led war possibly with nuclear weapons especially if Hillary Clinton or most of the Republican front-runners were to become president. Iran is sure making Washington very nervous.

The Currency War on Oil producing countries: Iraq, Venezuela and Libya

Iraq, Venezuela and Libya tried to drop US dollars for oil trades but were met with resistance from Washington. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein (a former U.S. ally) decided he wanted to use Euros instead of US dollars for oil transactions. That was one of the main reasons that the Bush regime wanted to remove Saddam Hussein in the first place, not because of the fabricated “Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)” story published by the New York Times author Judith Miller which was the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq (codename ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’). The U.S. government and its big oil companies control world oil-markets with its dollar as the “fiat” international trading currency, but Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein defied the U.S. and it dollar supremacy by replacing it with the Euro. In 2006, Former Texas congressman Ron Paul explained Washington’s real motives behind their WMD lies against Iraq and the coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez by the Bush regime concerning the US dollar before the U.S. House of Representatives:

In November 2000 Saddam Hussein demanded Euros for his oil. His arrogance was a threat to the dollar; his lack of any military might was never a threat. At the first cabinet meeting with the new administration in 2001, as reported by Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, the major topic was how we would get rid of Saddam Hussein– though there was no evidence whatsoever he posed a threat to us. This deep concern for Saddam Hussein surprised and shocked O’Neill.

It now is common knowledge that the immediate reaction of the administration after 9/11 revolved around how they could connect Saddam Hussein to the attacks, to justify an invasion and overthrow of his government. Even with no evidence of any connection to 9/11, or evidence of weapons of mass destruction, public and congressional support was generated through distortions and flat out misrepresentation of the facts to justify overthrowing Saddam Hussein

One of the main reasons of the invasion of Iraq was about Saddam Hussein’s goal to eliminate the US dollar and replacing it with the Euro for Iraq’s oil sales, but that did not stop there. Ron Paul also mentioned Venezuela under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez at the time:

In 2001, Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia spoke of Venezuela switching to the Euro for all their oil sales. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with assistance from our CIA. After these attempts to nudge the Euro toward replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency were met with resistance, the sharp fall of the dollar against the Euro was reversed. These events may well have played a significant role in maintaining dollar dominance

Iran is a long term goal for regime change. However, with Russia and China in the picture, it seems very “less likely” to happen. Russia and China are major obstacles for the pentagon war planners. The US has hopes that the Islamic state can create more chaos in the region allowing ISIS to target Iran within its borders but that is a long shot. Iran is leading the charge in the Middle East to replace the US dollar with other currencies and Washington is panicking. Syria, Hezbollah and Russia stand in the way as the US dollar loses its dominance. Washington’s call for war will get louder as more countries around the world seek to replace the US dollar. Washington wants to make Iran an example to let the world knows what happens if you abandon their currency, just like they did to Iraq, Venezuela and even Libya. Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s planned a “single African currency” linked to gold that would have dethroned US dollars and the Euro for African oil trades and possibly other transactions which was the reason why Washington ordered US-NATO forces to remove Gaddafi from power.

Will Washington force Iran to use its dollars for its oil transactions with the threat of war? With major powers backing the Islamic republic, it will be an impossible task to accomplish. As more countries demand less US dollars, a decline in the “exchange value” will result in a weaker dollar. Usually when countries demand a certain currency on the foreign exchange markets, the value of that particular currency increases. So will the US war machine attempt to force countries such as Iran to use its dollars for its oil trades to keep the dollar afloat? There is a “currency war” currently being waged by Iran and Russia. Who can blame them? Washington started this war with its economic sanctions on Iran and Russia because they do not comply with its demands as Imperial power that makes all the rules for the world to follow. Now Iran and Russia will finish it by dropping the US dollars for their business transactions, a solution long overdue.

The one hundredth anniversary of the Great War is prompting a renewed effort at both the popular and academic levels to ensure that the different units and countries involved are not forgotten. While not supplying combat troops, China entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, furnishing much-needed labourers, 140,000 by conservative estimates and possibly more, who played an essential role on the Western Front and other theatres, taking responsibility for a wide range of tasks. Among others, unloading military supplies and handling ammunitions, building barracks and other military facilities, digging trenches, and even agriculture and forest management.

While their essential contribution was recognized in British documents, both Paris and London saw them as a temporary expedient, to be ended as soon as the war was over. Furthermore, their deployment gave rise to all sorts of culture and language clashes, in addition to the dangers of travelling to Europe and surviving in close proximity to the battle field. However, beyond these travails, the Chinese Labour Corps left a significant legacy, with members seeing the world, experiencing other nations, and often becoming literate. More widely, despite being on the winning side, China’s failure to secure any gains at Versailles prompted the May 4^th Movement and can be seen as a key juncture in the long and winding road from empire to nation-state. It is an important reminder of the global nature of the Great War, whose impact extended far from the battle field to all corners of the world.

The one hundredth anniversary of the Great War has prompted renewed interest in the conflict and a major drive by myriad institutions and individuals to inform the public and assure that the sacrifices made one century ago are never forgotten. While the main theatres of the war were in Europe, there are reasons why it is called the First World War, since its nature and scope were truly global. This includes Asia, which may have seen limited combat operations (other than in South-Western Asia, part of the Middle East) but where a number of countries made key contributions to the Allied cause. They include Japan, whose navy helped secure the Pacific, while her troops took over German territories, and took part in the conquest of Tsingtao; China, which contributed much-needed workers; and India, whose soldiers helped stabilize the Western Front in late 1914 and later played a key role in a wide range of theaters, including Gallipoli, East Africa, and Mesopotamia.

While such contributions were recognized by contemporary media and are well documented, with the passage of time there is little public awareness of them. The first centenary of the war is, however, prompting many public and private organizations in countries like Japan,¹ India, and China², and among communities from those nations, to make renewed efforts to make sure that their contribution is duly recognized, both at home and abroad, and in particular among their war-time Allies. This is an aspect of the renewed geopolitical competition in the Asia-Pacific region, which also features countries vying to stress their past roles in world conflicts.

China at the outset of the War: Nation Building, Limited Sovereignty, and Collective Security

The outbreak of the Great War caught China in the midst of a giant yet incomplete transformation from Empire to Republic, an exercise in nation building that would take decades to complete and see myriad wars and turmoil amid fragmentation and widespread human suffering.³ The Revolutionary Party（中华革命党), renamed Guomindang (国民党) in 1919, had been forced in 1916 to cede the presidency to Yuan Shikai, and warlords ruled much of the country, with significant foreign influence. In 1916 Duan Qirui, a graduate of the Beiyang Military Academy who had furthered his studies in Germany, became prime minister following Yuan’s death. One of the dossiers on his table was whether to join the Great War. One of the factors at play was the possibility of recovering the German concessions in Shandong Province, and more generally of improving China’s international standing, something which, among others, leading intellectual Liang Qichao hoped for.⁴ Pressure also came from the United States, at that time moving towards joining the war, and from the Japanese, who had decided on a policy of loans to China and other financial incentives in exchange for recognition of their position in northern regions which Tokyo considered a sphere of influence necessary to protect its Korean colony and shield it from Russian ambitions, following its failed bid to impose the “twenty one demands” on China in 1915.⁵ These wide-ranging demands were tantamount to turning China into a Japanese protectorate. Among others, Tokyo demanded freedom of movement and the right to purchase land and carry out business for Japanese nationals in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, a promise “not to cede or lease to any other Power any harbour or bay on or any island along the coast of China”, and the appointment of Japanese advisors.⁶ In March 1917 Duan convinced Parliament to break diplomatic relations with Germany, and, after a struggle over who had the constitutional power to issue it, a declaration of war by the cabinet followed in August.⁷

Thus, although her own nation-building process was far from complete, Chinese leaders decided to join a conflict which, while global in nature, had its origin and main focus thousands of miles away. Ideally, being on the winning side would help China consolidate and increase her national stature, but as we shall see later, things would turn out quite differently. What was clear in 1916 was that whereas China had little, if any, expeditionary military capability to offer to the Allies, it had something they desperately needed: manpower. The concept was simple: import Chinese labour, thus freeing British and French young men for combat duties. Although the Chinese and Japanese governments concluded a military agreement whereby Tokyo would provide “aid, advisers and instructors to develop the Chinese War Participation Army to support the Allied cause,” no troops were deployed to Europe, and Japanese aid simply served the purpose of reinforcing Duan’s troops concentrated in North China.⁸ Germany, on the other hand, provided financial support to Sun Yat-sen’s alternative government in Guangzhou, in the hope of pushing China back into neutrality.⁹ As was the rule in those years, factional interests frequently took precedence over the exercise of national power.

The Chinese Labour Corps: China’s major contribution to the war effort

Logistics is often forgotten, or at least rarely granted a degree of attention commensurate with its true importance, in many military histories. In the case of the Western Front in the Great War the distances involved were not huge, in particular if compared to some theatres in the Second World War, but the industrial nature of the fighting, the dual demands of artillery and fortification, and the sheer number of troops involved, meant a strong and growing demand for labour behind the trenches. Although some machinery and vehicles were available, building and repairing railways and roads, moving supplies, mail, troops, and the injured, laying down and maintaining telephone lines, plus constructing all sorts of military facilities, were tasks mainly undertaken with a mixture of human and animal labour. Many labour units were created. The Royal Engineers, for example, set up eleven labour battalions, and in January 1917 the British Labour Corps was born. By the time of the armistice, it had grown to almost 400,000. Staffed by officers not medically fit for front-line duties (often returned wounded), it regularly operated within range of enemy fire, and some of its units were employed as emergency infantry during the spring 1918 German offensives.

The Allies quickly realized that their manpower pool was simply not large enough to feed this ever-growing need for construction and logistics labour. At first arrangements were often ad hoc, but the scale of the fighting, the inadequacy of some earlier approaches, and the realization that this would be no short conflict, soon gave way to a more systematic approach. France was the first to tap into China’s huge labour force. Great Britain followed, with both countries already in negotiations with China in the summer of 1916.¹⁰ According to the Official History: ‘…although some labour units were raised and eventually labourers from various parts of the Empire and China were brought to France, the numbers were never at any period sufficient for the demands of a great army operating in a friendly country’. Despite this, it is clear that Chinese workers played a crucial role in sustaining the Allied armies in the field. Precise numbers are not available, with some sources mentioning that in August 1918, 96,000 were enrolled in the British Labour Corps, with a further thirty thousand working for France,¹¹ but Chinese sources stress that the specific number is disputable and that 140,000 in total for both France and Britain is a conservative estimate.¹² Guoqi Xu notes the “sizable discrepancy among the figures provided by different sources” and provides a range from several authors.¹³ Among others, he mentions the Dictionary of the First World War by Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheale, eds. (320,000)¹⁴, Arthur Philip Jones (150,000 Chinese workers in France, Mesopotamia, and Russia)¹⁵, Chen Sanjing (between 175,000 and 200,000 adding those recruited by France and Great Britain)¹⁶, and CLC interpreter Gu Xinqqing (175,000 again as a joint figure)¹⁷. He also quotes a US War Department telegram (97,000 recruited by London, 40,000 plus 1,500 specialists by Paris)¹⁸. We could add that, although Paris was first to tap China’s vast labour pool, there were precedents in Great Britain for the employment of Chinese at times of war to free military and naval personnel from other duties. This includes the Napoleonic Wars, during which ‘Chinese men who worked in merchant ships were then used by the Royal Navy in support roles to provide cover for the British men who were away fighting, such as ships’ porters’.¹⁹ London also used colonial workers in the Indian, Egyptian, and South African Native Labour Corps.

The Individual Experience of Chinese Workers: Tasks, Dangers, and Opportunities

Even before China had formally declared war, a processing plan was set up in Shandong Province, with the purpose of screening and hiring labourers. Located near the Royal Navy’s base at Weihaiwei, it was followed by a second facility in the port of Qingdao. Recruitment was not difficult, given the region’s poverty and instability and the high wages offered. These consisted of twenty Chinese dollars as a starting bonus, food and clothing, and ten dollars per month partly payable to their families. The medical examination was focused on tuberculosis, trachoma (a viral disease of the eye, then prevalent in Shandong), and venereal diseases.²⁰ Some 100,000 were selected, issued a serial number in a dog tag around their wrists,²¹ and sprayed prior to embarkation. Many still donned a queue and were urged to cut it.

Travel to Europe was not without its dangers. Already in 1916 a ship carrying Chinese workers to France²² had been sunk by a German submarine in the Mediterranean, with the loss of 543,²³ prompting the use of an alternative trans-Pacific route across Canada by train.²⁴ Once in the Old Continent, although their contracts said they would not be deployed in or near the front, they often found themselves under enemy fire or dealing with other dangers, such as unexploded ammunitions.²⁵ Illness was an additional hazard (including the Spanish Flu from 1918), together with the harsh climate and unfamiliar food, despite which in December 2018 “Colonel Wetherall said that the Chinese suffered very little from ill-health; out of a total strength of some 93,000 Chinese in France, there were only about 1,500 in hospital.” ²⁶ In addition to those lost at sea, more than 2,000 died. Their tombs can be found in France, Flanders, and England, some in special cemeteries.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps were distributed in 500-strong companies, under British officers and Chinese foremen. The language barrier was a significant problem, for example when an American soldier said “let’s go,” which sounds like “GOU” in Chinese (meaning “dog”) it nearly caused a rebellion among Chinese labourers.²⁷ Many translators were hired, while efforts were conducted to recruit Chinese-speaking British officers. The latter’s number was small, not only because there were not that many Britons resident in China who had mastered the language but because most of those able and willing to serve sought to join a combat unit. British officers never saw their Chinese Labour Corps counterparts as true equals.²⁸

A typical schedule was ten working hours per day, seven days per week.²⁹ Although under military discipline and severe restrictions on their movement, to a certain extent resulting in segregation, authorities made efforts to accommodate some of their customs. An example was the free days they got during Chinese festivals.³⁰ An effort was made to facilitate postal communication with their families, despite censorship and the fact that many were illiterate. The resulting letters (up to fifty thousand per month) are a very useful source to learn about their roles, thoughts, and living conditions. The YMCA played a key role in their welfare, organizing recreational activities and literacy classes. Hong Kong- and US-educated James Yen created a 1,000-character vocabulary and the Chinese Workers’ Weekly, also writing many letters for illiterate labourers.³¹ As a result of various literacy drives, it is estimated that some two thirds of the members of the Chinese Labour Corps returned being able to read and write, albeit to a limited extent, whereas originally more than eighty percent were illiterate.³² Classes were so popular that they ran out of materials.³³

Their work was varied and ranged from unloading military supplies and handling ammunition to building barracks, digging trenches, and constructing fortifications. It even extended to agriculture and forest management.³⁴ The minutes of a meeting on “Chinese Labour in France,” held on January 18, 1918 at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister in the chair (and following a War Cabinet meeting on the same subject the day before), reveal that at first labour tended to be allocated to the different services from a central pool, but this gave way to the view that it was better to second at least a minimum to each department, so that, among others, the members of the Corps could specialize and achieve greater proficiency at a given kind of work, and their supervisors become more familiar with them. That was the position defended by Sir Eric Geddes, who explained that it was the system employed with the first seven thousand Chinese workers brought to France by the British Department of Transportation. General Travers Clarke supported the “desirability of keeping the same men at the same job,” adding that “it was done now at a considerable extent.” He spoke in favour of retaining a central pool, which, while compatible with the described specialization, allowed a measure of flexibility. Eric Geddes said that labour was “nobody’s child” and defended the permanent allocation of “a minimum number of men” to departments, so that “they could put in their interpreters and N.C.O.s and control would increase rather than diminish.” Sir Joseph MacLay and Sir Guy Granet concurred in these views of Eric Geddes.³⁵

Handling ammunition by the CLC	Building roads by CLC, to sustain industrial warfare on Western Front

While labouring long hours in uncomfortable and often hazardous jobs, their stay in Europe was for many their first opportunity to experience life not only outside China but beyond their village or province. As often happens, contact with a different reality prompted more than a few to question their country’s place in the world and to wonder how it could be changed. Contact with fellow citizens and with nationals from other Allied nations may have helped the members of the Chinese Labour Corps to develop a sense of national identity and of their country’s place in the world.³⁶ It should also be emphasized that, while originally intended to carry out unskilled tasks, members of the Chinese Labour Corps often ended up being responsible for much more complex tasks, even tank maintenance, overcoming the extensive prejudice that saw them as hard working but incapable of performing technologically-demanding jobs.³⁷

The British Government View: A Commodity? Yet a Valuable One

A look at British official documents reveals a dual view of the Chinese Labour Corps. On the one hand, its members often appear as little more than objects. They are referred to in terse terms, as if one was talking about a piece of equipment. On the other, the vital nature of their contribution to the war effort often appears openly, without any attempt to disguise it. This is clear even in the immediate post-war period, once the hostilities were over but the need for labour remained high. For example, the minutes of the December 4, 1918 meeting of the War Cabinet included an item devoted to the “Repatriation of Chinese coolies.” Faced with a proposal from the Ministry of Shipping to repatriate a number of workers, taking advantage of available space in two passenger ships, “the Adjutant-General said that he had taken this matter up with G.H.Q. in France, who were averse from the idea of repatriating Chinese coolies at the present time. There was a great deal of work to be done, e.g., handling cargo at the ports, upkeep of roads, filling up the shell-holes, and rolling up the barbed wire, for which civilian labour would have to be engaged if the Chinese were withdrawn.”³⁸ At the meeting, the British prime minister pointed out that while there was a shortage of labour in France, “the amount of work requiring this class of labour must have greatly diminished since the cessation of hostilities,” and it was decided to arrange the repatriation of five thousand Chinese workers, with a further five thousand to follow.³⁹ Thus, while essential, and openly recognized as such in official documents, the decision was made that Chinese workers, viewed as a temporary asset, were to be returned to their native country as soon as possible.

Direct Hiring and the End of the Comprador System: a Precedent for General Stilwell’s Training Drive?

At the same January 18, 1918 meeting referred to earlier, Colonel MacLaren Brown said that during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, with which he was familiar, “the recruiting and control of the Chinese was kept in the hands of the Compradors. The Railway Company dealt only with and through the Compradors.” While conceding that in that case “the Chinese understood the system and it worked well”, Colonel Brown explained that “in the case of the Chinese in Northern France they have been recruited on a different basis and under special conditions,” a reference to the system of individual contracts outlined earlier.⁴⁰

We can thus see how the Great War led to a change in the way Chinese labour was employed, dispensing with middlemen. During the Second World War, a similar change would take place to some extent in the military sphere. When training Chinese soldiers at Ramgarh (British India) from 1942, in an attempt to develop a number of modern, capable divisions, US General Joseph Stilwell accepted the recruits sent by the government of the Republic of China but insisted that they be paid individually, in a bid to prevent corruption by officers pocketing their men’s pay.⁴¹

Considering, and Rejecting, the Use of Chinese Troops

France did not just initiate the recruitment of Chinese workers. It also endeavoured to secure the deployment in the Western Front of Chinese troops,⁴² although the move was ultimately rejected by London and never took place. Even before the Chinese declaration of war, General Ferdinand Foch had argued for the need to get China to raise “pioneer battalions,” between 1,200 and 1,500 strong. In an August 11, 1917 secret report, he pointed out that, “given the population of China, the number of battalions which can be raised is theoretically limitless.” Foch asked Paris to press China to dispatch between seventy and eighty battalions. Such units, mostly officered by the Chinese themselves, would have undertaken construction and logistical work near and at the front, making it unnecessary to individually hire further Chinese workers.⁴³ France did not manage to persuade the United Kingdom, with the War Cabinet noting at its February 4, 1918 that “the Supreme War Council do not accept Joint Note No. 11 of the Permanent Military Representatives on the subject of Chinese battalions.”⁴⁴ Logistics did not seem to be the reason behind British opposition despite the shortage of Allied shipping and the unsuitability of Chinese vessels for oceanic voyages described in the same missive.⁴⁵

While not the focus of the paper, it should also be mentioned that a small number of Canadian citizens of Chinese origin volunteered and managed to be accepted for service, despite the refusal to enrol them in, for example, British Columbia. While sources estimate them at, at most, three hundred, ‘Those of Chinese origin who are known to have volunteered included Frederick Lee and Wee Hong Louie (enlisted in Kamloops), William Thomas Louie (Calgary), Tung On Hong (Sudbury), and Victor Fong (Quebec).’⁴⁶

The Ultimate Impact of China’s Contribution to the War Effort: Logistics, Frustration and Revolution

CLC recruits in Weihaiwei doing physical training before leaving for Europe (image)

As explained, life was not easy for the members of the Chinese Labour Corps, and a number made the ultimate sacrifice. On the positive side, however, they could acquire some savings, widen their horizons, and some gained a measure of literacy. Many went back home with the desire and ability to play a more meaningful role in the future of their country. The presence of Chinese in France did not end with the Great War, and included some key figures in Chinese communism who took part in the Work-Study Program, including Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. Deng lived in France from 1920 to 1925, where he became active in politics for the first time and joined the Chinese Communist Party.⁴⁷ Zhou was in the country from 1920 to 1924, playing a leading role among Chinese work-study students.⁴⁸

At the international level, the outcome of the First World War was frustrating for China. Despite being on the winning side and a participant in the Versailles Peace negotiations, China was unable to secure any significant gains. Japan, a more powerful and cohesive state which had entered the war earlier, pre-empted Chinese moves and succeeded Germany in securing rights in China and a number of Pacific Ocean islands. The 62-strong Chinese delegation was attacked following revelations of Japan’s confidential agreements with France, Great Britain and Italy, on the one hand, and Duan Qirui on the other. US President Wilson, originally sympathetic to China, agreed on April 30, 1919 with French PM Georges Clemenceau and British PM David Lloyd George to the transfer of all German rights in Shandong Province to Japan. This “flagrant denial of the new Wilsonian principles of open diplomacy and self-determination,” inflamed Chinese public opinion and prompted many protests.⁴⁹ Enraged, Chinese students in Paris surrounded the hotel where the Chinese delegation was staying in order to prevent it from signing the Peace Treaty as decided by the government in Beijing, which sent a telegram to that effect.⁵⁰ Mass demonstrations in Beijing on 4 May would give a name to a movement which sought to renew China and raise her to the position of equal among international powers. One of its immediate consequences was the emergence of a new standard for the written language, based on the modern Beijing dialect, which would replace classical Chinese..⁵¹ It would also lead to the creation of the Chinese Communist Party.

China’s intervention in the First World War, while contributing to the Allied victory, failed to secure for Beijing any significant geopolitical gains. Indeed, by boosting Japan and weakening the British Empire, it could even be argued that the war facilitated the later clash between the two Asian giants. In its wake, London put an end to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, sided with the United States, and started work on a new naval base in Singapore, designed to provide a measure of deterrence. The Great War, however, transformed the lives of many Chinese, both members of the Labour Corps and students and intellectuals at home, and helped reinforce the conviction that the country needed to become stronger and renew itself in order to be treated as an equal in the international sphere.⁵² It was yet another reminder, following less than a generation after the First Sino-Japanese War, that unlike Japan, China had not yet transformed itself into a modern nation state and gained a measure of recognition as an equal by the leading Western powers of the time.

Geopolitics, Public Diplomacy, and Soft Power: Competing Narratives.

The importance of commemorating the First World War and of highlighting their national contribution to the allied victory has not gone unnoticed in Beijing, New Delhi, or Tokyo. The fact that these three major Asian powers, competitors and often party to border disputes on land or at sea, fought on the same side in the Great War is a two-edged sword. It could have led to coordinated efforts and even have provided, in the case of China and Japan, a counter to other historical episodes, very much alive in popular memory, which act as major obstacles to a lasting peace. However, this does not seem to have been the case. China tends to see the Great War mainly in terms of having capped Japan’s successful move from colonialism target to colonial power, with Tokyo not just replacing Berlin in China and the Pacific, but decisively moving towards a paramount position in much of China.

Efforts at remembrance are also being made in the United Kingdom, where “The National Campaign for a Permanent Memorial to the Chinese Labour Corps of the First World War” was launched in August 2014⁵³, while initiatives in China include a documentary series by CCTV, introduced with a reminder that “An estimated 145,000 Chinese workers stood shoulder to shoulder with British and French soldiers during the conflict from 1914 to 1918. More than 20,000 of them were killed.”⁵⁴ A challenge as we commemorate the centenary of the Great War is to ensure it includes greater awareness of the contributions of the Chinese Labour Corps.

Alex Calvo is a guest professor at Nagoya University (Japan) and the author of ‘The Second World War in Central Asia: Events, Identity, and Memory’, in S. Akyildiz and R. Carlson eds., Social and cultural Change in Central Asia: The Soviet Legacy (London: Routledge, 2013).

Bao Qiaoni is an ECUPL (East China University of Political Science & Law) law undergraduate and exchange student (NUPACE Program) at Nagoya University (Japan) School of Law.

Notes:

Archival Materials

NA National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, UK.

SHAT Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Service historique de la défense, Château de Vincennes, Avenue de Paris, 94306 Vincennes cedex

USNA US National Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, 700

Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20408-0001, USA

Other Primary Sources

Huimin hetong zhaogonghetong惠民合同招工合同, Article 9.

Yingguo zhaogong hetong (Renjihetong) 英国招工合同（仁记合同）[The contract of British Recruitment], Article 12.

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Maillard, Domonique. 2009. “Diyici shijie dazhan qijian zaif aguo dezhong guolaogong” 第一次世界大战期间在法国的中国劳工[Chinese laborers in France during World War I]. Guojiguancha国际观察 [International Review]. No.2.

National Palace Museum. 2011. A Century of Resilient Tradition: Exhibition of the Republic of China’s Diplomatic Archives. Taipei: National Palace Museum.

Peng Zhiguo彭志国. April 1, 2014. “Yizhan huagong, bugai wangji de xuelei zhi ge” 一战华工，不该忘记的血泪之歌 [Chinese laborers in World War I，a song of blood and tears].Youpin优品 [Trading up]. No.4.

Pope, Stephen, Wheale, Elizabeth-Anne, and Robbins, Keith, eds. 1995. Dictionary of the First World War. New York: St.Martin’s Press.

Schwartz, Benjamin I. 1983. “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After.” In John King Fairbank, ed. The Cambridge History of China: Volume 12, Republican China 1912-1949, Part I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Sheridan, James E. 1983. “The warlord era: politics and militarism under the Peking government , 1916-1928.” In John King Fairbank, ed. The Cambridge History of China: Volume 12, Republican China 1912-1949, Part I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Song Enrong宋恩荣. 1989, 528. “Yanyangchu quanji”晏阳初全集[Complete works of Y.C. James Yen]. Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe湖南教育出版社　[Hunan education press]. Vol.2. As seen in XuGuoqi徐国琦. 2007, “Wenming de jiaorong—diyici shijie dazhan qijian de zaifa huagong”文明的交融—第一次世界大战期间的在法华工[Cultural fusion–Chinese laborers in France during the first World War]. Wuzhou chuanbo chubanshe五洲传播出版社.

Spence, Jonathan D. 1990. The Search for Modern China. New York: W W Norton and Company.

Stilwell, Joseph Warren. 1948. The Stilwell Papers. New York: William Sloane Associates Inc

“The Labour Corps of 1917-1918.” In The Long, Long Trail: the British Army in the Great War, undated, available here.

The National Campaign for a Permanent Memorial to the Chinese Labour Corps of the First World War, undated, available here.

Vancouver Public Library. 2012. “Chinese-Canadians in World War I (1914-1918).” In Chinese-Canadian Genealogy, available here.

Walker, James W. St. G. “Race and Recruitment in World War I: Enlistment of Visible Minorities in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.” Canadian Historical Review LXX I (1989)

Wang Jiading王家鼎. December 15, 1997. “Diyici shijie dazhan qijian huagong fufa”第一次世界大战期间华工赴法 [Chinese laborers who went to France during the first World War], Mingguochunqiu民国春秋. No.6.

Wang Jian王建. 2014, 33-36.“Diyici shijie dazhan qijian Shandong diquhuagong zhaomu”

第一次世界大战期间山东地区的华工招募 [Recruitment of Chinese laborers in Shandong Area during the First World War]. Anhui daxue shuoshi lunwen [安徽大学硕士论文].

Xu Guoqi徐国琦. 2007, 56–60. “Wenming de jiaorong—diyici shijie dazhan qijian dezai fahuagong”文明的交融—第一次世界大战期间的在法华工[Cultural fusion–Chinese laborers in France during the first World War]. Wuzhou chuanbo chubanshe五洲传播出版社.

Xu, Guoqi. 2011. Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Xu, Guoqi. 2011. China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yang, Jichen杨机臣. September 8, 2007. “Beiyi wangde 15wan zhongguo yizhanhuagong”被遗忘的中国一战华工[The forgotten Chinese laborers in the first World War]. Zhongguo zuojia中国作家Chinese writers.

Yao Na姚娜. September, 2011.”Yizhan qijian zhongguo zhengfu paiqian huagong fuou dongyinxi” . 一战期间中国政府派遣华工赴欧动因析. [Causes of Chinese government’s sending laborers to Europe during World War I]. Anhui ligong daxue xuebao (shehuikexueban) 安徽理工大学学报（社会科学版）[Journal of Anhui University of Science and Technology(Social Science)], Vol. 13. No. 3.

Yong, C. F. 1987. “The 1911 Revolution and the Kuomintang Movement in Malaya and Singapore, 1912-1925.” In Lee, L. T. ed. The 1911 Revolution: the Chinese in British and Dutch Southeast Asia. Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1987, 100.

Notes

¹ A. Calvo, “Japan and the Century Since World War I”, Shingetsu News Agency, 20 June 2014, available here.

² International academic conference of Chinese laborers during World War I, 2008. CCTV, 2009; CCTV, 2014. Deng Xiaojun 邓小军. February 15, 2009.

³ Yao Na 姚娜. September, 2011.

⁴ Sheridan 1983, 308.

⁵ These demands alarmed Western powers bent on keeping the balance of power in China. They also prompted a rift between the Kuomintang, radically opposed to the Yuan Shikai regime, and those organizations stressing unity in the face of Japanese expansionism. For the latter see Yong 1987, 100. Yao Na姚娜. September, 2011.

⁶ Text of the demands, 7 May 1915 ultimatum, and Chinese reply, reproduced in Michael Duffy, “Primary Documents – ’21 Demands’ Made by Japan to China, 18 January 1915”, FirstWorldWar.Com, 22 August 2009, available here.

⁷ Spence 1990, 289-290. Li Zhancai 李占才. October 3, 2011.

⁸ Sheridan 1983, 304.

⁹ Anthony B. Chan, Arming the Chinese: The Western Armaments Trade in Warlord China, 1920-28, (Vancouver-Toronto: UBCPress, 2010), p. 18.

¹⁰ Huang Yinghu 黄英湖. December, 2011.

¹¹ The Long, Long Trail. Undated.

¹² Xu Guoqi 徐国琦. 2007, 56–60.

¹³ Xu Guoqi 徐国琦. 2007, 56.

¹⁴ Pope et al. 1995.

¹⁵ Jones 1986, 108-09.

¹⁶ Chen Sanjing 陈三井.1986, 34—35.

¹⁷ Gu Xingqin 顾杏卿. 1937, 50.

¹⁸ RG165M1444 Roll 2, documents 2055-12, USNA.

¹⁹ Ermito and Liu 2013.

²⁰ Huang Yinghu 黄英湖. December, 2011.

²¹ Yangjichen 杨机臣. September 8, 2007. Domonique Maillard.2009.

²² They had been hired by the French and thus did not belong to the Chinese Labour Corps, which was a British organization.

²³ Deng Xiaojun 邓小军. February 15,2009.

²⁴ Li Zhancai 李占才. October 3, 2011.

²⁵ Peng Zhiguo 彭志国.April 1, 2014.

²⁶ CAB 23/8, NA.

²⁷ Song Enrong 宋恩荣. 1989, 528.

²⁸ Ermito and Liu 2013. Li Zhancai 李占才. October 3, 2011.

²⁹ Huiminhetongzhaogonghetong 惠民合同招工合同, Article 9.　Yingguozhaogonghetong(Renjihetong) 英国招工合同（仁记合同）[The contract of British Recruitment], Article 12.

³⁰ Xu Guoqi 徐国琦. 2007.

³¹ Spence 1990, 291-292.

³² Wang Jiading 王家鼎. December15, 1997.

³³ Xu 2011 A, 191-192.

³⁴ CAB 24/39, NA.

³⁵ CAB 24/39, NA.

³⁶ Xu 2011 A, 3.

³⁷ Xu Guoqi 徐国琦. 2007.

³⁸ CAB 23/8, NA.

³⁹ CAB 23/8, NA.

⁴⁰ CAB 24/39, NA.

⁴¹ “The U.S. Army insisted that the soldiers at Ramgarh be paid individually and by public roll call. The Chinese constantly agitated that the soldiers’ pay be turned over in a lump sum to the commanding officer of the units involved. This was the traditional channel of theft in the Chinese Army, and the U.S. Army refused.” Stilwell 1948, 213.

⁴² Xu 2011 B, 185.

⁴³ 16N2450, GQG, 6498, SHAT.

⁴⁴ CAB/23/5, NA.

⁴⁵ CAB/24/31, NA.

⁴⁶ Vancouver Public Library 2012. Walker 1989.

⁴⁷ Nora Wang, “Deng Xiaoping: The Years in France”, The China Quarterly, Volume 92, 1982, pp. 698-705.

⁴⁸ Paul Bailey, “The Chinese Work—Study Movement in France”, The China Quarterly, Volume 115, 1988, pp. 441-461, p. 442.

⁴⁹ Schwartz 1983, 407.

⁵⁰ A copy of the telegram from the delegation reporting on the failure to secure German rights in Shandong is available in National Palace Museum 2011, 134-135. On the other hand, China signed the Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Austria (Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Layle) and the Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Hungary (Treaty of Trianon) National Palace Museum 2011, 136-139.

⁵¹ De Francis 1984, 243-245.

⁵² Deng Xiaojun 邓小军. February 15,2009；　Wang Jian 王建. 2014, 33-36.

⁵³ The National Campaign, undated.

⁵⁴ CCTV 2009.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said following independent reports in support of Moscow’s intel and evidence on the Turkish scandal of oil trade with the ISIL Takfiri terrorist groups, it’s now President Erdogan’s turn to act on his words and resign.

Addressing a weekly press briefing in Moscow on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that her country’s information about smuggling of ISIL oil in Turkey has been confirmed by other sources now.

“For instance, Danish newspaper Klassenkampen has published report on Turkish participation in oil smuggling, which has been prepared by consulting company Rystad Energy,” she said.

The Spokesperson stressed that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had stated earlier that he would step down if ISIL oil smuggling would be confirmed, but Russia has presented evidence on Turkish partnership in the smuggling, implying that it’s now Erdogan’s turn.

“I would like to remind you that not too long ago, Turkish President announced his readiness to resign if it is proven that oil deliveries by Ankara or with the help of the government of Ankara from the terrorist group [are taking place], that ‘if this fact is proven, I’ll leave this chair,’ Erdogan told journalists on the sidelines of the climate summit in Paris. I’d like to understand: What’s up with that chair?” the Russian FM spokeswoman underlined.

“Russia is implementing all measures in countering oil smuggling by the ISIL and hopes that other countries will join in cooperating with Moscow,” Zakharova said.

“As you know, and we’ve said this constantly, Russia is implementing measures in order to stop and close the paths of oil deliveries by terrorists. We hope for active actual cooperation with other countries towards goals,” she added.

Earlier, the Russian defense ministry announced that Erdogan and his family members are directly involved in illegal oil deliveries from ISIL oil fields in Syria.

Turkey’s leadership, including president Erdogan and his family, is involved in illegal oil trade with ISIL militants, the Russian Defense Ministry had said, stressing that Turkey is the final destination for oil smuggled from Syria and Iraq.

Satellite and drone images showed hundreds and hundreds of oil trucks moving from ISIL-held territory to Turkey to reach their destination at Turkish refineries and ports controlled by Turkish president’s family.

According to 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe.

Major Cities in Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings.

Plans to Target People (“Population”) Violated International Legal Norms.

SAC Wanted a 60 Megaton Bomb, Equivalent to over 4,000 Hiroshima Atomic Weapons.

The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive www.nsarchive.org, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.

The SAC study includes chilling details. According to its authors,  their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and “friendly forces and people” to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout.  Moreover, the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw.  Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).

The National Security Archive, based at The George Washington University, obtained the study, totaling more than 800 pages, through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process (see sidebar).

The SAC document includes lists of more than 1100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base.  With the Soviet bomber force as the highest priority for nuclear targeting (this was before the age of ICBMs), SAC assigned priority one and two to Bykhov and Orsha airfields, both located in Belorussia. At both bases, the Soviet Air Force deployed medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers, which would have posed a threat to NATO allies and U.S. forces in Western Europe.

A second list was of urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction.”  SAC listed over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established.  Moscow and Leningrad were priority one and two respectively.  Moscow included 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) while Leningrad had 145, including “population” targets.  In both cities, SAC identified air power installations, such as Soviet Air Force command centers, which it would have devastated with thermonuclear weapons early in the war.

According to the study, SAC would have targeted Air Power targets with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons.  Exploding them at ground level, as planned, would have produced significant fallout hazards to nearby civilians.  SAC also wanted a 60 megaton weapon which it believed necessary for deterrence, but also because it would produce “significant results” in the event of a Soviet surprise attack. One megaton would be 70 times the explosive yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

*

SAC Nuclear Planning for 1959

SAC’s top priority for destruction was Soviet “air power” because of the apparent immediate threat that Soviet bombers posed to the continental United States and to U.S. forces in Europe and East Asia.   The report’s detailed introduction explained that the priority given to Air Power (BRAVO) targets dictated the surface bursting of high-yield thermonuclear weapons to destroy priority targets, including airbases in Eastern Europe.  That tactic would produce large amounts of radioactive fallout compared to bursting weapons in the air.  According to the study, “the requirement to win the Air Battle is paramount to all other considerations.”

The “greatly compressed time factor”—the danger of a speedy Soviet attack and counterattack– encouraged targeters to require the surface bursting of high-yield nuclear weapons. According to SAC, bursting the weapon in the air would “result in decrease of blast effect.” Detonating the weapon on or close to the ground would maximize blast effects, destroy the target, and disperse irradiated particles which would be picked up by winds and descend far and near.[1]

According to the study, SAC planners placed “prime reliance” on blast effects, finding that thermal and radiation effects were “relatively ineffective.”  As Lynn Eden has demonstrated in her study, Whole World on Fire, the Air Force’s World War II experience encouraged target planners to emphasize blast effects when they tried to estimate the damage that nuclear weapons would cause. The resulting “blast frame” of mind overlooked the significant devastation caused by other nuclear weapons effect such as radiation and mass fires. [2]

Believing that a “favorable decision may be reached in the initial stages” SAC thought it essential to achieve high levels of damage. Accordingly, target planners wanted to be sure that enough firepower was launched to assure a 90 percent chance of destroying targets in the airpower category: collapsing above-ground structures or cratering airbase runways and underground facilities.

SAC laid out the numbers and types of nuclear weapons  required to destroy each DGZ.  The nuclear weapons information is completely excised from the report making it impossible to know how many weapons SAC believed were necessary to destroy the various targets.   In any event, SAC could anticipate a very large stockpile of nuclear weapons by 1959 to target priority objectives.  This was a period when the nuclear weapons stockpile was reaching large numbers, from over 2400 in calendar 1955 to over 12,000 in calendar 1959 and reaching 22,229 in 1961.

The Air Power and Systematic Destruction lists were not final lists of targets for a military plan. Nuclear war planning was always in a state of change because new intelligence information would become available and change the understanding of which targets had greater priority.  It is clear that SAC anticipated further refinement of target lists.  The target study included language about the “nomination” of objectives in all of the areas, Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern European satellites, which were responsive to the goal of destroying air power and “war-making” capability.

Air Power Target System

SAC’s top priority for destruction, the Soviet bloc’s air power, was a complex target system.  Before the Soviet Union  acquired the atomic bomb and significant capability to deliver nuclear weapons at long distances,  SAC’s priority had been the destruction of the Soviet urban-industrial complex, but during the mid-1950s the “greatly compressed time factor” produced a reversal.[3]   In the SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, SAC broadly defined the “Air Power” target: air and missile bases for strategic  and tactical forces, defensive and offensive, but also government and military control centers that would direct the air battle and nuclear weapons storage sites, air industry, atomic industry, and petroleum-oil-lubricants (POL) storage areas.  To this extent, the Air Power category cut across some of the major categories of target systems that Pentagon planners had developed in the early 1950s: strategic nuclear (BRAVO category), conventional forces (ROMEO category), and urban-industrial (DELTA).[4]

Given the expansive definition of Air Power, this suggested that targets in major cities such as Moscow and Leningrad could be subjected to H-bomb attack because both were rich in air power targets. For example, according to the SAC study, the Moscow area had 12 airbases. None of them were even in the top 400 airbases on the list so they may not have been attacked immediately, but Moscow had other potentially higher priority targets: 7 Air Force storage areas, 1 Air Force military control, 1 government control (presumably Kremlin and vicinity), 4 guided missile entities (R&D, production), 5 atomic energy research centers, 11 airframe entities, 6 aircraft engine entities, 2 liquid fuel plants, and 16 liquid fuel storage areas, including refineries. Moreover Moscow had a variety of other non-air military objectives, such as an Army military headquarters, Army and Navy military storage areas, and biological warfare research centers that might have been deemed worthy of attack at the opening of the war.

Leningrad was also a prime candidate for high-yield nuclear weapons aimed at air power targets.  It had 12 airbases in the vicinity, as well as such installations as: 1 air frame , 1 aircraft engine, 2 atomic energy research, 2 guided missiles, 3 liquid fuel, 1 Air Force military control, and 4 Air Force military storage areas.

At the heart of the Air Power target system were bases for bombers, missiles, and air defenses. The SAC Atomic Weapons Requirement Study listed alphabetically over 1100 air fields, with a priority number assigned to each. As noted earlier, the number one and number two priority bases on the list were in Belarus—Bykhov and Orsha (a.k.a. Balbasova)—as were four others in the top 20:  Baranovichi, Bobruysk (or Babruysk), Minsk/Machulische, and Gomel/Prybytki. Seven of the top 20 were in the Ukraine:  Priluki (Pryluky), Poltava, Zhitomir/Skomorokhi, Stryy, Melitpol, Melitpol, and Khorol.  Six were in Russia: Pochinok (Shatalovo), Seshcha, Ostrov (Gorokhov), Soltsy, Spassk Dalniy, and Vozdenzhenka.  One airfield, Tartu (number 13 in priority), was in Estonia.

Declassified CIA documents suggest why Bykhov and Orsha had such high prominence on the target list.  Months before the list was prepared, the CIA’s Current Intelligence Bulletin published an article indicating “Western” military attachés had seen Bison (M-4) jet bombers at Bykhov and possibly also at Orsha, although uncertainty existed as to whether the espied aircraft were Badger [Tu-16] or Bison bombers.  In fact, Orsha was becoming a site for Badger bombers, which were slated for strike missions in nearby theaters, such as Western Europe, where they would have posed a threat to NATO allies and U.S. forces. Despite Washington’s fears, the M-4 could not reach the United States on two-way missions (it lacked the technology for aerial refueling), but multiple flyovers of Red Square during a 1954 military parade created fears of a “bomber gap” in Washington.  Bykhov was a base for Badger bombers but later became prominent as a base for medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) so it was sure to remain a high priority target [5]

The 3M (Bison-B), successor to the M-4 and the Tu-95M (Bear), gave the Soviets their “first real intercontinental capability.”  The Bear was becoming operational, although it had significant technical problems.  The Soviet air force deployed Bears at only a handful of bases, but they were among the top 100 airfields targeted by SAC—for example, Mozdok (number 34) and Semipalitinsk (number 69).[6]

According to the SAC study, each airfield was one DGZ [designated ground zero].  Some targets, however, appeared in the war plans of more than one command. For SAC some element of duplication was “desirable and necessary” to assure the destruction of urgent targets in the event that one command or the other could not destroy them.  Therefore, the duplications were “confined to higher priority air fields.”

The “Final Blows”

If fighting continued once the air power battle was over, the second phase of the war was to be the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc war-making potential. The “final blows” in the bombing campaign would strike “basic industries”—those industries and economic activities which most contributed to war-making capability. This was consistent with Air Force ideas dating back to World War II and earlier that the destruction of key nodes in a society’s industrial fabric could  cause its collapse. Toward that end, SAC would drop atomic bombs, not H-bombs, on large numbers of specific installations in designated urban-industrial areas.

General Curtis LeMay, Commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command when SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 was prepared. [Photo source: U.S. National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG 342B, Box 507 B&W]

As the SAC  study indicates, Mark 6 (B and C) atomic bombs, implosion weapons with explosive yields of up to 160 kilotons—some eight times the yield of the “Fat Man” weapon which destroyed Nagasaki—were assigned to the “systematic destruction” mission.   The explosive yields of these bombs were likely to exceed by far the requirements of destroying specific targets in the systematic destruction mission, such as power plants or transportation nodes.[7]

Moscow, the number one urban target, had around 180 installations slated for destruction; some were in the air power category, but many involved a variety of industrial activities, including factories producing machine tools, cutting tools, oil extraction equipment, and a most vital medicine: penicillin.  Other targets involved significant infrastructural functions: locks and dams, electric power grids, railroad yards, and repair plants for railroad equipment. SAC might not have targeted each installation with a bomb but may have used the concept of “target islands” whereby adjacent installations were targeted at a central aiming point.  SAC may have assigned more than one weapon to large industrial complexes, however, because they were regarded as several installations.

What is particularly striking in the SAC study is the role of population targeting.  Moscow and its suburbs, like the Leningrad area, included distinct “population” targets (category 275), not further specified.  So did all the other cities recorded in the two sets of target lists. In other words, people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed.   What the specific locations of these population targets were cannot now be determined. The SAC study includes the Bombing Encyclopedia numbers for those targets, but the BE itself remains classified (although under appeal).

The SAC study does not include any explanation for population targeting, but it was likely a legacy of earlier Air Force and Army Air Force thinking about the impact of bombing raids on civilian morale. For example, in a 1940 Air Corps Tactical School lecture, Major Muir Fairchild argued that an attack on a country’s economic structure “must be to so reduce the morale of the enemy civilian population through fear—of death or injury for themselves or loved ones, [so] that they would prefer our terms of peace to continuing the struggle, and that they would force their government to capitulate.” Thinking along those lines continued into the post-war period when social scientists studied the possible impact of nuclear bombing on civilian morale.[8]

Whatever SAC planners had in mind, attacks on civilian population per se were inconsistent with the standards followed by Air Force leaders.  While they were willing to accept mass civilian casualties as a consequence of attacking military targets, as was the case during the Korea War, they ruled out “intentional” attacks on civilians.  Moreover, attacks on populations violated international legal norms of the day, which were summarized in the then-unratified Hague rules on aerial warfare (1923).  Nevertheless, such targeting rules were not in force until the 1977 agreement on the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention (1949). The United States, however, has consistently refused to accept claims that the targeting standards of the Additional Protocols apply to the use of nuclear weapons.[9]

The “systematic destruction” category would be struck with atomic weapons only. As suggested, that might not have made much difference for cities like Moscow and Leningrad which had numerous air power targets, along with the surrounding population, which may well have already been destroyed with thermonuclear weapons.  This planning occurred years before U.S. defense officials decided that there should be a “withhold” option to spare Moscow in order to leave someone to negotiate with.

How long, and to what extent, SAC planners followed  war plan with major phases of Air Power and Systematic Destruction is  unclear.   The priority given to Air Power priority posited the thermonuclear destruction of relevant military targets in Moscow and Leningrad, but that implied the simultaneous devastation of any nearby installations that had been slated for “Systematic Destruction” at a later stage of the conflict.  Whether SAC officers saw that as a problem or not, by the late 1950s, Pentagon planners were thinking in terms of an “optimum mix” war plan which sought rapid, but simultaneous, destruction of important military and urban-industrial targets, although giving priority to the Air Power target system in terms of numbers of DGZs.[10]

Eastern European Targets

The SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 stipulated that with exceptions SAC would use lower-yield atomic bombs against targets in Eastern Europe.  Apparently this was for “political” and “psychological” reasons, to differentiate those countries from the Soviet Union through somewhat less destructive bombing. The exception was air power targets: because of the primacy of that category, such targets in Eastern Europe were scheduled to be destroyed by high-yield thermonuclear weapons.  For example, according to the SAC target list, Brieg and Modlin airfields, located near Warsaw, were 31^st and 80^th in priority respectively.  Tokol airport near Budapest was 125^th in priority, therefore a likely target.  Thus, urban populations in Eastern Europe would be exposed to the fallout and other effects of thermonuclear weapons, eroding much of the distinction between targets in that region and targets in the Soviet Union itself.

East Germany was the site of major Soviet airbases and East Berlin itself was a target for “systematic destruction.”  A sampling of the SAC airfields list finds more than a few Soviet-operated installations among the top 200, with some not very far from Berlin. Among them were Briesen (number 140), Gross Dolln (Templin) (number 70), Oranienberg (number 95), Welzow (number 96), Werneuchen (Verneuchen) (number 82).  For example, Oranienberg, which was then a base for Il-28 (Beagle) bombers, is only 22 miles (34 kilometers) north of Berlin. Gross Dolln (Templin), originally a base for Il-28 bombers and later for Soviet fighter aircraft, is 55 miles (66 kilometers) north of Berlin. Werneuchen (number 82), a base for interceptors and fighter/bombers, is about 22 miles (33 kilometers) northeast.  Presumably those bases would have been targeted with thermonuclear weapons which could have subjected the Berlin area to tremendous danger, including radiation hazards.

East Berlin had a priority ranking of 61 in the list of urban-industrial slated for “systematic destruction.”  The SAC study identified 91 DGZs in East Berlin and its suburbs: a wide range of industries and infrastructural activities including electric power, railroad yards, liquid fuel storage, machine tools, and radio and television stations.  In addition, East Berlin and its suburbs included “population” targets, as did Warsaw (target priority 62.) The atomic bombing of East Berlin and its suburbs would very likely have produced fire storms, among other effects, with disastrous implications for West Berlin.   Whether SAC conducted studies on the vulnerability of West Berlin to the effects of nuclear attacks on East Berlin or in other East German targets is unknown.

China

Whether China was fighting on the Soviet side or not in a war, SAC treated it as part of the Soviet bloc and listed Chinese airfields and cities in the target lists, including Beijing. Of the list of targets scheduled for “systematic destruction,” Beijing [Peiping in Wade-Giles transliteration] was in the top 20 (number 13) with 23 DGZs.  The list included several Air Power targets, including two Air Force military control centers and two Air Force storage areas. The location of those installations suggests that Beijing would have been targeted with thermonuclear weapons early in the war. For Beijing and its suburban district Fengtai, SAC identified various infrastructural and military DGZs, including “Population” targets.

Target Lists

SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 provides two target lists. The Department of Energy has excised the numbers and types of weapons assigned to various DGZs in both of them but some general information about them has been declassified. The first list, Part I, consisted of 3400 DGZs—the “SAC Target System,” which suggested that it was the sum total of all targets then considered to be eligible.  The list was “unrestricted” apparently because  a large supply of fissionable material would be available for the weapons assigned to the targets    Taking into account duplicate targets in the Air Power category, the attack plan would have required more than 3400 weapons but that number remains classified.

The second list, Part II, consisted of 1209 DGZs targeted by a larger but classified number of nuclear weapons.  Part of the description for part II is excised so the reasoning behind it  cannot be explained, but it was a “restricted” target list.  According to the study, the “weapons are programmed against targets on the basis of 69,000 [kilograms] of oralloy equivalent (76 tons US).”  Oralloy [Oak Ridge alloy] was a term of art for highly-enriched uranium. “Oralloy equivalent” may refer to the total amount of HEU and plutonium (PU) that was available to fuel the atomic bombs and H-bombs slated to inflict the desired level of destruction.  Seventy-six tons conveys the significant quantities of fissile material required for the atomic bombs and the first generation of two-stage thermonuclear weapons.

The 3400 and 1209 DGZs in the unrestricted and restricted lists are worth comparing with the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the war plan prepared in 1960 by the SAC-controlled Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff.  If the U.S. had strategic warning of a Soviet attack, it would preemptively strike with a full force of 3500 weapons against an “optimum mix” of 1050 DGZs, including strategic air, missile bases, air defenses, and 151 urban-industrial targets. Attrition and multiple weapons against priority targets accounted for the discrepancy between the number of weapons and the number of DGZs.[11]

Delivery Systems

To deliver the weapons to targets, SAC would use bombs and missiles. For bomber delivery systems, SAC would use B-47s, based in the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Spain, and intercontinental B-52s, which were just beginning to be deployed in the continental U.S.

SAC listed four missile types for delivering nuclear warheads: the Snark, the Rascal, the Cross Bow, and IRBM [Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile].  The Snark, an early intercontinental ground-launched cruise missile, was only briefly deployed, during 1959, because it was a fiasco (areas in the Atlantic Oceans where the missiles crashed were called “Snark infested waters”).  The Rascal (replaced by the Hound Dog in 1958) and Cross Bow were both bomber-launched missiles, with the Crossbow targeting radars.

President Eisenhower had made IRBMs, along with ICBMs, a national priority, but in 1956 the IRBM was still projected for the future. With a range of up to 1700 miles (1500 n.m.), deployment overseas would be necessary and the Air Force envisaged stationing them in the United Kingdom, although talks with the British had yet to begin. The Air Force would eventually deploy liquid-fueled Thor IRBMs in the United Kingdom during 1960-1963, while Jupiter missiles were stationed in Italy and Turkey during 1961-1963 (removed as part of the Cuban Missile crisis settlement).[12]

SAC also identified the atomic bombs and the thermonuclear weapons that would be mated to the delivery systems.  They would be Mark 6 (B and C) atomic weapons and Mark 15, 27, and 36 thermonuclear weapons. The latter had extraordinarily massive explosive yields: MK 15: 1.6 to 3.9 megatons; MK 27: 2 megatons, and MK 36: 9 to 10 megatons.  These compare with the size of the U.S. nuclear tests in Operation Castle during 1954, in which actual explosive yields (not counting one fizzle) ranged from 1.7 to 15 megatons.

SAC wanted a 60-megaton bomb, but it was not programmed for this particular study.  According to SAC, it was “essential, not only as a deterrent but also to ensure significant results even with a greatly reduced force in the event of a Soviet surprise attack.”  Discussion of ultra-high yield thermonuclear weapons continued during the 1950s and early 1960s so the concept of 60 megatons was not out of the ordinary in Air Force circles.  Indeed, in a moment of enthusiasm Edward Teller proposed a 10-gigaton device, and in the early 1960s, in another outburst, he suggested yields up to a 1,000 megatons. A 25-megaton bomb, the B-41, had the largest yield of any weapon in the U.S. stockpile and it stayed in service until the 1970s.  The Soviets staged the largest nuclear test in history in late October 1961 with the 50-megaton “Tsar bomba.”

Interpretative Problems 

Using the category code table in the SAC study it is possible to go to the list of cities slated for the systematic destruction mission and determine how many installations and of what type SAC had in mind.  For whatever reason, the two restricted and unrestricted target lists are not quite identical; for example, with respect to Moscow, there are minor variations in the types and numbers of installations itemized in the restricted and unrestricted target lists.  A larger puzzle has to do with targets itemized at the beginning of the catalogs for the various cities identified in each of the two lists.  For example, the beginning of the Moscow targets section in the unrestricted list includes 13 sets of numbers, beginning with 5545-03737, without category codes.

By contrast, the beginning of the Moscow target section in the restricted target list includes 7 sets of such numbers.  Presumably, the numbers are from the Bombing Encyclopedia, but what they mean is uncertain. The same pattern can be found in other city listings.  Also unclear are the letters in the DGZ [Designated Ground Zeroes] column; for example, at the beginning of the Moscow list above, A, AH, AM, AN, etc.

Archival location of the SAC study: U.S. National Archives, College Park, Record Group 242, Operational Planning, box 147, file B 89351

Note to readers:

Apparently the original version of SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 was published as a compendium of spread-sheets.  To process this study for declassification, the National Archives and Records Administration scanned it so that the information would fit on 8 by 11 inch sheets of paper. To make this highly compressed PDF legible the reader will need to expand it to at least 150 percent of the text size.  Excerpts from this huge study, which is about 800 pages in length, are presented below. For ease of use, the document has been broken down into sections, as separate PDFs, as follows:

1. Title page, table of Contents and introduction.
2. Part 1 Unrestricted Allocation 22 and Cross-reference list [excerpts]
3. Category code list
4. Airfield list with weapons [excerpts]
5. Complex list with weapons [excerpts]
6. Part II Restricted allocation [1209 DGZ’s] with airfields list and weapons [complete list]
7. Complex List with Weapons [excerpts]
8. IV Tabular Presentation [As Outlined in Annex “C,“ Appendix SM 129-56]:
   1. Atomic Weapons Requirements and Summary [PDF 1-6]
   2. Desired Stockpile Composition [PDF 7-11]
   3. Part I Telescoped Summary [PDF 12-13]
   4. Part II Telescoped Summary [PDF 14-15]

Notes

Thanks to Michael Dobbs for his original MDR request and his suggestions about the posting, to Scott Sharon for his quantitative analysis of installations in major cities slated for targeting, to Gregory Grave for reviewing the numbers, to Steve Paschke for additonal help with the spread sheets, and to Lynn Eden, Alex Wellerstein, and Stephen Schwartz for invaluable advice and comments.

[1] .   The study’s authors mistakenly asserted that “worldwide contamination is minimized when the surface burst is utilized.” The anonymous authors may not have been scientists, but in light of the 1954 Castle Bravo test, which spread radioactive debris globally, they should have known better.

[2] .  Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

[3] .  For targeting during the early 1950s and changes in priorities, see David A. Rosenberg, “A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End Of Two Hours”: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954-1955,” International Security 6 (1981/82), 3-38.

[4] .  For useful background on developments in SAC targeting during the 1950s, see Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015), especially chapter four, “The Fantastic Compression of Time,” at pages 77-107.

[5] .  Steven J. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 24; Oleg Bukharin, Pavel Podvig, et al., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 342.

[6] . Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword, 29.

[7] .   For World War II bombing concepts, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[8]. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 31, 214.  On population targeting, see also Jeffrey Richelson, “Population Targeting and U.S. Strategic Doctrine,” in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 234-249.

[9] .  Matthew Evangelista and Henry Shue, eds., The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms from Flying Fortresses to Drones (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 36-37, 39, 58-60, and 62-63; David A. Rosenberg, “Nuclear War Planning,” in Michael E. Howard et al., The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 165.

[10] .   David A. Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945-1960,” 7 International Security (1983) 3-71.  For JCS thinking in terms of a two-phase attack plan, see Kaplan, To Kill Nations, 98.

[11] .  Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill,” 6.  See also Kaplan, To Kill Nations, 99, without citing source for numbers of weapons and targets.

[12] .  For the history of the U.S. IRBM program, see Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

The wars stoked up by American and European imperialism in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to what could possibly be the largest refugee crisis in human history, with the number of people forced to flee their homes “exceeding 60 million for the first time,” the United Nations said last week.

Over a million of those refugees sought asylum in Europe, the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported Monday.

“2015 will be remembered as a year of human suffering and migrant tragedies,” William Lacy Swing, the director general of the IOM, said in a statement.

Swing noted that more than 5,000 refugees had died while fleeing, including 3,692 who drowned in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, while “millions have been made into scapegoats and become the targets of xenophobic policies and alarmist rhetoric.”

Eleven more refugees, including three children, died Tuesday after their wooden boat capsized in the Aegean Sea. The route from Turkey to Greece across the Mediterranean Sea has become “the deadliest route for migrants on our planet,” according to the UN.

More than a third of refugees entering Europe are children. The Save the Children charity issued a sharply worded response to the latest figures, declaring that “Europe is doing too little to protect and help vulnerable refugee children and stop families drowning on our shores.” It declared, “When children are dying on our doorstep we need to take bolder action. There can be no bigger priority.”

Commenting on the figures, António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said, “It’s clear humanitarian actors are no longer able to provide the minimum support both in relation to core protection and lifesaving activities.”

“If you become a refugee today your chances of going home are lower than at any time in more than 30 years,” declared Guterres. Only 124,000 international refugees returned in 2014, down from a million 10 years ago.

Having made “human rights” the watchword for bombing and plundering helpless countries, the Western powers stand exposed by the refugee crisis as completely indifferent to these same “human rights” when it comes to their own borders. Instead of providing aid and assistance to the thousands of people drowning on their shores, they are using the refugee crisis as a pretense to further escalate the drive to war and attack on democratic rights at home.

The German government, which has sought to posture as a supporter of refugees, has vastly expanded deportations while slashing social assistance to refugees. The country deported 18,363 people in 2015, nearly double the number deported in the previous year and up from 7,651 in 2012. A further 190,000 people currently reside in Germany whose applications for asylum have been denied, and live in constant fear of deportation. Behind the scenes, the German government is making plans to use the military to carry out mass deportations next year.

German authorities have spearheaded the drive by the EU to work out an agreement to pay Turkey some $3 billion to stop refugees from the Middle East from entering Europe via a land route. Some 2.2 million people have fled to Turkey, where they have been prevented from entering Europe and kept in abhorrent conditions in refugee camps.

With most land routes into Europe closed off, refugees seeking to flee to Europe have been forced to make the perilous journey by sea onto the Greek islands over the tempestuous Aegean. Some 816,752 people have arrived by this route, compared to only about 30,000 who traveled by land, a testament to the brutal effectiveness of the EU’s attempts to seal its external borders.

Greece’s Syriza-led government, which in its election campaign this year sought to pander to the altruistic pro-refugee sentiments of Greek workers, has, together with its total capitulation to the austerity demands of European officials, acquiesced to its role as a border guard for the larger European powers.

To this end, the Greek Island of Lesbos, the birthplace of the lyric poet Sappho, has been turned into a giant internment camp. Some 450,000 refugees arrived in Lesbos this year, more than five times the number of island’s permanent inhabitants. Over 4,000 arrived on Monday alone.

The island is the site of the EU’s first refugee “hot spot,” a sanitized term used to describe what is little more than a concentration camp. Under police guard and surrounded by barbed wire, refugees are kept in squalid conditions.

Reuters, which was allowed to visit the “hot spot” but denied permission to take photographs, described the deplorable conditions facing refugees. “As night falls and temperatures drop to about 6 degrees Celsius (43 Fahrenheit) or lower, groups of people huddle among piles of suitcases, burning pieces of cardboard to keep warm. The dusty plot of land turns to mud each time it rains.” Greece has promised the EU it would set up four more such miserable camps.

The one million refugees who have managed to enter Europe are among the five million people who have been newly displaced this year, according to figures released by the United Nations last week. This was on top of the 59.5 million who were displaced by the end of 2014.

But the UN figures cover only the first half of the year, before the enormous spike in people fleeing the Syrian Civil war as a result of intensified intervention by the Western powers. This means that the number of people displaced worldwide could hit over 70 million in 2015 once the figures are updated.

Fully half of those crossing the Mediterranean this year were refugees from Syria. Those fleeing the war in Afghanistan accounted for 20 percent, while those fleeing Iraq accounted for 7 percent. Thus, more than three quarters of those seeking refuge in Europe are seeking to escape wars directly stoked up by US and European imperialism in the Middle East.

The European powers have pledged to intensify their crackdown in the New Year. This month, The European Commission announced plans to double the funding and personnel of Frontex, the EU border patrol agency. It vowed to further militarize the organization, creating a force of “rapid intervention troops” provided with their own ships and helicopters to intercept and turn back refugees.

In his seminal ‘Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization,’ Bryan Ward-Perkins writes, “Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever… They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”

The Empire of Chaos, today, is not about complacency. It’s about hubris – and fear. Ever since the start of the Cold War the crucial question has been who would control the great trading networks of Eurasia – or the “heartland”, according to Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861–1947), the father of geopolitics.

Russia says Turkish leadership involved in illegal oil trade with #ISIS https://t.co/0tt7cvgyrh pic.twitter.com/4ggMhPdIDI

— RT (@RT_com) December 2, 2015

We could say that for the Empire of Chaos, the game really started with the CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953, when the US finally encountered, face to face, that famed Eurasia crisscrossed for centuries by the Silk Road(s), and set out to conquer them all.

Only six decades later, it’s clear there won’t be an American Silk Road in the 21st century, but rather, just like its ancient predecessor, a Chinese one. Beijing’s push for what it calls “One Belt, One Road” is inbuilt in the 21st century conflict between the declining empire and Eurasia integration. Key subplots include perennial NATO expansion and the empire’s obsession in creating a war zone out of the South China Sea.

As the Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership analyses it, the oligarchic elites who really run the Empire of Chaos are bent on the encirclement of Eurasia – considering they may be largely excluded from an integration process based on trade, commerce and advanced communication links.

Beijing and Moscow clearly identify provocation after provocation, coupled with relentless demonization. But they won’t be trapped, as they’re both playing a very long game.

Russian President Vladimir Putin diplomatically insists on treating the West as “partners”. But he knows, and those in the know in China also know, these are not really “partners”. Not after NATO’s 78-day bombing of Belgrade in 1999. Not after the purposeful bombing of the Chinese Embassy. Not after non-stop NATO expansionism. Not after a second Kosovo in the form of an illegal coup in Kiev. Not after the crashing of the oil price by Gulf petrodollar US clients. Not after the Wall Street-engineered crashing of the ruble. Not after US and EU sanctions. Not after the smashing of Chinese A shares by US proxies on Wall Street. Not after non-stop saber rattling in the South China Sea. Not after the shooting down of the Su-24.

It’s only a thread away

A quick rewind to the run-up towards the downing of the Su-24 is enlightening. Obama met Putin. Immediately afterwards Putin met Khamenei. Sultan Erdogan had to be alarmed; a serious Russian-Iranian alliance was graphically announced in Teheran. That was only a day before the downing of the Su-24.

France’s Hollande met Obama. But then Hollande met Putin. Erdogan was under the illusion he fabricated the perfect pretext for a NATO war, to be launched following Article 5 of the NATO Charter. Not by accident failed state Ukraine was the only country to endorse – in haste – the downing of the Su-24. Yet NATO itself recoiled – somewhat in horror; the empire was not ready for nuclear war.

At least not yet. Napoleon knew history turns on a slender thread. As much as Cold War 2.0 remains in effect we were, and will remain, just a thread away from nuclear war.

Whatever happens in the so-called Syrian peace process the proxy war between Washington and Moscow will continue. Hubristic US Think-Tank Land  can’t see it any other way.

For Exceptionalist neocons and neoliberalcons alike, the only digestible endgame is a partition of Syria. The Erdogan system would gobble up the north. Israel would gobble up the oil-rich Golan Heights. And House of Saud proxies would gobble up the eastern desert.

Russia literally bombed all these elaborate plans to ashes because the next step after partition would feature Ankara, Riyadh – and a “leading from behind” Washington – pushing a Jihadi Highway all the way north to the Caucasus as well as Central Asia and Xinjiang (there are already at least 300 Uyghurs fighting for ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.) When all else fails, nothing like a Jihadi Highway plunged as a dagger in the body of Eurasia integration.

In the Chinese front, whatever “creative” provocations the Empire of Chaos may come up with, they won’t derail Beijing’s aims in the South China Sea – that vast basin crammed with unexplored oil and gas wealth and prime naval highway to and from China. Beijing is inevitably configuring itself by 2020 as a formidable haiyang qiangguo – a naval power.

Washington may supply $250 million in military “aid” to Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia for the next two years, but that’s mostly irrelevant. Whatever “creative” imperial ideas would have to take into account, for instance, the DF-21D “carrier killer” ballistic missile, with a 2,500 km range and capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

On the economic front, Washington-Beijing will remain prime proxy war territory. Washington pushes the TPP – or NATO on trade pivoting to Asia? It’s still a Sisyphean task, because the 12 member nations need to ratify it, not least the US featuring an extremely hostile Congress.

Against this American one-trick pony, Xi Jinping, for his part, is deploying a complex three-pronged strategy; China’s own counterpunch to the TPP, the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP); the immensely ambitious “One Belt, One Road”; and the means to finance a tsunami of projects, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) – the Chinese counter-punch to the World Bank and the US-Japan-controlled Asian Development Bank (ADB).

For Southeast Asia, for instance, the numbers tell the story. Last year, China was the top ASEAN partner, to the tune of $367 billion. This will grow exponentially with One Belt, One Road – which will absorb $200 billion in Chinese investment up to 2018.

Heart of Darkness – revisited

Prospects for Europe are nothing but bleak. French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar has been one of the few who identified the crux of the problem. A jihadi reserve army across Europe will continue to feed on batallions of excluded youth in poor inner cities. There is no evidence EU neoliberalcons will be fostering sound socio-economic policies to extract these alienated masses from the ghettos, employing new forms of socialization.

So the escape route will continue to be a virus-like version of Salafi-jihadism, sold by wily, PR-savvy profiteers as a symbol of resistance; the only counter-ideology available on the market. Khosrokhavar defined it as the neo-umma – an “effervescent community that never existed historically”, but now openly inviting any young European, Muslim or otherwise, afflicted by an identity crisis.

In parallel, on our way into a full 15 years of the endless neocon war against independent states in the Middle East, the Pentagon will be turbo-charging an unlimited expansion of some of its existing bases – from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan – into “hubs”.

From sub-Saharan Africa to Southwest Asia, expect a hub boom, all of them merrily hosting Special Forces; the operation was described by Pentagon supremo Ash “Empire of Whining” Carter as “essential”;

“Because we cannot predict the future, these regional nodes – from Moron, Spain to Jalalabad, Afghanistan – will provide forward presence to respond to a range of crises, terrorist and other kinds. These will enable unilateral crisis response, counter-terror operations, or strikes on high-value targets.”

It’s all here: unilateral Exceptionalistan in action against anyone who dares to defy imperial diktats.

From Ukraine to Syria, and all across MENA (Middle East and North Africa), the proxy war between Washington and Moscow, with higher and higher stakes, won’t abate. Imperial despair over the irreversible Chinese ascent also won’t abate. As the New Great Game picks up speed, and Russia supplies Eurasian powers Iran, China and India with missile defense systems beyond anything the West has, get used to the new normal; Cold War 2.0 between Washington and Beijing-Moscow.

I leave you with Joseph Conrad, writing in Heart of Darkness:

“There is a taint of death, a flavor or mortality in lies….To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe….We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories…”

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of “Globalistan” (2007), “Red Zone Blues” (2007), “Obama does Globalistan” (2009) and “Empire of Chaos” (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is “2030”, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.

Zahran Alloush, the commander of the Jaysh al-Islam alliance was killed in a Damascus suburb. August 21, 2013 the Saudi intelligence asset Alloush was commanding Liwa-al-Islam when he gave the order to launch the chemical weapons attack against the East Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Zahran Alloush has been on the payroll of Saudi intelligence since the 1980s.

The Central Command of the Syrian Arab Army confirmed that it successfully launched an air strike in the Damascus suburb of Otaya, targeting and killing several Jihadist commanders.

Among them the leader of Jaysh al-Islam, Zahran Alloush. Jaysh al-Islam is an alliance of several Jihadist militia, including Liwa-al-Islam. Jaysh al-Islam is allied with the Syrian Al-Qaeda Franchise Jabhat Al-Nusrah.

An in-depth investigation by nsnbc international, in 2013, concluded that Zahran Alloush was the commander who gave the direct order to launch the chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta on August 21, 2013.

The investigation also concluded that command responsibility for Alloush’s decision led directly to the U.S.’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House, and to the Saudi government.

(Pictured right: Jaysh al-Islam and Liwa-al-Islam Commander and Chemical Waeapon Expert Zahran Alloush has been working for Saudi Intelligence since the 1980s)

Alloush would also be in control over choosing the “security guards” UN inspectors had to submit to while gathering evidence after the chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta. (see details and names in the report).

Zahran Alloush, Liwa-al-Islam and Saudi intelligence also played central roles in the attempt to obstruct Syria’s decommissioning of chemical weapons by launching attacks against chemical weapons transports. The information about these transports was highly classified, leading the Syrian government to the conclusion that Saudi intelligence provided information to Liwa-al-Islam.

Zahran Alloush was since the 1990s involved in the Salafist – Wahabbist terrorist networks in Syria which led to his arrest by Syrian intelligence. He was released in early of 2011, when the Assad administration granted a general amnesty. Immediately after his March 2011 release from prison, Zahran Alloush began receiving substantial funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence, which enabled him to establish Liwa-al-Islam as a de facto Saudi Arabia sponsored mercenary brigade under the auspices of the Saudi Interior Ministry.

The Saudi intelligence assets Alloush and Liwa-al-Islam also played crucial roles in the demise of the predominantly Qatari and Turkish backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other, predominantly Qatari-backed insurgencies. In June 2013 in the Jobar district of Damascus, for example, Alloush withdrew his Liwa-al-Islam troops during a major battle with the Syrian Arab Army without announcing the sudden withdrawal to the Qatar-sponsored First Brigade and the Liwa Jaish al-Muslimeen. Both brigades were literally wiped out by the Syrian Army.

The air strike that exterminated Zahran Alloush also exterminated one of the primary field commanders who were responsible for the transition from the primacy of Muslim Brotherhood linked insurgencies to Al-Qaeda-linked insurgencies in the Syrian theater. That includes the primacy of Jabhat al-Nusrah, Jaysh al-Islam, Liwa-al-Islam, and ultimately also the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a.k.a. ISIL, ISIS or Daesh.

Dr. Christof Lehmann is the founder and editor of nsnbc. He is a psychologist and independent political consultant on conflict and conflict resolution and a wide range of other political issues. His work with traumatized victims of conflict has led him to also pursue the work as political consultant. He is a lifelong activist for peace and justice, human rights, Palestinians rights to self-determination in Palestine, and he is working on the establishment of international institutions for the prosecution of all war crimes, also those committed by privileged nations. On 28 August 2011 he started his blog nsnbc, appalled by misrepresentations of the aggression against Libya and Syria. In March 2013 he turned nsnbc into a daily, independent, international on-line newspaper. He can be contacted at nsnbc international at [email protected]

Judging by the developments of recent several years, Mustafa Kemal’s dream of a secular Turkish nation-state is, of not yet dead, then certainly on life support. Recent Turkish governments but particularly president Erdogan have changed course toward transforming Turkey into…something else. It is not yet clear what the new Turkey will look like, though it is already evident this is a country that has enormous ambitions which hint at a plan of imperial revival.

The Turkey of Ataturk and his Cold War-era successors pursued a relatively unambitious foreign policy. The country stayed out of World War 2, was a peripheral member of NATO, and did not become involved in the many conflicts in the Middle East, though there were the perennial crises and even clashes with Greece culminating in the invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Turkey’s nationalist domestic policy and conservative foreign policy was jealously guarded by its military which was not above launching coups to remove heads of state who were deemed risking Ataturk’s legacy. The US looked benevolently at these developments. Under the de-facto military rule, Turkey was a stable southern flank of NATO and its inward-looking policies meant the country was unlikely to provoke a crisis that might conceivably unleash WW3. The fact that Turkey actually shared a border with USSR also helped moderate Turkish behavior.

All of that changed following the end of the Cold War. The US was no longer interested in internal Turkish politics. Turkey no longer bordered USSR or even Russia, for that matter. And the military’s grip on Turkey’s politics began to slip, allowing the country to recede back into Islamism as evidenced by the very existence and even success of first the Welfare Party (where Erdogan began his political career) and then the Justice and Development Party. Turkish notables such as the President Turgut Ozal, who proclaimed the 21st century to be “Turkey’s Century,” or Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel, who spoke of a “Turkish world” spanning between the Adriatic Sea and the Great Wall of China, gave voice to Turkish elites’ neo-Ottoman ambitions. Turkey began to shift away from ethnic Turkish nationalism as the founding principle and instead embrace Islam as the glue that binds together all the peoples of the state, which has the advantage potentially greatly expanding Turkey’s borders to absorb many of its neighbors. Nowhere was that shift more evident than in Erdogan’s calling Kurds Kurds, as opposed to Mountain Turks, which was the required term used since Ataturk’s times.

Until recently, the pan-Turkic agenda had been pursued through largely benign means of applying Turkey’s “soft power”, both through the institution of Turkic Council founded in 2009 and comprising Kazakhstan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan, and through bilateral economic, cultural, and political ties which include educational and cultural exchanges among other measures. Turkey’s penetration into Muslim post-Soviet territories is facilitated by the success which Turkish businesses had in establishing themselves on post-Soviet markets.

However, America’s failures in and destabilization of Iraq and the subsequent “Arab Spring” revolutions have greatly expanded Turkey’s scope of interest, which now includes virtually all of North Africa (Turkey, for example, maintained close relations with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood) and other parts of the Middle East. US apparent withdrawal from the Middle East is creating a vacuum of power and a sea of instability which Turkey is very actively seeking to fill, and it is impatient to do so lest some other power preempt it in that task. The rift between Russia and the West caused by the West’s regime change policy in Ukraine and subsequent sanctions on Russia likewise signaled to Ankara that the situation is optimal for Turkish expansion, with a window of opportunity that likely would not stay open for very long.

The interest in countries which are not populated by Turkic-speaking peoples suggests the pan-Turkic agenda now has a companion in the form of a neo-Ottoman one, as Turkey is striving to expand its influence in all directions including Balkans, Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East proper, and North Africa. Moreover, it is now willing to pursue that agenda through not only patient diplomacy and “soft power,” but by raising proxy armies (such as Daesh) to extend its influence in the relevant regions and even through direct use of military force. Thus, pan-Osmanism encroaches on not only Iran’s and Russia’s interests but also Saudi Arabia’s, European Union’s (which is interested in Balkan stability) and even Israel’s, which would rather prefer to be surrounded by failing Arab states than by a powerful, unified neo-Ottoman entity. Given these implications, Ankara would have been well advised to pursue sphere of influence agreements with interested parties ahead of its military actions, which does not appear to be the case considering the division within the ranks of the anti-Assad coalition. It also appears rather contrary to Erdogan’s own personality. Russia is hardly the only country to have felt betrayed by Erdogan’s backflips. Turkey’s plans to establish a military base in Qatar (!) cannot possibly be viewed favorably by Saudi Arabia which almost certainly does not desire to see yet another foreign power in what it considers its own backyard.

Even the United States seems concerned by the breadth of Ankara’s ambitions, judging by it ordering Turkey to vacate its positions in northern Iraq and its unwillingness to rush to its “NATO ally’s” defense in recent weeks following the ambush of the Russian Su-24 near the border with Turkey. Finally, following the refugee crisis which was wholly of Erdogan’s making in order to bludgeon the EU into acquiescence in Ankara Middle East schemes, nobody in that organization will ever believe Erdogan is a reliable partner. Erdogan’s erratic policies appear to have had the effect of alarming the EU, in particular, so much so that the West, which usually has no trouble in coming up with excuses to impose sanctions on Russia, did not come to Turkey’s aid when it found itself on the receiving end of Russia’s economic restrictions.

However, Turkey’s internal political divisions and conflicts meant Erdogan was not able to establish a clear and focused policy of either pan-Turkism or neo-Ottomanism, with the effect of damaging Turkey’s international reputation in virtually every politically relevant part of the world and embroiling it in costly conflicts from which it will find it difficult to extricate itself in a face-saving manner. Turkey’s predicament is likely why Russia has been so bold in inflicting economic pain on Turkey in retaliation for its “stab in the back”, confident that at the moment Turkey has almost no friends willing to confront Russia on its behalf. Indeed, US and especially EU actually seem pleased with Russia taking Turkey to task in order to reduce its international adventurism. In the absence of a serious rethinking of priorities, Turkey’s pan-Turkic and neo-Ottoman ambitions are liable to suffer a major setback, undoing two decades of progress.

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In a message to the Libyan people, the US President said the 2011 Libyan revolution liberated them from “42 years of dictatorship.” Now there are “profound challenges,” which the Libyan people “have demonstrated the commitment to resolve.”

Barack Obama welcomed the endorsement of the Libyan Political Agreement signed on December 17 and expressed confidence that with political dialogue and the establishment of a Government of National Accord, peace, prosperity, and security would come in the divided country.

Critics of GM promote pseudo-science, make false claims based on ignorance and are driven by politically motivated ideology. The actions of these affluent elitists effectively deny food to the hungry. They are therefore committing crimes against humanity. If you follow the GM issue, no doubt you’ve heard this kind of simplistic, tired and predictable diatribe before.

A good deal of the debate surrounding GMOs involves attacking critics of the technology who voice genuine concerns and put forward valid arguments to back up their case. The attacks by the pro-GM lobby are nonsensical because there is sufficient, credible evidence that questions the safety, efficacy and the science used to promote GM, as well as the politics and practices used to get GMOs on the commercial market.

This evidence has been validated many times before by peer-reviewed studies and official reports. Furthermore, many of the slick PR claims made by the pro-GM lobby have been deconstructed and found to be seriously wanting. Such evidence has been referred or linked on many occasions in my numerous previous articles, and I see no need to regurgitate this here.

Attacks on opponents of GM are designed to whip up emotive, populist sentiment and denigrate critics with the aim of diverting attention from the underlying issues pertaining to hunger and poverty, as well as ideology, commercial interests and political motivations of the pro-GM lobby itself.

Lobbyist Patrick Moore has called GMWatch “murdering bastards.” Journalist William Saletan portrays those who question GM as heretics clinging to faith and relying on an “army of quacks and pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science.” Claire Robinson has taken apart his pro-GM ideology and evangelising here, which is little more than disinformation masquerading as objective journalism.

Former UK environment minister Owen Paterson has described critics of GM as a ‘green blob’ bunch of affluent elitists who are anti-science Luddites. Then there is Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Richard John Roberts, who calls for less politics in science, implying that critics have a political agenda. He says they should stop scaremongering and forwarding propaganda.

Roberts recently said  that if you don’t want to eat GMOs, then don’t – conveniently ignoring that fact that Monsanto has denied choice by spending at least $100 million in the US to prevent labelling of GM food. He says that GM is probably safer than traditional foods, which it clearly isn’t, and has expressed dismay over the delay in the production of Golden Rice. Mirroring the propaganda of the GM sector, Roberts says though Golden Rice became a reality in February 1999 and could have been used as early as 2002, the opposition to GM has ensured that it is not currently available, which again is simply not the case.

He claims more than 15 million children have died or suffered globally due to vitamin A deficiency since 2002. Roberts asks: “How many must die before we consider this a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted?” His claims are baseless and his tactic is deliberately inflammatory.

Another prominent scientist-cum-lobbyist, Anthony Trewavas, uses similar tactics by calling on critics to defer to (pro-GM) scientists and stop forcing their authoritarian views on people, thus denying choice and GM to consumers and farmers alike. In a similar vein, C S Prakash has used politically-motivated attacks on opponents and made numerous claims in favour of GM in high-profile media outlets that he does not appear to want to back up.

If scaremongering and propaganda are occurring, Roberts, Trewavas, Prakash and others should look a little closer to home because what they are doing is engaging in a high-profile roll-out of psychological projection: accusing opponents of the very things the pro-GM lobby is guilty of doing in order to shift the focus of attention.

The bedrock of the industry and its supporters is driven by politics, commercial gain and ideology. It’s very foundation is based on a fraud and the capturing and corrupting of international and national bodies, including the WTO, trade deals, governments and regulatory bodies.

And, arguably, it is also driven by fear. “They are scared to death,” says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of several books on food policy. She adds:

“They have an industry to defend and are attacking in the hope that they’ll neutralize critics… It’s a paranoid industry and has been from the beginning.”

While massive financial clout and the capture of key political institutions (thereby curtailing the option of prioritising more productive  and sustainable models of agriculture) constitute the power base of global agribusiness corporations, we also must not overlook the role of prominent individuals, whether scientists or media figures.

These foot soldiers of the GM industry try to set the GM debate by painting critics as irrational, ignorant and politically motivated, whereas they (scientists especially) are supposedly objective and untainted by vested interests (clearly untrue). And they have been quite successful at getting this message into the mainstream media.

Readers are urged to check websites such as Lobbywatch, Powerbase and Spinwatch, where they will see links between some prominent GM scientist-lobbyists and big agribusiness companies, the ultra-right group the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Scientific Alliance (described as a front group for corporate interests) and Bivings Group (a public relations company that worked with Monsanto), among others.

And these connections have resulted in well-orchestrated smear campaigns against individuals and groups (see this, this and this), pro -GM propaganda (see this about the sweet potato) and dirty tricks (for example, using fake identities to attacks critcs of GM). At the same time, those responsible for such things carefully manage the message that they themselves are the persecuted victims of ideologically-driven anti-GM campaigners.

The doublespeak and hypocrisy is plain to see.

If anything matters to the pro-GM lobby, contrary to the public persona it tries to convey, it clearly has little to do with ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ or objective science. It has more to do with undermining and debasing these concepts.

And if it were to genuinely embrace these values, along with ‘humanitarianism’, a concept it also lays claim to, it would flag up and protest against the corporate capture of science and the infiltration by commercial interests of institutions and regulatory bodies, and it would also protest against the way trade and aid is used to subjugate regions and the most productive components of global agriculture – the small/peasant farmer – to the needs of powerful commercial entities.

For all of its talk about GM ‘feeding the world’ and scaremongering about the actions of anti-GM activists leading to the deaths of “billions” due to their resistance to GM, the pro-GM lobby sidesteps the true nature of hunger and poverty. It is only by understanding the issues raised by Eric Holt-Giménez in the article from which the following quote comes from that we can begin to see how ridiculous the claims of Moore, Trewavas, Roberts and the rest really are:

“The World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Food Program, the Millennium Challenge, The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and industrial giants like Yara Fertilizer, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto, carefully avoid addressing the root causes of the food crisis. The “solutions” they prescribe are rooted in the same policies and technologies that created the problem in the first place: increased food aid, de-regulated global trade in agricultural commodities, and more technological and genetic fixes. These measures only strengthen the corporate status quo controlling the world’s food. For this reason, thus far, there has been little official leadership in the face of the crisis. Nor has there been any informed public debate about the real reasons the numbers of hungry people are growing, or what we can do about it. The future of our food—and fuel—systems are being decided de facto by unregulated global markets, financial speculators, and global monopolies.”

But certain people would rather attack those who do actually flag up and campaign against such things and who desire transparency, democracy and the proper accountability of institutions that supposedly exist to protect the public interest. What we get instead is prominent figures decrying these campaigners as ‘murderers’, ‘elitists’ and regressive authoritarian ‘types’ and ludicrously comparing their actions with authoritarian regimes and mass death that occurred under such systems.

Anthony Trewavas:

“Most objectors in this area have a political programme not a scientific one but they like to bend science to their own political point of view. Science is by its nature not politics or political propaganda or anything like it. It deals with evidence not superstition, or political or social philosophies.”

Trewavas conveniently sidesteps the underlying politics and commercial interests underpinning GM and instead relies on a heavy dose of propaganda by stating:

“It is an unfortunate situation that in our present world many environmentalist groups have become typically authoritarian in attitude. Greenpeace notably decides its opinions must prevail regardless of others, so it arrogates to itself the right to tear up and destroy things it doesn’t like. That is absolutely typical of people who are unable to convince others by debate and discussion and in the last century such attitudes, amplified obviously, ended up killing people that others did not like. But the same personality type the authoritarian.”

Such a simplistic analysis indicates that Trewavas is not a psychologist, a historian or a political scientist. He is a molecular biologist but appears to think his status qualifies him to have his ill-informed personal views taken as fact and promoted by the media. And he is not alone.

Kevin Folta, another molecular biologist (with close links to big agribusiness), argues that adopting GM would offer “plentiful and affordable food supply using responsible and sustainable agricultural practices.” Is he also an economist, a political scientist, a trade policy analyst and an ecologist? No amount of gene splicing or fine-sounding rhetoric can overcome the structural factors that lead to poverty and hunger. (Folta has also often spoken on health-related issues, which again are beyond the field of his expertise and has got things wrong.)

Structural inequality, oil prices, debt repayment, trade policy, commodity speculation, land use (eg for biofuels), the destruction of indigenous food systems, access to land and credit, soil health, irrigation, etc, all feed into policies that determine plentiful, affordable food and sustainability. As the backbone of global food production, especially in the Global South, small farmers increasingly face marginalisation and oppression due to corporate seed monopolies, land speculation and takeovers, rigged trade that favours global agribusiness interests and commodity speculation: see this on food commodity speculation, this on the global food system and the dynamics that lead to hunger and inequality, this by the Oakland Institute on land grabs and the effects on small farmers and the following link on the impact of international trade rules.

So, what are we to conclude?

That certain figures within the pro-GM lobby are objective and independent? That they really do believe in choice and democracy, even when the evidence is clear that is being been denied consumers and farmers through, for example, unremitting regulatory fraud,  rigged markets, secrecy, manipulation of aid and trade and strings-attached loans? That they know where the line is between science and lobbying, between science and propaganda?

Please refer to Part 1 before reading this article.

The ‘Odd’ Men Out

Having just described the breadth of membership in the Saudis’ 34-nation “anti-terrorist” coalition, a few words deserve to be said about some of the states that aren’t party to this framework because their absence is indicative of certain political decisions that don’t often meet with scrutiny from the public eye. The sectarian reasons for Iran, Iraq, and Syria’s exclusions are obvious, but less known are the grounds on which Algeria, Eritrea, and Oman didn’t join:

Algeria:

This North African state has one of the most capable militaries on the continent and is routinely threatened by AQIM and other terrorist groups, but despite this, it refused to sign on to the Saudis’ coalition. The cause is actually pretty simple, and it’s that Algeria is a quasi-member of the Resistance Bloc – not being closely aligned enough with Iran to be a constituent member, but also being far away enough from the US and Saudi Arabia to retain a large degree of independence. Algeria’s historical relations with Russia are another added plus, and it could also be said that its 1990s civil war against Islamic terrorists convinced its present leadership of the need to stay as far away from the Saudis as is realistically possible. Another motivating factor for its government’s decision to abstain from the military coalition is because of Morocco’s membership within it. The two neighbors have a heated rivalry and are presently in a cold war with one another, even going as far as keeping the border closed between them. Under these conditions, as well as Morocco’s chummy ties with the US/NATO and Saudi Arabia/GCC, it’s impossible for Algeria to ever entertain the possibility of joining, although if aging and stroke-ridden President Bouteflika passes away soon and the country falls victim to an Islamist coup or Egyptian-style regime change, then all of this could rapidly change.

Eritrea:

The author previously wrote an extensive analysis about the GCC’s expansion to Eritrea, and it would naturally seem probable that Asmara would join the same framework as its new patrons. This didn’t happen, and it can be attributable to Saudi Arabia not wanting to endanger the viability of the militarily critical GCC naval base there.  To explain, after the revelation came out that Eritrea had sold its sovereignty to the Gulf, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn firmly declared in an interview that he would not tolerate the facility being used for any aggressive designs against his country. At the moment, it’s widely thought that a type of military parity exists between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has kept the conventional (but not asymmetrical) peace between them since their mutually disastrous war from 1998-2000, but the GCC base could theoretically tip the balance in favor of Eritrea.

Understanding the enormity of the threat that could be facing it, Ethiopia may have signaled to its Gulf counterparts (especially in this case GCC and “anti-terrorist” coalition leader Saudi Arabia) that it would not tolerate Eritrea’s formal incorporation into any military alliance and that it might preemptively act to stop such a development out of defense of its national interests. The GCC places such an importance on the Eritrean facility’s use in assisting in their War on Yemen that they don’t want to put it in any sort of danger at the moment, likely explaining why they didn’t allow Eritrea to join (although it likely would have if offered). Conversely, an alternative but complementary possibility is that Eritrea itself realized that it would probably spark a formal continuation war if it joined the bloc (provided that it was offered an invitation and refused, which is extraordinarily improbable considering its current GCC cooperation but still theoretically possible), and instead wagered against it out of its government’s interest for self-preservation.

Oman:

The GCC member is noticeably absent from the Saudi-led “anti-terrorist” coalition, but regular regional observers shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s a well-established fact that Oman is the most pragmatic and moderate of all of the Gulf States, and Muscat has a deeply entrenched reputation for pursuing a foreign policy that’s largely independent of any unipolar influence. For example, it played the role of neutral meeting ground between the US and Iran prior to the conclusion of the nuclear deal, and it’s also exploring the possibility of having Iran build a gas pipeline to the country. Sultan Qaboos has thus been geopolitically wise in preserving his country’s sovereignty and refraining from membership in the Saudi-led military bloc, knowing full well that joining it would likely put Shiite blood on the Kingdom’s hands sooner or later. Another fact that may have motivated this decision is that most Omanis follow the Ibadi sect of Islam, which might one day make them a target of the Wahhabist hordes if Saudi Arabia and its ilk decided that the geopolitical conditions were ripe for such an offensive (possibly after Qaboos’ passing if a power struggle ensued between pro-GCC and GCC-neutral elements). Therefore, by being in a similar sectarian vulnerability as Iran and others vis-à-vis the Wahhabis, the Ibadi Sultanate was already disinclined to join the alliance as it was.

“Terrorists” Everywhere

It was earlier mentioned that one of the ‘benefits’ that the Saudi-led coalition members can receive from one another is multilateral support in fighting their own “Wars on Terror”, with the label of “terrorist” being subjectively thrown around to any manner of anti-government or anti-establishment group. It’s very probable that the aforementioned support will presumably be dominated by Saudi financial largesse, but it could also potentially see the formation of regional ‘peacekeeping’ deployments in support of the host state’s “anti-terrorist” mission, provided of course that the anticipated strategic and economic benefits were enough to justify the military risk. Saudi Arabia’s forecasted geopolitical application of this strategy will be discussed in the next section, but for now, it’s relevant to briefly address some of the ways in which the coalition members might abuse the “terrorist” label (commonly associated in the current global context with extreme Islamic groups, although by no means exclusive to them) in order to aggressively pursue their own self-interests:

Guinea/Sierra Leone/Ivory Coast/Togo/Benin:

These five countries may likely label any rebel group or anti-government tribe as “terrorists” in order to discredit them and ‘justify’ a harsh community-wide crackdown against them (bordering, if not exceeding, outright ethnic cleansing).

Mali:

It’s foreseeable that separatist and/or autonomy-demanding Tuaregs might fall under this label if they continue to be a nuisance to the UN-led peace efforts in the country.

Sudan:

While the myriad of rebel groups fighting in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states already commit terrorist acts as it is, information about their crimes might become more widely disseminated among the Saudi bloc if Khartoum ties them in with the organization-wide “War on Terror”. There’s a possibility that Riyadh may not support this, however, so long as Washington continues to implicitly encourage the militant dissolution of the unified Sudanese state as a proxy attack against Chinese energy interests.

Turkey:

It’s without a doubt that Erdogan will use his Saudi-granted pedestal to preach about why the bloc should recognize the PKK and supportive Kurds as “terrorists”, hoping that he can gain wider acceptance for his bloody crackdown against them, and any other groups that rise up in defiance of his government (leftists, secular protesters, etc.) will also fall under this umbrella.

Lebanon/Palestine:

The only reason that these two states are part of Riyadh’s “anti-terrorist” coalition is so that the Saudis can ‘justify’ possibly forthcoming material assistance to each of their respective proxies within them (to varying extents, some Hariri-aligned elements in the Lebanese Armed Forces and the most pro-Saudi agents in Hamas) for their fight against Hezbollah. The reader should remember that Hezbollah is a Shiite Resistance organization whose religious identity makes it an irresistible target of the Wahhabist and identity-exterminating Saudis, and that the royal family will stop at nothing in trying to wipe out the group. Any (Saudi-driven) Lebanese Armed Forces and/or Hamas attack against Hezbollah also tacitly serves the interests of Israel, which isn’t at all coincidental because the exceptionalist convergences between Wahhabism and Zionism are an open secret in the Mideast.

Yemen:

The puppet government led by deposed premier Hadi has an existential interest in having the Ansarallah labeled and ‘widely’ recognized as “terrorists” so that an expanded Saudi-coalition-led occupation force (probably euphemistically labeled as “peacekeepers”) can come in and wipe them out completely.

The Contradiction And It’s Anti-Shiite “Solution”

In speaking about the self-serving interests that many members of the Saudi-led coalition are expected to promote through the “terrorist” label, it seems almost inevitable that the Saudis will turn against their Turkish and Qatari ‘partners’ by declaring war against the Muslim Brotherhood. One should bear in mind that the Muslim Brotherhood legitimately is a terrorist group, but that Riyadh is purposely turning somewhat of a temporary blind eye to Turkey and Qatar’s support of it for the moment in order to pursue the broad-based multilateral alliance that it’s constructed. Sooner or later, however, the internal terrorist contradictions between the Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood (different for the most part only by their hierarchy, foreign patronage, and slight divergences in religious misinterpretation) might become too strong to ignore, especially if one or the other feels confident enough to make a power play on their respective host’s territory one day. Another coalition-disrupting scenario would be if the Turkey and Qatar use the Saudi-led framework as a vehicle for advancing the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological interests in some respect among all of the other coalition members, thereby engendering fierce competition from the Saudis that might warrant a militant backlash.

Either way, in order to prevent the bloc from falling apart along diverging terrorist lines, the Saudis are expected to informally link their alliance with a larger crusade against Shiites. The presence of an external, non-Sunni ‘enemy’ is the only real force capable of holding the alliance together for the long-term and indefinitely mitigating the terrorist differences between its respective Saudi and Turkish/Qatari ideological poles. Perceived in this manner, it’s not coincidental then that the Saudis probably masterminded the Zaria massacre in order to show that the so-called “Shiite threat” even stretches into Africa’s largest country. Considering that the Saudi-led coalition will most likely functionally become an anti-Shiite NATO (and therefore anti-Iranian, anti-Iraqi, anti-Syrian, and anti-Ansarallah), it implicitly supports the US and Israel’s grand strategic vision for the Mideast and can be seen as logical extensions of both of their militaries. From a conceptual standpoint, the Saudi-led bloc represents a partial civilization-wide Lead From Behind application of the US and Israel’s decades-long attempts in fiendishly trying to initiate a Muslim fratricide by turning most of the Islamic world against its Resistance Bloc members.

Riyadh’s Geopolitical Designs

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old Defense Minister, announced that the Saudi “anti-terrorist” coalition would be active in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan, and given everything that’s been discussed in the research thus far, it’s possible to make some solid assessments about Riyadh’s interests in each and possible forecasts for how they may be actualized.

Syria and Iraq

It’s not yet known what form of “anti-terrorist” support Saudi Arabia wants the coalition to apply in Syria and Iraq, but it’s anticipated beyond any pale of doubt that it will have to do with anti-Shiite activity of some sort or form. For example, this could take the shape of Riyadh decreeing that the Shiite anti-ISIL militias in Iraq are “terrorists” and then ordering airstrikes or other attacks against them in order to support pro-Saudi Sunni militias that may be fighting to carve out a pseudo- or fully independent “Sunnistan” there or in eastern Syria. A more watered-down variation of this strategy would be for the coalition to provide arms, training, and special forces support to Sunni anti-government militias in each of these countries, all with the eventual grand intent of actualizing the geopolitical construct mentioned above and described in detail in the afore-cited link.

Libya and Egypt

Moving along to Libya and Egypt, these two theaters are inherently intertwined. Cairo frets about a full Islamist takeover in Libya but is very reluctant to get caught up in a quagmire there to prevent it. Instead, Egypt and the UAE have carried out a few surgical and highly symbolic (but scarcely substantial) strikes against terrorists there, but the formalization of the Saudi-led coalition might provide them with additional multilateral support. Also, because Libya is becoming a central focus in the West’s anti-ISIL efforts, doing so could also earn the praise and international acceptance of the EU and could substitute for NATO’s own possibly planned efforts there (a War on Libya 2.0). As positive as this could be for the Saudis’ image, there’s a very strong potential for intra-bloc conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting states of Turkey and Qatar on one hand, and the internationally recognized Libyan government-supporting states of Egypt and the UAE on the other, with the Saudis conceivably trying to play ‘kingmaker’ (but predictably to no avail) if their competition comes to cataclysmic heights. A similar fallout could be possible in the Sinai as well, with the Qatari-supported terrorist groups there likely not giving up without a very brutal fight that might escalate to the level of state-on-state (Turkish/Qatari-on-Egyptian/Saudi) tensions.

Afghanistan

The final publicly stated theater of intent is in Afghanistan, and here it’s a bit more difficult for the Saudis to directly exert influence in this area. Nonetheless, this explains why the bloc was so eager to bring Pakistan on board, since Riyadh would like for Islamabad to play a destabilizing role there which would be fundamentally contradictory to it and its Chinese ally’s national self-interests. At this point, it’s not possible to tell how deep the Saudis and their influence may have infiltrated the Pakistani military and intelligence services or whether it’s just isolated to a few high-level decision makers, but the fact remains that the Saudi intent (key word) is to use Pakistan as a springboard for further Afghan destabilization at the expense of Russia’s CSTO peripheral security. There’s also the tangential ‘benefit’ of keeping Afghanistan as a black hole of US- and Saudi-supported chaos so as to indefinitely retain a geographically convenient training ground for Uighur terrorists and to perpetually keep Turkmenistan under threat. The latter is very important nowadays because the former Central Asian republic is an energy super-hub for the multipolar world, being linked mostly to China, but also to Russia, Iran, and in the future to India. It’s also a ‘sitting duck’ for destabilization due to the constitutional neutrality that prohibits it from fruitful and productive cooperation with the CSTO and SCO’s anti-terrorist bodies, and if ISIL, the Taliban, a new terrorist group, and/or some sort of hybrid repeats the “Syraq” scenario and storms across the Afghan-Turkmen border, then it could suddenly create an urgent and simultaneous strategic threat to Russia, China, and Iran.

It All Comes Back To Yemen

Prior to concluding this far-reaching study, it’s necessary to bring the reader’s focus back towards its beginnings and the failed War on Yemen. The Saudis interpret this unnecessary conflict as being integral to their conception of “security”, and they’re obsessed with ‘winning’ at all costs. Their present losses, the pathetically underperforming capabilities of their contracted armies, and the embarrassing ineptitude of their own Armed Forces have created a pitiful military situation that’s in need of immediate correcting. The “anti-terrorist” coalition is one of the methods by which Saudi Arabia hopes to gain tangible support for its war-fighting efforts, and it’s anticipated that some (if not most) of the members will pay ‘mercenary tributes’ to their institutional leader in exchange for the financial largesse mentioned earlier. They also have their own perceived self-interests in having the entire bloc play along with their “anti-terrorist” labelling and supporting them in a similar manner, thus meaning that the Saudi-led coalition is really a ‘legitimized’ and large-scale marketplace for mercenaries. It’s also very probable that with the War on Yemen continuing to go south for the Saudis, they may desperately try to ‘institutionalize’ the aggrandized mercenary presence there under the false auspices of an illegal non-UN-mandated “peacekeeping” mission deployed by the “anti-terrorist” bloc. This, more so than any other possible application, would dramatically (albeit very  brutally and with the major risk of identity cleansing) increase the likelihood that the Saudis could win their War on Yemen, which as was mentioned, has become an obsession for them and might even pave the way for future “peacekeeping” deployments in other “anti-terrorist” locations within the coalition.

Concluding Thoughts

Saudi Arabia’s “anti-terrorist” coalition may have come as a news-making surprise the moment it was first reported and was widely treated as a sick and ironic joke by most of those who heard about it, but upon closer examination, it can authoritatively be said that it was predictable in hindsight and is predicated on long-standing sectarian and geopolitical designs.

The bloc encompasses a wide swatch of territory across the world and abuts three separate oceans, but the cohesiveness of the organization has yet to be tested, especially as it relates to the group’s internal Wahhabi-Muslim Brotherhood fault line. In light of this terrorist contradiction within its own ranks, it means that the Saudis will press the anti-Shiite identity of the organization even more feverishly than if Turkey and Qatar hadn’t been admitted to the organization, thus raising fears that Saudi Arabia is preparing for a prolonged proxy conflict with Iran and other Resistance Bloc members like Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Ansarallah. However, it’ll probably be the last of the bunch that the Saudi-led military alliance attacks first, turning it into an unwitting bell weather of the bloc’s capabilities. If Saudi Arabia’s “anti-terrorist” coalition is ‘successful’ in their first real battle (given that the earlier GCC-majority coalition was a dismal failure by all metrics), then it’s exceedingly probable that it’ll swiftly ride the wave of confidence that this creates in getting itself directly entangled in Syria and Iraq, with all of the globally destabilizing consequences.

On December 7, 2015, after the December 6 elections, the White House indicated in a press briefing:

“What is clear is that the people of Venezuela have expressed their overwhelming desire for a change in direction.  And what is necessary is for all of the parties involved to engage in a dialogue about the future of that country mindful of the election results.  So that’s a process that we’ll certainly continue to watch closely from here.” (Emphasis added)

This is a clear interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Who is the United States to tell the Venezuelan people how to interpret the new situation? The White House promotes the same narrative that the opposition in Venezuela is pushing.

In a December 7 press statement issued by Secretary of State John Kerry, he declares:

“Venezuelan voters expressed their overwhelming desire for a change in the direction of their country.  Dialogue among all parties in Venezuela is necessary to address the social and economic challenges facing the country, and the United States stands ready to support such a dialogue together with others in the international community.”

What right does the United States have to impose themselves, along with their few allies in Latin America and an international organization, as a mediator in Venezuela?

The outstanding Argentine journalist, Stella Calloni, wrote an article published on December 17 in CubaDebate:

“We are witnessing a new pattern of intervention in our countries, that we can call ‘election coups….’”

Her full article provides us with an excellent orientation for analyzing events. As far as Venezuela is concerned, the U.S. and its allies in that country have been waging a relentless economic war combined with media terrorism against the Bolivarian Revolution and President Nicolás Maduro. In addition, the collapse of international oil prices on which Venezuela depends but beyond its control, fed into the economic war. The goal of the U.S. in the last year or so was to clear the path for the opposition to win the legislative elections on December 6, 2015. Yes, there are weaknesses in the Bolivarian Revolution, everyone recognizes it, including the Maduro government. It is striving to take action in conjunction with the people at the base. However, the combined economic and media war orchestrated by Washington was the main reason for the December 6 defeat.

The hand of Washington is exposed if one takes into account the interference by the U.S. in  Venezuelan elections before the December 6, 2015 and in the context of its Latin American policy.

Click here to see the book cover. The December 6, 2015 election is not the first time that Latin American and Caribbean countries have been the target of the Obama administration. In 2009, right after Obama’s coming to power, the Honduras coup took place with Washington’s full involvement. The role of the Honduran military, armed and trained by the U.S., became notorious for its violent suppression of the Hondurans, who struggled for months on end against what the grass roots called a dictatorship.

The February 2014 U.S. interference in Venezuela was initiated in Washington by the Obama administration the day after the April 14, 2013, presidential election victory by the Bolivarian Revolution’s candidate, Nicolás Maduro. From April 15, 2013 to date Washington has tried everything to provoke incidents in Venezuela in order to usher in a coup d’état. This amounts to a slow-motion coup attempt based on a series of “election coups”. The goal was and is to draw Venezuela into its orbit once again, as was the case before Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in December 1998. On April 15, 2013, White House press secretary Jay Carney gave the green light to the pro-U.S. opposition to violently protest the election results by declaring:

“…given the tightness of the result — around 1 percent of the votes cast separate the candidates — the opposition candidate and at least one member of the electoral council have called for a 100 percent audit of the results. And this appears an important, prudent and necessary step to ensure that all Venezuelans have confidence in these results.”

 That same day, the opposition organized violent riots and killed eight Chavistas who were defending health centers and other public places from the bands. On April 16, Patrick Ventrell, Acting Deputy Spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, appeared in a press briefing. The following interaction with a journalist indicated the desire of the U.S. to refrain from recognizing the election results and call into question the legitimacy of the Maduro government:

 “MR. VENTRELL: …And we said yesterday, a full recount would be important, prudent, and necessary in ensuring that an evenly divided Venezuelan electorate is confident that the election meets their democratic aspirations….

QUESTION [from a journalist]: Well, okay. So are you prepared to congratulate Mr. Maduro on his victory?

MR. VENTRELL: We’re not there.

QUESTION: Why? The vote has been certified. He has been elected. So either you say, “Okay, and we’ll work with you,” or, “try to work with you,” or you say, “We don’t think that you’re the real winner”, or, “We think that there is no winner because the vote hasn’t been certified,” so — I mean, are you prepared to work with President Maduro, President-Elect Maduro?

MR. VENTRELL: Well, we said we’re prepared to work with whichever government comes out of this electoral process. Having said that, given what happened yesterday, we’re consulting with key partners, the OAS [the Washington-based Organization of American States], the EU [European Union], other regional neighbors as we examine this.”

The next day on April 17, the White House issued the following statement:

“The United States congratulates the Venezuelan people for their participation in the April 14 presidential elections in a peaceful and orderly manner. We call on the Venezuelan government to respect the rights of Venezuelan citizens to peaceful assembly and free speech. We also urge everyone to refrain from violence and other measure [sic] that could raise tensions at this difficult moment. The United States notes the acceptance by both candidates for an audit of the ballots and supports calls for a credible and transparent process to reassure the Venezuelan people regarding the results. Such a process would contribute to political dialogue and help advance the country’s democracy.”

On April 19, 2013, regarding the elections in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, a communiqué from the 33 countries — that is, the entire hemisphere, excluding the U.S. and Canada — composing the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), read in part: “…CELAC congratulates President Nicolás Maduro on the election results and for his election as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”

Despite, and perhaps in response to this, Obama himself stepped up to the plate and said in a May 4 interview to an important and widely accessed Spanish-language media, Univision.com:

“…María Elena Salinas: I have two more questions. One is does the U.S. recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate President of Venezuela?

President Barack Obama: Well, you know, I think it’s not what the U.S. alone is concerned about. But I think that the entire hemisphere has been watching the violence, the protests, the crackdowns on the opposition. I think our general view has been that it’s up to the people of Venezuela to choose their leaders in legitimate elections….” (Emphasis added)

Obama went even further than his own administration by implicitly proclaiming the Venezuelan election as being illegitimate. In addition, by completely ignoring the CELAC position taken only a few days earlier, Obama de facto claimed that the “entire hemisphere” is composed of only the U.S. and Canada!

By Googling for the repercussions from this interview right after it was made public, it was immediately found in over 50 entries in Spanish “Obama habló de Venezuela: ‘El hemisferio completo está viendo la violencia y los ataques a la oposición’” (the entire hemisphere has been watching the violence, the protests, the crackdowns on the opposition).

In February 2014, a wave of violence occurred in Venezuela. It was carried out by the opposition, this time led by another figure (Leopoldo López rather than Capriles). What did the Deputy U.S. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf say in a Washington, D.C. press briefing held on February 13, 2014? She left the door wide open for Washington to switch loyalties from Capriles to the more openly violent López, if it was not already done:

“…QUESTION [from a journalist]: I’d like to ask if you have any comment about the violent protest that took place yesterday there and the lack of coverage provided by the local TV. And also, this morning the Venezuelan foreign minister in an interview blamed an opposition politician, Leopoldo López, for violence that took place yesterday and said that López and his acolytes have been financed by the U.S. Government for a long time. If you please have a comment on those two points, I would appreciate it.

MS. HARF: Yeah. Well, let me see if I can get some specifics on what’s happened in the last few days. In general, when it comes to Venezuela, we’ve made clear that we’re open to having a constructive relationship with the Government of Venezuela. Quite frankly, we haven’t seen that — we have not seen that reciprocated, to be clear. So we also, I think, see a lot of conspiracy theories or rumors out there in the press about how the U.S. is interested in influencing the domestic political situation in Venezuela, which is absolutely not true. It’s not up to us to comment on internal Venezuelan politics. So I’m happy to check with our team to see if there is more specifics about the protest specifically that I’m not as familiar with, and see if we can get you something on that….” (Emphasis added)

The very next day, on February 14, in another regular press briefing by Harf, notice how Washington walks the tightrope. It continues with the claim that the U.S. is not involved in the internal affairs of Venezuela, while at the same time taking sides with the violent opposition leader against the constitutionally elected Maduro government:

“…QUESTION [from a journalist]: So the government accused Washington of being involved in these — the [Venezuelan] protests.

MS. HARF: It’s not true. It’s not true.

QUESTION: They didn’t accuse you?

MS. HARF: No. We are not involved in them.

QUESTION: Oh, okay.

MS. HARF: They may have accused us; we’re not involved in them.

QUESTION: And they’re also accusing an opposition leader. Do you think this is a step up in the regime’s —

MS. HARF: Are you talking about Mr. López?

QUESTION: Yes.

MS. HARF: Yes. So we are deeply concerned by rising tensions, by the violence surrounding these February 12th protests, and by the issuance of a warrant for the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López. We join the Secretary General of the OAS [the Washington-based Organization of American States] in condemning the violence and calling on authorities to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of peaceful protestors. We also call on the Venezuelan Government to release the 19 detained protestors and urge all parties to work to restore calm and refrain from violence….” (Emphasis added)

This interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela was solidified even more through a press statement by John Kerry, Secretary of State, on February 15, 2014, which reads in full:

“Recent Violence in Venezuela

The United States is deeply concerned by rising tensions and violence surrounding this week’s protests in Venezuela. Our condolences go to the families of those killed as a result of this tragic violence.

We are particularly alarmed by reports that the Venezuelan government has arrested or detained scores of anti-government protestors and issued an arrest warrant for opposition leader Leopoldo López. These actions have a chilling effect on citizens’ rights to express their grievances peacefully.

We join the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, and others in condemning this senseless violence. We call on the Venezuelan government to provide the political space necessary for meaningful dialogue with the Venezuelan people and to release detained protestors. We urge all parties to work to restore calm and refrain from violence.

Freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly are universal human rights. They are essential to a functioning democracy, and the Venezuelan government has an obligation to protect these fundamental freedoms and the safety of its citizens.” (Emphasis added)

On February 17, the then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elías Jaua disclosed in a press conference in Caracas that the Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, had received a telephone call from a State Department official. According to the Venezuelans, the U.S. is “asking” the Maduro government for “a series of conditions” and threatened Venezuela with “international consequences” if opposition leader Leopoldo López were to be arrested. Elías Jaua also revealed proof indicating that Washington has been directly involved in training the violent groups.

On February 19, 2014, at a Press Conference by President Obama, President Peña Nieto (Mexico) and then Prime Minister Harper (Canada), in Toluca, Mexico, Obama stated:

“In Venezuela, rather than trying to distract from its own failings by making up false accusations against diplomats from the United States, the government ought to focus on addressing the legitimate grievances of the Venezuelan people. So, along with the Organization of American States, we call on the Venezuelan government to release protestors that it’s detained and engage in real dialogue. And all parties have an obligation to work together to restrain violence and restore calm.”

How can Obama say that the accusations against U.S. diplomats for interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela are false? The above three-sentence statement exclusively on Venezuela uttered by the U.S. president consists in itself an arrogant attempt to interfere in Venezuela’s internal affairs. The “legitimate grievances” of the Venezuelan people were addressed by the Bolivarian Revolution in numerous ballot box contests since December 1998. These electoral gains precisely target the U.S.-dominated economic and political system existing from 1958 to 1998. The voting included at that time the April 14, 2013, presidential election won by Nicolás Maduro and which the U.S. refused to recognize; by negating the results recognized by the whole continent, Washington had planted the seeds of the current violence carried out by the pro-U.S. elements in the country. The candidates of the Bolivarian Revolution’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) also won the majority of municipalities, mayoralties and the popular vote in the December 8, 2013, municipal elections.

Furthermore, who is Obama to declare that the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) is the reference point for Venezuela, while the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELA) is not considered? CELAC excludes two of the three countries represented at the above-cited press conference in Mexico: Canada and the U.S. They are omitted because of the historical role in the south played especially by the U.S., but also Canada, as gendarmes and plunderers of natural resources. Moreover, by what right does the U.S. define the vandals and their leader Leopoldo López as “protesters” and representatives of the “Venezuelan people,” as if they have no history of U.S.-driven violent coup attempts against the Hugo Chávez and Maduro legitimate governments? Does Venezuela not have the right to arrest and put on trial individuals who have been responsible for the violence? Obama urges “all parties” to “restrain violence.” He thus places the perpetrators of violence on the same footing as those who are trying to calm the situation, restore order and protect public and private property as well as lives from the vandals. Furthermore, by calling for “real dialogue,” he thus condemns the government for failing to consider grievances while painting a picture of the “protesters” as innocent victims of the Maduro government. However, despite the provocations, Maduro was calling for dialogue with the opponents.

This “opposition promotion” is part of the U.S. plan to create a pretext for a coup d’état in that oil-rich country. The role of the media in turning truth on its head and thus invent excuses for intervention in Venezuela is pointed out in an article by Professor Steve Ellner (who, since 1977, has taught at the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela). Despite the combined forces of the oligarchy’s international and local Venezuelan media, as well as the U.S.-financed and inspired democracy promotion groups, the first battle was won by Venezuela’s participatory democracy. On February 18, the Bolivarian Revolution, led by its government and Nicolás Maduro, displayed a show of force. A massive demonstration was held by mainly oil-industry workers in Caracas. This sector has been the source of forces to overthrow the legitimate constitutional regime and open up a path for the re-colonization of Venezuela. This demonstration temporarily put the pro-U.S. forces in Venezuela on the defensive. It is only because the people are empowered and are effectively part of political power that this momentary victory and other subsequent ones are able to take place. These successful inroads into the pro-U.S. imperialist camp came about because of Venezuela’s new experiments in participatory democracy under way since Hugo Chávez won the election in December 1998. Thus, on April 19, the day after the Chavista counter-offensive, the situation was relatively calm.

However, to counter the February 18 victory and the ensuing relative order prevailing on February 19, it was no accident that Obama came to the rescue. The above-quoted statement by Obama on February 19 encouraged Washington’s allies in Venezuela to restart their violent activities in Venezuela and create a climate of chaos. Thus, the next day, on February 20, violent incidents erupted once again, inflamed by Washington’s support, in various parts of Venezuela. On-the-spot reporting by “Venezuelanalysis.com” testifies to the nature of the violent opposition protests and the growing desire at the grass roots to take the streets back from the perpetrators of violence; others deftly analyze the proponents of violent regime change.

The international media, including the liberal CNN, played their usual role. However, it was very refreshing to hear Maduro telling the CNN that, if it does not cease its “war propaganda,” it “will have to leave Venezuela.”

The U.S. and their Venezuelan powerful media allies are blaming the Venezuelan government for the violence in that country, while it is the so-called “pro-democracy” groups that are in fact causing the rampage and disturbances. The U.S. expansionist goals toward Latin America and the Caribbean go all the way back to the last quarter of the 18th century. U.S. mainstream political parties, now known as Republicans and Democrats, have always been involved in direct and indirect military intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean; in fact, the Democrats actually scored better than their Republican with more — not less — military interventions.

In order to increase the U.S. policy of domination over the southern part of the hemisphere, much of which has been in revolt against U.S. control, a new face was needed for U.S. ambitions; this new image was necessary in order to close the international and domestic credibility gap created by the Bush years. This is the role of Obama; his image of “change” was, and is, consciously promoted by Obama himself and the Chicago marketing specialists.

The arrogant interference in Venezuela by Washington and its allies constitutes the latest example from among the long list of U.S. presidents who adopt and actively sponsor the original 17th- century evangelical notion: the Thirteen Colonies and then the U.S. constitute a chosen people, the beacon on the hill for the world to look toward for salvation. Herein lays the pompous nature of Washington. It can only be smashed in Venezuela through the channels of daily participatory democracy fashioned by the Bolivarian Revolution; it is striving to do so at this time in the most difficult circumstances after the December 6, 2015 serious electoral defeat. One must also add that the solidarity of other countries and peoples, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also the world, is a key ingredient.  The “election coups” make the situation all the more complex and dangerous.

Arnold August, a Canadian journalist and lecturer, is the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections and, more recently, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion. Cuba’s neighbours under consideration are the US, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Arnold can be followed on Twitter @Arnold_August.

Thursday marked the 150^th anniversary of the founding of America’s deadliest terrorist organization: the Klu Klux Klan.

Since September 11, extremists associated with various far-right wing ideologies, including the KKK and Jewish extremists, have killed far more people in the United States than extremists motivated by radical Islam.

One centuries’ old example of US government double standards when it comes to terrorism, is the infamous Klu Klux Klan. The Klan has terrorized and killed far more Americans than Islamic terrorists ever have; and despite being America’s oldest terrorist organization, the US government does not officially consider the KKK a terrorist organization, classifying it merely as a “hate group”.

By classifying the KKK’s actions as hate rather than terror, the US government allows the Klan, unlike ISIS, to freely hold rallies in America, fundraise, and even appear on TV to promote their ideology. Recently Franc Ancona, a KKK leader, appeared on national television and threatened “lethal force” against black protestors.

The KKK was founded just days after slavery was abolished in America; and ever since then, bombings, lynchings, tar-and-featherings, and other violent forms of terrorism on those challenging white supremacy have always been the hallmark of the Klan. At its peak in the 1920’s, Klan membership exceeded the equivalent of 8 million Americans nationwide.

The simple fact that, to this day, the U.S. Government refuses to designate the KKK as a domestic terrorist organization speaks volumes about the nation’s commitment to combating terrorism and promoting racial equality.

The deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, prior to 9/11, was the Oklahoma City bombing, which was masterminded by Timothy McVeigh, a man who had deep ties to far-right Nazi militant circles. In 2011, Kevin Harpham, who was a war veteran, placed a bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. In 2012, Wade Michael Page killed six innocent people in a shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Page was a member of a white supremacist band and associated with the Hammerskins, a violent neo-Nazi group. A few months ago an Imperial Grand Wizard of the KKK from Kansas, went on a killing spree whilst shouting “Heil Hitler”, in which a fourteen-year-old boy was among the dead.

Despite the growing number of mass shootings and terrorist attacks by the far right, the media chooses to focus almost exclusively on the lesser threat of radical Islam. Media pundits routinely demand that moderate Muslims condemn acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims. When was the last time that you have seen white priests being pressured to go on television to denounce violence by white supremacists in order to show that “not all Christians” are like that? How long would a Muslim group, with as violent a record as the KKK, be allowed to operate freely before it was shut down by Homeland Security? Clearly racism, as much as oil, fuels the War on Terror.

The threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism has been largely manufactured so that the so-called War on Terror can promote profitable militarism abroad and erode civil liberties at home.

Fourteen years after 9/11, al Qaeda has not successfully conducted another attack inside the United States. According to a recent Harvard University report, named The Exaggerated Threat of Home Grown Terror:

“… since 2001, despite warnings by public officials and terrorism analysts, there is little evidence that the risk of terrorist attacks in the United States by American Muslims is especially serious or growing.”

So why then has the United States spent over $6 trillion dollars on the War on Terror?

FBI data from 1980 to 2005 show that Jewish terrorists committed 7 percent of the acts of terrorism within the United States, which was more than the 6 percent committed by Islamist extremists. This statistic is made even more remarkable by the fact that the FBI drastically undercounts instances of terrorism perpetrated by Jewish extremists because of institutional racial double standards. How many Americans can name the Jewish Defense League or Jewish Armed Resistance, both terror groups that have committed more acts of terror than their Muslim counterparts?

The infamous Jewish Defense League has been operating in the U.S. for over half a century. A Department of Energy report on terror threats to nuclear facilities notes:

“…for more than a decade, the Jewish Defense League has been one of the most active terrorist groups in the United States.”

Unbeknown to many Americans, these Jewish extremists have mail-bombed police, targeted UN ambassadors, and firebombed civilians at a Symphony Orchestra performance.

If the U.S. Government is serious about combating domestic terror and mass shootings, the FBI’s statistics suggest that it should be aggressively surveilling white males. The simple fact that U.S. law enforcement has not infiltrated and spied on conservative Christian or Jewish communities to disrupt violent rightwing extremism confirms what Muslims in America know in their bones: to worship Allah is to be a suspect.

Muslim-Americans increasingly feel as though they are living in a totalitarian police state with worsening harassment, profiling, and surveillance by the state. Researcher, Arun Kundnani, has shown how the FBI has 1 counterterrorism spy for every 94 Muslims in the US, which approaches totalitarian East Germany’s infamous spy agency Stasi’s ratio of 1 spy for every 66 citizens.

White Christians and Jews don’t have to worry that an undercover agent or informant has infiltrated their churches, student groups, or social clubs.

For centuries, white terrorists in America have been allowed ample breathing room to spread their ideology and to plan and orchestrate their attacks, which explains both the greater relative lethality of white supremacist terrorism, and also the much lower rate of indictment for white perpetrators.

In America Brown and Black people are reflexively considered terrorists, thugs and gangbangers, deserving of society’s derision, whereas white people who commit terrorist attacks are simply “mentally disturbed” loners who were in need of society’s help.

Society’s decision to call a particular act of violence ‘terrorism’ indicates that the act belongs to a more widespread pattern that needs consideration beyond normal crime fighting. Calling mass shootings by white supremacists merely “hate” or murder, rather than terrorism, downplays the significant role of the perpetrator’s racist motives and avoids tough questions about the prevalence of racism in American society.

Recently, James Holmes shot over 80 people in a movie theatre but he was brought in alive by law enforcement and the media refused to call his actions terrorism, focusing instead on portraying Mr. Holmes as an “awkward” and tender “loner”. Similarly, white supremacist Dylan Roof massacred nine black churchgoers in Charlestown and not only was Roof brought in alive by law enforcement, but also the police described Roof at the time of his arrest as “very quiet, very calm … not problematic.” The police even went so far as to buy Mr. Roof lunch at Burger King, moments after he unleashed terror on innocent churchgoers. Contrasted with the police’s countless modern day lynchings of innocent and often unnamed black boys and men, it is clear that US law enforcement is as tolerant of white terrorism as it is institutionally racist to its core.

Clearly, there is a costly and unhealthy obsession among U.S. society and law enforcement, with preventing violence perpetrated by American Muslims, one that ignores both the real threat of white terrorism and the ongoing terrorism by police towards Black American citizens.

Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on [email protected]

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokeperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the co-author, with Damien Millet of Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He is the author of many essays including one on Jacques de Groote entitled Procès d’un homme exemplaire (The Trial of an Exemplary Man), Al Dante, Marseille, 2013, and wrote with Damien Millet, AAA. Audit Annulation Autre politique (Audit, Abolition, Alternative Politics), Le Seuil, Paris, 2012. See his Series “Banks versus the People: the Underside of a Rigged Game!” Next publication : Bankocracy Merlin Press, Londres, May 2015 (English version).
Since the 4^th April 2015 he is coordinator of the Truth Commission on Public Debt.

Notes:

|1| The DEA (Internationalist Workers’ Left) is a revolutionary Marxist organization and Syriza’s co-founder. With Kokkino and APO (anti-capitalist political group), two other revolutionary Marxist organizations, and with other independent activists, the DEA has created the Red Network group within Syriza. Kokkino and DEA merged in December 2014. The Red Network and the left-wing group inside Synapismos (Panagiotis Lafazanis being its most famous member) formed the Left Platform within Syriza. About 25 Syriza MPs (out of 149) directly participate in this platform (two of whom are from the Red Network). Approximately 30% of Syriza’s delegates supported this Platform during the convention held in 2013. During the July/August 2015 voting on the new Memorandum imposed by the Eurogroup, the MPs Elena Psarrou (DEA) and Ioanna Gaïtani (APO) as well as 23 members of the left and other Syriza MPs such as Zoe Konstantopoulou voted against. On 16 July, 32 Syriza MPs voted against the 13 July agreement. On 23 July, 31 voted against and on 14 August, 32 voted against. Now the Red Network is part of Popular Unity which didn’t succeed in electing members of the parliament in the anticipated general elections of 20^th September 2015.

French Government Proposes Constitutional Amendment on State of Emergency, Deprivation of Citizenship

The Syrian Arab Army is continuing its military operations to secure the recently-captured military airport of Marj al-Sultan, and retook new areas in the Damascus province. According to the reports, the SAA attacked al-Nusra, Jeish al-Islam, al-Rahman and other terrorist groups in Eastern Ghouta, in the vicinity of Marj al-Sultan Military Airport and Harasta farms. The Syrian troops killed at least 14 militants and destroyed their vehicles and weapons in the clashes.

Separately, the SAA cut off the terrorists’ supply line militants between Darayya and al-Moadamyeh in the Damascus province. The pro-government forces captured over 1 km of the supply route disconnecting the most important arms and logistical supply route used by the militants in the region.

In North Latakia, the SAA gained control of Height 489.5 after and Height 465.5 in the al-Kabir Black mountain. Height 489.5 is located at the east side of the Attira town and around 1.5 km away from the al-Saraf town. The height is a major crossing leading to Jabal Zahia. The loss of this important logistical point made the terrorists’ counter attack in the area very difficult.

In West Idlib, the SAA and its allies launched an assault to capture the village of Al-Sirmaniyah after partly encircling it after the recent clashes. The village is controlled by the Jaysh Al-Fateh terrorist alliance. According to the field reports, the Syrian forces are advancing on Al-Sirmaniyah from the western flank while the Russian MI-24 Hind Helicopter Gunships provide air support.

The SAA has reportedly used Russia-made military robots took the strategic tower of “Syriatel”, 754m in height in the Latakia province. According to the unconfirmed reports, 6 robotic complexes “Platform-M” and 4 complexes “Argo” were used to detect the terrorists’ fire positions which then were destroyed by the SAA artillery. Amid the usage of Kalibr cruise missiles and strategic bombers in Syria, these reports could be truthful. Thus, Moscow is continuing to test the newest military equipment in the real battle conditions in Syria.

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 It is now openly discussed even in mainstream media the fact that Turkey has been intimately involved in fomenting and supporting the war on Syria, with its ultimate goal of the overthrow of the Syrian government and its replacement by a compliant proxy aligned with Turkish President Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood. That this is no longer a ‘conspiracy theory’ but a conspiracy fact not only vindicates my analysis over the last four years, but it also brings to the fore the nefarious role of a NATO member in stoking a brutal and bloody war for its own ends.

Beyond just the war itself, Turkey has been implicated in a wide variety of crimes (some constituting war crimes) which cast Ankara in a very bad light: a supporter of terrorism, a criminal government engaging in acts of aggression against its neighbors and other world powers, the repression of journalists and others who have brought the truth to the light of day, among many others. Taken in total, it becomes clear that under President Erdogan Turkey has become a belligerent actor with delusions of hegemony and a complete disregard for human rights and sovereignty.

But how exactly has this transformation happened? What has been proven regarding Turkish government actions that make it so clear that the regime in Ankara is criminal in nature?

Cataloguing Turkish Crimes

The criminality of the Erdogan government can be roughly broken down into the following categories: aggression against sovereign states, material support for international terrorism, and systematic violation of human rights. Naturally, there are many other crimes that would also be included in a full and completing accounting of Ankara’s illegal actions including, but not limited to, corruption, promoting and tacitly supporting fascist gangs, and many others. But it is the support for international terrorism that rises above all others to thrust Turkey into the spotlight as one of the single most important supporters of the global scourge of terrorism.

Turkey’s central role in each and every aspect of terrorism in Syria must be the starting point of any analysis of Turkey’s grave crimes. President Erdogan has not been shy about calling for regime changein Syria, but his position has been far more than merely rhetorical; Erdogan’s government has played a very direct role in the sponsorship, arming, facilitation and military backing of everyone from the Free Syrian Army to Jabhat al-Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria) and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh).

In 2012, the New York Times confirmed that the CIA was sending weapons and other military materiel into the hands of anti-Assad forces from the Turkish side of the border, using their connections with the Muslim Brotherhood to do so. However, it has also come to light that Turkish intelligence has been front and center in the ongoing campaign to arm and resupply the terror groups such as the al-Nusra Front and others. This fact was exposed by Can Dündar, the editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet, who now faces a potential life sentence at the behest of President Erdogan, who himself called for Dündar to receive multiple life sentences.

What is the reason for the attack on Dündar and other opposition journalists? The Cumhuriyet, one of the most widely read Turkish dailies, published video footage confirming the widespread allegations that Turkish trucks, ostensibly loaded with humanitarian supplies, were actually filled with arms bound for terror groups fighting against Assad, and that those trucks were operated by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT). But it goes much further than that.

Turkey has been directly involved on the ground in Syria both in active military and support roles. In fact, transcripts of wiretaps obtained by Cumhuriyet, and presented in Turkish courts, along with shockingvideo footage, have confirmed what numerous eyewitnesses have stated: Turkish security forces have been directly involved in shelling and support operations for Nusra front and other jihadi groups in and around Kassab, Syria, among other sites. This is a crucial piece of information because it explains just why those terror groups were able to successfully capture that region in 2014, and recapture it this year. Eyewitnesses in Kassab have confirmed what Syrian soldiers speaking on condition of anonymity had reported, namely that Turkish helicopters and heavy artillery were used in support of Nusra and the other terror groups during both the 2014 and the current campaign.

Of course this policy of alliance with anti-Assad terrorists has been part of Turkey’s modus operandi since the beginning of the conflict. In 2012, Reuters revealed that Turkey, “set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the border… ‘It’s the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main coordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom,’ said a Doha-based source.”

This information was confirmed by Vice President Joe Biden in his spectacular foot-in-mouth speech at Harvard University where he stated:

Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends… [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, etcetera. What were they doing?…They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad — except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.

But one must guard against the false notion that somehow Turkey’s role has been merely as auxiliary in Syria, as a supporter, but not leader, of the terrorist factions wreaking havoc on the Syrian battlefield. Instead, it is now an inescapable fact, even acknowledged by some high-ranking military and intelligence officials, that Turkey has been the principal financier and supporter of the Islamic State and the other jihadist groups.

According to the UK Independent, President Erdogan’s son Bilal Erdogan, along with a number of other close associates, have been directly benefitting from the illicit oil trade with the Islamic State. The paper noted that, “Bilal Erdogan…is one of three equal partners in the BMZ group, a major Turkish oil and marine shipping company, which both the Russian and Syrian governments have accused of purchasing oil from ISIS…Bilal Erdogan has been directly involved in the oil trade with ISIS… Turkey downed a Russian jet on 24 November specifically to protect his oil smuggling business.”

In fact, Syria’s Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi explained that “All of the oil was delivered to a company that belongs to the son of Recep [Tayyip] Erdogan. This is why Turkey became anxious when Russia began delivering airstrikes against the IS infrastructure and destroyed more than 500 trucks with oil already. They’re importing not only oil, but wheat and historic artefacts [sic] as well.”

So it seems that Erdogan and his clique are involved not simply in fomenting war and terrorism in Syria, but also in its plunder, with complex smuggling networks being directly tied to the Turkish President himself. Indeed, just such smuggling networks have been uncovered throughout Asia, tying Turkey into the broader international architecture of terrorism trafficking.

In late 2014 and early 2015, a human trafficking ring was exposed by Chinese authorities. It was revealed that at least ten Turks were responsible for organizing and facilitating the border crossings of a number of Uighurs (Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang), at least one of whom was a wanted Uighur terrorist with others being “radicalized potential terrorists.” These individuals were likely part of a previously documented trend of Uighur extremists traveling to the Middle East to train and fight with the Islamic State and/or other terror groups.

In fact, precisely this trend was exposed two months earlier in September 2014 when Reuters reportedthat Beijing formally accused militant Uighurs from Xinjiang of having traveled to Islamic State-controlled territory to receive training. Further corroborating these accusations, the Jakarta Post of Indonesiareported that four Chinese Uighur jihadists had been arrested in Indonesia after having travelled from Xinjiang through Malaysia. Other, similar reports have also surfaced in recent months, painting a picture of a concerted campaign to help Uighur extremists travel throughout Asia, communicating and collaborating with transnational terror groups such as IS.

Now, with these latest revelations regarding Turkish nationals being involved in the trafficking of extremists, it seems an invaluable piece of the terrorist transit infrastructure has been exposed. Indeed my assertions above (initially made here in early February 2015) have been substantiated by Syria’s ambassador to China, quoted at length by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his pieceMilitary to Military which notes the following:

[Syria’s ambassador to China Imad Moustapha explained that] ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations…and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria’ [emphasis added].

Moustapha’s concerns were echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst, whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria [emphasis added]. ‘US intelligence,’ he said, ‘is not getting good information about these activities because those insiders who are unhappy with the policy are not talking to them.’ He also said it was ‘not clear’ that the officials responsible for Syrian policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’. IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has information that ‘up to 860 Uighur fighters are currently in Syria.’

It has become clear that Turkey is now unmistakably a major supporter of international terrorism, with Syria being merely the proving ground for a stable of terror groups directly or indirectly working with Erdogan’s government. This is further evidenced by the now documented and verified fact that the Erdogan government was directly involved in the transfer of chemical weapons into the hands of ISIS.

As Turkish MP Eren Erdem explained before the Turkish parliament and to international media, “There is data in this indictment. Chemical weapon materials are being brought to Turkey and being put together in Syria in camps of ISIS which was known as Iraqi Al Qaeda during that time.” Erdem noted that according to an investigation launched (and abruptly closed) by the General Prosecutor’s Office in Adana, Turkish citizens with ties to the intelligence community took part in negotiations with ISIS-linked and Al-Qaeda-linked militants to sell sarin gas for use in Syria. The evidence of these allegations came in the form of wiretapped phone conversations similar to those published earlier this year by Cumhuriyet.

Taken in total, the case against Erdogan’s government is damning. At the same time, one must also note Erdogan’s grave crimes against his own people.

As noted already, Can Dündar and his colleagues at Cumhuriyet have been targeted by Erdogan’s state for their disclosure of Ankara’s dealings with the terrorists of Syria. Just a few weeks ago Dündar, along with Cumhuriyet’s Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul, were charged in a Turkish court with “spying” and “divulging state secrets.” This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Turkey’s track record when it comes to opposition journalism.

In fact, in December 2014, the Turkish police raided the offices of the Zaman newspaper, one of the most popular in the country, alleging that Zaman was responsible for “launching an armed terror organization.” The authorities detained the Zaman Editor-in-Chief Ekrem Dumanlı , as well as the head of the Samanyolu Media Group, Hidayet Karaca, along with a producer, scriptwriter and director.

The Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) and the Turkey Journalists’ Labor Union (TGS) released a joint statement in condemnation of the raids and the ongoing repression of journalists by the Erdogan government, noting that “Almost 200 journalists were previously held in prison on charges of being a member of a terror organization, violating their right to a fair trial. Journalists are now being detained once again. These developments mean that freedom of the press and opinion is punished in Turkey, which takes its place in the class of countries where the press is not free.”

International organizations too expressed their outrage at this blatant violation of freedom of the press. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and its regional group the European Federation of Journalists (EFL), stated that, “We are appalled by this brazen assault on press freedom and Turkish democracy…One year after the exposure of corruption at the heart of government, the authorities appear to be exacting their revenge by targeting those who express opposing views…This latest act demonstrates that the authorities’ contempt for journalism has not diminished.”

Of course, Ankara’s war on freedom of speech, and the media generally, is not relegated to established media outlets such as Zaman and Cumhuriyet, but also to citizen media and social media as well. In response to the leaking of recordings on Twitter documenting corruption among Erdogan cronies and political elites within his Justice and Development Party (AKP), Erdogan attacked the social media platform, and his government immediately moved to restrict access to Twitter.

Erdogan even went so far as to suggest a total ban on all social media sites, including Facebook and YouTube, saying that “The international community can say this, can say that. I don’t care at all. Everyone will see how powerful the Republic of Turkey is.” This sort of megalomaniacal rhetoric has become the norm for Erdogan, who sees himself as less a president and more a sultan or absolute monarch.

The famous words of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg succinctly and matter-of-factly state that the waging of aggressive war is “essentially an evil thing…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” This is undeniably true. But what happens when one is engaged in an international campaign to destroy a neighboring country through war? What happens when one country enables and participates in the destruction of another? What happens when one country will stop at nothing to come out victorious in a war it is not officially involved in, but covertly manages, and from which it directly benefits? Are these not simply different forms of the same crime, the supreme crime, as it were?

Let’s face it, Turkey is now a mafia state ruled by a criminal regime. It is also a NATO member state. Perhaps now the pernicious illusion of NATO as military alliance defending justice, human rights, and the rule of law can finally be put to rest. While the propagandists will continue the charade, Turkey has permanently exposed the US-NATO-GCC-Israel for the warmongers they are in Syria and around the world. Let’s just hope the world notices.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

French President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls presented to the council of ministers yesterday an amendment inscribing the state of emergency in the French constitution.

Even the fragmentary initial reports that emerged from the meeting show that it opened the way to the lasting imposition of police-state rule in France. The amendment that Hollande proposed would allow the president to call a state of emergency the duration of which would be set by legislation. The amendment places no restrictions on how long a state of emergency parliamentarians could decide to allow. It also permits a stepped-up use by police of their already enormous powers of repression and electronic surveillance of the population.

Moreover, by proposing to extend the deprivation of nationality to dual nationals condemned for “terrorist crimes,” including dual nationals born French, the ruling Socialist Party (PS) is openly affirming its sympathies for the ideas of the neo-fascist National Front (FN).

Deprivation of nationality, a policy traditionally advocated by the FN, was employed under the Nazi Occupation amid the French authorities’ participation in the Holocaust.

The French state pronounced collective deprivations of French nationality under the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime to deprive Jewish refugees in France who had been naturalized of their citizenship. The law of July 22, 1940 deprived 15,154 people of their French citizenship, including approximately 6,000 Jews as well as leaders of the Resistance. Vichy first interned Jews deprived of French citizenship in concentration camps and then, after passing a Franco-German accord on July 2, 1942, began deporting them out of France towards death camps to the east.

The proposals by the PS underscore the sharp shift towards the extreme right of the entire political establishment, including its social-democratic components and their pseudo-left satellites, such as the Left Front and the New Anti-capitalist Party in France.

These forces defended in 2014 the NATO powers’ decision to back a fascist-led putsch in Kiev and refused this year to travel to Moscow to celebrate the 70h anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory against Nazi Germany in World War II. Now, the PS government is highlighting its counter-revolutionary historical sympathies inside France itself.

PS Justice Minister Christiane Taubira had announced during a trip to Algiers on December 20-21 that the PS had in fact definitively ruled out new measures on deprivations of citizenship. She told Algerian Channel 3 radio that this was “a subject that will go away,” as it “created a problem for the fundamental principle that one can acquire full citizenship through residence in France.”

Taubira was echoing the position of the PS only a few years ago. In 2010, Valls denounced a debate on imposing new measures on deprivation of citizenship by right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy as “foul and absurd.” However, Taubira learned upon her return to France that the PS would take a decision on this issue in meetings to which she was not invited.

Observing Valls’ and Hollande’s rush to propose measures they previously denounced as “foul,” Le Monde concluded that Taubira had been reduced to a “sort of political cover for the government, to reassure a left-wing electorate increasingly disturbed by the head of state’s turn to law and order.”

This debate underscores that far deeper political issues are involved in the state of emergency than police matters on how to prevent terrorist attacks.

A deep crisis of the capitalist regime is shaking Europe. As austerity devastates workers across the continent, and imperialist wars in the Middle East are provoking growing opposition, the ruling class is pushing for a broad ideological reorientation towards the far right.

The PS is appealing to nationalism and racism in order to fashion an ultra-reactionary political consensus that will allow it to continue imposing its unpopular measures. The fact that this operation has produced a return to measures championed by the Vichy regime underscores the immense dangers posed.

Hollande initially proposed the preparation of a constitutional amendment on November 16, three days after the terror attacks in Paris, at a joint session of parliament at Versailles. He said the amendment would allow for a state of emergency in France for the duration of the “war on terror.” It would allow the police to use the vast powers of surveillance and repression under the state of emergency against anyone police believed posed even a potential threat to public order, based on their “behavior, friendships, statements, or plans.”

Hollande was thus proposing to give a blank check for the elimination of freedom of opinion and the installation of a police dictatorship of indefinite duration.

Now, the media are seeking to somehow reassure the public that the state of emergency poses no threat to democracy. Hollande’s amendment has been modified, L’ Obs wrote, “after numerous debates.” Several reports indicated that high-ranking judicial officials and legislators had firmly criticized parts of the first text presented by the PS. Valls’ staff insisted yesterday that the new amendment, due to be debated by the National Assembly, would not establish a permanent state of emergency.

The council of ministers did not publish the new amendment proposed by Hollande, so it is of course impossible to establish its precise contents. However, the entire political evolution of the PS suggests that it aims to use the law-and-order measures and the political hysteria surrounding the state of emergency to try to crush political opposition inside France and to found an authoritarian regime.

The PS banned outright protests against the Gaza war last year and recently against the COP-21 ecological summit, and it is now backing the illegal mass sacking of Sodexo workers in Marseille for striking.

Another indication of the character of the PS’ proposals on the state of emergency is the close link that exists between Hollande and the military dictatorship in Egypt. Only a few hours after the November 13 attacks, Hollande received a phone call from General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to discuss how to fight terrorism.

Sisi, who overthrew Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi, runs a bloody dictatorship under a state of emergency, citing the threat of Islamist terrorism. He has ordered army units to shoot thousands of unarmed protesters in the streets of Egypt, had police imprison and torture tens of thousands of workers and youth, and had Egypt’s obedient judicial system impose mass death sentences against members of oppositional political parties.

According to RFI, Sisi called Hollande just after the terror attacks “to present his condolences and those of Egypt … Relations between Presidents Sisi and Hollande go well beyond simple protocol. French sources said there is ‘friendship’ between the two men. Official sources in Cairo said that the two presidents discussed reinforced cooperation in the anti-terror struggle, especially against the Islamic State.”

The West has forced millions to become wandering, destitute refugees, as it destroys nations and peoples that get in the way of Empire. Palestinians have lived this reality for 67 years. Beirut sits at the lip of the volcano.

They cluster on the prosperous, Christmas-themed streets of Beirut: Syrian mothers and their children begging from passersby until deep in the night; young girls holding infant siblings; pre-teen boys with shoe shine cans who persist for blocks before finally taking no for an answer; grandmothers tapping on the windows of traffic-trapped cars. One million Syrians have descended on neighboring Lebanon, a tiny nation of only four million people that now hosts the highest percentage of refugees in the world.

When Syria held presidential elections in June of 2014, so many refugees rushed to vote at the Syrian Embassy, located high on a hill (everything is high on a hill or low in a valley in Lebanon), that many had to abandon their cars and walk several kilometers to cast their ballots, according the Eva Bartlett, part of our small delegation in solidarity with Palestine. We were hoping to spend a few days in Syria before participating in the Third Global Convention of Solidarity with Palestine, at a grand hotel in southern Beirut, December 8 through 10. The problem was, nobody in the Syrian ambassador’s office had been informed of our urgent need for visas, and soon our time would run out.

Nowhere is the refugee crisis more acute than in the camps of Palestinians, themselves exiled from their neighboring homeland by Zionist terror 67 years ago. Half a million Palestinians are registered as refugees in Lebanon, with somewhat less than half of them living in 12 camps. The Bourj el-Barajneh camp sits next to a highway in what used to be the southern outskirts of Beirut, but is now surrounded by a crowded Shia neighborhood that is overwhelmingly loyal to Hezbollah, the most politically and militarily powerful institution in the country. Bourj el-Barajneh was already densely packed with 18,000 Palestinians before the West and its royal Persian Gulf allies plunged Syria into a multi-front proxy war, in 2011. With the influx of Palestinians from Syria’s 13 refugee camps – especially the largest, Yarmouk, which had nearly 150,000 residents before it was partially overrun by al-Nusra terrorists – Bourj el-Barajneh more than doubled in population, adding 25,000 new residents.

“One million Syrians have descended on neighboring Lebanon, a tiny nation of only four million people that now hosts the highest percentage of refugees in the world.”

Ayoub is the fatigue-jacketed leader of the dominant political organization in the camp, a man who carries around his own coffee and knows every nook and cranny of the one square kilometer warren of alleyways and lethal, drooping wires. (On average, 10 or 12 people are electrocuted in the wilderness of wires, every year.) He escorts our small group of two Americans, a French/Moroccan, a Canadian and an Englishwoman out of the camp shadows and down a hill to the street where two ISIS suicide bombers killed 43 people on November 12. The Shia neighborhood, also known as Bourj el-Barajneh, is once again full of shoppers – poor people, patronizing cheap shops, whose deaths were cheapened when western media focused all their attention on the attacks in Paris, the next day.

Swarms of Palestinian and Lebanese youths on battered motor scooters buzzed past a memorial to those “martyred” in the bombing, mostly young men, whose photographs sanctify the corner. The street is still indented where the first bomber blew himself up. A block away, another scar in the pavement marks the second bomber’s self-demolition, timed to kill people coming to the aid of the first victims.

Riches and Refugees

If it were located in Manhattan, the Hamra area of Beirut would call itself Chelsea. It abuts the wealthy seaside international corporate zone, where English advertising blasts from blinding billboards. Christmas rules along Hamra Street, with holiday mall-music wafting over shoppers and Syrian beggars. Dollars (but not euros) are as spendable as Lebanese lira. On the cross streets are bars and clubs in numbers that rival the new York City’s West Village. The neighborhood is also home to the American University, where delegations like ours can find an audience.

If there is anyplace that exudes “internationalism,” it is the American University in Beirut. In a country where it is permissible to smoke almost everywhere, tobacco stops at the AU campus gate. Mariam, an AU professor and political activist who spent many years in the Triangle area of North Carolina, filled a classroom with students, teachers, and activists. I stressed that internationalism lay at the core of the Black Radical Tradition; that, historically, when Black folks talked among themselves about foreign policy, they would say, “What are THEY doing?” in Vietnam, or Latin American, or wherever the U.S. was meddling in other people’s affairs – not “What are WE doing?” We didn’t identify with the actions of the U.S. government: that was “them,” not “us.”

Early in African American history, for complex reasons, many Blacks chose to identify as “Arab” or “Moorish” – culturally advanced civilizations that had defeated whites, militarily, crossing from Africa to conquer Spain. Moorish societies proliferated in Black America, along with the wearing of the fez. Deep into the late 20^th century, Black men who sold fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn wagons on the streets of Baltimore were called “A-rabs.” Not Arabs, but A-rabs.

Identification with Arab civilization led to identification with Islam, so that by the 1930s and ‘40s Black Americans had created their own, Black brand of Muslim religion: the Nation of Islam. This was, I told our university audience, “an entirely political project, an ideological assault on the belief system of the white American oppressor.” It was a project rooted in identification with the Arab world.

The Nation of Islam provided “a pathway to the internationalist framework espoused by Malcolm X, without whose influence the Black Panther Party’s internationalism would not have been possible.” The explosion of Black American Islam began with Elijah Muhammad’s organization, and then spread to mainstream Islamic branches. By the early Nineties, Black Americans made up a majority of Muslims in the United States.

Even today, after a huge influx of Muslims from around the world, African Americans still make up 23 percent of U.S. Muslims – and 60 percent of third generation U.S. Muslims.

By the late Sixties, U.S. Zionists were calling Black Americans the “most anti-Semitic” group in the U.S. That was never true, although Blacks were by far the most Islamic-oriented major ethnic group in the country. The long-time Black identification with Arabs had nothing to do with Jews; it was all about Black rejection of domination of the world by white people. If Jews wanted to be “white” – here in the U.S. and in the Middle East – that was their own doing.

The Zionists threatened to withhold their money and bring down the wrath of their influence on Black projects if African Americans did not tow the Israeli line in foreign policy. The blackmail has been very successful, especially with the Black political class aligned with the Democratic Party – which means virtually all Black elected officials. In the summer of 2014, every Black member of Congress voted for a resolution favoring Israel during its murderous assault on Gaza – even though Black Americans are the nation’s most pro-Arab (or the least anti-Arab) constituency, historically and currently.

How do you prove such a proposition, when the overwhelming bulk of Black elected officials are in Israel’s pocket? The best evidence came in February of 2003, six weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Zogby polling organization (owned by two Lebanese Americans of Arab Christian extraction) asked the question: “Would you support a U.S. invasion of Iraq if it would result in the death of thousands of Iraqi civilians?”

Strong majorities of white males said Yes, bring the war on, to hell with Arab civilians.

Slightly more than half of white females agreed.

Among Hispanic Americans, 16 percent answered the Zogby question in the affirmative.

But, only 7 percent of Black Americans were willing to go to war if meant the death of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

When it comes to blood lust, White America – and even Hispanic America – live in a different world than Black America, where war mongers are confined to single digits. Black American internationalism flows from humanitarian compassion and identification with the victims of white American savagery.

Resistance, and Dissidence

Malcolm X is big in Lebanon. Ajamu Baraka, a founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network and columnist for Black Agenda Report, found that out early last year when he spoke about Malcolm on a television station that caters to Shia Lebanese, the country’s largest population group. When Baraka returned to Beirut this December, folks stopped him on the street to commend his presentation. Thus, when Baraka was called upon to speak to the full Convention of Solidarity with Palestine, he cited Malcolm X and declared: “There can be no compromise between settler colonialism in the U.S. and settler colonialism in Palestine. We have never given up on that objective. We have stood shoulder to shoulder with Palestine and Palestine has stood with us,” most dramatically since the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore (where the “A-rabs” once roamed). “The 21^st century,” said Baraka, “will be the last century of western dominance.”

“There can be no compromise between settler colonialism in the U.S. and settler colonialism in Palestine.”

With almost daily reports of stabbings of Israelis by Palestinian youths, the convention hummed with excitement at the prospect of a prolonged Third Intifada. Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of Hamas in Gaza and former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, said in a video message to the convention:

“The Intifada will only stop at its real stop, which is the stop of Return. We call on all states to unite around the Intifada. The real enemy, the constant enemy, is the Israeli occupation.”

Salah al-Khawaja, of the Stop the Wall campaign, told the convention:

“There has been a clear message from the youth of Palestine to the political leadership: If you are resisting or not resisting, you will be a target. You have no choice but to unite and adopt a position of resistance. The political and diplomatic movement of the occupation has to be paralyzed all over the world, especially the Arab world.”

Saeb Erekat, Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), called for an international tribunal to hold the Israelis “responsible for their crimes, their war crimes.”

But the most compelling comments, rebelliously delivered, came from a Palestinian student who somehow gained possession of the microphone amidst the turbaned and suited dignitaries. He spoke for “a new generation that doesn’t waver to any kind of aggression.” The PLO was directly criticized for its “absence” from the struggle and its role in the discredited Oslo agreement. “We have no arms because of the Oslo authority in our homeland, and we will not accept the continuity of the aggression, regardless of who signed the occupation agreement,” said the young activist. “There is no money for the resistance, for schools, but there is money for the big shots, it goes to their pockets, probably to those who are among us, here.”

Soldiers, Sons and Sheikhs

The next day, the remaining convention delegates boarded busses to southern Lebanon to visit Beaufort Castle, a Crusader fort once held by the Israelis when they maintained a six-mile “buffer zone” of Lebanese territory, and the Mleeta Tourist Memorial to the Hezbollah fighters that drove the Israelis from the country once and for all in 2006. At one of the observation platforms high on a mountain, a young Palestinian engaged the Americans from the solidarity delegation. He had snuck out of “occupied Palestine” to attend the conference and to make contact with comrades outside of Israeli-controlled territory, and intended to return by the same dangerous path. Yes, he said, it was horrible that Arab nations like the United Arab Emirates and Dubai were considering “normalizing” relations with Israel, but he was even more concerned that militancy was ebbing on the occupied West Bank. Tens of thousands of Palestinian households were now hooked to home mortgages, a pacification policy urged on the Israelis by Americans – and it was having an effect. Still, he said, there were plenty of youth willing to fight the occupiers and their Palestinian collaborators. “That guy is a soldier of the revolution,” the Americans agreed.

Only days later, Kristian Bailey, the organizer who helped get 1,000 Black American academics, artists and celebrities to sign a petition to stand with Palestinians and against Zionism, and who was among 100 youths from around the world that attended the Beirut convention, was arrested by the Israelis. He’s becoming a soldier, too.

Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, leader of Nigeria’s Shia Muslims, and his son Hammad left Beirut while we were touring battle sites. Hammad was dead by Saturday, killed by the Nigerian military along with as many as 1,000 other unarmed Shia while trying to defend his father, who suffered four bullet wounds to his hands. Six years ago, the Nigerian military killed three other sons of Sheikh Zakzaky. His followers have also been suicide bombed by Boko Harma, which the Sheikh charges is manipulated by the Nigerian military and elements of the country’s elite.

Nigeria recently joined the Saudi Arabia-led coalition against “terror” – which means exactly the opposite.

Glen Ford is the executive editor of BAR

Afghan opium is being processed into high-grade heroin in clandestine Turkish drug labs for distribution in Europe and Russia, Russia’s anti-drug chief has revealed. The trafficking route was exposed after a joint Russian-Afghan anti-drug operation.

“The cargo traveled through Badakhshan-Doshi-Bamiyan-Herat, then further through Iran and into Turkey, where the opium was processed in well-equipped laboratories…into high quality heroin, and then was to be sent to Europe and Russia,” Ivanov said during an anti-narcotics committee meeting.

#ISIS uses Turkey for trafficking heroin to Europe – Russian anti-drugs chief https://t.co/nfXx9Rjgzn pic.twitter.com/2QWyJviif0

— RT (@RT_com) December 20, 2015

The head of Russia’s federal anti-drug agency (FKSN) Viktor Ivanov reported that 600 kilograms of opium was seized in a joint operation carried out by Russian and Afghan special anti-drug units in the city of Doshi in Afghanistan’s Baglan Province.

The operation was conducted in mid-December by Afghanistan’s Kabul Gates anti-drug unit with intelligence support from the FKSN, Ivanov said. The drug shipment was found in an Afghani truck traveling to Turkey via Iran.

The FSKN head stressed that drug trafficking has enabled Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) to boost its numbers four-fold since 2014, Ivanov said.

“The spike in IS fighters corresponds with the annual increase of drug smuggling in the Middle East, which is confirmed by the growing number of heroin seizures in the region,” Ivanov said.

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) is “actively engaged with drug trafficking,” Ivanov said, adding that according to the FSKN estimates, the group’s income from illegal drug trade “makes up to $200-500 million annually.”

Another season of Zionist violence and dispossession in the Holy Land.

This Christmas, as every year since 1948, Jewish and Christian Zionists will continue the catastrophe that already violently destroyed hundreds of Arab villages and forced three quarters of a million civilians to become refugees in their own land. 

A catastrophe that continues to this day, courtesy of an American congress that cares nothing for human rights or justice at this time of Christian celebration as it increases its arms shipments to the military occupier of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to over US$6billion a year under the political pressure of AIPAC and its affiliated lobby groups.

As tourists cavort themselves upon the beach at Tel Aviv, the rest of the world sings Christmas carols to the glory of God; praising peace and goodwill to all men. But not in the Holy Land where darkness and death still pervade every corner of the Israeli-occupied, Palestinian lands.

For here there is no light, save for the flashing fire of a US-Israeli tank-shell destroying another home and another family, as God weeps yet again at another Zionist season of violence and inhumanity to mankind, this Christmas.

The terms of Resolution 2254 mostly confirm those of the Geneva Communiqué, which was adopted three years ago. The two greatest military powers in the world agree that the Syrian Arab Republic should be maintained, while the imperialists – with France in the front line – pursue their dream of changing the Syrian régime by force. But the world has changed over the last few years, and it will not be as easy to sabotage this new agreement as it was in 2012.

Washington-Moscow relations

For the second time, the United States and Russia have signed an agreement and concluded a peace plan for Syria.

• The first time was during the Geneva Conference in June 2012 [1]. The content of this agreement concerned bringing peace both to Syria and the whole of the Middle East by dividing the region into zones of influence [2]. However, this agreement was immediately sabotaged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her group of « liberal hawks » and « neo-conservatives ». And less than two weeks later, France organised a reprise of the war, during the Paris Conference of « Friends of Syria » [3], then with the operation « Damascus Volcano and Syrian Earthquake » [4]. To this dispute was added the coup d’État in Ukraine at the end of 2013. The two events marked the almost total suspension of diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow.

• The second time was during the visit by John Kerry to Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin, on the 15th Decembre 2015 [5]. Their encounter was immediately followed by a meeting of the High Commission of the Syrian opposition, and the adoption of Resolution 2253 [6], which forbade the financing of Al-Qaïda and Daesh, and Resolution 2254 [7], which institutionalised the efforts deployed in Geneva and Vienna for Syria. To general surprise, the High Commission of the opposition elected the Ba’athist ex-Prime Minister Riad Hijab – member of a tribe present in Arabia – to lead its delegation. In order to avoid errors of interpretation, Secretary of State Kerry declared at the Kremlin that the United States’ opinion of President Assad would not be an obstacle to the Syrian vote, then confirmed at the Security Council that the « political process will not offer a choice between Assad and Daesh, but between war and peace ».

The withdrawal of the Iranian military advisors had begun a little before the summit meeting at the Kremlin .

Russia accepted to conform with the Geneva Communiqué, which stipulates that elements of the opposition should be integrated into a sort of government of national union for the Syrian Arab Republic. In order to demonstrate that it is fighting the terrorists, but not the political opposition, whether or not they are armed, Russia concluded an agreement with the Free Syrian Army and its sponsor, France.

While this army has never had the importance on the ground that the Atlantist media claim, and although it has not existed since the end of 2013, as many as 5,000 combatants, who have appeared from no-one knows where, are now collaborating with the Russian army as well as the Syrian army against Al-Qaïda and Daesh – this is a surprising development considering that the Free Syrian Army was supposed to be settled in the South, but is now fighting in the North of the country.

Since the fiasco of the Geneva Conference of June 2012, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. Certain of the protagonists have been eliminated, and the balance of power has been inverted.

• President Obama seems to have regained a portion of his power and closed down the « Arab Spring » project. He has managed, successively, to get rid of General David Petraeus (whom he had arrested in handcuffs in November 2012), Hillary Clinton (in January 2013), and General John Allen (forced to resign just two months ago in October 2015). In the same way, he has cleaned out his administration – including the National Security Council – by banishing the Muslim Brotherhood. However, Jeffrey Feltman remains the number 2 at the UNO. Feltman has drawn up a plan for the total and unconditional surrender of Syria, and has been dragging his feet on peace negotiations in the hope that the Syrian Arab Army will be defeated first [8].

• In June 2013, the White House forced Emir Hamad al-Thani of Qatar to abdicate, and his Prime Minister Hamad ben Jassem to withdraw from political life [9]. However, ben Jassem has become the co-President of the Brookings Institute in Doha, while the new Emir, Tamim, maintained the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood and their terrorist organisations until the diplomatic crisis with his Saudi neighbour, in March 2014 [10].

• Despite warnings from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), David Petraeus’ group was able, in mid-2014, to manage the development of an organisation that he had created in 2004, with Colonel James Steele, Colonel James Coffman and ambassador John Negroponte, under the name of the « Islamic Emirate in Iraq ». They used it to ethnically cleanse part of the country with a view to partition. This operation was supported by several states (Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, France, Italy, Israël, Qatar, Turkey and Ukraine) and multinationals (Exxon-Mobil, KKR, Academi).

• The White House was able to eliminate the clans of both ex-king Abdallah and prince Bandar ben Sultan from the Saudi directorate, leaving it in the hands of princes Mohamed ben Nayef and Mohamad ben Salmane, under the authority of the new king Salmane. This new distribution weakened the power structure, but made political change possible.

• The 5+1 agreement with Iran marked Teheran’s renunciation of its revolutionary ambitions [11], so that a modus vivendi with the Saudis became conceivable [12], even though the Yemen episode complicated the situation.

• Both Washington and Moscow have taken a firm dislike to Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [13]. However, the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO forced the White House to play carefully, parrticularly since Ankara is allied with Kiev [14], another important theatre of war in the global strategy of the United States [15].

• The balance of power between Washington and Moscow was progressively inverted, in June 2012 and September 2015. NATO lost its superiority in both intercontinental missiles [16] and conventional warfare [17], so that Russia has now become the world’s leading military power.

As a result, the roles have been inverted. In 2012, the Kremlin aimed at becoming the equal of the White House. Today, the US needs to negotiate in political terms the loss of its military domination.

A sign of the times – the Rand Corporation, the emblematic think tank of the military-industrial complex, has just published its Peace Plan for Syria. This powerful group had already shocked the US establishment in October 2014, when it confirmed that the victory of President el-Assad would be the best result for Washington [18]. It then proposed a cease-fire which would justify the presence of representatives from the opposition and the Kurds in the future government of national union [19].

The opposition to the new world order

The opposition to Barack Obama’s policy has not altogether disappeared. For example, the Washington Post accuses him of having surrendered to Russia on the question of régime change in Syria [20].

In 2012, it was possible to interpret the opposition of the Petraeus-Clinton clan to peace as a desire to profit as far as possible from US military supremacy. But with the development of new Russian weaponry, this no longer makes any sense. As of now, the only possible interpretation is the hope of provoking, with minimal delay, an international confrontation, believing that the Western powers may still have a chance of winning – something that will become unimaginable as soon as China is in a position to field its army.

Just as it did at the Geneva Conference, France stepped in as soon as Resolution 2254 was adopted. Its Minister for Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius, once again declared that while all opposition groups should be allowed to participate in the transition in Syria, only President el-Assad should be excluded – an idea which is contrary to the principles of the Geneva Communiqué and Resolution 2254 itself.

While in 2012 it was still possible to interpret the French position as a desire to replace the Ba’athist régime with a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood, in the continuity of the overthrow of secular Arab régimes (the « Arab Spring ») – or as an attempt to « bleed the Syrian army » in order to facilitate regional domination by Israël – or simply as a desire for recolonisation – this is no longer possible today, because any of these three objectives would imply war with Russia.

France is orchestrating the Syrian question on behalf of the US liberal hawks and neo-conservatives. In doing so, it is supported by the Messianic Zionists who, like Benjamin Netanyahu, consider it a religious duty to hasten the arrival of the Messiah by provoking an eschatological confrontation.

Peace in Syria or nuclear war ?

It does not seem credible that the liberal hawks, the neo-conservatives and the  Zionists could manage to impose their politics on the two great powers. However, it will be difficult to arrive at a definitive result before January 2017 and the arrival of a new President in the White House. Now we may better understand the support proclaimed by Vladimir Putin for Donald Trump, who seems the best placed to block his friend Hillary Clinton [21].

In reality, everything is now ready for a peace that will allow the losers to hold their heads high.

Key points:

• Resolution 2253 forbids the sponsors of Daesh and Al-Qaïda to continue to support them. Resolution 2254 confirms the Geneva Communiqué of June 2012. Both Russia and the US agree to maintain the Syrian Arab Republic and to support a government of national union.

• During the Geneva Communiqué, the opposition army, supported by Saudi Arabia, elected Ba’athist ex-Prime Minister Riad Hijab to lead its delegation. Meanwhile, Russia concluded an agreement with the Free Syrian Army and its sponsor, France.

• Everything is ready for the conclusion of a peace agreement which would allow the losers to save face. But, just as in 2012, France reiterated its demands as soon as Resolution 2254 was adopted.

Global Editor’s Note

The Department of Defense now authorizes the domestic deployment of US troops  in “the conduct of operations other than war”  including law enforcement activities and the quelling of “civil disturbances”: “Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances…“

These developments –which are currently the object of heated debate– are the result of  more than ten years of “repressive legislation” which increasingly points to the “fusion of the police and military functions both within the US and abroad”.

In a path breaking article published by Global Research in 2003,  award winning author Frank Morales shows how the post 911 “Patriot Act” which he describes as a “repressive coordination” had set the stage for the militarization of America, namely “a form of state terrorism directed against the American people and democracy itself.”

The “domestic war on terrorism” hinges upon the Pentagon’s doctrine of homeland defense. Mountains of repressive legislation are being enacted in the name of internal security. So called “homeland security”, originally set within the Pentagon’s “operations other than war”, is actually a case in which the Pentagon has declared war on America.

Shaping up as the new battleground, this proliferating military “doctrine” seeks to justify new roles and missions for the Pentagon within America. Vast “legal” authority and funds to spy on the dissenting public, reconfigured as terrorist threats, is being lavished upon the defense, intelligence and law enforcement “community.”

We bring to the attention of our readers this path-breaking analysis by Frank Morales

Michel Chossudovsky, December 25, 2015

The “PATRIOT Act” is a repressive “coordination” of the entities of force and deception, the police, intelligence and the military. It broadens, centralizes and combines the surveillance, arrest and harassment capabilities of the police and intelligence apparatus. Homeland defense is, in essence, a form of state terrorism directed against the American people and democracy itself. It is the Pentagon Inc. declaring war on America.

The “domestic war on terrorism” hinges upon the Pentagon’s doctrine of homeland defense. Mountains of repressive legislation are being enacted in the name of internal security. So called “homeland security”, originally set within the Pentagon’s “operations other than war”, is actually a case in which the Pentagon has declared war on America. Shaping up as the new battleground, this proliferating military “doctrine” seeks to justify new roles and missions for the Pentagon within America. Vast “legal” authority and funds to spy on the dissenting public, reconfigured as terrorist threats, is being lavished upon the defense, intelligence and law enforcement “community.”

All this is taking place amidst an increasingly perfected “fusion” of the police and military functions both within the US and abroad, where the phenomena is referred to as “peacekeeping”, or the “policization of the military”. Here in America, all distinction between the military and police functions is about to be forever expunged with the looming repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act. The latter, was passed after the Civil War to rein in the military. It bars federal troops from doing police work within United States borders, although strictly speaking, the Act refers only to the Army and the Air Force, not to the Marines or the National Guard in “state status.” According to the New York Times:

“the Bush administration has directed lawyers in the Department of Justice and Defense to review the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and any other laws that sharply restrict the military’s ability to participate in domestic law enforcement.”

The Washington Post (7/21/02) put it a bit more starkly, stating that the Bush administration:

“has called on Congress to thoroughly review the law that bans the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines from participating in arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other police-type activity on US soil.”

In other words, the “New World Law and Order” based on the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, requires a system of domestic and global counterinsurgency led by the Pentagon.

The first requirement of this counterinsurgency, which is directed at all forms of social dissent is the “collection”, “retention” and “dissemination” of information, information on anyone who resists, whether through violent means or otherwise. Recall, that the protests in Seattle and numerous other cities in recent years were more often than not classified within official DoD and FEMA documents as “terrorist events”. The objective is to centralize all intelligence gathering under one roof, the Department of Homeland Security and to widely cast the net over all of us, making certain that we all fall in line with the Pentagon Inc. agenda.

To this end the myriad modes of intelligence gathering or “collection” have been beefed up: From CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) to Carnivore (e-mail spying), from the NSA’s Echelon (global listening device), to spy satellite imagery, from FBI “roving wiretaps”, to CIA access to grand juries and secret FISA “foreign intelligence” courts, the means, legal sanctions and technology of social control proliferate, are sanctioned, are demanded by a paranoid public. Homeland security requires manufactured insecurity. A bit of anthrax to keep em on their toes and minding their p’s and q’s…

Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS)

Typical of the need for “tactical (on the ground) intelligence” is the creation of TIPS or the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. Set up in January 2002 by Ashcroft’s Justice Department, TIPS is described as a “national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity”. In fact, TIPS is a hotline to the National White Collar Crime Center, a Justice Department organization that deals with “economic crime” and cyberattack. For a little under a million bucks they plan to register all “suspicious, publicly observable activity that could be related to terrorism” and forward it to law enforcement and other agencies “opting to receive TIPS information.” These agencies “would be responsible for determining how to respond to the tips they receive.”

The “workers” that TIPS is willing to offer its hotline service are those in the transportation, trucking, shipping, maritime, and mass transit industries. The truckers, for their part, are jumping in with both feet. The trucker magazine FleetOwner recently noted (6/1/02) that:

“attempting to stay ahead of Federal regulators charged with securing US transportation networks from terrorist attacks, the American Trucking Assns. has readied a ‘Neighborhood Watch’ program for the nation’s highways.”

The ATA’s “Anti-Terrorism Action Plan”, geared to keeping the “wheels of commerce” rolling, envision a plan in which “a potential 3 million professional truck drivers will be trained to spot and report any suspicious activities that might have terrorism or national security implications.” As if truckers don’t have enough on their minds, although it might be wise for them to keep their eyes wide open.

It seems that the Bush administration concern for workers knows no bounds. According to the New York Times (8/!4/02) President Bush wants to exempt all homeland security coordinated agencies “from collective bargaining requirements if (he) were to determine that our national security demands it.” Little known to the public, the president is seeking not only to “exempt agency employees from federal labor relations rules and prohibit them from joining unions”, but he’s also prepared to force them to work, under the conditions he chooses, if “national security demands it”. The “flexibility” that Bush is calling for, a “fast moving homeland security department unfettered by work rules and red tape” is sure to result in a lot less “flexibility” on the part of workers who may soon be confronted with a form of involuntary employment during “times of war”, all set out in Department of Defense directives.

Financing Homeland Defense

TIPS, which is an integral part of the CitizenCorps/ FreedomCorps/ AmeriCorps axis of patriotic, police loving do-gooders, is buttressed with funds from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). In the wake of 9/11, CNCS was fully integrated into “homeland defense efforts”. In March 2002, the Corporation issued a “notice of availability of funds to strengthen communities and organizations in using service and volunteers to support homeland security.” With an emphasis on “public safety” and “freeing up police time”, the grants offered under the announcement “are to assist communities in getting involved in the war against terrorism on the home front.” In the area of “public safety” the grants “will help provide members to support police departments…in tasks and other functions that can be performed by non-sworn officers.” Now mind you, the volunteers “are not armed, nor can they make arrests, but they carry out vital tasks including organizing neighborhood watch groups…” They also “organize communities to identify and respond to crime and disorder problems…”

In July 2002, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced, while sitting in a Washington DC police station, the first round of CNCS homeland security grants totaling $10.3 million, an “initiative” that is to involve some 37,000 volunteers nationwide. One recipient of a $484,000 Corporation grant, based in NYC, is the Center for Court Innovation. Linked to the NYC Public Safety Corps, the grant “will enhance homeland security by assisting criminal justice officials (police, probation officers, judges) as they perform their duties…(while) 40 full time AmeriCorps members will…free up police…to address conditions of disorder that if left unchecked create a climate where crime would flourish.”

In NYC, ground zero for the attack, homeland defense equates to the same old thing, cracking down on “disorder” (protest) and “quality of life crimes”, which is a racist police code for arresting and jailing more poor people.

The euphemism of “homeland defense”, codified within the halls of the Pentagon as early as the mid-1990’s, long before 9/11, buttressed with various Presidential Decision Directives and Executive Orders, includes, within the doctrinal rubric of “operations other than war”, continual training to suppress dissent, or as it is conveniently phrased, to put down “civil disturbance.” The decades old “Garden Plot” operation, which is the Pentagon’s stand alone “civil disturbance” plan, has become generalized in the “homeland defense” concept and it’s focus on the “asymmetric threat”. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Defense, Homeland Security Council etc. the Bush administration is seeking to institutionalize it’s “permanent war” against “terrorism”, dovetailed with it’s ongoing war against dissent.

So while Garden Plot directives, geared for domestic use, are exported to “peacekeeping” troops abroad, “homeland defense” tightens the grip at home. The recent appointment of General Ralph E. Eberhart and the creation of a Northern Command within the Pentagon reflect the depth of commitment the elite have to maintaining “full spectrum dominance” at home.

With “the PATRIOT Act” and other legal monstrosities foisted upon the people, what emerges is a repressive “coordination” (as the Nazis used to call it) of the entities of force and deception, the police, intelligence and the military, in the interests of a “permanent” counterinsurgency, by way of the centralization and broadening of surveillance capabilities, arrest capabilities, and harassment capabilities, which target anyone corporate America doesn’t like. Homeland defense is, in essence, a form of state terrorism directed against the American people and democracy itself. It is the Pentagon Inc. declaring war on America.

Global Counterinsurgency

The “war on terrorism” is a global counterinsurgency whose aim is to wipe out any and all resistance to US global hegemony and corporate domination. Utilizing “operations other than war” (OOTW), corporate America and it’s military are taking a more direct, hands on approach to the needs and requirements of corporate globalization. OOTW, with its host of new missions (e.g. peacekeeping and civil disturbance operations), is based on a pre-emptive doctrine. In this new war, which relies on both standard means of killing along with so-called non-lethal weapons, so-called ” non-combatants” (i.e. civilians) become the primary target. And in so doing, the military, via its OOTW doctrine, is violating one of the sacred tenets of the so-called “laws of war”, namely, that militaries not target civilian populations. But after all, as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld noted in a (12/12/01) statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the “enemy” “hides in caves abroad”, and more importantly, “among us here at home.”

Now, despite the fact that both the Presidential and military directives target “non-United States citizens” (as if that’s not bad enough), in June 2002, the Bush administration jailed a New York City man of Puerto Rican descent, Jose Padilla – or as he now calls himself – Abdullah al Muhajir, and is holding him in a military brig in South Carolina. He has yet to be charged with any crime. Like the hundreds of Muslim immigrants still being held in detention since September 11, he is considered a “material witness” to the investigation of the attack. And yet, rather than have him subject to the discretion of Federal courts, he was handed over to the military as an “enemy combatant” after Ashcroft and the Pentagon talked it over. At that moment, Padilla was taken out of his New York prison cell and transferred to a US Navy brig in South Carolina. His attorney, Donna Newman of NYC was not informed of his transfer and has been denied access to her client. Even the Washington Post, which has backed virtually all of the repressive measures of the Bush administration since September 11, wrote at the time of Padilla’s jailing that:

 “the governments actions in this latest case cut against basic elements of life under the rule of law” and that “if its positions are correct, nothing would prevent the president – even in the absence of a formal declaration of war – from designating any American as an enemy combatant…If that’s the case, nobody’s constitutional rights are safe.”

This “chilling legal precedent” is but the tip of the iceberg of the complete subsuming of normal judicial processes to the growing militarization of law enforcement and jurisprudence.

“Homeland defense”, as we experience it today, has been percolating in the bowels of the Pentagon and corporate think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations, along with their Congressional counterparts, for nearly a decade. What it required was an emergency situation. The “homeland security” apparatus presently being constructed is modeled roughly after the military’s “combatant command structure” and is –in the wake of 9/11– set within the context of the “laws and customs of war”, hence the introduction of military courts and the shifting of jurisdictions for so-called “crimes associated with terrorism”. The Northern Command, based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, whose job as of October 1st is to patrol America, will head up this homeland defense “command structure”.

Concurrent with the round-up of over a thousand people following the September 11 attack, many of whom have been held in solitary confinement, with no charges being filed, President Bush signed in November 2991 order, establishing military “tribunals” for those non-citizens accused, anywhere, of “terrorist related crimes”. According to the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, the order violates the constitutional separation of powers:

 “[It] has not been authorized by the Congress and is outside the President’s constitutional powers”… the order strips away a variety of checks and balances on governmental power and the reliability and integrity of criminal judgments… [T]he order undermines the rule of law worldwide, and invites reciprocal treatment of US nationals by hostile nations utilizing secret trials, a single entity as prosecutor, judge and jury, no judicial review and summary executions.”

Department of Defense Military Commission Order No.1, issued March 21, 2002, is concerned with “procedures for trials by military commissions of certain non-United States citizens in the War Against Terrorism.” The “commissions”, according to the order, “shall have jurisdiction over violations of the laws of war and all other offenses triable by military commission.” Overseen by a “military officer” who will “admit or exclude evidence at trial”, the “prosecutor” would be a “special trial counsel of the Department of Justice.” On the defense side, well, one could opt to go with the DoD’s version of the public defender, namely another “military officer”, or one could secure an attorney.

Although “the Accused may also retain the services of a civilian attorney of the Accused’s own choosing…at no expense to the United States Government”, this would only be possible once it “has been determined” that the civilian attorney is “eligible for access to information classified at the level of SECRET or higher…”

In other words, to get any kind of impartial and efficient legal representation in Mr.Rumsfeld’s court, your attorney has to be cleared by the Pentagon.

Over the past six days, Russian warplanes have conducted 302 sorties and hit 1,093 terrorist targets in the provinces of Idlib, Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, Hama and Homs. Russian Su-34 bombers destroyed a large terrorist training camp in the Syrian province of Idlib hosting fighters from Turkey and CIS states. Also, Russian warplanes have destroyed two oil storage facilities, three oil-extraction plants along with dozens of fuel pumps in the Deir ez-Zor province.

Moreover, six off-road vehicles equipped with heavy machine guns and three militants’ trucks were destroyed in the Homs province. And an Ahrar ash-Sham militant group’s command post was destroyed in the Aleppo province.

On Wednesday evening, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) took control of the farms north of the Marj Al-Sultan Military Airport after a heavy fight with Nusra and Jaysh Al-Islam and advanced north towards the town of Harasta in the East Ghouta. Currently, intense clashes are still going between the SAA and terrorists near the P-35 Radar Base.

In the Deir Ezzor province, ISIS launched a massive offensive that targeted the government-controlled districts of Al-Sina’a, Al-Rusafa and ‘Amal located along the vast Euphrates River.

Initially, hundreds ISIS militants stormed the SAA defenses at the Al-Sina’a District’s eastern flank. After the heavy clashes, militants moved deeper into the district but found the SAA has fire superiority in combat. Thus, ISIS was pushed to retreat. According to the SAA reports, over 40 militants were killed. Separately, ISIS launched counter-attacks in Al-Rusafa, Al-‘Amal, and the Old Airport District.

Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, local Yazidi militia, supported by the Iraqi and US-led coalition air forces are fighting to regain control over the city of Ramadi from ISIS. According to the Iraqi government, the military captured parts of the city on Tuesday and are advancing toward the government complex in the central district of Ramadi. It’s confirmed that the Iraqi and coalition warplanes have been conducting airstrikes in neighborhoods around the complex. The progress in recapturing Ramadi is slowed down by the decision to ban local Shia militias from fighting in the area. With this, the US and US-backed Iraqi officials are trying to prevent the grow of the militias’ influence in the country.

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From Libya and Egypt to Syria and Yemen, the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is undergoing unprecedented tumult and chaos. To understand the current breakdown of states and society, examining the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 that laid the groundwork for this ongoing regional anarchy is indispensable.

Global Research brings to the attention of its readers the newly released book by Christopher L. Brennan.  Fall of the Arab Spring: From Revolution to Destruction (available here), propounds an incisive and timely analysis. The book views this widespread Arab upheaval, not as authentic grass roots movements for democracy, but as a US-engineered destabilization. Below are excerpts largely from the introduction. 

*        *       *  

From 2011 to around early 2014, the so-called “Arab Spring” encompassing the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region came to the forefront of international political affairs. In the words of Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, it was “frequently referred to as the most remarkable episode in the international life of the new 21st century.” The authoritarian regimes of the Arab world have been fragile systems. This is especially true more recently in their relationship with burgeoning youthful populations. Arab historian Said K. Aburish argues that these various regimes all lack modern political legitimacy—from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to Egypt, from military cliques to monarchies. [1]

This lack of modern political legitimacy—coupled with decades of political repression, world economic crises, and unresolved grievances such as the unmitigated oppression of the Palestinian people—creates potential for massive political awakening. This dynamic was particularly pronounced because of the region’s marked demographic ‘youth bulge.’ Historically, youth cohorts are receptive to new ideas, eager to challenge the status quo, and active in times of political crisis. Indeed, it was the age 25 and under demographic that spearheaded the MENA mass protests. Using what is referred to as ‘civilian-based power,’ Western powers exploited and guided this massive potential for political awakening to advance Western and Israeli geopolitical imperatives. These eruptions were followed closely by covert and overt military intervention.

[To order book click image right]

Fall of the Arab Spring: From Revolution to Destruction examines modern imperialism vis-à-vis the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ This widespread Arab upheaval takes place in the context of a period when the restructuring of the world order—from unipolarity (uncontested world hegemony) toward multipolarity (multiple centers of power)—converges with aggravated economic breakdown. This provides the lens from which this study is viewed. The focus of this analysis is the underlying themes, methods, and most prevalent aspects of the MENA uprisings. Particular focus is given to Egypt and Libya as highly instructive case studies. Egypt demonstrates an effective utilization of ‘civilian-based power,’ while Libya provides one of the most palpable displays of the empire’s ruthless stewardship of the “Arab Spring” to smash a recalcitrant Arab state.

In his study The Sorrows of Empire, author Chalmers Johnson, professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, categorizes modern imperialists into two groups: “those who advocate unconstrained, unilateral American domination of the world (couched sometimes in terms of following in the footsteps of the British Empire) and those who call for imperialism devoted to ‘humanitarian’ objectives…. The complex issue at the heart of liberal imperialism is ‘humanitarian intervention’ … ‘the responsibility to protect’”[2]  as a pretext for military intervention.

In truth, the so-called “Arab Spring”which swept through the MENA region was a wave of destabilizations sponsored by Washington and launched through ‘civilian-based power’ techniques. It was American imperialism of the most modern form. With the onset of multipolarity—with many of Washington’s vassals looking to resurgent power centers such as Moscow and Beijing—the US moved pre-emptively for ‘regime change’ against the independence of ‘enemy’ states and erstwhile clients. Additionally, the ‘Arab Spring’ offensive was given impetus by the imperative to accelerate the regional process of what Bernard Lewis, perhaps the most influential British Arabist, termed “Lebanonization” as a self- fulfilling prophecy. [3] This refers to the far-reaching balkanization, societal breakdown, and explosion of sectarian conflicts following the attenuation or collapse of the state—the model of Somalia.

Although it is commonly thought to have gradually faded following World War II, imperialism continues via neo-colonialism.The actions of the West, with its leading state the US at the forefront, have followed an imperialist tendency throughout the Arab uprisings. As we shall see, the West’s ongoing involvement in the “Arab Spring” is part of a larger offensive to maintain the status quo of Western and Israeli hegemony. This was done—not through the crude and direct means of the Bush II regime—but more indirectly and via a sustained synergy of hard and soft power: so-called ‘smart power.’ This was supplemented and spearheaded through the techniques of the ‘color revolution.’ Thus, although a new cadre emerged with the onset of the Obama regime, the status quo imperative to secure Israel remained, and Obama administration introduced new techniques of projecting power. Whereas the second Bush administration was blunt and bellicose, the Obama regime acted more indirectly and surreptitiously, often relying on local proxies and ambitious regional powers such as Qatar and Turkey. This approach can be aptly labeled ‘imperialism on the cheap.’ It has been the defining foreign policy strategy of the Obama presidency.

The excessive reliance on ‘hard power,’ overt military and economic means to project power, during the George W. Bush presidency, generated widespread discourse on its imperial nature.[4]  In contrast, the presidency of Obama was rarely, if ever, characterized in similar terms in its early stage. On the contrary, it was often branded as a radical departure from the aggressive tendencies of the Bush II regime. ‘Soft power’ is defined as “the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than using the carrots and sticks of payment or coercion.”[5] After President Bush put US standing in a compromised position—with allies antagonized and a military and populace demoralized—the American establishment opted to shift to a more emphatically ‘soft power’ approach, as advanced by theoreticians such as Joseph Nye, Jr. and Zbigniew Brzezinski of the elite Trilateral Commission. The new strategy rejected an outright bellicose use of ‘hard power,’ the proclivity of the Bush II regime. Instead, ‘hard power’ was used more selectively and from the standpoint of ‘leading from behind.’ This means encouraging allies (or vassals) to engage in geopolitical initiatives for the US, which provides necessary military aid covertly.

Reacting to a waning American empire and a need to ensure the security of Israel, this synergy of ‘soft power,’ alliances, and ‘hard power’ came to characterize US strategy. In Libya—where direct military intervention took place—humanitarian imperialism was carried out with these as guiding principles. Fall of the Arab Spring outlines the synergy between this array of methods including the use of information and irregular warfare. In the final outcome, for the Arab world, the romantic illusions of ‘democracy’ and ‘dignity’—platitudes sold by the West—were shattered, and much of the region degenerated into the breakdown of the state and society.

PressTV:  Russia has voiced regret over the extension of the US sanctions against Moscow, saying it will consider possible counter measures.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the sanctions are a continuation of Washington’s “unfriendly stance against Russia”, which have a devastating impact on bilateral relations. Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov has also condemned the move and accused US government institutions of what he called acting zombie style. He added that the new sanctions may change the reality of relations between Moscow and Washington. Earlier, the US treasury announced an updated sanctions list targeting 34 individuals and entities in Russia to put pressure on Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine. 

Peter Koenig: As I said on other occasions – Washington simply cannot let go.

These sanctions have nothing to do with reality. These sanctions are used for propaganda purposes. Russia – especially Mr. Putin – must remain the villain in the eyes of the western world which is mercilessly subjected to media lies and falsehood time and again.

Washington has no interest in peace, or peaceful relations with Russia. These sanctions just show the farce and hypocrisy behind John Kerry’s recent visit to Moscow, when he acted like a well-behaved little boy wanting to please and cooperate in the fight against ISIS. What a miserable farce.

The Islamic State or Daesh or ISIL – for those who still believe the Islamic State emerged out of the blue – the ISIL/S monster is the creation of the composite of other monsters, the Pentagon (already at the early stages of the Iraq war), NATO and CIA, entirely supported and funded by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, NATO – and yes, Turkey – trained by the CIA, associated secret services and NATO.

Obviously everything Kerry and Obama say in terms of cooperation is an outright lie. It is propaganda making the western world believe that if cooperation doesn’t happen it is Russia’s fault. As the extension of these sanctions just show again.

US Foreign Policy begins losing credibility even in Washington’s inner-circles. Kerry and Obama often make contradictory statements regarding President Assad’s ‘staying’ or ‘going’. And, to put the icing on the cake, Obama’s generals, who officially are supposed to fight the Islamic Jihadists in Iraq and Syria, but really are ordered to support them, as they have done from the beginning  – these generals, fed-up with the ludicrous policies of US fraud Number One, Barack Obama, are now clandestinely supporting President Assad, informing him about ISIL’s whereabouts, so Mr. Assad’s army (and Russian air cover) can fight them – see Seymour Hersh 

Back to sanctions. The main argument for them is Ukraine – and of course, always, so the western stooges won’t forget, as a by-line – the invasion and ‘annexation’ by Russia of Crimea. Western media never mention that the people of Crimea themselves launched a referendum to re-join their motherland to where they belonged for hundreds of years.

By now everybody should know that the coup d’état in Kiev that killed a hundred people at Kiev-Maidan on 21 February 2014, when the democratically elected president was deposed, was instigated and funded by the US and NATO, directed from Washington’s Embassy in Kiev and carried out by Washington paid mercenaries.

PressTV: On 21 December Brussels also decided to extend their sanctions on Moscow. Why is that? What does the EU get out of these sanctions?

PK: Europe plays Washington’s ball game. They have to.

The EU puppets have conceded long ago the last vestiges of their sovereignty to Washington. They have no own will. The self-styled lords of Brussels, those who make-believe they command Europe, those of the unelected European Commission, have nothing to say, nothing to decide – just to follow Washington’s orders. Unfortunately this is a fact.

A living proof is the ongoing behind closed doors ‘negotiation’ about the evil TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) – to which not even EU deputies have access. If ratified, it would be so nefarious for Europe (as would be the TPP for 11 Asian and South American partner countries), those in Washington with their puppets in Europe who pull the strings are afraid, that if it would be made public – it would not only fall apart, but might cause an anti-globalization revolution in Europe.

Europe is owned by Washington – owned as in slavehood. Nobody seems to wonder who put 28 neoliberal so-called leaders (sic) of the EU nations at the head of these nations; nobody seems to logically conclude that this is no coincidence; that occult forces similar to those that commanded, divided and decided the Spanish 20 December election

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/spain-has-fallen-not-like-greece-but-fallen-all-the-same/5497397).

As long as spineless lackeys are sitting in Brussels and are tolerated by a duped European public, there is no alternative – Brussels will follow the dictate of Washington for everything, and of course also for sanctions. This regardless of whether these so-called sanctions hurt Europe far more than Russia. That is immaterial. This is part of Washington’s ‘Plan’.

For those who don’t know – the EU was from the start a product of the United States, beginning with the 1948 Brussels Treaty, coerced as a European concession for the Marshall Plan and signed just after WWII. That ‘treaty’ or contract was covertly (for the public) followed and directed through a string of other treaties, all the way to the Maastricht Treaty, the basis for the current EU, and on to the present-day Lisbon Treaty. The EU doesn’t have a Constitution uniting them as a political entity.

Why? – Because Washington didn’t have a free and sovereign Europe in mind when they initiated in 1948 the process that eventually led to the so-called European Union – which, in reality has little if anything to do with a union. Such a non-union is not sustainable. No solidarity between nations and everyone for him-self is exactly what Washington wanted – the old divide to conquer. And they got it. It’s blatantly glaring into every citizen’s face, but they are blinded and can’t see it.

Probably many European politicians don’t even know that the Mastermind behind this built-to-fail malicious construct, the EU is the US of A – not Europe.

And the common currency the Euro, in a Union that has no political goal and objective cannot be sustainable and is bound to fail. This is demonstrated by the presently ongoing semi-clandestine purchasing of government bonds by some of the EU member countries’ central banks, an act which is per se against the official ECB (European Central Bank) rules.

It is, however, quietly tolerated by ECB’s President Draghi, a former Goldman Sachs Executive, for some privileged countries, like France, Italy and perhaps some others. This local money-printing serves to balance over-burdened state budgets, at the same time putting more liquidity into banks, making them more vulnerable. Draghi is shaping European monetary and financial policies exactly the way the Wall Street- FED tandem wants it.

Never mind that these ECB ‘rules’, enforced by blackmail and criminal intimidations for some countries, like Greece, are against member countries’ sovereignty; sovereignty which they have not given up in any signed document or treaty. Had Greece sidestepped this ‘rule’, as others are doing, resisted the threats and produced her own euros to revamp their economy, as an internal debt, rather than a huge and high-interest debt to German and French private banks, their economy would now be recovering rather than sinking into a bottomless pit.

Europe had now the opportunity to say STOP. No more sanctions. No more following the Washington dictate; no more committing economic suicide – and punishing the only true, honest and long-term real partner, Russia. The Merkels and Hollands and consortia, those supposedly in charge of Europe, they know very well who is behind and instigated the Ukraine bloodbath, the civil war which left millions homeless, causing a flood of more than 2 million refugees into Russia. They could have said NO to more sanctions and break loose and free from the fangs of the US. But they didn’t. They can’t.

Sadly Brussels and the entire gang of politicians that command over 28 member countries BELONG to Washington. Yes, correct: they are enslaved to Washington. You may only speculate what miht happen to them, if they would dare exiting the miserable path of destruction they have embarked on. This mob of spineless vassals is afraid of – or sold to – the naked emperor and his cardboard sword.

PressTV: What will be Russia’s reaction and how will it impact.

PK: The Impact of the sanctions on Russia will be minor, compared to the impact these sanctions have already had and will continue to have on the European economy. Over the last year or so, Russia’s economy has begun adjusting to the ‘sanctions’ regime, by becoming self-sufficient, revamping her agriculture and industrial production, largely delinking the economy from the deceitful dollar, building a close economic (and military) alliance with China and the other BRICS and SCO countries (Shanghai Cooperation Organization).

China and Russia have developed their own international payment system (CIPS – Chinese International Payment System) which replaces the western SWIFT system and circumvents the control of the obscure BIS (Bank for International Settlements), also considered the central bank of (western) central banks, a 1930 Rockefeller-Rothschild construct.

In the last two years the BRICS and SCO countries have started dealing among each other outside the dollar control, in their own currencies which makes them less vulnerable to the illegal US-EU sanctions. Surely, the US / Saudi engineered drop of the oil price from about US$ 100 / barrel a year ago to US$ 40 to ‘hurt’ US enemies, particularly, Russia, Venezuela and Iran, is harming any hydrocarbon producer. It is even ruining America’s own fracking industry. Maybe Washington absurdly considers this a small sacrifice for conquering the world. Among themselves BRICS and SCO countries which, by the way, make up about 50% of the world population and about one third of the world’s GDP, are trading hydrocarbons in their own currencies and in some cases with the outside world in gold.

As Russia is moving out of the dollar system, sanctions will have an ever declining impact. Russia and China can today easily survive and thrive without the dollar. This is not mainstream media news, as it doesn’t fit the anti-Putin propaganda purpose.

Russia’s response to the sanctions will continue to be barring imports from the EU, agricultural produce, as well as manufactured goods, leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions of European workers without a job, or with jobs at risk. In Germany alone, estimates range from 300,000 to 500,000 employments being lost or at risk. This compounded with the endless influx of highly educated refugees from Syrian and Iraq, from the very countries the US and NATO devastated may leave the European labor market – and economies – in shambles. This is exactly what Washington wants.

The elite of the European serfs of the self-proclaimed hegemon must know this. They know what’s at stake for Europe’s future. Yet somehow they are bound – like in an occult evil alliance – to Washington, condemning perhaps hundreds of millions of future generations to misery.

It sounds and looks like a criminal conspiracy to help America to reach global hegemony; a conspiracy of those same Europeans whose forefathers have usurped, colonized and raped Africa, Asia and the Americas for hundreds of years.

But they are not there yet – and most likely won’t achieve this elusive goal.

Russia and China and their allies within the BRICS and SCO are strong countries, with a strong and free monetary system backed by their strong economies – unlike the criminal fiat dollar system that keeps unaligned and un-obedient countries hostage with sanctions. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have already created two development institutions to challenge and replace the World Bank and the IMF, the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank BRICS (NDB BRICS, formerly the BRICS Development Bank), both located in Shanghai. Unlike at the World Bank and IMF, no country has a veto, and decisions are taken by one country one vote. These economies don’t need fraud, financial coercion and military aggression for survival as Washington does.

Russia and China and the other BRICS and SCO countries’ presence with their free and fair trade and monetary system, delinked from the dollar, will eventually attract all those that have been suffering under US oppression for years and decades.

With President Putin’s speech at the UN General Assembly on 28 September and Russia’s subsequent intervention in Syria to truly fight the western made terror – a worldwide awakening has started and the tectonic shift of the political plates has begun.

Edited version of an interview with Press TV

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance .