How US sanctions against Russia promoting bilateral trade and finance
Sanctions are forcing large volumes of trade and finance out of the ambit of traditional networks, weakening western control over such flows.
Tue Sep 23, 2014 2:19PM GMT
Western sanctions are having an unintended effect. They are accelerating the birth of a parallel ecosystem where countries not allied to the West are able to operate without the constant threat of sanctions. Free of western control, this alternative platform is gaining traction at a surprisingly fast pace.
It is worth mentioning at the start that western companies have a huge exposure in the Russian market. In contrast, Russia is primarily an exporter of commodities such as oil, gas, metals and minerals which are in great demand – especially in Asia's ravenous markets. Bottom line: while western consumer and capital goods can be replaced by Asian manufacturers, Russian commodities are the lifeblood of economies in both Asia and Europe.
SWIFT move
The move towards a non-western world is happening most rapidly in the area of finance. This is hardly surprising because financial flows are easier to reroute – and replace – than say, a shipment of coal or an oil tanker.
Among the dozens of sanctions directed against Russia, the most extreme one was proposed by the UK, which pressed European Union leaders to block Russian access to the SWIFT banking transaction system. The Belgium-based SWIFT, which stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the financial world's very arteries.
Restricting Russian usage of SWIFT would no doubt disrupt financial and commercial activities in the country, but according to Richard Reid of the University of Dundee in Scotland it may carry a longer-term downside. "Large chunks of Russian international payments flows would move to much less well monitored and measured financial channels and thus be beyond sanctions at any future point," he told Bloomberg News.
Although German Chancellor Angela Merkel swiftly rejected the British proposal as too extreme, the damage has been done. It is now abundantly clear to Moscow that the US-UK evil twins are not content with symbolic sanctions but are really out to destroy its economy. Anticipating this blow to its financial jugular, Russia had in July drawn up a law that would create a local equivalent of SWIFT.
The sanctions have also highlighted the synergy between Russia and China. Vesti Finance says sanctions aimed at restricting Russian access to finance will have almost no sense, since Russian companies will find the necessary money in China. And the Chinese are keen to increase the impact of the renminbi and turn it into the world's reserve currency.
De-dollarization
The move to a parallel payment system is happening in tandem with the ditching of the US dollar on which the entire US economy – and hegemony – pivots. The dollar's status as the reserve currency is due to it being the only currency accepted de-dollarization in the petroleum market, which is why it's also known as the petrodollar.
That's about to change as Russia and other emerging powers are planning to drop the petrodollar and end the dollar's reserve status. But because the dollar's dominance is so overwhelming in the petroleum trade, it would require someone really big to take it down.
That heavy hitter is Gazprom. Kommersant reports the Russian oil company has started shipping oil from the Arctic and the tankers will arrive in European ports this month, with payment to be received in rubles. Gazprom will also deliver oil via the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline (ESPO), accepting payment in Chinese renminbi.
Finance portal Zero Hedge says, "Russia is actively pushing on with plans to put the US dollar in the rearview mirror and replace it with a dollar-free system – or a de-dollarized world."
Citing the Voice of Russia, Zero Hedge says the country's Ministry of Finance is ready to greenlight a plan to radically increase the role of the ruble in export operations while reducing the share of dollar-denominated transactions.
As Zero Hedge says, "The further the west antagonises Russia, and the more economic sanctions it lobs at it, the more Russia will be forced away from a US dollar-denominated trading system and into one which faces China and India."
Worth mentioning is that the Siberia-sized $400 billion gas contract with China – which Moscow and Beijing had haggled over for a decade – finally got inked in May 2014, after westerns sanctions kicked in.
Military: That sinking feeling
It is a pointer to the paucity of strategic thinking in France and Germany that they are so easily swayed by the US-UK combine to welch on military contracts already inked with Russia. The built-in penalties aside, the breach of contract is guaranteed to alarm other buyers.
If Germany and France are planning to drive away their weapons customers, then they are doing a pretty good job of it. But look at it this way: perhaps that's precisely what the US and UK have been planning all along – to attract disillusioned buyers.
As part of its military modernization, Russia had hired Germany's Rheinmetall to build a modern military training facility. But under pressure from the US, Germany cancelled the $134 million contract. Strategy Page says Russia may turn to China to get the training centre built as China has obtained – or rather purloined – the technology and built its own.
"The growing list of sanctions against Russia has hit the Russian arms industry particularly hard because new Russian weapons depend on Western suppliers for some of the high tech components needed," says Strategy Page. "China is taking advantage of this by pointing out it has become a major producer of high-end electronic and mechanical components, and can probably replace Western suppliers now unavailable because of the sanctions. While Russia does not buy a lot of foreign weapons it does buy a lot of high-tech components (especially electronic ones) from the West. A lot of these items are dual use items that China and other East Asian countries also manufacture. China backs Russian (moves in Ukraine) and is hostile to sanctions (which it has been under for several decades). Beijing believes it can replace enough western suppliers to Russia to create about $1 billion a year in additional business for Chinese firms."
Similarly, India is watching – with a mix of amusement and dismay – France kowtow to the US and letting its $1.6 billion Mistral deal with Russia sink. France has been a reliable supplier of quality combat systems and has never welched on a deal with India. However, that was in the past when France had opted out of NATO. With Paris now syncing its foreign policy with the warlords in Washington, India's military should be cagey about 'Made in France' technology.
Loss-loss for the West
As the US and EU fumble around in the dark, there is considerable activity in countries allied to Russia. As well as market-led movements (food exporters from Asia rushing in to fill Russian supermarket shelves) there are strategic moves afoot. For instance, the US and EU have a monopoly on wide body aircraft and also dominate the middle categories. The sanctions are just the push required to expedite aviation joint ventures, particularly between Russia and China in wide body aircraft and Russia and India in mid-size airliners.
The concept of a "World Without the West" was first articulated by American academics Steven Weber, Naazneen Barma and Ely Ratner. "By preferentially deepening their own ties among themselves, and in so doing loosening relatively the ties that bind them to the international system centered in the West, rising powers are building an alternative system of international politics whose endpoint is neither conflict nor assimilation with the West," they say.
So in effect, by not playing by the rules and systems set by the West they are creating an alternative arrangement in which they neither enter into conflict situations with the West nor enter into subservient alliances (like those offered to South Korea and Japan).
Years from now, westerners will ruefully look back at the sanctions as the tipping point that ushered in a world without the West.
AN/AGB
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/09/23/379745/us-sanctions-on-russia-dedollarization/
September 23, 2014
How US sanctions against Russia promoting bilateral trade and finance
September 12, 2014
Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS
AlterNet [1] / By Nicolas J.S. Davies [2]
Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS
September 10, 2014 |
Editor's note: On Wednesday night President Barack Obama gave a nationally televised address in which he vowed that the United States would "degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL."
Thirteen years ago, a draft dodger from Texas stood on a pile of rubble in New York City and promised, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Of course, the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center could not hear anybody, as their remains were buried in the rubble beneath Bush's feet. And our government's extraordinary relationship with one of the world's last and most brutal absolute monarchies ensured that any accomplices still in the U.S. were quickly flown home to Saudi Arabia before the crime could be investigated. In 2003, Bush meekly complied [3] with Al-Qaeda's most concrete demand, that he withdraw U.S. forces from military bases in Saudi Arabia.
A month after September 11, Donald Rumsfeld stood at a podium in front of a $2 billion B-2 bomber at Whiteman AFB in Missouri and addressed the aircrews of the 509th Bomber Wing [4], before they took off across the world to wreak misdirected vengeance on the people of Afghanistan. Rumsfeld told them, "We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal."
Since then, the United States has launched more than 94,000 air strikes [5], mostly on Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Rumsfeld's plan has undoubtedly achieved his goal of changing the way people live in those countries, killing a million of them [6] and reducing tens of millions more to lives of disability, disfigurement, dislocation, grief and poverty.
A sophisticated propaganda campaign has politically justified 13 years of systematic U.S. war crimes, exploiting the only too human failing that George Orwell examined in his 1945 essay, "Notes on Nationalism [7]." As Orwell wrote, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Orwell listed "torture [8], the use of hostages [9], forced labor [10], mass deportations [11], imprisonment without trial [12], forgery [13], assassination [14], the bombing of civilians [15]." The U.S. has committed all these atrocities in the past 13 years, and Americans have responded exactly as the "nationalists" Orwell described.
But some of the horrors of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan found their way into the conscience of millions of newly war-wise Americans, and President Obama was elected on a "peace" platform and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. To the deep disappointment of his former supporters, Obama has overseen the largest military budget since WWII [16]; an eight-fold increase [17] in drone strikes; special forces operations in at least 134 countries [18], twice as many as under Bush; and a massive increase in the special forces night raids or "manhunts" originally launched by Rumsfeld in Iraq in 2003, which increased from 20 in Afghanistan in May 2009 to 1,000 per month by April 2011 [19], killing the wrong people most of the time [20] according to senior officers.
Like Eisenhower after Korea and other Presidents after Vietnam, Obama turned to methods of regime change and power projection that would avoid the political liabilities of sending young Americans to invade other countries. But the innovations of Obama's doctrine of covert and proxy war have only spread America's post-9/11 empire of chaos farther and wider, from Ukraine to Libya to the seas around China. Covert wars are no secret to their victims, and the consequences can be just as dire. The U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs [21] in its secret war on Cambodia than it dropped on Japan in WWII. As Cambodia imploded in an orgy of genocide, the CIA's director of operations [22] explained that Khmer Rouge recruiting "has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."
As Western politicians and media breathlessly follow the escalation of U.S. bombing in Iraq, they neglect to mention, or maybe haven't even heard as Orwell suggested, that Obama has already launched more than 24,000 air strikes, mostly in Afghanistan [23], with the same results as in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq, killing thousands of people and making implacable enemies of millions more. These air strikes are an integral component of Obama's covert war doctrine, but they are only covert in the sense that they are unreported.
In Libya, the U.S. and its NATO allies launched 7,700 air strikes [24] in a war that killed at least 25,000 people [25] and plunged the country into endless chaos. NATO's illusory and short-lived success in Libya led to airlifts of weapons and fighters [26] to Turkey, where British special forces provided training and the CIA infiltrated fighters into Syria to try and duplicate the overthrow and butchering of Gaddafi.
The sobering experience of watching a CIA operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s lead to the crime of the new century in New York on September 11 should have led U.S. officials to reject new alliances with Islamist jihadis. But the Obama doctrine embraced the use of Islamist militias to destabilize Libya, providing them with weapons, equipment, training and air support. Leadership on the ground came from Qatar's mercenary "special forces," [27] many of whom are veterans of the Pakistani military [28] and its ISI intelligence agency, which works with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These Qatari special forces are part of the Libyan template that was transposed onto Syria, where they embedded with the al-Nusra Front. They and/or their Turkish allies [29] probably trained al-Nusra in the use of chemical weapons for the "false flag" attack that almost triggered another U.S. bombing campaign in 2013.
With U.S. support, Qatar spent $3 billion [30] and flew 70 planeloads of weapons to Turkey to support its proxies in Syria, while its regional rival Saudi Arabia sent volunteers and convicts, and paid for weapons shipments from Croatia to Jordan [31]. Wealthy Gulf Arabs paid up to $2,000 per day [32] to hardened mercenaries from the Balkans and elsewhere. As first al-Nusra and then ISIS established themselves as the dominant rebel group, they absorbed the bulk of the fighters and weapons that the U.S. and its allies poured into the country.
The chaos that Obama's doctrine of covert and proxy war has wreaked in Libya, Syria and Iraq should be a reminder of one of the obvious but unlearned lessons of September 11, that creating and arming groups of religious fanatics as proxies to fight secular enemies has huge potential for blowback and unintended consequences as they gain power and escape external control. Once these forces were unleashed in Syria, where they had limited local support but powerful external backers, the stage was set for a long and bloody conflict. But the U.S. and its allies, the U.K., France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were so committed that they schemed [33] to undermine Kofi Annan's 2012 peace plan and pledged ever more support, funding and weapons to the rebels as the conflict escalated into a full-blown civil war.
The current view of ISIS (or ISIL or IS) in Western media and political debate is distorted by a dangerous confluence of interests between Western propaganda and ISIS' own public relations in playing up its strength and its atrocities. On the other hand, when the U.S. and its allies downplayed the role of ISIS in Syria and pretended to be funding and arming only "moderate" forces, this allowed ISIS to quietly gain strength and eliminate its rivals. So Western propaganda has effectively helped ISIS at every turn.
This reckless pattern in Western propaganda extends back to the origins of ISIS. When the original leader of its precursor, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the "terrorist mastermind" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was crowned as America's new public enemy in Iraq in 2004, U.S. military intelligence officers explained his propaganda value [34] to Adrian Blomfield of the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph as follows:
"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq... Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable to latch on to, and we got one."
After Zarqawi's death in 2006, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq, but it continued to fulfill the same function in U.S. propaganda, helping to paint the Iraqi Resistance as dangerous, bloodthirsty religious fanatics rather than people legitimately and bravely resisting the illegal invasion and occupation of their country. The Bush administration claimed that ISI was responsible for 15% of violent incidents in Iraq, but this was debunked by a Congressional Research Service investigation [35] in 2007, which held ISI responsible for only 2% of violent incidents. Of course, all such analyses completely ignored the far greater violence of U.S. air-strikes, night-raids and other uses of excessive and indiscriminate force in Iraq, as well as the the root cause of all the violence, the U.S. invasion and occupation itself.
As the Western- and Arab royalist-backed proxy war took hold in Syria in 2012, the rump of ISI, which had been reduced to as few as 1,000 men under arms in Iraq, found a new lease on life. In March 2013, when rebels led by the al-Nusra Front captured Raqqa [36], a provincial capital with a population of 220,000, ISIS took control of the provincial and local government. Raqqa was once the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia in the ninth century, so it serves both a symbolic and practical role as the capital of ISIS's new caliphate or Islamic State.
Now that ISIS is once again fighting in Iraq as well as Syria, we have come full circle and Western propaganda and ISIS itself have again found common cause in exaggerating its strength and highlighting its brutality. But its true role in Iraq and its relationship with other Resistance forces there is ambiguous. The gains of Resistance forces, now spearheaded by ISIS, are the result of a political crisis that has been brewing ever since the U.S. invasion. The sectarian Maliki government politically and economically marginalized the mainly Sunni Arab areas of northern and western Iraq, and its security forces have dealt with dissent and political demands from these areas with utter brutality.
Part of the U.S. response to resistance in Iraq [37] was to recruit, train and direct Iraqi death squads, mostly from the Badr Brigades Shia militia. It unleashed these forces in a reign of terror in Baghdad in 2005 and 2006, torturing and killing tens of thousands of mainly Sunni Arab men and boys and ethnically cleansing most of the city. Deputy Interior Minister and Badr Brigade commander Adnan al-Asadi, who oversaw that campaign, remains in office today and has run the Interior Ministry while the formal position of Interior Minister has remained vacant for years on end. The forces he commands, originally called the Special Police, were rebranded the National Police after their al-Jadiriyah torture center was exposed in November 2005, and then rebranded again as the Federal Police, but these are the same forces that have terrorized Sunni Arabs and other minorities and dissidents in Iraq since the darkest days of the U.S. occupation. The Interior Ministry has responded to the current crisis with a new upsurge in death squad activity [38].
During the Arab Spring in 2011, Iraqis took to the streets [39], held rallies and set up protest camps like their counterparts across the Arab world to protest their repressive, sectarian government. They were met by security forces sealing off public squares, arrests, beatings, torture, snipers firing from roof-tops and U.S. helicopters flying over to dump garbage on a protest camp in a square in Mosul.
A new round of protests [40] broke out on December 21st 2012 after security forces raided the home of a popular Sunni politician, Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi, and arrested his staff and bodyguards. Dr. al-Issawi was the director of Fallujah Hospital during the two U.S. Marine massacres in 2004 and a vocal opponent of Prime Minister Maliki, and he had already survived an assassination attempt a year earlier. Three weeks after the arrest of his bodyguards, he survived another bomb attack.
Within two weeks, protests shut down major highways near Fallujah and Ramadi, and spread to at least 13 other cities, from Nasiriyah in the south to Kirkuk in the north, while tribal delegations from all over the country traveled to Fallujah and Ramadi to support the main protests. Government security forces responded with typical brutality, opening fire on protesters in Mosul and Fallujah. On January 25, they killed seven protesters and wounded 70 in Fallujah. Tribal leaders in Anbar issued a joint declaration that they would launch jihad against government forces if the killers were not brought to justice, but protests remained mainly peaceful, even as government forces killed more protesters.
In March 2013, Dr. Issawi and Izz al-Din al-Dawla, the Minister of Agriculture, resigned from the government, and Bunyan al-Obeidi, a protest leader in Kirkuk, was killed by a government death squad. In April, after an Army officer was killed in Hawija, near Kirkuk, the government besieged Hawija [41]and at least 56 people were killed in armed clashes between the residents and government forces. Peaceful protests gradually gave way to armed resistance across the north and west of Iraq. The government banned 10 satellite TV channels, including Al-Jazeera, to censor news of the uprising. In May 2013, the UN reported the highest monthly death toll in Iraq in 5 years, with hundreds of people killed. By the end of the year, the UN estimated that 7,818 civilians and over 1,000 Army and Interior Ministry troops had been killed.
On Dec. 28, 2013, government forces raided the home of Ahmed al-Alwani, a Member of Parliament from Ramadi, killing his brother and 5 of his guards. Two days later, the government sent in Federal Police commandos to destroy the Ramadi protest camp, and 10 protesters and three police commandos were killed. Forty Sunni members of Parliament resigned, and a general tribal uprising forced Army and Interior Ministry forces to withdraw from Fallujah and Ramadi.
Over the next few days, hundreds of ISIS fighters appeared in Fallujah, Ramadi and around Anbar province, and formed a sometimes uneasy alliance with other Iraqi resistance groups and tribal leaders. As in Syria, they have come to dominate and lead the uprising that has swept through western and northern Iraq in the past nine months. ISIS' main allies have been secular ex-Baathist military officers, still under the umbrella of the Baath Party and formally headed by General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri [42], now aged 72; and tribal leaders led by Ali Hatem al-Suleiman [43] of Anbar's Dulaim tribe and the Anbar Tribes Revolutionary Council. Douri eventually announced a split with ISIS in July 2014 after it launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Christians in Mosul, but this has only led to a few localized clashes between ISIS and other resistance forces.
Suleiman has claimed that ISIS fighters make up only 5-7% of Resistance fighters in Iraq, and that the resistance could oust ISIS from regions it controls. But he has said it will not do so until government forces withdraw from northern and western Iraq and a political transition grants civil and political rights denied to the people of these regions. Another tribal leader from Anbar, Abu Muhammad al-Zubaai, echoed Suleiman's claims in an interview two weeks ago [44]. Zubaai told the BBC's Jim Muir, "We don't want guns from the Americans, we want a real political solution, which the U.S. should impose on those people it installed in the Green Zone. The IS problem would end. If they guarantee us this solution, we'll guarantee to get rid of IS."
Zubaai described a clash at Garma, near Fallujah, that killed 16 ISIS fighters, but added, "We had to choose between a comprehensive confrontation with IS, or ceding control of that area and keeping a low profile. We decided to stand down because we are not ready to fight IS in the current circumstances—who would we be fighting for? On the daily bombing of Fallujah and other cities by the Iraqi air force, with heavy civilian casualties, Zubaai said, "Our biggest concern now is a political solution. A security solution will achieve nothing. The bombing has to stop."
These tribal leaders claim to represent 90% of Sunni-majority tribes in Iraq. They have tried to approach U.S. officials, but without any response. Zubaai sees the options facing the U.S. as a stark choice between solidly supporting a genuine political transition and fueling an out-of-control spiral of violence, "If things stay the same, a new generation will emerge, beyond the control of the U.S. or Iran or Syria-hundreds of thousands of young men will join up with IS."
President Obama's bombing campaign to support a repressive, sectarian government and Kurdish separatists will reduce more Iraqi cities to rubble, kill thousands more civilians and turn ISIS into the unstoppable monster that Zubaai predicts. But, as he says, the President still has another choice. He can provide full diplomatic and political support for a legitimate political transition in Iraq that would honor the civil and political rights of all Iraqis. This could begin to solve the long-running political crisis caused by the U.S. invasion, which has led millions of Iraqis to see an alliance with ISIS as a lesser evil than submission to the brutal U.S.- and Iranian-backed regime in the Green Zone.
Like the crisis in Iraq, every part of the current crisis in U.S. foreign policy is amenable to serious diplomacy. We are on the verge of a diplomatic solution to the phony crisis [45] over Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program. There is global consensus on ending the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with only the United States clinging to its effective support [46] for a territorial expansion that the world will never recognize. The framework for a peace process [47] in Syria was agreed on in Geneva on June 30, 2012, more than two years ago, but stalled as the U.S. and its allies reintroduced their precondition that President Assad must resign first. The coup regime in Ukraine and its Western backers may finally be ready to accept long-standing Russian proposals [48] for a political and diplomatic resolution based on regional autonomy and international neutrality. And ISIS's allies in Iraq are offering to "get rid of" it in exchange only for the basic civil and political rights that the U.S. promised them when it invaded their country.
But as Robert Parry noted recently [49], there's an "old woman who swallowed a fly" quality to neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. The proposed solution to any U.S. foreign-policy failure is always some kind of escalation, invariably leading to an even more dangerous crisis. Instead of developing more rational policy goals in response to their overreaching and failures, neoconservative policymakers instead keep doubling down to take on more powerful adversaries and risk even greater disasters. Thus a failed CIA coup in 1996 and the impending collapse of the UN sanctions regime led to the invasion and destruction of Iraq; the U.S. defeat in Iraq led to targeting Syria and Iran; and Russia's role in Syria led to a U.S.-led coup in Ukraine and a U.S.-Russian confrontation that has raised the specter of nuclear war: "There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She died of course."
The U.S. propaganda system presents Americans with a looking-glass view of the world, in which our "shining city on a hill" is a bastion of peace, democracy and prosperity, while the rest of the world is a dreadful mess riven by endless crises and insoluble problems. The dirty little secret that our propaganda system cannot mention is that the current crises are all deeply rooted in U.S. policy. At this point in our history, most of those roots lead back to the fateful decision to respond to a mass murder in New York City with 94,000 air strikes, an opportunistic global military expansion and a doubling of the military budget. So Zubaai's plea for Iraq echoes through the larger crisis in U.S. foreign policy, "Our biggest concern now is a political solution. A security solution will achieve nothing. The bombing has to stop."
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nicolas-js-davies
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_Saudi_Arabia
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[41] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Hawija_clashes
[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_Ibrahim_al-Douri
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[44] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28978941
[45] http://harpers.org/blog/2014/05/manufactured-crisis-the-untold-story-of-the-iran-nuclear-scare/
[46] http://www.alternet.org/world/3-ways-america-enables-slaughter-gaza
[47] http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Syria/FinalCommuniqueActionGroupforSyria.pdf
[48] http://newsru.com/pict/big/1638517.html
[49] http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/27/why-neocons-seek-to-destabilize-russia/
[50] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS
[51] http://www.alternet.org/tags/isis
[52] http://www.alternet.org/tags/iraq-0
[53] http://www.alternet.org/tags/air-strikes-0
[54] http://www.alternet.org/tags/nato-0
[55] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
http://www.alternet.org/print/world/9-11-americas-insane-foreign-policy-continued-under-obama-has-killed-million-and-created-isis
September 11, 2014
STRATEGIC BLUNDERS, by S. Trifkovic
Strategic Blunders
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region's stability.
Putin's strategy in Ukraine has been overtly defensive ever since Maidan turned ugly last winter. In essence the strategy has been to refrain from serious support for the rebels in the east, in the hope that Kiev will reciprocate with a comprehensive settlement that would include a promise of Ukraine's permanent "Finlandization" as a neutral buffer—and perhaps a bridge—between Russia and NATO. That strategy has failed, primarily because—contrary to German and French preferences—Washington has aggressively pursued an all-or-nothing course. It has also failed because Russia's leadership has been singularly unable to develop adequate alternative scenarios.
The end result is increasingly likely to be a Western-hostile Russia and a dirt-poor, unpleasantly chauvinist Ukraine, dependent on Western largesse. If Moscow fails to prevent Ukraine's eventual transformation into a viscerally Russophobic Banderistan, as now seems likely, the return of the Crimea last March will be scant compensation for the overall rapid weakening of Russia's geopolitical position along her southwestern border. The outcome could be comparable to the map of Eastern Europe after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918 and made short-lived only thanks to Germany's subsequent collapse on the Western Front.
The ultimate goal of Washington's strategy is nothing less than regime change in Moscow. If the weakening geopolitical position of the Russian Federation in Europe leads to the eventual collapse of Putin's popularity, the theory goes, the likely result would be a new Yeltsin (Medvedev, perhaps) and a return to the 1990's. Admittedly, Russia's political elites have been traditionally unforgiving of geopolitical failure. Czar Nicholas I—seemingly invincible in the early 1850's—died a broken man after the defeat in the Crimea. His namesake's military failures made the coup of February 1917 possible, which opened the floodgates for the Bolshevik nightmare. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown in the first week of Operation Barbarossa, fearful more of the collapse of his authority than of the Wehrmacht's early victories. Khrushchev was replaced after the failure of his Cuban misadventure. Brezhnev's Afghan fiasco contributed decisively to the collapse of the credibility of all subsequent Soviet leaders. Putin's current 66-percent approval rating may likewise collapse if the Russians conclude that Vladimir Vladimirovich's diplomatic successes in China, Latin America, and Syria are insufficient to compensate for the appearance of trigger-happy, NATO-armed Galician storm troopers in Ukrainian uniforms on Russia's vulnerable southwestern border.
The theory is grotesquely short-sighted. It is far more likely that we'd see the emergence of a seriously anti-Western political figure—which Putin is not and has never been. A disciple of Aleksandr Dugin's "Euroasianist" paradigm could emerge and threaten Putin in 2018, or else Putin could become a dedicated Euroasianist, determined to treat the United States as an outright enemy. Either way, America and "the West" would lose. Bringing NATO east of the Dnieper would greatly increase the danger of an intra-European war, and even of a trans-Atlantic nuclear exchange, which would guarantee the final suicide of an already moribund civilization. It would irrevocably push Russia into the development of an already emerging, implicitly anti-Western Eurasian alliance—a Moscow-Beijing axis—that would include Iran and India. The latter has already emerged as a key player in the new BRICS currency pool—a further sign of the world's rapid multipolarization.
The U.S. government is nevertheless determined to follow its self-defeating course. The shooting-down of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 over Eastern Ukraine on July 17 was thus hailed as a "game-changer" in Washington. The circumstances remain murky. An outright false-flag operation would have led Kiev authorities to shoot down the airliner and blame the rebels. An elaborate false-flag operation would have entailed guiding the airliner into a war zone and hoping that the rebels fire their missiles in the reasonable assumption that anything that flies is noncivilian and therefore a legitimate target. It was one of the two; the truth may never be known. Either way, the Nulandesque clique in Washington is likely to have had a hand in the ploy. The stage managers have ample experience in the field: Think Saddam's WMDs in 2003, Bosnia's Markale Market "massacre" in 1994, Kosovo's Racak "massacre" (stage-managed in January 1999, compliments of CIA agent William Walker), Bashar al Assad's "gassing of his own people" in the suburbs of Damascus last August, or Qaddafi's "imminent genocide" in Benghazi two years earlier.
Even if everything works as planned, a solidly "pro-Western" Ukraine integrated into NATO is not in the American interest. It would dramatically increase the possibility of nuclear escalation in the course of some new crisis in the years and decades to come. Devoid of a territorial buffer zone, faced with an inherently hostile NATO stronghold in the north (Estonia)—an hour's drive from St. Petersburg—and in the south (the Kharkov-Donetsk-Lugansk knife in Russia's southern underbelly), Moscow's strategists would be certain to rely on their nuclear arsenal (possible first-use included) to deter any perceived danger of an attack. Russia's demographic weakness, which excludes the option of permanently maintaining a large conventional force along her western borders, coupled with the ongoing development of the U.S. missile-defense system in Eastern Europe, will make that option well-nigh inevitable. America would be less safe than she is now, and in that sense the U.S. policy in Ukraine is a strategic blunder of historic proportions.
Not of the same global magnitude, but even more immediately indicative of Washington's strategic ineptitude, is the rise of ISIS. Having captured Mosul and executed some thousands of Shi'ite prisoners, the jihadist group declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as its caliph, combining religious and state authority in the tradition of Muhammad's early successors, across Iraq and Syria and beyond. For the first time since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in the aftermath of the Great War, there is a substantial state-like entity presuming to revive the mantle of Sunni Islamic universalism.
The Islamic Caliphate is a "state." Traditional international law postulates the possession of population, of territory, and the existence of a government that exercises effective control over that population and territory: a state exists if it enjoys a monopoly on coercive mechanisms within its domain, which the caliphate does. After all, unrecognized state entities such as Transnistria, Abkhazia, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh command their denizens' overwhelming loyalty and exercise effectively undisputed control over their entire territory. Some international jurists may cite the ability of the self-proclaimed state's authority to engage in international discourse, but that is a moot point. The capacity to control a putative state's territory and population almost invariably leads to such ability, regardless of the circumstances of that state's inception: South Sudan is a recent case in point, and the creation of Israel in 1947 also comes to mind.
At the end of July ISIS controlled an area the size of Montana, composed in roughly equal parts of northern and northeastern Syria and western and northwestern Iraq. It has over ten million inhabitants, and most of those who did not cherish life under its black banner have already fled to Damascus or Baghdad. The caliphate has substantial funds at its disposal, initially given it by the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Turks, Qataris, Bahrainis, UAE donors, et al., and it augmented its coffers to the tune of half a billion dollars looted from the Iraqi government vaults in Mosul and Tikrit. It is also, by all accounts, effective in collecting taxes, tolls, "donations," and excise duties. With no debts or liabilities, the existing stash and ongoing cash flow makes the emerging ISIS entity more solvent than most small or even medium-sized sub-Saharan "republics" or Pacific-island states currently represented in the United Nations. It has enough oil and derivatives not only for the caliphate's own needs, but also to earn the foreign exchange needed to buy all the food and other goods it needs from abroad. Al-Baghdadi's budding state is in much better financial shape, on a per capita basis, than Egypt or Yemen.
In the fullness of time, and left to their own devices, Damascus and Baghdad—with some help from Tehran and Moscow—just might do the job. The caliphate is nevertheless winning for now. Its prospects are further brightened by the fact that the United States may yet "level the field" in favor of ISIS—effectively ensuring its long-term survival—with President Obama's request to Congress at the end of June for $500 million in eminently lethal aid for the "vetted," "moderate" opponents of the Syrian government. Their likely composition is apparent in John McCain's family album from Syria, the moral replica of his Right Sector buddies in Kiev. Caliph Ibrahim (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's real name) knows that any "vetting" would be left to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the main past sponsors of ISIS. He salivates at the thought of half a billion dollars in U.S. hardware coming directly to him or being up for grabs if delivered to the long-moribund "Free Syrian Army." He is justifiably confident that nobody in Washington will have any control whatsoever over the weaponry once it reaches the local distribution points.
On balance, the new caliphate is a viable project, because—as per Vladimir Ilyich Lenin—the government of the United States is acting as its "objective ally." Barack Hussein Obama's intended crime of continuing to help Assad's Islamic foes has the potential to exceed George W. Bush's crime of starting the Iraq war.
At the end of summer 2014, the world is far more turbulent and unsafe than a year earlier. The inability of the Obama administration to anticipate and adequately manage crises (ISIS) and its readiness to instigate and escalate them (Ukraine) is alarming yet unsurprising. The ruling Duopoly has no coherent understanding of the American interest, and is therefore inherently unable to promote and protect it.
September 02, 2014
Western hypocrisy sinks to new depths
Western hypocrisy sinks to new depths
Ukrainian troops are seen at their position during fighting with pro-Russian fighters in the eastern Ukrainian town of Ilovaysk.
Tue Sep 2, 2014 1:12PM GMT
By Luke Eastwood
Related Interviews:
While the western mainstream media hurls abuse at Russia and its government, blaming it for the crisis in Eastern Ukraine there is little mention of the role of USA and its NATO puppets in the continuing tragedy.
The USA, Canada and EU are happy to impose sanctions on Russia and provide military assistance, loans and intelligence to a Ukrainian government that was not elected (established by the violent coup aided by the CIA). However these countries are not willing to allow Russia to assist the Eastern-Ukrainians in any way – even with humanitarian aid.
What is worse again is that while they condemn the Russians for not making the separatists lie down and accept an unelected and prejudiced government they also turn a blind eye to the constant bombing of unarmed civilians. Meanwhile, in Gaza the same thing is happening to the Palestinian people – they are being bombed consistently and it is again mostly unarmed civilians who are being injured or killed.
Much as the western powers pay lip-service to the disgust of such terrible acts in Gaza, they do nothing to prevent it continuing – Israel is not censured, placed under sanctions or threatened in any way, while Russia is constantly pressured for speaking up on behalf of the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainians. Little is said about the daily death toll in Eastern Ukraine, where like in Gaza the infrastructure is destroyed and there is little food, water and adequate emergency care readily available.
Not one EU country or North American country is willing to condemn Israel for indiscriminate killing of civilians or condemn the Ukraine government for doing the same to its own people. These same countries are happy though to condemn Russia for standing up for and helping their close neighbours, despite the fact that it was USA that precipitated the Ukraine civil war in the first place.
The attitude of the western powers, and USA in particular, smacks of total hypocrisy given that they have done nothing to end either humanitarian crisis and in fact have been enablers of the (heavily armed) aggressors in both instances.
It is well known that USA has a hegemonic agenda to reduce both Russia and China to a state of incapacitation, so it's no real surprise that they have acted duplicitously. What is really incredible is that Canada and the EU, that have no real interest in a proxy or direct war, have continually allowed themselves to be manipulated by the hawks in Washington.
After all, Russia withdrew quickly from Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which precipitated good relations with the Reagan government and most European governments. In contrast, to this day the USA has many military bases throughout Europe with approximately 68,000 troops present in at least 10 European countries. Germany, with over 40,000 US troops, is still an occupied country, despite the fact that WWII ended nearly 70 years ago.
The western governments are too scared to stand up to the USA, a country which should have withdrawn its troops from Europe and Japan two decades ago. It is the USA that has intervened in countless countries since WWII, none of which border the USA. Whereas Russia has mostly intervened in countries that have a land border with itself in circumstances where there could (possibly) be justification in its own domestic interest. China has a similar record and in fact has much less involvement in conflict in recent decades. Despite a much better record than the USA, in recent decades, both Russia and China are vilified as potentially dangerous, aggressive and possible rogue nations.
Looking at the evidence without prejudice one would have to say that it is USA government (and its pathetic, sycophantic allies) that is aggressive, expansionist and most likely to cause conflict. Unfortunately, the obvious decline of American power makes the USA government even more dangerous as it becomes more desperate to vainly retain its position, not unlike Britain at the beginning of the 20th century.
If the other western governments had any sense (which they obviously don't) they would abandon NATO and their alliance with the dying USA empire and make friends with the BRICS nations. BRICS nations (and many others besides) realise that a multi-polar world is the way forward, but the American leadership wishes to maintain a uni-polar world at all costs – even if that means constant war.
This way of thinking is not what the world needs. Instead of sinking further into hypocrisy and grovelling to warmongering demands perhaps the Western powers should man up and accept that they are no-longer the only game in town.
If another world war were to begin it would most likely be an unprecedented disaster for humanity and the planet. Surely it's better for western governments to suck up a bit of humble pie than to allow a fatally crippled empire to plunge the world into an unnecessary and possibly terminal conflict?
LE/HMV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/09/02/377452/western-hypocrisy-sinks-to-new-depths/
