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/

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

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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."

 

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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
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[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_in_the_United_States
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[11] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013368333991931.html
[12] http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/01/06/guantanamo-ten-years
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[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/
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[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

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.  

 

 

 

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:

• 'US poking nose into Russia interests'
• 'EU, West after Russian resources'

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/

No-Bluff Putin

 

VOICE

No-Bluff Putin

Anyone who says Russia is losing in Ukraine doesn't understand how this game is played.

BY STEPHEN M. WALT

JUNE 4, 2014

 

Who's winning the battle for Ukraine? Despite continued signs of trouble in Ukraine's eastern provinces, some pretty prominent people have recently offered a decidedly upbeat interpretation of events there. The first was U.S. President Barack Obama, who, during his commencement speech at West Point last week, cited the Western response to the crisis as a telling example of successful multilateral diplomacy. In his words, "the mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda, Russian troops on the borders, and armed militias." It's not over, he warned, but this effort "has given a chance for the Ukrainian people to choose their future."

A second optimistic appraisal came from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who announced on May 27 that Vladimir Putin had "blinked" and proclaimed that the Russian leader "got pretty much everything wrong." According to Friedman, "Putin's seizure of Crimea has weakened the Russian economy, led to China getting a bargain gas deal, revived NATO, spurred Europe to start ending its addiction to Russian gas and begun a debate across Europe about increasing defense spending." His close-to-gleeful summary: "the country Putin threatens most today is Russia."

There's a grain of truth in these optimistic assessments, in the sense that Russia has paid a price for its recent actions. And Obama and Friedman are correct to remind us that Russia is not the looming geopolitical threat that some hawks tried to conjure up when it seized Crimea. But what both Obama and Friedman miss is the real -- and completely normal --motivation behind Putin's behavior.

It ain't rocket science: Putin was willing to pay a substantial price because Russia's vital interests were at stake.

It ain't rocket science: Putin was willing to pay a substantial price because Russia's vital interests were at stake. On balance, I'll bet Putin still sees this matter as a net win.

Just consider what Putin has achieved in the past few months.

First, he has put the idea of a further NATO expansion on the back burner for a long time, and maybe forever. Russia has opposed NATO's march eastward ever since it began in the mid-1990s, but Russia was not in a position to do much about it. The brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was Putin's first attempt to draw a red line, and that minor skirmish dampened enthusiasm for expansion considerably. This time around, Putin made it abundantly clear that any future attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO or even into EU membership will be met with firm Russian opposition and will probably lead to dismemberment of the country.

Second, Putin has restored Russian control over Crimea, an act that was popular with most Crimean residents and most Russians as well. The takeover entailed some short-term costs (including some rather mild economic sanctions), but it also solidified Russian control over its naval base in Sevastopol and will allow Russia to claim oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea that may be worth trillions of dollars. The United States and Europe can try to block development of these reserves by tightening sanctions even more, but they are more likely to let sanctions ease off once the situation in Ukraine cools. And if Russia eventually decides to start exploiting these areas, is the United States going to send the 6th Fleet to stop it?

Third, Putin has reminded Ukraine's leaders that he has many ways to make their lives difficult. No matter what their own inclinations may be, it is therefore in their interest to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Moscow. And Ukraine's new president, Petro Poroshenko, got the message. As he told Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post before his election, "Without a direct dialogue with Russia, it will be impossible to create security." Since taking office, he has made it clear that he wants to expand Ukraine's economic ties to Europe -- something crucial to any hope of reforming its troubled economy -- but he also intends to improve relations with Russia as well.

Fourth, Friedman's tale of a "revived" NATO iswishful thinking at best and pure fiction at worst. The alliance did deploy a few warplanesto the east to reassure its Baltic members, and Obama offered the usual verbal affirmationsand pledged $1 billion in miscellaneous defense measures during his visit to Poland this week. But the Poles seem less than reassured and continue to demand more U.S. protection; what they seem to want is a big NATO military base on their territory. The crisis also reminded observers that NATO expansion was never based on serious calculations of interest and capability: The United States and its allies simply assumed the Article 5 pledge to defend NATO's new members would never have to be honored. I don't think Russia has the slightest intention of expanding anywhere else, but doubts about the wisdom of NATO's earlier expansion have never been greater.

Friedman also says Europeans are now debating increased defense spending, as if these discussions were going to make Putin lose a lot of sleep. In fact, NATO's European members have talked about doing enhanced defense capabilities for years, but the level of actual spending has steadily declined.

Finally, Friedman seems to think Russia signed its new 30-year, $400 billion gas deal with China out of a sense of desperation and that the deal is a losing proposition. Hardly: The price China reportedly agreed to pay is slightly less than what Russia charges its European customers, but it is more than double the price that customers in the Commonwealth of Independent States cough up, and it will still earn Gazprom a tidy profit. More importantly, the deal strengthens Sino-Russian economic relations and diversifies Gazprom's customer base, which will allow it to push for harder bargains elsewhere. Western sanctions may have made Putin somewhat more willing to cut a deal, but it is still a net win for him.

To sum up: Putin's maneuverings look like a failure only if you believe his goal was to dismember Ukraine completely or re-create the old Soviet Union. By contrast, if you think his primary objective was to keep Ukraine from joining a U.S.-led "sphere of influence" in Europe, then his handling of the crisis looks adroit, ruthless, and successful.

In short, Putin's tacit acceptance of the recent Ukrainian election and his other moves to de-escalate the crisis aren't an example of his backing down in the face of coordinated Western pressure. Instead, he is lowering the temperature because he got the most important things he wanted and just about everything he could reasonably expect. Putin didn't "blink"; he just knew when to pocket his gains and cash in.

Photo by YURI KADOBNOV/AFP/Getty Images

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/04/no_bluff_putin_russia_ukraine_obama_tom_friedman

 

 

Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe

Washington's Iron Curtain in Ukraine

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified "Russian aggression". The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO.  This was not a mere matter of a "sphere of influence" in Russia's "near abroad", but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia's border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn't.  He could underreact, and betray Russia's basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine.  The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was "the new Hitler", poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.

In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course.  Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found.  Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country's duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias.  The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.

Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. "You just don't invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext", Kerry pontificated.  "It's really 19th century behavior in the 21st century". Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin's unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.

It Was All Planned at Yalta

 In September 2013, one of Ukraine's richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine's future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945.  The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a "display of fierce diplomacy", stated that: "The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time." The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland's influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski.  Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia's natural gas reserves.  The center of discussion was the "Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement" (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine's integration with the West.  The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine's ties with Russia in favor of the West.

Conspiracy against Russia?  Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia's position perfectly clear.

Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference.   Forbes reported at the time  on the "stark difference" between the Russian and Western views "not over the advisability of Ukraine's integration with the EU but over its likely impact."  In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on "very specific and pointed economic criticisms" about the Trade Agreement's impact on Ukraine's economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports ccould only swell the deficit.  Ukraine "will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout".

The Forbes reporter concluded that "the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev."

As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.

In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself.  Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong.  What went wrong first was that Yanukovych  got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union.  He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.

Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel

Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West.  The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.

It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics.  So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn't matter too much.

It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine's border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow,  Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Habsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.

The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: "For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union."  Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder.  In any case, he was never "Moscow's man", and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.

It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia.  In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position.  The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country's role as bridge.  This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev.  A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.

But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia "the enemy".

Plan A and Plan B

U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue.  Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.

As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called "promoting democracy").  This investment is not "for oil", or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia's Achilles' heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.

What called public attention to Victoria Nuland's role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, "Fuck the EU".  But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions.  The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate.  Nuland's rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but "Yats".  And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.

Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia's indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea.  Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin's necessary defensive move to prevent this.

But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy.  If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster.  On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective.  Putin's totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked "Russian expansionism", which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media.  Suddenly, we are told that the "freedom-loving West" is faced with the threat of "aggressive Russian expansionism".  Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States.  But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge.  Never mind "communism"; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia's current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that.  The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.

The Protection Racket Returns

But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to "save Europe",  which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe.  Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama's swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies.  The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union.  This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.

Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended.  So has the EU.  With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes.  The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states.  Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained.  Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of "the Russians are coming!" in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.

Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat.  Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new "iron curtain" meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony.  The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.

Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to "protect" Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine.  This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.

To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on "defense", notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe's energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia's natural gas sales  – stigmatized as a "way of exercising political pressure", something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent.  Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.

From D-Day to Dooms Day

Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade.  French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future.  In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.

Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue.  The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army.  If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.

Putin is widely credited as being "the best chess player", who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis.  He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him.  But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the "old" Europeans.  Apparently abandoning all Europe's accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today's European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.

Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference?  All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

 

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/06/washingtons-iron-curtain-in-ukraine/

 

 

'Russian troops in Ukraine? Got any proof?' Putin's best quotes from French media talk

Published time: June 04, 2014 18:30
Edited time: June 04, 2014 20:16

Vladimir Putin faced a barrage of tricky questions in France from the media ahead of his meeting with world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Here are his best replies on key issues: Ukraine, Crimea and relations with the US.

On Ukraine, its sovereignty and Russian troops:

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has been occupying the center of international attention since the end of last year. While the coup-appointed government in Kiev is carrying out a military crackdown on the southeast of the country, the US said that Russian troops are allegedly involved in the crisis and they have proof of that.

"What proof? Why don't they show it?" Putin told French media.

"The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You know – it's one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence."

"After the anti-constitutional coup in Kiev in February, the first thing the new authorities tried to do was to deprive the ethnic minorities of the right to use their native language. This caused great concern among the people living in eastern Ukraine."

 

"I wouldn't call them either pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian. They are people who have certain rights, political, humanitarian rights, and they must have a chance to exercise those rights."

"When [the coup] happened some people accepted this regime and were happy about it while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine just won't accept it."

On Crimea, its referendum and historical ties to Russia:

After Crimea voted in its March referendum to join Russia, the West voiced concerns that the people in the region voted at gunpoint.

"Russian troops were in Crimea under the international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It's true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum 1) on their independence and 2) on their desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination."

 

"We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia."

One journalist asked the president whether he wants to recreate the old borders of the Soviet Union.

"We want to use modern policies to improve our competitive advantage, including economic integration. This is what we are doing in the post-Soviet space within the Customs Union and now also within the Eurasian Union."

On US relations and its aggressive foreign policies:

"Speaking of US policy, it's clear that the United States is pursuing the most aggressive and toughest policy to defend its own interests – at least, this is how the American leaders see it – and they do it persistently."

"There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries, even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders."

 

"So it is ironic that our US partners accuse us of breaching some of these rules," Putin said, apparently referring to Hillary's Clinton's statement on Russia's foreign policy in Eastern Europe, comparing it with Hitler's in the 1930s. "When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman."

"As for my relations with Barack Obama, I have no reason whatsoever to believe he is not willing to talk to the President of Russia. But ultimately, it is his choice. I am always ready for dialogue, and I think that dialogue is the best way to bridge any gaps."

On Russia, defense, sovereignty, and opposition parties:

Amid the tensions concerning the latest $1.6 billion military deal that France will supply Russia with two Mistral helicopter carriers, Putin said he hopes the two countries will continue to develop their ties.

"Overall, our relations in this area are developing well, and we would like to continue strengthening them – in aviation, shipbuilding, and other sectors."

"A policy of expansionism and conquest has no future in the modern world. We're confident that Russia can and should be a partner with its traditional allies, in the broad sense, now and also in the future."

"Any country that becomes a member of a military alliance gives away some of its sovereignty to a supranational body. For Russia, this would be unacceptable. As for other countries, it has nothing to do with us. They have to decide such matters for themselves."

 

"And there's another example: François Mitterrand, who spoke of European confederation, with Russia as its member. I think this opportunity still exists and we will have it in the future."

Speaking about internal policies Putin said that Russia is a common democratic state and its' "current regime is not connected to any particular person"

"The overwhelming majority of Russian citizens tend to rely on their traditions, their history and, if I may say so, their traditional values. I see this as the foundation and a factor of stability in the Russian state, but none of this is associated with the President as an individual. Moreover, it should be remembered that we only started introducing standard democratic institutions recently. They are still in the process of evolving."

"Some of our opponents say there are unacceptable restrictions. What kind of restrictions do we have? For example, we have banned the promotion of suicide, drugs and pedophilia. These are our restrictions. What's wrong with that?"

"In the United States, since we talked about it, homosexuality is illegal in some states. We impose no criminal liability whatsoever. We banned only promoting homosexuality among minors. It is our right to protect our children and we will do it."

http://rt.com/news/163676-putin-ukraine-french-us/