December 07, 2014

New York Times propagandists exposed: Finally, the truth about Ukraine and Putin emerges

NATO was the aggressor and got Ukraine wrong. Many months later, the media has eventually figured out the truth

Vladimir Putin (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan/Photo montage by Salon)

Well, well, well. Gloating is unseemly, especially in public, but give me this one, will you?

It has been a long and lonely winter defending the true version of events in Ukraine, but here comes the sun. We now have open acknowledgment in high places that Washington is indeed responsible for this mess, the prime mover, the "aggressor," and finally this term is applied where it belongs. NATO, once again, is revealed as causing vastly more trouble than it has ever prevented.

Washington, it is now openly stated, has been wrong, wrong, wrong all along. The commentaries to be noted do not take on the media, but I will, and in language I use advisedly. With a few exceptions they are proven liars, liars, liars — not only conveying the official version of events but willfully elaborating on it off their own bats.

Memo to the New York Times' Moscow bureau: Vicky Nuland, infamous now for desiring sex with the European Union, has just FedExed little gold stars you can affix to your foreheads, one for each of you. Wear them with pride for you will surely fight another day, having learned nothing, and ignore all ridicule. If it gets too embarrassing, tell people they have something to do with the holidays.

O.K., gloat concluded. To the business at hand.

We have had, in the last little while, significant analyses of the Ukraine crisis, each employing that method the State Department finds deadly: historical perspective. In a lengthy interview with Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, none other than Henry Kissinger takes Washington carefully but mercilessly to task. "Does one achieve a world order through chaos or through insight?" Dr. K. asks.

Here is one pertinent bit:

KISSINGER. … But if the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.

SPIEGEL. What was it then?

KISSINGER. One has to ask oneself this question: Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn't make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask oneself, Why did it happen?

SPIEGEL. What you're saying is that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?

KISSINGER. Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine's economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the demonstrations in Kiev. All these, and their impact, should have been the subject of a dialogue with Russia. This does not mean the Russian response was appropriate.

Interesting. Looking for either insight or honesty in Obama's White House or in his State Department is a forlorn business, and Kissinger surely knows this. So he is, as always, a cagey critic. But there are numerous things here to consider, and I will come back to them.

First, let us note that Kissinger's remarks follow an essay titled "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault." The subhead is just as pithy: "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin."

Wow. As display language I would speak for that myself. And wow again for where the piece appears: In the September-October edition of Foreign Affairs, that radical rag published at East 68th Street and Park Avenue, the Manhattan home of the ever-subverting Council on Foreign Relations.

Finally and most recently, we have Katrina vanden Heuvel weighing in on the Washington Post's opinion page the other day with "Rethinking the Cost of Western Intervention in Ukraine," in which the Nation's noted editor asserts, "One year after the United States and Europe celebrated the February coup that ousted the corrupt but constitutionally elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, liberal and neoconservative interventionists have much to answer for."

Emphatically so. Here is one of vanden Heuvel's more salient observations:

The U.S. government and the mainstream media present this calamity as a morality tale. Ukrainians demonstrated against Yanukovych because they wanted to align with the West and democracy. Putin, as portrayed by Hillary Rodham Clinton among others, is an expansionist Hitler who has trampled international law and must be made to "pay a big price" for his aggression. Isolation and escalating economic sanctions have been imposed. Next, if Senate hawks such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham have their way, Ukraine will be provided with arms to "deter" Putin's "aggression." But this perspective distorts reality.

I can anticipate with ease a thoughtful reader or two writing in the comment thread, "But we knew all this already. What's the point?" We have known all this since the beginning, indeed, thanks to perspicacious writers such as Robert Parry and Steve Weissman. Parry, like your columnist, is a refugee from the mainstream who could take no more; Weissman, whose credentials go back to the Free Speech Movement, seems fed up with the whole nine and exiled himself to France.

Something I have wanted to say for months is now right: Thank you, colleagues. Keep on keeping on.

Also to be noted in this vein is Stephen Cohen, the distinguished Princeton Russianist, whose essay in the Nation last February gave superb and still useful perspective, a must-read if you propose to take Ukraine seriously and get beyond the propaganda. (Vanden Heuvel rightly noted him, too, wrongly omitting that she and Cohen are spouses. A report to the Ethics Police has been filed anonymously.)

These people's reporting and analyses require no imprimatur from the mainstream press. Who could care? This is not the point. The points as I read them are two.

One, there is no shred of doubt in my mind that the work of the above-mentioned and a few others like them has been instrumental in forcing the truth of the Ukraine crisis to the surface. Miss this not. In a polity wherein the policy cliques have zero accountability to any constituency — unbelievable simply to type that phrase — getting accurate accounts and responsibly explanatory copy out — and then reading it, equally — is essential. Future historians will join me in expressing gratitude.

Two, we have indirect admissions of failure. It is highly significant that Foreign Affairs and the Washington Post, both bastions of the orthodoxy, are now willing to publish what amount to capitulations. It would be naive to think this does not reflect a turning of opinion among prominent members of the policy cliques.

I had thought for months as the crisis dragged on, this degree of disinformation cannot possibly hold. From the Nuland tape onward, too much of the underwear was visible as the trousers fell down, so to say. And now we have State and the media clerks with their pants bunched up at their ankles.

The Foreign Affairs piece is by a scholar at the University of Chicago named John Mearsheimer, whose publishing credits include "Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics" and "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy," the latter an especially gutsy undertaking. He is a soothsayer, and you find these people among the scholars every once in a while, believe it or not.

Mearsheimer was writing opinion in the Times with heads such as "Getting Ukraine Wrong" as far back as March, when the news pages were already busy doing so. In the Foreign Affairs piece, he vigorously attacks NATO expansion, citing George Kennan in his later years, when Dr. Containment was objecting strenuously to the post-Soviet push eastward and the overall perversion of his thinking by neoliberal know-nothings-read-nothings. Here is a little Mearsheimer:

… The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU's expansion eastward and the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a "coup"—coup—was was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Drinks for Mearsheimer, for his plain-English use of "coup" alone, any time the professor may happen into my tiny Connecticut village. It is an extensive, thorough piece and worth the read even if Foreign Affairs is not your usual habit. His conclusion now that Ukraine is in pieces, its economy wrecked and its social fabric in shreds:

The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process — a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.

Mearsheimer has as much chance of seeing this shift in policy as Kissinger has finding honesty and insight anywhere in Washington. One hope he is busy in other matters.

As to Dr. K., he reminds me at 90 of the old survivors of the Maoist revolution in China, the last few Long Marchers. They enjoy a certain immunity in their sunset years, no matter what they may say, and for this reason I have always appreciated meeting the few I have. So it is with Henry.

Did Washington in any way authorize Kissinger's interview, as it may have the Foreign Affairs piece, given the revolving door at East 68th Street? I doubt it. Did it know this was coming. Almost certainly. A nonagenarian, Henry still travels in high policy circles. His critique on Ukraine has been evident here and there for many months.

Interesting, first, that Kissinger gave the interview to a German magazine. Nobody in the American press would have dared touch such remarks as these — they cannot, having lied so long. And Kissinger understands, surely, that the Germans are ambivalent, to put it mildly, when it comes to Washington's aggressions against Russia.

I have been mad at Kissinger since throwing rocks at the CRS, the French riot police, outside the American embassy in Paris in the spring of 1970, when the U.S started bombing Cambodia. And I am not with him now when he asserts "the Russian response was not appropriate."

Why not? What was Putin supposed to do when faced with the prospect of NATO and the American Navy assuming privileges on the Black Sea? Was it appropriate when Kennedy threatened Khrushchev with nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis? Arming the contras? Deposing Arbenz? Allende? Let us not get started.

Here is the thing about Henry. European by background, he understands balance-of-power politics cannot be ignored. He understands that spheres of influence must be observed. (My view, explained in an earlier column, is that they are to be acknowledged but not honored — regrettable realities that our century, best outcome, will do away with.)

We reach a new moment in the Ukraine crisis with these new analyses from people inside the tent urinating out, as they say. I have hinted previously at the lesson to be drawn. Maybe now it will be clearer to those who object.

Whatever one may think of Russia under Vladimir Putin, it is secondary at this moment — and more the business of Russians than anyone else — to something larger. This is a non-Western nation drawing a line of resistance against the advance of Anglo-American neoliberalism across the planet. This counts big, in my view. It is an important thing to do.

Some readers argue that Putin oversees a neoliberal regime himself. It is an unappealing kind of capitalism, certainly, although the centralization of the economy almost certainly reflects Putin's strategy when faced with the need to rebuild urgently from the ungodly mess left by the U.S-beloved Yeltsin. See the above-noted piece by Stephen Cohen on this point.

For the sake of argument, let us accept the assertion: Russia is a neoliberal variant. O.K., but again, this is a Russian problem and Russians, not Americans, will solve it one way or the other — as they like and eventually. Important for us is that Putin is not pushing the model around the world, chest-out insisting that all others conform to it. This distinction counts, too.

Joseph Brodsky wrote an open letter to Václav Havel back in 1994, by which time the neoliberal orthodoxy and its evangelists were well-ensconced in Washington. The piece was titled "The Post-Communist Nightmare." In it Brodsky was highly critical of "the cowboys of the Western industrial democracies" who, he asserted, "derive enormous moral comfort from being regarded as cowboys—first of all, by the Indians."

"Are all the Indians now to commence imitation of the cowboys," the Russian émigré poet asked the new president of the (also new) Czech Republic.

I view the Ukraine crisis through this lens. A huge mistake has now been acknowledged. Now it is time: Instead of complaining about Putin and what he is doing to Russians every prompt given, like trained animals, now we must complain about what America proposes doing to the rest of the world, limitlessly.

Patrick Smith is the author of "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century." He was the International Herald Tribune's bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote "Letter from Tokyo" for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/04/new_york_times_propagandists_exposed_finally_the_truth_about_ukraine_and_putin_emerges/

November 01, 2014

Whistleblower urges external probe into EU mission in Kosovo

31.10.14 @ 19:13

By Andrew Rettman

BRUSSELS - Only an external investigation can restore faith in Eulex, the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo, Maria Bamieh, the British prosecutor at the heart of corruption revelations has told EUobserver.

The revelations, first published in Kosovo daily Koha Ditore earlier this week, say: that a senior official colluded with suspects in criminal cases; that another official took bribes to shut down prosecutions; and that a third one quashed internal Eulex probes.

The story cited transcripts of wire-tapped conversations as well as internal letters written by Bamieh to her superiors to alert them of wrongdoing.

In a second story, published on Friday (31 October), Koha Ditore cited other documents showing that Eulex gave confidential information to Serbian intelligence services.

Bamieh told EUobserver on Thursday the EU mission also: turned a blind eye to a miscarriage of justice in a triple-murder case; failed to protect witnesses; and lied to press.

She said two Kosovo men - who are in jail for a bombing in 2007 and for killing three other people the same year - were convicted of the triple murder on evidence "that would never stand up in a British court".

The men agreed to give Eulex information on the Kosovo mafia in return for promises that Eulex would re-examine the triple-murder case and would guarantee their future safety.

But Bamieh said neither promise was kept.

"They've been spilling their guts out, telling Eulex police everything that's happening [in Kosovo] … Now they're saying: 'When Eulex goes [its mandate expires in 2016] everybody knows we've been talking and we're going to be killed' and Eulex is doing nothing for them. There is no lasting protetcion offered to these individuals".

Referring to the Koha Ditore revelations, she noted: "I don't know whether I touched on the tip of an iceberg or not, whether it [Eulex corruption] runs a lot deeper … I can only speak about what I found".

But she added that some EU states' seconded judges and policemen are more prone to temptation than others'.

"This country is corrupt. Everywhere you look in Kosovo there is corruption. If you bring in senior people [to Eulex] from poor countries, or countries which also have endemic corruption, they are more likely to end up colluding with the locals".

"I'm not saying that all Italians, all Greeks, or all Romanians [for instance] are bad, but people [Eulex staff] who come from other parts of Europe … are maybe not so susceptible", she said.

When the Koha Ditore story broke, the EU foreign service, which is in charge of Eulex, said: "Since 2013, Eulex and Kosovo judicial authorities have been pursuing a joint investigation into these allegations. Due diligence has therefore been applied thoroughly".

Bamieh confirmed that one of the allegedly corrupt Eulex officials named in her letters to superiors - Italy's Francesco Florit - is under internal investigation.

But she said a second one - the Czech Republic's Jaroslava Novotna - is not.

She also accused Eulex of deleting emails pertaining to her complaints against Novotna in 2012 in an attempt to "bury" any probe.

Passing the buck

"It's a lie - there's an investigation into Florit but not into Novotna", Bamieh said of the EU statement on "due diligence".

"It's a complete joke. I do think there should be an independent investigation and I've been saying this from day one".

"How can the people of Kosovo trust them [Eulex] when they keep lying? … What hope is there for SITF to be able to guarantee safety for witnesses if Eulex doesn't change?", she added, referring to the Special Investigative Task Force (SITF), an Eulex unit looking into war crimes allegations against Kosovo politicians, including PM Hashim Thaci.

The British prosecutor said that Fernando Gentilini, an Italian who is the EU foreign service's top official on the Western Balkans, should be held accountable for the mess.

"I name him because, at the end of the day, Eulex is run by the EEAS [the EU foreign service]. But they always try to pass the buck … they say: 'It's not us. It's the [EU] Council'. The Council says: 'It's not us. It's the EEAS'. Nobody takes responsibility. The EEAS should have some kind of transparency and accountability mechanism for its missions".

Bamieh is not alone in calling for external oversight.

Ulrike Lunacek, an Austrian Green MEP, said, on Friday, that Eulex "must be duly investigated by an external and independent body", leading to a potential "reconfiguration and redefinition of the mandate of the whole mission".

Elmar Brok, a German centre-right MEP who chairs the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee, has put the Eulex scandal on the agenda of its next session, on 3 November.

"We have to listen to the people responsible and decide how to proceed", he told this website.

Doris Pack, a German centre-right politician and former MEP who has worked on Kosovo since the break-up of former Yugoslavia, also called for an Eulex audit.

"There should be a total check of Eulex, otherwise there will no longer be any trust in it and we will totally lose the right to teach others [on how to apply rule of law]", she told EUobserver.

Thanks, but no thanks

EU countries are reluctant to let outsiders look behind the scenes, however.

The EU foreign service gave a confidential briefing on Eulex to member states' ambassadors on the Political and Security Committee (PSC) on Tuesday.

An EU diplomat familiar with the briefing voiced support for whistleblowers in general, saying: "It's important to needle [EU] bureaucracy … if there has been improper conduct, then society should know and should care about such things".

But the diplomat added: "The general conviction [in the PSC] was that it [the Eulex affair] should be handled by an internal process, not by external people. We've created internal structures to deal with problems like this, so we should use them".

The UK - which seconded Bamieh to Eulex after a distinguished carreer in its own Crown Prosecution Service - is toeing the line.

A British foreign office spokesman told this website on Friday: "We are aware of the allegations in the press about the Eulex mission. This is a matter for the mission to respond to".

EUobserver understands the British embassy in Pristina also on Friday ordered Bamieh to stop talking to media.

A German foreign ministry spokesman said Berlin advocates "a resolute and comprehensive clarification of facts concerning the allegations".

But he added: "We place full confidence in the work of the new as well as in the work of the previous head of mission [Eulex]. Both have contributed and are contributing actively to the investigation".

For his part, Joao Sousa, an SITF spokesman, shrugged off Bamieh's concern that Eulex malpractice might harm the SITF's work by making war crimes witnesses fearful to co-operate.

He told this website the special task force "is a fully autonomous investigative entity based in Brussels, conducting its operational work independently from Eulex".

"The SITF has its own team of investigators and prosecutors, and has adopted special safeguards to ensure the confidentiality of its documents and the safety of its witnesses".

But an EU source noted the SITF is based in Brussels and is to hold future trials in The Hague precisely due to lack of confidence in Eulex and Kosovo courts' ability to protect informants and to follow due process.

Presumption of guilt

Meanwhile, Bamieh is being forced to stay in Pristina to answer questions in an Eulex investigation, launched on Friday, into whether she is the source of the Koha Ditore leaks.

She is forced to stay, protected by Eulex bodyguards, despite getting death threats from the Kosovo underworld.

Both she and the editor-in-chief of Koha Ditore, Agron Bajrami, say she is not the source of the leaks.

But Eulex suspended her from her post and told press that she handed over the internal documents before it began the leak investigation on Friday, violating the principle of presumption of innocence.

"I am going to Eulex to receive my charges [on the leak investigation] tomorrow", she told EUobserver on Thursday.

Bamieh noted that she never intended to go public until she was "frog-marched" out of her office by two Eulex guards in front of her colleagues like a criminal.

"They [Eulex] keep telling the press I'm a crazy woman, a disgruntled employee who wants revenge", she said.

"I don't have much, but I have my reputation to protect … I don't have any grudge against Eulex. I have many good colleagues there and many people there work damn hard".

She added: "I'm not mad. How dare they attack my mental health?".

"It's really awful to suffer all this stress. At times, you begin to doubt yourself. Then you say: 'But those are the facts. These are the intercepts. These are the texts'," Bamieh noted, referring to intercepts of illicit conversations between Novotna, who has not been suspended, and suspected gangsters.

http://euobserver.com/foreign/126341

This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.

October 24, 2014

Putin lashes out at US, West for destabilizing world

Published time: October 24, 2014 12:25
Edited time: October 24, 2014 14:18

Get short URL

Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti / Vitaly Belousov)

1.9K645817

October 19, 2014

The European Union Isn't Going To Bail Out Ukraine

Comment Now

Follow Comments

The European Union has had a pretty rough run over the past seven years. Economically, things are simply catastrophic. The Eurozone is not only experiencing an output slump that is even worse than the great depression, it is also teetering dangerously close to outright deflation. Unemployment remains persistently high everywhere except Germany: it is still above 25% in both Greece and Spain, and above 10% in Portugal, Italy, and France. The forecasts are hardly encouraging, with expectations of little or no growth in 2014 and an exceedingly modest rebound predicted for 2015. The situation is so desperate and hopeless that respected economists like Tyler Cowen have started to compare the performance of the more sclerotic European economies with the de-industrialization of 19th century India.

Politically, things aren't a whole lot better. The most recent elections to the European Parliament in late May saw Euroskeptics and radicals of various stripes storm to unprecedented victories. Even The Economist, which has been relentless in its promotion of the EU, sounded the alarm, admitting that the previous "bastion of European federalism" was set to become a "beachhead for all sorts of anti-Europeans." There's also the small matter that Viktor Orban, Hungary's president, has all but declared war on "liberal democracy." This is just a little bit awkward because Hungary is a member of an organization explicitly founded on liberal democratic concepts. The EU is now in the unprecedented position of needing to confront an avowedly "illiberal" regime within its own ranks.

As I hope the above makes clear, the EU is barely holding itself together. Even in a relatively optimistic scenario, it will have experienced a "lost decade" of economic growth, and tens of millions of Europeans will have had their professional lives deeply and negatively impacted by the European elite's inability to effectively respond to the crisis. Political radicalism has already been strengthened to a frightening degree, and its anyone's guess where the process will lead. In such a situation the EU is pretty obviously not in a position to bail anyone else out. Economically the EU doesn't have the money and, politically, there is no will for further "expansion."

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who is well known for his extensive use of social media and for his support of Ukraine's integration into European institutions, hasn't gotten the message though. The other day he tweeted the following:

Important that Germany Chancellor Merkel now raises the issue of EU help in rebuilding of Donbass region. Will be needed. And expensive.

To the extent that Bildt convinces anyone in Ukraine that the EU will ride to the rescue he is being cruel. There is no other word for it. The EU is not going t help rebuild the Donbass. Full stop. Even if the EU (read: Germany) had sufficient funds at its disposal for this sort of effort, which is increasingly doubtful, the recent election made clear that popular enthusiasm for the EU project is evaporating almost in real time. There is precious little enthusiasm among the German public for bailout of other Eurozone members. The idea that Germany will consent to spending tens of billions of dollars rebuilding Eastern Ukraine is completely and totally divorced from political reality. Can anyone seriously imagine Angela Merkel, whose country recently had its 2014 growth estimate downgraded to a mere 1.5%, going in front of the German public to demand a substantial outlay for Ukrainian infrastructure? It would be political suicide, and Merkel is clearly a clever enough politician to understand this.

Ukraine and its political leadership needs to understand that, regardless of Bildt's musings, the country's "European choice" is not going to be underwritten by anyone else. Basic political reality in Germany and the EU, particularly the rapid growth of Euroskepticism, means that no help will be forthcoming. Kiev will have to chart its own course, and will need to find a way to pay for the (enormous!) expenditures of repairing its Eastern industrial heartland.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2014/08/25/the-european-union-isnt-going-to-bail-out-ukraine/

This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.

October 13, 2014

Hong Kong’s Umbrellas are ‘Made in USA’

Hong Kong's Umbrellas are 'Made in USA'

Boiling Frogs Post
Published time: 8 October, 2014

The Washington neo-cons and their allies in the US State Department and Obama Administration are clearly furious with China, as they are with Russia's Vladimir Putin. As both Russia and China in recent years have become more assertive about defining their national interests, and as both Eurasian powers draw into a closer cooperation on all strategic levels, Washington has decided to unleash havoc against Beijing, as it has unleashed the Ukraine dis-order against Russia and Russian links to the EU. The flurry of recent deals binding Beijing and Moscow more closely—the $400 billion gas pipeline, the BRICS infrastructure bank, trade in rubles and renminbi by-passing the US dollar—has triggered Washington's response. It's called the Hong Kong 'Umbrella Revolution' in the popular media... To read further, click here

October 02, 2014

Henry Kissinger's Thoughts On The Islamic State, Ukraine And 'World Order'

Henry Kissinger's Thoughts On The Islamic State, Ukraine And 'World Order'
NPR

http://www.npr.org/2014/09/06/346114326/henry-kissingers-thoughts-on-the-islamic-state-ukraine-and-world-order

... The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of an established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony. A Russian state was created around Kiev about 1,200 years ago. Ukraine itself has been part of Russia for 500 years, and I would say most Russians consider it of Russian patrimony. The ideal solution would be to have a Ukraine like Finland or Austria that can be a bridge between these two rather than an outpost.

September 23, 2014

How US sanctions against Russia promoting bilateral trade and finance

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 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."

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/9-11-americas-insane-foreign-policy-continued-under-obama-has-killed-million-and-created-isis

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
[4] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/dod_brief46.asp
[5] http://www.alternet.org/world/bomber-chief-20000-airstrikes-presidents-first-term-cause-death-and-destruction-iraq-somalia
[6] http://www.alternet.org/story/123818/iraq%27s_shocking_human_toll%3A_about_1_million_killed,_4.5_million_displaced,_1-2_million_widows,_5_million_orphans
[7] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_in_the_United_States
[9] http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/06221-etn-hrf-dic-rep-web.pdf
[10] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1554064/US-used-forced-labour-to-build-Iraq-embassy.html
[11] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013368333991931.html
[12] http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/01/06/guantanamo-ten-years
[13] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/forging-the-case-for-war/
[14] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/
[15] http://billmoyers.com/content/authors-marilyn-young-and-pierre-sprey-on-bombing-civilians-in-war/
[16] http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2014/FY14_Green_Book.pdf
[17] http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graphs/
[18] http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175794/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_secret_wars_and_black_ops_blowback/
[19] http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3588:how-mcchrystal-and-petraeus-built-an-indiscriminate-killing-machine
[20] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-the-militarys-joint-special-operations-command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
[22] http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot1.html
[23] http://www.afcent.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-140113-009.pdf
[24] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
[25] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/libya-conflicting-death-toll-raises-questions-about-what-truly-happened-237895
[26] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nato-vs-syria/
[27] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/qatar-troops-libya-rebels-support
[28] http://www.phantomreport.com/upping-the-ante-the-cia-and-special-operation-forces-from-qatar-and-pakistan-orchestrating-the-war-in-syria
[29] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
[30] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/86e3f28e-be3a-11e2-bb35-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Cpu1Y9ug
[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/world/middleeast/in-shift-saudis-are-said-to-arm-rebels-in-syria.html?pagewanted=all
[32] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Syrian_Army
[33] http://www.alternet.org/world/armed-rebels-and-middle-eastern-power-plays-how-us-helping-kill-peace-syria
[34] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1473309/How-US-fuelled-myth-of-Zarqawi-the-mastermind.html
[35] http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/crsiraq0907.pdf
[36] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raqqa
[37] http://www.alternet.org/world/victory-popular-resistance-occupied-iraq
[38] http://www.brussellstribunal.org/article_view.asp?id=1774#.VA9adSiSffg
[39] http://www.globalresearch.ca/iraq-occupation-is-the-highest-form-of-dictatorship-which-washington-calls-democracy/24357
[40] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9314_Iraqi_protests
[41] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Hawija_clashes
[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_Ibrahim_al-Douri
[43] http://rudaw.net/english/interview/06072014
[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

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2014/September/38/9/magazine/article/10824776

Strategic Blunders

Srdja Trifkovic

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

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/

SNN

ANTIC.org-SNN Archive

December 07, 2014

New York Times propagandists exposed: Finally, the truth about Ukraine and Putin emerges

New York Times propagandists exposed: Finally, the truth about Ukraine and Putin emerges

NATO was the aggressor and got Ukraine wrong. Many months later, the media has eventually figured out the truth

November 01, 2014

Whistleblower urges external probe into EU mission in Kosovo

Whistleblower urges external probe into EU mission in Kosovo

Related

Passing the buck

Thanks, but no thanks

Presumption of guilt

October 24, 2014

Putin lashes out at US, West for destabilizing world

Putin lashes out at US, West for destabilizing world

October 19, 2014

The European Union Isn't Going To Bail Out Ukraine

The European Union Isn't Going To Bail Out Ukraine

October 13, 2014

Hong Kong’s Umbrellas are ‘Made in USA’

Hong Kong's Umbrellas are 'Made in USA'

October 02, 2014

Henry Kissinger's Thoughts On The Islamic State, Ukraine And 'World Order'

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

Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS

September 11, 2014

STRATEGIC BLUNDERS, by S. Trifkovic

Strategic Blunders

September 02, 2014

Western hypocrisy sinks to new depths

Facebook Badge

Search This Blog

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me