The China-US 'Brotherhood'
By Pepe Escobar

The fifth round of the US-China Strategic and
Economic Dialogue began this Thursday in
Washington. This China-US "Brotherhood" does
involve a lot of talk - with no perceptible action. US
Think Tankland is trying to convey the impression
that Beijing is now in a more fragile position relative to Washington compared with the post-financial
crisis environment in 2009. Nonsense. It's as if the ongoing NSA (global) scandal never
happened; Edward Snowden exposed how the US
government has turned against its own citizens
even while it keeps spying on virtually the whole
planet. Then there's the meme of the Chinese
economy being "in trouble", when in fact Beijing is launching a
long-reaching, complex strategy to calibrate the
effects of a relative economic slowdown. Finally, the supposed "aggressive Chinese
behavior" in terms of Asian security is just spin.
Beijing is building up its navy, of course - yet at the
same time both China and selected members of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations are fine-
tuning their tactics ahead of multilateral talks about a code of conduct for any serious problems in the
South China Sea. Beijing would be foolish to go for
diplomacy of the gunboat variety - which would
certainly attract a US countercoup. Bogged down, all over Beijing has clearly interpreted the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization's "liberation" of Libya - now
reverted into failed state status; US support for the
destruction of Syria; and the "pivoting" to Asia as all
interlinked, targeting China's ascension and devised
to rattle the complex Chinese strategy of an Eurasian energy corridor. Yet it does not seem to be working. As Asia Times
Online reported, the Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline may well end up as IPC, "C" being an extension to
Xinjiang in western China. Beijing also knows very
well how the proposed Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline
has been a key reason for the emphatic attack on
Syria orchestrated by actors such as Qatar, Saudi
Arabia and Turkey. Beijing calculates that if Bashar al-Assad stays and the US$10 billion pipeline ever
gets completed (certainly with Chinese and Russian
financial help) the top client may end up being
Beijing itself, and not Western Europe. Considering its strategic relationship with
Islamabad, Beijing is also very much aware of any
US moves to stir up trouble in geo-strategically
crucial Balochistan in Pakistan - with a possible
overspill to neighboring Sistan-Balochistan province
in Iran. In parallel, Beijing interprets US bluster and intransigence about Iran's nuclear program as a
cover story to upset its solid energy security
partnership with Tehran. Regarding Afghanistan, the corridors at the
Zhongnanhai in Beijing must be echoing with
laughter as Washington backtracks no less than 16
years, to the second Bill Clinton administration - an
eternity in politics - to talk to the Taliban in Doha
essentially about one of the oldest Pipelinestan gambits. "We want a pipeline" (the Turkmenistan-
Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, TAPI), says
Washington. "We want our cut", the Taliban reply.
This is politics as Groundhog Day. The problem is Washington has absolutely nothing
to offer the Taliban. The Taliban, on the other hand,
will keep their summer offensive schedule, knowing
full well they will be free to do whatever they please
after President Hamid Karzai slides into oblivion. As
for the Washington notion that Islamabad will be able to keep the Afghan Taliban in check, even the
goats in the Hindu Kush are laughing about it. It's all about Syria Syria, though, remains the key story - as the pivot
of a spreading cancer, a Sunni/Shi'ite sectarian war
largely encouraged by the House of Saud and other
Gulf Cooperation Council actors, and bought hook,
line and sinker by the Obama administration. It took a courageous diplomat to leak it, plus
translations from Russian to Arabic and then
English, for the world to have an idea of what
politicians actually discuss in those largely
vacuous, photo-opportunity summits. What Russian
President Vladimir Putin told Obama, Britain's David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande
face-to-face at the recent Group of Eight summit in
Northern Ireland is nothing less than gripping.
Examples: Putin addressing the table: "You want President
Bashar al-Assad to step down? Look at the leaders
you've made in the Middle East in the course of
what you have dubbed the 'Arab Spring'." Putin addressing Obama, Cameron and Hollande:
"You want Russia to abandon Assad and his regime
and go along with an opposition whose leaders don't
know anything except issuing fatwas declaring
people heretics, and whose members - who come
from a bunch of different countries and have multiple orientations - don't know anything except
how to slaughter people and eat human flesh." Putin addressing Obama directly: "Your country
sent its army to Afghanistan in the year 2001 on the
excuse that you are fighting the Taliban and the al-
Qaeda organization and other fundamentalist
terrorists whom your government accused of
carrying out the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. And here you are today making an
alliance with them in Syria. And you and your allies
are declaring your desire to send them weapons.
And here you have Qatar in which you [the US]
have your biggest base in the region and in the
territory of that country the Taliban are opening a representative office." The best part is that German Chancellor Angela
Merkel then corroborated Putin's every word. And
Chinese President Xi Jinping certainly would have
done the same. Keep weaving that net, brother Even if the Obama administration's bright idea of
selecting the "good" rebels to be presented with light
weapons would work (and it won't; in a war theatre
the real hardcore fighting forces - as in the Jabhat
al-Nusra-style gangs - end up laying their hands on
the best weapons), there's no evidence that Bashar al-Assad's forces will fold. On the contrary. There will be a push to reconquer
all of Aleppo - already in progress, as well as a push
southward to Daraa to secure the border with
Jordan; petro-monarchy-fueled weapons to "rebels"
in southern Syria go through Jordan. Rumors of
"overextension" are greatly exaggerated; this can be accomplished in stages. Russia, meanwhile, will keep playing a very clever
game; ensuring essential weapons to the Syrian
government while ready to deliver even more lethal
stuff in case Washington decides to step up its
weaponizing. And then there's the whole Muslim Brotherhood-wide
mess. Al-Akhbar has deliciously detailed how the House of Saud virtually destroyed Qatar in Egypt -
as well as in Syria. It's never enough to remember
that the House of Saud supports backward Salafi
parties in Egypt and weaponizes backward Salafi
fighters in Syria. In Egypt, meet the new boss - Saudis and Emiratis -
same as the old boss - Qataris. Before he recently
decided to self-depose, Emir al-Thani spent as
much as $17 billion on assorted Arab Springers,
most of it for Morsi in Egypt. Now the House of
Saud has already offered $5 billion, and the Emirates $3 billion. None of them have obviously
been reading on this site the views of Spengler -
who has proved that Egypt, much to the regret of
their wonderful people, will remain a banana republic
- without the bananas (see Islam's civil war moves to Egypt , Asia Times Online, July 8, 2013.) The bottom line: Beijing is betting it will win in
Pakistan, in Iran, in Syria (it's already winning in
Iraq), in Pipelineistan, not to mention in the South
China Sea, while Washington will be entangled in its
own Brotherhood net. "Fragile"? You wish. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Is the Government of Nigeria’s Homophobic and
Anti-Human Rights Rhetoric the Real Threat to
Moral Order in the Country?

Homophobia in Nigeria by IJEOMA EKOH

According to Nigeria’s Ministry of Information, its web portal was attacked on July 4th by a “group” of gay rights activists, who were ostensibly hoping to successfully fight Nigeria’s anti homosexual rights laws by ambushing its
governmental portals. As the special assistant to
the minister of Information, Joseph Mutah, puts
it, the attacks were attempts to not only “promote” homosexuality in the country but also
to “blackmail” Nigerians into abandoning their
commitment to a “highly cultured and religious
society.” Admonishing the group to lawfully
campaign for queer rights through the
institutions of Nigeria’s “robust” democracy, Mutah warned the gay rights villains that
Nigeria’s government would not succumb to their
immoral whims since the majority of its people’s
remain “overwhelmingly opposed to the
imposition of gay rights and marriages as
practiced in other countries.” Now one might be tempted to laugh out loud at
the preceding press release, as there are certainly
reasons to find it amusing. For instance, there is
the issue of Mutah’s assertion that Nigeria is a
“robust” democracy despite a deeply entrenched
culture of vote rigging, gross human rights violations, corrupt and ineffective legislature and judiciary. One would have to suspend disbelief in
order to embrace the idea that although Nigeria
remains a country where most citizens lack access
to electricity and the internet, gay rights activists
could electronically subvert deeply entrenched
homophobic attitudes to “promote” queer rights by compromising its web sites, if only for a few
hours. Yes indeed! For Mr. Mutah and his ministry
there are big bad gay bandits lurking around
menacingly on the Internet hoping to change
Nigeria’s anti gay culture instantaneously and
compromise the country’s high moral standards. But perhaps the biggest reason why one might
find all this satirical is that it signals the first time
the Nigerian government appears very much
committed and invested in representing the will
of the people. Yes, Mr. Mutah is right! Although
the majority of Nigerians are in dire need of three square meals a day, electricity, drinking water, security from domestic terrorists and a more rigorous guarantee of their human rights, they are also “overwhelmingly” homophobic.
And to this end, its ever-prudent government has chosen to disregard the people’s more urgent
material needs to prioritize its human rights
denying will. It has in an unprecedented display
of bowing to the presumed desire of the people
passed a repressive legislation that could
imprison homosexuals for up to 14 years. More scarily, they have given moral licence to the
continuation of the type of jungle justice that was recently practiced in Imo state where a number of individuals accused of being gay were stripped
naked, tied up with rope and paraded around the
community. Indeed Mr. Mutah and like-minded
officials are continuing Nigeria’s noble tradition
of maintaining an exemplary commitment to the
principles of democracy and human rights! Yet this author urges all to hold their laughter. If
only because Mutah’s deployment of democratic
rhetoric while simultaneously justifying the
denial of democratic rights to a segment of the
population is worrying and should be for every
Nigerian committed to the principles of human rights. Indeed despite signing on to the United
Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the continued violation of the human rights of homosexuals means that Nigeria’s
government cannot be relied upon to protect the
inalienable rights of all its citizens. What is more, the attack on queer rights ought to
be seen by Nigerians of good conscience as part
and parcel of the human rights violations that
characterize the daily lives of most Nigerian
citizens. The culture of impunity enjoyed by the
titans at the top of the Nigerian food chain against ordinary people is the same one that
legitimizes the attack on the human rights of
LGBT members of the national community. My
fellow–Nigerians, the oppression of queer
people is bound up with your human rights and
should not be seen as alien and different! Martin Luther King was right on with his bold
declaration that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere. We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly.” But if one needs further reasons to hold their
mirth, another look at Mutah’s pronouncements
is also helpful. What does Mutah mean when he
asserts that Nigerians will not accept the
“imposition of gay rights from abroad”? Why,
one may ask, is a presumably educated Nigerian official with access to enormous resources and
the world wide web, reproducing the now
debunked fable that homosexuality is a western
and an un-African import? Should we at best,
view Mutah’s pronouncements as a commitment
to ignorance; or at worst an attempt to miseducate the people, a state of affairs already
facilitated by his government’s neoliberal policy
of disinvestment in public education? Whatever
the case may be it behoves me at this juncture to
recommend the book Boy-wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, on
the matter of homosexuality and Africa. It should
help dispel the seemingly stubborn idea that
homosexuality was brought to Africa by the
Europeans much like Christianity, elaborate
“white” weddings, and the white wigs worn by our esteemed judges. And what about the oft deployed argument,
explicit in Mutah’s pronouncements, that
guaranteeing basic human rights to homosexuals
is a threat to moral order in Nigeria? Although,
we have all come to expect irrational statements
from Nigerian politicians dressed in grandiose language, one must still wonder as to the basis
for such declarations? Since homosexuality has
been demonstrated to be as African as Mutah
himself is and has always existed in Africa, to
what extent does the notion that it threatens
Nigeria’s “highly cultured and religious society” rational? One could only believe this assertion if
one is partial to the false premise that
homosexuality is un-African. If one does not
pander to the “out-of-Africa” thesis, how can the
decriminalisation of homosexuality now threaten
Africa if it has always been on the continent? And where homosexuality has been legalised, in what
ways has it threatened the society’s moral order?
Perhaps Mutah, the Ministry of Information, the
federal government and like-minded people in
Nigeria should enlighten us as to this special
rubric that they use to measure morality in which Nigeria apparently ranks higher than the rest of
the world? To conclude, the bottom line must be that
Mutah’s rhetoric and the current climate of
extreme homophobia in Nigeria is far from
humorous. Indeed if the federal government’s
recent rejection of the United Nation’s
recommendations on the human rights of LGBT people is anything to go by, the only people that
might be laughing are those Nigerians that
erroneously view the guarantee of basic human
rights to homosexuals as distinct from their own
human rights. Congratulations to the morally upstanding and
virtuous national legislature for successfully
distracting the people from the manifold social,
political and economic issues that undermine
their quality of life and actually threaten the
country’s moral order. Ijeoma Ekoh is adoctoral student at York University (Canada) and Director at We Are
From Ihe.

Counterpunch
US V. Trayvon Martin

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary
School massacre, Texas Congressman Louie
Gohmert, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell,
Senator Rand Paul, Florida State Representative
Dennis Baxley (also sponsor of his state’s Stand
Your Ground law), along with a host of other Republicans, argued that had the teachers and
administrators been armed, those twenty little
kids whose lives Adam Lanza stole would be alive
today. Of course, they were parroting the
National Rifle Association’s talking points. The
NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying group
responsible for drafting and pushing “Stand Your
Ground” laws across the country, insist that an
armed citizenry is the only effective defense
against imminent threats, assailants, and
predators. But when George Zimmerman fatally shot
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian
returning home one rainy February evening from
a neighborhood convenience store, the NRA
went mute. Neither NRA officials nor the pro-
gun wing of the Republican Party argued that had Trayvon Martin been armed, he would be alive
today. The basic facts are indisputable: Martin
was on his way home when Zimmerman began to
follow him—first in his SUV, and then on foot.
Zimmerman told the police he had been
following this “suspicious-looking” young man. Martin knew he was being followed and told his
friend, Rachel Jeantel, that the man might be
some kind of sexual predator. At some point,
Martin and Zimmerman confronted each other, a
fight ensued, and in the struggle Zimmerman
shot and killed Martin. Zimmerman pursued Martin. This is a fact.
Martin could have run, I suppose, but every black
man knows that unless you’re on a field, a track,
or a basketball court, running is suspicious and
could get you a bullet in the back. The other
option was to ask this stranger what he was doing, but confrontations can also be dangerous
—especially without witnesses and without a
weapon besides a cel phone and his fists. Florida
law did not require Martin to retreat, though it is
not clear if he had tried to retreat. He did know
he was in imminent danger. Where was the NRA on Trayvon Martin’s right to
stand his ground? What happened to their
principled position? Let’s be clear: the Trayvon
Martin’s of the world never had that right
because the “ground” was never considered
theirs to stand on. Unless black people could magically produce some official documentation
proving that they are not burglars, rapists, drug
dealers, pimps or prostitutes, intruders, they are
assumed to be “up to no good.” (In the
antebellum period, such documentation was
called “freedom papers.”) As Wayne LaPierre, NRA’s executive vice president, succinctly
explained their
position, “The only thing that stops a bad guy
with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Trayvon
Martin was a bad guy or at least looked and acted
like one. In our allegedly postracial moment, where simply talking about racism openly is
considered an impolitic, if not racist, thing to do,
we constantly learn and re-learn racial codes.
The world knows black men are criminal, that
they populate our jails and prisons, that they kill
each other over trinkets, that even the celebrities among us are up to no good. Zimmerman’s racial
profiling was therefore justified, and the defense
consistently employed racial stereotypes and
played on racial knowledge to turn the victim into
the predator and the predator into the victim. In
short, it was Trayvon Martin, not George Zimmerman, who was put on trial. He was tried
for the crimes he may have committed and the
ones he would have committed had he lived past
17. He was tried for using lethal force against
Zimmerman in the form of a sidewalk and his
natural athleticism. The successful transformation of Zimmerman
into the victim of black predatory violence was
evident not only in the verdict but in the stunning
Orwellian language defense lawyers Mark O’Mara
and Don West employed in the post-verdict
interview. West was incensed that anyone would have the audacity to even bring the case to trial—
suggesting that no one needs to be held
accountable for the killing of an unarmed
teenager. WhenO’Mara was asked if he thought the verdict might have been different if his client
had been black, he replied: “Things would have
been different for George Zimmerman if he was
black for this reason: he would never have been
charged with a crime.” In other words, black men
can go around killing indiscriminately with no fear of prosecution because there are no Civil
Rights organizations pressing to hold them
accountable. And yet, it would be a mistake to place the verdict
at the feet of the defense for its unscrupulous use
of race, or to blame the prosecution for avoiding
race, or the jury for insensitivity, or even the gun
lobby for creating
the conditions that have made the murder of young black men justifiable homicide. The
verdict did not surprise me, or most people I
know, because we’ve been here before. We were
here with Latasha Harlins and Rodney King, with
Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart. We were
here with Anthony Baez, Michael Wayne Clark, Julio Nunez, Maria Rivas, Mohammed Assassa.
We were here with Amadou Diallo, the Central
Park Five, Oscar Grant, Stanley “Rock” Scott,
Donnell “Bo” Lucas, Tommy Yates. We were
here with Angel Castro, Jr. Bilal Ashraf, Anthony
Starks, Johnny Gammage, Malice Green, Darlene Tiller, Alvin Barroso, Marcillus Miller, Brenda
Forester. We’ve been here before with Eliberto
Saldana, Elzie Coleman, Tracy Mayberry, De
Andre Harrison, Sonji Taylor, Baraka Hall, Sean
Bell, Tyisha Miller, Devon Nelson, LaTanya
Haggerty, Prince Jamel Galvin, Robin Taneisha Williams, Melvin Cox, Rudolph Bell, Sheron
Jackson. And Jordan Davis, killed in
Jacksonville, Florida, not long after Trayvon
Martin. His murderer, Michael Dunn, emptied
his gun into the parked SUV where Davis and
three friends sat because they refused to turn down their music. Dunn is invoking “stand your
ground” in his defense. The list is long and deep. In 2012 alone, police
officers, security guards or vigilantes took the
lives of 136 unarmed black men and women—at
least twenty-five of whom were killed by
vigilantes. In ten of the incidents, the killers were
not charged with a crime, and most of those who were charged either escaped conviction or
accepted reduced charges in exchange for a guilty
plea. And I haven’t included the reign of terror
that produced at least 5,000 legal lynchings in
the United States, or the numerous
assassinations—from political activists to four black girls attending Sunday school in
Birmingham fifty years ago. The point is that justice was always going to elude
Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but because it worked. Martin died and
Zimmerman walked because our entire political
and legal foundations were built on an ideology
of settler colonialism—an ideology in which the
protection of white property rights was always
sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always black, brown, and
red; and where the very purpose of police power
was to discipline, monitor, and contain
populations rendered a threat to white property
and privilege. This has been the legal standard
for African Americans and other racialized groups in the U.S. long before ALEC or the NRA
came into being. We were rendered property in
slavery, and a threat to property in freedom.
And during the brief moment in the 1860s and
‘70s, when former slaves participated in
democracy, held political offices, and insisted on the rights of citizenship, it was a well-armed
(white) citizenry that overthrew democratically-
elected governments in the South, assassinated
black political leaders, stripped African-
Americans of virtually all citizenship rights (the
franchise, the right of habeas corpus, right of free speech and assembly, etc.), and turned an
entire people into predators. (For evidence, read
the crime pages of any urban newspaper during the early 20th century. Or just watch the hot new show, “Orange is the New Black.”) If we do not come to terms with this history, we
will continue to believe that the system just needs
to be tweaked, or that the fault lies with a
fanatical gun culture or a wacky right-wing
fringe. We will miss the routine character of such
murders: according data compiled by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person
is killed by the state or by state-sanctioned
violence every 28 hours. And we will miss how
this history of routine violence has become a
central component of the U.S. drone warfare and
targeted killing. What are signature strikes if not routine, justified killings of young men who might be Al-caeda members or may one day commit acts of terrorism? It is little more than a
form of high-tech racial profiling. In the end, we should be able to prevent another
Sandy Hook school tragedy—and the $7.7 million
dollars that poured into Newtown on behalf of
the victims suggests a real will to do all we can to
protect the innocent. But, sadly, the trial of
Travyon Martin reminds us, once again, that our black and brown children must prove their
innocence every day. We cannot change the
situation by simply finding the right legal
strategy. Unless we challenge the entire criminal
justice system and mass incarceration, there will
be many more Trayvon Martins and a constant dread that one of our children might be next. As
long as we continue to uphold and defend a
system designed to protect white privilege,
property and personhood, and render black and
brown people predators, criminals, illegals, and
terrorists, we will continue to attend funerals and rallies; watch in stunned silence as another police
officer or vigilante is acquitted after taking
another young life; allow our government to kill
civilians in our name; and inherit a society in
which our prisons and jails become the largest,
most diverse institutions in the country.

Robin D. G. Kelley, who teaches at UCLA, is the author of the remarkable
biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

Two Faux Democracies That Threaten the World
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Amitai Etzioni has raised an important question:
“Who authorized preparations for war with China?” Etzioni says that the war plan is not the sort of contingency plan that might be on hand
for an improbable event. Etzioni also reports
that the Pentagon’s war plan was not ordered by,
and has not been reviewed by, US civilian
authorities. We are confronted with a neoconized
US military out of control endangering Americans and the rest of the world. Etzioni is correct that this is a momentous
decision made by a neoconized military. China is
obviously aware that Washington is preparing
for war with China. If the Yale Journal knows it,
China knows it. If the Chinese government is
realistic, the government is aware that Washington is planning a pre-emptive nuclear
attack against China. No other kind of war makes
any sense from Washington’s standpoint. The
“superpower” was never able to occupy Baghdad,
and after 11 years of war has been defeated in
Afghanistan by a few thousand lightly armed Taliban. It would be curtains for Washington to
get into a conventional war with China. When China was a primitive third world country,
it fought the US military to a stalemate in Korea.
Today China has the world’s second largest
economy and is rapidly overtaking the failing US
economy destroyed by jobs offshoring, bankster
fraud, and corporate and congressional treason. The Pentagon’s war plan for China is called
“AirSea Battle.” The plan describes itself as
“interoperable air and naval forces that can
execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth
to disrupt, destroy, and defeat enemy anti-access
area denial capabilities.” Yes, what does that mean? It means many
billions of dollars of more profits for the
military/security complex while the 99 percent
are ground under the boot. It is also clear that
this nonsensical jargon cannot defeat a Chinese
army. But this kind of saber-rattling can lead to war, and if the Washington morons get a war
going, the only way Washington can prevail is
with nuclear weapons. The radiation, of course,
will kill Americans as well. Nuclear war is on Washington’s agenda. The rise
of the Neocon Nazis has negated the nuclear
disarmament agreements that Reagan and
Gorbachev made. The extraordinary, mainly
truthful 2012 book, The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, describes the post-Reagan breakout of
preemptive nuclear attack as Washington’s first
option. During the Cold War nuclear weapons had a
defensive purpose. The purpose was to prevent
nuclear war by the US and USSR each having
sufficient retaliatory power to ensure “mutually
assured destruction.” MAD, as it was known,
meant that nuclear weapons had no offensive advantage for either side. The Soviet collapse and China’s focus on its
economy instead of its military have resulted in
Washington’s advantage in nuclear weaponry
that, according to two US Dr. Strangeglove
characters, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, gives
Washington first-strike capability. Lieber and Press write that the “precipitous decline of
Russia’s arsenal, and the glacial pace of
modernization of China’s nuclear forces,” have
created a situation in which neither Russia nor
China could retaliate to Washington’s first strike. The Pentagon’s “AirSea Battle” and Lieber and
Press’ article in Foreign Affairs have informed China and Russia that Washington is
contemplating pre-emptive nuclear attack on
both countries. To ensure Russia’s inability to
retaliate, Washington is placing anti-ballistic
missiles on Russia’s borders in violation of the
US-USSR agreement. Because the American press is a corrupt
government propaganda ministry, the American
people have no idea that neoconized Washington
is planning nuclear war. Americans are no more
aware of this than they are of former President
Jimmy Carter’s recent statement, reported only in Germany, that the United States no longer has
a functioning democracy. The possibility that the United States would
initiate nuclear war was given reality eleven years
ago when President George W. Bush, at the
urging of Dick Cheney and the neocons that
dominated his regime, signed off on the 2002
Nuclear Posture Review. This neocon document, signed off on by
America’s most moronic president, resulted in
consternation and condemnation from the rest of
the world and launched a new arms race. Russian
President Putin immediately announced that
Russia would spend all necessary sums to maintain Russia’s retaliatory nuclear capability.
The Chinese displayed their prowess by knocking
a satellite out of space with a missile. The mayor
of Hiroshima, recipient city of a vast American
war crime, stated: “The nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear
weapons, is on the verge of collapse. The chief
cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly
declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear
first strike and calling for resumed research into
mini-nukes and other so-called ‘useable nuclear weapons,’ appears to worship nuclear weapons as
God.” Polls from all over the world consistently show
that Israel and the US are regarded as the two
greatest threats to peace and to life on earth. Yet,
these two utterly lawless governments prance
around pretending to be the “world’s greatest
democracies.” Neither government accepts any accountability whatsoever to international law,
to human rights, to the Geneva Conventions, or
to their own statutory law. The US and Israel are
rogue governments, throwbacks to the Hitler and
Stalin era. The post World War II wars originate in
Washington and Israel. No other country has
imperial expansionary ambitions. The Chinese
government has not seized Taiwan, which China
could do at will. The Russian government has not
seized former constituent parts of Russia, such as Georgia, which, provoked by Washington to
launch an attack, was instantly overwhelmed by
the Russian Army. Putin could have hung
Washington’s Georgian puppet and
reincorporated Georgia into Russia, where it
resided for several centuries and where many believe it belongs. For the past 68 years, most military aggression
can be sourced to the US and Israel. Yet, these two originators of wars pretend to be
the victims of aggression. It is Israel that has a
nuclear arsenal that is illegal, unacknowledged,
and unaccountable. It is Washington that has
drafted a war plan based on nuclear first strike.
The rest of the world is correct to view these two rogue unaccountable governments as direct
threats to life on earth.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate
Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest
book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic
format.

Our man in Moscow
By Pepe Escobar

So what is the "extremely disappointed" Obama
administration, the Orwellian/Panopticon complex
and the discredited US Congress to do? Send a
Navy Seal Team 6 to snatch him or to target
assassinate him - turning Moscow into Abbottabad
2.0? Drone him? Poison his borscht? Shower his new house with depleted uranium? Install a no-fly
zone over Russia? Edward Snowden, under his new legal status in Russia, simply cannot be handed over to Bradley Manning's lynch mob. Legally, Washington is now as powerless as a tribal Pashtun girl facing an
incoming Hellfire missile. A President of the United
States (POTUS) so proud of his constitutional law pedigree - recent serial trampling of the US
constitution notwithstanding, not to mention
international law - seems not to have understood the
message. Barack Obama virtually screamed his lungs out telling Russian President Vladimir Putin he had to
hand him Snowden "under international law". Putin
repeatedly said this was not going to happen. Obama even phoned Putin. Nothing. Washington
even forced European poodles to down Bolivian
President Evo Morales's plane. Worse. Moscow
kept following the letter of Russian law and
eventually granted temporary asylum to Snowden. The Edward Snowden saga has turned the
Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine on its
Hydra-head. Not only because of the humbling of
the whole US security state apparatus, but also for
exploding the myth of Full Spectrum Dominance by
POTUS. Obama revealed himself once again as a mediocre politician and an incompetent negotiator. Putin
devoured him as a succulent serving of eggs
benedict. Glenn Greenwald will be inflicting death by
a thousand leaks - because he is in charge of
Snowden's digital treasure chest. And Snowden took a taxi and left the airport - on his own terms. Layers and layers of nuances have been captured in this fascinating discussion at Yves Smith's blog - something impossible to find across Western corporate media. For POTUS, all that's left is to probably boycott a bilateral meeting with Putin next month, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in St Petersburg. Pathetic does not even begin to explain
it. I did it my way What a boost for good literature; Snowden spent most of his time in airport transit reading
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a collection of Chekhov stories, a history of the Russian state by
19th century historian Nikolai Karamzin - and
learning the Cyrillic alphabet. He did take a taxi to the bright side when he left, alongside Sarah Harrison of
WikiLeaks. He may have gone to a FSB safehouse
- with zero chance of the CIA's Moscow station
finding him, although his lawyer said he would
choose his place of residence and form of protection. His father Lon may soon visit. Even self-
described "pole-dancing superhero" girlfriend
Lindsay Mills may soon resurface. How he must have relished to close the nerve-
racking waiting game by having the last word - as in
his statement published by WikiLeaks; "Over the
past eight weeks we have seen the Obama
administration show no respect for international or
domestic law, but in the end the law is winning. I thank the Russian Federation for granting me
asylum in accordance with its laws and international
obligations." Snowden is legally allowed to work - and has
already received a job offer, by the founder of
Vkontakte (Russia's Facebook), Pavel Durov, to be
a member of his "all-star security team". By 2018 he
will be entitled to Russian citizenship. He promised
Putin he won't leak "information that may harm the US" - the key condition for the asylum request to be
granted. But then he does not have to; Greenwald
has everything since those heady initial days in
Hong Kong. What's Washington to do? Turn
Greenwald's apartment in Rio into a Pashtun
wedding party? The timing could not have been more dramatic.
Snowden finally landed in Russia immediately after
Greenwald revealed the details of XKeyscore [1] -
once again stressing how US public opinion, US
media and the cosmically inept US Congress had no
clue about the full extent of the NSA's reach. "Constitutional checks and balances", anyone? There's got to be a serious glitch with the collective
IQ of these people. The Obama administration as
well as the Orwellian/Panopticon complex are in
shock because they simply cannot stop death by a
thousand leaks. The Roving Eye is among those
who suspect the NSA has no clue about what Snowden, as a systems administrator, was able to
download (especially because someone with his
skills can easily delete traces of access). Even the
top NSA robot - General Keith Alexander - admitted
on the record the "no such agency" does not know
how Snowden pulled it off. He could have left a bug, or infected the system with a virus. The fun may
have not even started. Watch lame duck POTUS Credit to some cynical latitudes, as in South
America, where people for years have been joking,
"the gringos spy on everything we do"; the Internet,
after all, was originally an American military
program. Professor John Naughton of Britain's Open
University goes one step ahead, [2] stressing that "the days of the internet as a truly global network
are numbered." What lies ahead is balkanization -
geographical subnets governed by the US, China,
Russia, Iran, etc. Naughton also stresses that the US and other
Western sub-powers have lost their legitimacy as
governors of the internet. To top it off, there's no
more "internet freedom agenda", as parroted by the
Obama administration. This Big Brother obsession with watching, tracking,
monitoring, controlling, decoding virtually everything
we do digitally is leading to monumental stupidities
like Google searches attracting armed US
government's agents to one's house, as is
pricelessly detailed here. And still Paranoia Paradise has not isolated Washington from a major
ass kicking in Afghanistan and Iraq, or has foreseen
the 2008 financial crisis; but then again it probably
did, and the elites who arbitraged all that massive
inside information royally profited from it. For the moment, what we have is an Orwellian/
Panopticon complex that will persist with its
unchecked powers; an aphasic populace; a quiet,
invisible man in a Moscow multitude; and a POTUS
consumed with boundless rage. Watch out. He may
be tempted to wag the (war) dog.

Who Owns Jesus?
By Tasbeeh Herwees

Every 10 years, millions of Middle Easterners
in the U.S. turn to their census forms and
check the box under race labeled “white.” This
is, after all, their legal classification. The U.S.
government formally recognizes anyone from
“Europe, the Middle East or North Africa” as white. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s the
product of several contentious court battles
that occurred in the early 1900s. The most
prominent of these was Dow v. United States, a 1915 case in which Syrian immigrant George Dow fought to overturn
two lower court decisions that found him
ineligible for naturalization because he wasn’t
white. A federal appeals court ruled in Dow’s
favor. And he won because of Jesus. Part of Dow’s successful argument was couched in the logic that if Jesus, a Middle Easterner, was white, it only followed that George Dow, also from
the Middle East, was white too. It was notions of
Jesus’ whiteness—in a largely white Christian
American culture—that ultimately won the case
for Dow. White Christians owned Jesus and the
right to call him theirs, and they were unable to let him go. Perhaps popular perceptions of Jesus have not
changed since then, as evidenced by the
extremely uncomfortable Fox News interview with Reza Aslan—a religious scholar and professor
at UC Riverside—that has gone viral since it was
posted July 26. Aslan is the author of “Zealot: The
Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” which has
been the center of some controversy at Fox News,
but not for anything that’s in the book. The point of contention for Lauren Green, host of the
FoxNews.com program “Spirited Debate,” and Fox
News guest writer and Christian pastor John S.
Dickerson is the author himself, who is Muslim. “I want to be clear, you are a Muslim,” Green
began the interview. “So why did you write a book
about the founder of Christianity?” In a manner befitting that of an elementary
school teacher, Aslan carefully explained to
Green that he was a scholar who’s devoted
much of his academic career to the history
of religions. His own religion was
inconsequential. “Well, to be clear,” replied Aslan, “I am a scholar of
religions with four degrees, including one in the
New Testament, and fluency in biblical Greek, who
has been studying the origins of Christianity for
two decades, who also just happens to be a
Muslim.” But Green’s line of questioning did not let up, and
she continued to prod Aslan’s motives for writing
the book, even quoting from the Dickerson Fox
News op-ed piece that purported to “out” Aslan as
a Muslim. Aslan, clearly unsurprised by her
persistence, informed her patiently that he’s never tried to hide the fact that he’s Muslim—it’s
something he states quite clearly on the second
page of his new book. This went on for almost 10 minutes, making it
clear that this wasn’t an interview. It was an
interrogation. In Dickerson’s op-ed and in Green’s
interview, it was not Aslan’s book that was being
put on trial, but Aslan himself. “But it still begs the question,” Green persisted in
the interview, “why would you be interested in the
founder of Christianity?” The insinuation underlying Green’s questions was
that a Muslim writing about Jesus was not just
outlandish, but inconceivable without some kind of
hidden agenda. Aslan’s religion nullified his
scholarly objectivity. Throughout the interview,
Aslan appeared unfazed, perhaps because this has come to be the modus operandi of Fox News
hosts, or perhaps because Aslan, like many
Muslims, faces this kind of suspicion in his
everyday life—by policemen, TSA officers and
passers-by who find his dark skin and foreign
name threatening. But what’s really revealing about Green’s interview
is what it exposed about how Jesus exists in the
popular Christian imagination—not just white, but
exclusively Christian. Green overlooked the fact
that Jesus appears in Islamic theology as one of
the great prophets of God, one of the few prophets mentioned by name in the Quran. He’s highly
revered among Muslims, who acknowledge Jesus
as the founder of Christianity, and Christianity as a
precursor to Islam. But Green and Dickerson both
ignored these facts—something that could have
made for a better interview discussion—and chose instead to attempt to implicate Aslan in some
grand conspiracy against Christianity itself. Despite Aslan’s academic distinctions, Fox News
will view him only as a Muslim writing about Jesus.
But what Aslan tried to get across to Green was
that he was just an interested scholar writing
about a man who 2,000 years after his death,
plays a role in the lives of billions of people around the world. Ultimately, however, Aslan has no right
to Jesus’ story. As far as Fox News—and much of
white, Christian America—is concerned, Jesus’
whiteness is fact, and Aslan, no matter what box
he checks on his census form, will never be white

THE ROVING EYE
Hi, I'm your new Axis of Evil
By Pepe Escobar

I have argued that what has just happened in Egypt is a bloodbath that is not a bloodbath, conducted by
a military junta responsible for a coup that is not a
coup, under the guise of an Egyptian "war on terror".
Yet this newspeak gambit - which easily could have
been written at the White House - is just part of the
picture. Amid a thick fog of spin and competing agendas, a
startling fact stands out. A poll only 10 days ago by
the Egyptian Center for Media Studies and Public Opinion had already shown that 69% were against the July 3 military coup orchestrated
by the Pinochet-esque Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. So the bloodbath that is not a bloodbath cannot
possibly be considered legitimate - unless for a
privileged coterie of Mubarakists (the so-called fulool), a bunch of corrupt oligarchs and the military- controlled Egyptian "deep state". The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government led by
Mohamed Morsi may have been utterly incompetent
- trying to rewrite the Egyptian constitution; inciting
hardcore fundamentalists; and bowing in
debasement in front of the International Monetary
Fund. But it should not be forgotten this was coupled with permanent, all-out sabotage by the
"deep state". It's true that Egypt was - and remains - on the brink
of total economic collapse; the bloodbath that is not
a bloodbath only followed a change in the signature
on the checks, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia (and the
United Arab Emirates). As Spengler has
demonstrated on this site (see Islam's civil war moves to Egypt, Asia Times Online, July 8, 2013), Egypt will remain a banana republic without the
bananas and dependent on foreigners to eat any.
The economic disaster won't go away - not to
mention the MB's cosmic resentment. The winners, as it stands, are the House of Saud/
Israel/ Pentagon axis. How did they pull it off? When in doubt, call Bandar In theory, Washington had been in (relative) control
of both the MB and Sisi's Army. So on the surface
this is a win-win situation. Essentially, Washington
hawks are pro-Sisi's Army, while "liberal
imperialists" are pro-MB; the perfect cover, because
the MB is Islamic, indigenous, populist, economically neoliberal, it wants to work with the
International Monetary Fund, and has not threatened
Israel. The MB was not exactly a problem for either
Washington and Tel Aviv; after all ambitious ally
Qatar was there as a go-between. Qatar's foreign
policy, as everyone knows, boils down to
cheerleading the MB everywhere. So Morsi must have crossed a pretty serious red
line. It could have been his call for Sunni Egyptians
to join a jihad against the Bashar al-Assad
government in Syria (although that's formally in tune
with Barack Obama's "Assad must go" policy).
Arguably, it was his push to install some sort of jihadi paradise from the Sinai all the way to Gaza.
The Sinai, for all practical purposes, is run by Israel.
So that points to a green light for the coup from both
the Pentagon and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is totally at ease with Sisi's Army and the
flush Saudi supporters of the military junta. The only
thing that matters to Israel is that Sisi's Army will
uphold the Camp David agreements. The MB, on
the other hand, might entertain other ideas in the
near future. For the House of Saud, though, this was never a
win-win situation. The MB in power in Egypt was
anathema. In this fateful triangle - Washington, Tel
Aviv and Riyadh - what remains to be established is
who was been the most cunning in the wag the dog
department. That's where the Incredibly Disappearing Qatar act
fits in. The rise and (sudden) fall of Qatar from the
foreign policy limelight is strictly linked to the
current leadership vacuum in the heart of the
Pentagon's self-defined "arc of instability". Qatar
was, at best, an extra in a blockbuster - considering the yo-yo drifts of the Obama administration and
that Russia and China are just playing a waiting
game. Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, the emir who ended up
deposing himself, clearly overreached not only in
Syria but also in Iraq; he was financing not only MB
outfits but also hardcore jihadis across the desert.
There's no conclusive proof because no one in
either Doha or Washington is talking, but the emir was certainly "invited" to depose himself. And not
by accident the Syrian "rebel" racket was entirely
taken over by the House of Saud, via the
spectacularly resurfaced Bandar Bush, aka Prince
Bandar bin Sultan. So the winners once again were the Saudis - as the
Obama administration was calculating that both the
MB and the al-Qaeda nebulae would then fade into
oblivion in Syria. That remains to be seen; it's
possible that Egypt from now on may attract a lot of
jihadis from Syria. Still, they would remain in MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa). As for Sisi, he was clever enough to seize the
"terror" theme and pre-emptively equate MB with al-
Qaeda in Egypt, thus setting the scene for the
bloodbath that is not a bloodbath. The bottom line is
that a case can be made that the Obama
administration has in fact subcontracted most of its Middle East policy to the House of Saud. Pick your axis Only two days before the bloodbath that is not a
bloodbath, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Martin Dempsey was in Israel getting cozy
with General Benny Gantz and Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, discussing the proverbial
"threats that could emanate out of the region - globally and to the homeland - and how we can
continue to work together to make both of our
countries more secure". It's unthinkable they did not
discuss how they would profit from the imminent
bloodbath that is not a bloodbath. At the same time, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe
Ya'alon bombastically announced a new "axis of evil"; Iran, Syria and Lebanon. That implies Tehran, Damascus and, significantly, Beirut as a whole (not
only the predominantly Shi'ite southern suburbs).
Ya'alon explicitly told Dempsey it was "forbidden"
for them to win the civil war in Syria. Considering that the Central Intelligence Agency
itself has deemed the civil war in Syria as a "top
threat" to US national security in case al-Qaeda-
style outfits and copycats take over in an eventual
post-Assad situation; and at the same time
Washington is extremely reluctant to stop "leading from behind", a case can be made that Israel may
be entertaining another invasion of Lebanon. An
always alert Sheikh Nasrallah, Hezbollah's
secretary-general, has already been talking about
the possibility. Then Dempsey went to Jordan - which already holds
around 1,000 US troops, F-16s with crews, and an
array of Patriot missiles. The spin is that the
Pentagon is helping Amman with "border control
techniques" as in one of those favorite Pentagon
acronyms, ISR ("intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance". That's just spin. Most of all Dempsey went to
survey the progress of the recent batch of anti-tank
missiles, bought by - who else - the Saudis and
supplied by the CIA, via Jordan, to (in theory)
selected "good rebels" in southern Syria. Those
"rebels", by the way, were trained by US Special Forces inside Jordan. Obviously Damascus will be
preparing a counterpunch to this offensive by the
American/Saudi/Jordanian axis. Pick your evil There's hardly any "American credibility" left in the
Middle East - apart from puppet entities like Jordan
and selected elites in the feudal Gulf, that
"democratic" realm of corruption, mercenaries and
imported proletariats treated like cattle. It hardly helps that US Secretary of State John
Kerry has recommended Robert Ford, the former US
ambassador to Syria, as the next US ambassador
to Egypt. Perception is everything. Informed opinion all across
the Middle East immediately identifies Ford as a
creepy death squad facilitator. His CV prior to Syria
- where he legitimized the "rebels" - is matchless;
sidekick to sinister John Negroponte promoting the
"Salvador Option" in Iraq in 2004. The "Salvador Option" is code for US-sponsored death squads, a
tactic first applied in El Salvador (by Negroponte) in
the 1980s (causing at least 75,000 deaths) but with
deep origins in Latin America in the late 1960s
throughout the 1970s. Sisi will keep playing his game according to his own
master plan - bolstering the narrative myth that the
Egyptian army defends the nation and its
institutions when in fact defending its immense
socio-economic privileges. Forget about civilian
oversight. And forget about any possible independent political party - or movement - in Egypt. As for Washington, MB or "deep state", even a civil
war in Egypt - Arabs killing Arabs, divide and rule ad
infinitum - that's fine, as long as there is no threat to
Israel. With Israel possibly mulling another invasion of
Lebanon; the Kerry "peace process" an excuse for
more settlements in Palestine; Bandar Bush back
practicing the dark arts; the pre-empting of any
possible solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier;
Egypt in civil war; Syria and also Iraq bleeding to death, what's left is the certified proliferation of all
kinds of axes, and all kinds of evil.

THE ROVING EYE
Operation Tomahawk with cheese
By Pepe Escobar.
This deafeningly hysterical show of Syria as Iraq 2.0
is only happening because a president of the United
States (POTUS) created a ''credibility'' problem
when, recklessly, he pronounced the use of
chemical weapons in Syria a ''red line''. Thus the US government urgently needs to punish
the transgressor - to hell with evidence - to maintain
its ''credibility''. But this time it will be ''limited''.
''Tailored''. Only ''a few days''. A ''shot across the
bow'' - as POTUS qualified it. Still, some - but not all
- ''high-value targets'', including command and control facilities and delivery systems, in Syria will
have to welcome a barrage of Tomahawk cruise
missiles (384 are already positioned in the eastern
Mediterranean). We all know how the Pentagon loves to christen its assorted humanitarian liberations across the globe with
names like Desert Fox, Invincible Vulture or some
other product of brainstorming idiocy. So now it's
time to call Operation Tomahawk With Cheese. It's like ordering a pizza delivery. ''Hello, I'd like a
Tomahawk with cheese.'' ''Of course, it will be ready
in 20 minutes.'' ''Hold on, wait! I need to fool the UN
first. Can I pick it up next week? With extra
cheese?'' In 1988, Operation Desert Fox - launched by Bill ''I
did not have sex with that woman'' Clinton - was
designed to ''degrade'', but not destroy, Saddam
Hussein's capacity to manufacture non-existent
weapons of mass destruction. Now, the deployment
of those deeply moral Tomahawks is also designed to ''degrade'' the Bashar al-Assad's government
capacity to unleash unproven chemical weapons
attacks. Yet there's always that pesky problem of perennially
ungrateful Arabs who, according to the New York
Times, ''are emotionally opposed to any Western
military action in the region no matter how
humanitarian the cause''. The deeply humanitarian Operation Tomahawk With
Cheese is running into all sorts of problems with the
calendar. POTUS leaves next Tuesday to Sweden -
and from there he will go to St Petersburg for the
Group of 20 summit, on Thursday and Friday next
week. The proverbial horde of ''unnamed White House officials'' has been spinning like mad
centrifuges, emphasizing that POTUS must wrap up
Tomahawk With Cheese before he musters the
courage to face Russian President Vladimir Putin
and other leaders of emerging powers. Surveying his impossibilities - with one eye to the
calendar and another to the resistance to enlarge his
mini-coalition of the willing - now POTUS seems to
be looking for an exit strategy that in fact would all
but abandon Operation Tomahawk With Cheese. Others are way more resilient. A predictable bunch
of 66 former ''government officials'' and ''foreign
policy experts'' - all of them Ziocons under the
umbrella of the Foreign Policy Initiative - has
published a letter urging POTUS to go way beyond
Operation Tomahawk With Cheese, arguing for a pizza sparing no lethal ingredients. This would be a
true humanitarian mission, able to support
''moderate'' Syrian ''rebels'' and on top of it ''dissuade
Iran from developing nuclear weapons''. A rebel, but not a jerk Let's see what a ''moderate'' Syrian ''rebel'' thinks
about all this. Haytahm Manna, in exile for 35 years,
is a key member of the non-armed Syrian opposition
(yes, they do exist). But he's not following the
script; he's resolutely against Operation Tomahawk,
with cheese or with extra cheese. (See here (in French). Worse; he debunks the US government's ''evidence''
of a chemical weapons attack as ''propaganda'' and
''psychological war''. He stresses the chemicals
were launched with ''artisanal weapons''; that ties up
with Russian intelligence, which is sure gas that it
was delivered by a homemade missile fired from a base under opposition control (extensive details
compiled here; scroll down to ''Qaboun rocket launches''). Manna also points to ''videos and photos on the
Internet before the attacks''; to al-Qaeda's previous
use of chemical weapons; and to the Russians as
''seriously working for the Geneva II negotiations'',
unlike the Americans. Ooops. This is not exactly what the designers of
Operation Tomahawk With Cheese were expecting.
If a Syrian exile draws these conclusions, the same
applies to Syria civilians who are about to be
greeted by those deeply moral Tomahawks. The Pentagon could always go for Plan B. A single
Tomahawk costs at least US$1.5 million. Multiply
that for 384. That's not a great bang for your buck -
because even if they all go humanitarian, the
Bashar al-Assad government would still remain in
place. So why not drop planeloads of sexy, Pininfarina-
designed Ferrari Californias? They retail for around
$200.000. Imagine the frenzy among Assad elite
forces struggling to seize the Big Prize, one among
2,000 Californias. With their eyes off the ball, the
''rebels'' could easily sneak in everywhere and take over Damascus. And perhaps even stage the
victory parade on a fleet of photogenic Ferraris. Call
that an improvement over Libya. Operation Tomahawk With Cheese may still happen;
even with the calendar pressing; even bypassing the
UN; even with a mini-coalition of the willing; even
making a total mockery of international law. The
White House has made it clear that ''diplomatic
paralysis'' cannot infringe on its ''credibility''. As for what is happening 10 years after the invasion
and occupation of Iraq, it's about the US
government, parts of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (Britain and France) and parts of the
Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates) burying the previous, much- lauded Euro-Arab ''dialogue'' and turning into a shady
Atlanticist-Islamist cabal bent on smashing yet
another secular Arab republic. Talk about rotten
cheese.

The Banality of Empire
by JASON HIRTHLER

You have to ask: does Syrian President Bashar al-
Assad have a death wish, launching a chemical
attack within miles of a U.N. chemical inspection
team? He must. Like those cloistered mullahs in
Qom, whom Zionist sage Benjamin Netanyahu
claims would fire a nuclear warhead at Tel Aviv the moment one fell into their hands, a mere fait accompli. Even though Iran would be instantly vaporized by American WMDs. Even though all
those coiling spires would turn to dust. Because,
as Bibi makes clear, you have to set aside the
survival instinct when you’re dealing with
madmen. Framing the Enemy Assad, of that nefarious Alawite sect, must have
similar dementia, since according to the Obama
administration he launched a chemical weapons
attack on Syrian “rebels” in Ghouta, a suburb of
Damascus, at perhaps the most ill-advised
moment in the two-year conflict. A moment when Assad had just welcomed United Nations
chemical weapons inspectors into his country to
see whether accusations of a May chemical attack
were true. The latest attack has generated a
freshet of rhetorical fraud we haven’t seen since
the lofty height of the Bush administration, when Dick Cheney was touring the Sunday talk shows
waving his imminent-threat manifesto and
sneering uncontrollably at spineless pacifists. It’s
Iraq all over again. Just like the fabricated
charges against a fangless Saddam Hussein,
Assad awaits the verdict of history—a false accusation, a war fever in the West, and then the
falling skies. There’s no preventing it. Nobody
mainstream has bothered to point out that Assad
would have to be suicidal to launch an attack with
inspectors in-country, and with the use of
chemical weapons being President Barack Obama’s vaunted “red line” across which no
sovereign Shi’ite government can cross. Rebels in Desperate Straits On the other hand, there are plenty of perfectly
reasonable pretexts by which the so-called “Free
Syrian Army” might have launched a chemical
weapons attack, as they likely did in May, according to Carla Del Ponte of the U.N. and the Independent International Commission of
Inquiry on Syria. She has now suggested the latest attack may have again been launched by the
rebels. Despite the support of al-Qaeda and their
al-Nusra Front affiliates, who each want Assad
gone for very different reasons, this mercenary
melting pot has been ceding territory to Syrian
government forces at an alarming rate in recent months. It would behoove them to stage a
chemical attack that the Americans could quickly
attribute to the Assad regime, and begin fueling
the drones and launching destroyers. Otherwise,
the government might subdue all the factions
ranged against it, consolidate its power, and be that much more difficult to unseat. Better to
conjure a crossed line from the dust of civil,
sectarian, and proxy strife. Baseless accusations
can then issue from the White House lawn, being
loudly seconded in Tel Aviv, where lawmakers
have just rubberstamped another bank of illegal settlements for prime West Bank real estate,
while Palestinians refugees in Ramallah are shot
in murky dust-ups with the IDF. Illegal
interventions. Outlawed occupations. Suspect
crackdowns. World conflicts in miniature are
always afoot in the Knesset. The Bi-Partisan Blueprint Regardless of the trigger mechanism, the
administration seems intent on pushing through
Donald Rumsfeld’s old madcap blueprint for the Middle East, which involved toppling the
governments of seven consecutive countries on
the way to unchallenged dominion over Arab and
Persian fossil fuels. Their eyes are on the prize.
The rest is detail. It seems to make little
difference to the Americans what becomes of Syria, only that Assad is overthrown, and the
warlord that plants his flag atop the wreckage is
hostile to Tehran and is willing to viciously put
down any foolhardy bids for self-determination
that might emerge from the populace. After all,
the U.S. has left a trash bin of fallen monuments and blown infrastructures in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Libya. If the entire Arab world is a flaming
midden whose only functional entities are oil
derricks, what cause for concern is that to our
imperial chieftains? Let the Islamists slaughter
each other on the peripheries of the bonfire while we vacuum every ounce of natural gas and
petroleum from the core of the earth. (One
conjures visions of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, mocking his young evangelical rival and shouting, “I drink your milkshake!”) Revving Up the Propaganda Machine The more controversial actions of state always
require a heavy dose of cheerleading from the
press, the better to manufacture the consent of
the general population, or at least seed enough
doubt to prevent a riot. To that end, The New York Times is back in the organ well, lifting its chorus of fearmongering to new heights. The Washington Post is cranking up the shrill calls for intervention. The ‘Situation Room’ is firing
on all cylinders. Fox News is delivering thumping polemics on how slow-footed Obama is on
foreign policy. Liberals stare blankly from the
sidelines while their “lesser evil” does another
expert impression of the “greater evil”. Obama
channels Clinton. Kerry channels Cheney. But
this is par for the course; justification cometh before the sword. It feels like 2003 again. All we
need is Judith Miller to surface with a source in
the chthonian depths of the Assad
administration. Or Colin Powell to crack open
PowerPoint and lift a few hollow tube photos
from Google. And for someone to climb into the bully pulpit and tell us in mournful tones that
yes, yes, we must once again wage war on those
nomadic savages pitching their tents above our
God-given bounty. Four Steps to War What can you expect in the coming days and
weeks? Here’s a sneak preview. It’s none too
surprising, since the formula has been refined
over decades. Its architects have their names
inscribed on the walls of the White House,
infamy emeritus. The model calls for Obama to undertake a series of anti-democratic and pro-
war actions that will be reformulated as pro-
democratic and anti-war: * First, he’ll ignore the people that elected him.
He’ll cite some moral platitude from a posture of
deep anxiety—the man of peace forced to
confront the need for noble violence. His
wrinkled brow will slowly morph into the steely
eyed gaze of determination—the defender of liberty come to rescue the hapless Syrian proles.
He’ll wave a flag of universal human rights,
declare that actions have consequences, and
point a heavy finger at Bashar al-Assad. Just nine percent of the American population want this. But Obama will be too transfixed by his moral
crusade to take notice. * Next, he’ll ignore Congress. This is the formal
equivalent of ignoring the people. But unlike
laughing off a Reuters poll, disregarding the
entire legislative branch of government will
require some nuanced prose from the
Department of Justice (DOJ). No problem. For the Libyan war, the DOJ asserted that the provision of guns, drone strikes, missile
launchers, and other weaponry didn’t collectively
amount to “hostilities.” Hence there was no war.
Hence no need to bother with Congressional
approvals. * Feeling more confident by the day, Obama will
then ignore the United Nations. He and deputy
John Kerry have already said it is too late for U.N. weapons inspectors in Damascus to
investigate the new claim of chemical weapons
abuse. They offered a smattering of nonsense
about “corrupted” evidence, despite the fact that
sarin can sit in the soil for months. In any case,
the U.N. could normally be relied upon to roll over in the General Assembly and Security
Council on war authorization, but for the
annoying presence of Russia, finger poised above
the veto button, awaiting for the Obama
administration to ask the Security Council
legitimate its belligerence. Russia, of course, is itself hiding behind a façade of shocked
innocence, saying it was fooled by America on
Iraq in 2003 and won’t be fooled again. This, too,
is sophistry. * Then he’ll bomb. Missiles will be fired from the
safety of the Mediterranean or the comparative
calm of high clouds. The missiles will target
heavily populated areas in Damascus, much to
our great leader’s great regret. Images of wailing
Muslims will dot the airwaves. NGOs will assemble lists of the collateral dead. The refugee
count—already at one million—will climb toward
two. And Syria, part of the cradle of civilization,
will begin to resemble Iraq and Afghanistan and
Libya in its kaleidoscopic mix of blasted
infrastructures, sectarian slaughter, rampant abuse of women, genetic deformities in the birth
population, and the steady buzz of Predators and
Reapers policing the carnage from the sky. But, in the end, the oil and gas will be ours, and in
Washington, that’s all that matters. Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry. He lives and works in New York City

THE ROVING EYE US:
The indispensable (bombing) nation
By Pepe Escobar

Yes We Scan. Yes We Drone. And Yes We Bomb.
The White House's propaganda blitzkrieg to sell the
Tomahawking of Syria to the US Congress is
already reaching pre-bombing maximum spin -
gleefully reproduced by US corporate media. And yes, all parallels to Iraq 2.0 duly came to
fruition when US Secretary of State John Kerry
pontificated that Bashar al-Assad "now joins the list
of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein" as an evil
monster. Why is Cambodia's Pol Pot never
mentioned? Oh yes, because the US supported him. Every single tumbleweed in the Nevada desert
knows who's itching for war on Syria; vast sectors
of the industrial-military complex; Israel; the House
of Saud; the "socialist" Francois Hollande in France, who has wet dreams with
Sykes-Picot. Virtually nobody is lobbying Congress
NOT to go to war. And all the frantic war lobbying may even be
superfluous; Nobel Peace Prize winner and
prospective bomber Barack Obama has already
implied - via hardcore hedging of the "I have decided
that the United States should take military action"
kind - that he's bent on attacking Syria no matter what Congress says. Obama's self-inflicted "red line" is a mutant virus;
from "a shot across the bow" it morphed into a "slap
on the wrist" and now seems to be "I'm the Bomb
Decider". Speculation about his real motives is idle.
His Hail Mary pass of resorting to an extremely
unpopular Congress packed with certified morons may be a cry for help (save me from my stupid "red
line"; or - considering the humanitarian imperialists
of the Susan Rice kind who surround him - he's hell
bent on entering another war for the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the House of
Saud lobby under the cover of "moral high ground". Part of the spin is that "Israel must be protected".
But the fact is Israel is already over-protected by an
AIPAC remote-controlled United States Congress.
[1] What about the evidence? The former "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" are
doing their part, enthusiastically supporting the
White House "evidence" with a dodgy report of their
own, largely based on YouTube intel. [2] Even Fox News admitted that the US electronic intel
essentially came from the 8200 unit of the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) - their version of the NSA. [3]
Here, former UK ambassador Craig Murray convincingly debunks the Israeli intercepted intel
scam. The most startling counterpunch to the White House
spin remains the Mint Press News report by AP
correspondent Dale Gavlak on the spot, in Ghouta,
Damascus, with anti-Assad residents stressing that
"certain rebels received chemical weapons via the
Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the gas
attack''. I had a jolt when I first read it - as I have been
stressing the role of Bandar Bush as the dark arts
mastermind behind the new Syria war strategy (See Bandar Bush, 'liberator' of Syria, Asia Times Online, August 13, 2013). Then there's the fact that Syrian Army commandos,
on August 24, raiding "rebel" tunnels in the
Damascus suburb of Jobar, seized a warehouse
crammed with chemicals required for mixing
"kitchen sarin". The commando was hit by some
form of nerve agent and sent samples for analysis in Russia. This evidence certainly is part of
President Vladimir Putin's assessment of the White
House claims as totally unconvincing. On August 27, Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish
Democratic Union Party (PYD), told Reuters the
attack was "aimed at framing Assad''. And in case
the UN inspectors found the "rebels" did it,
"everybody would forget it". The clincher; "Are they
are going to punish the Emir of Qatar or the King of Saudi Arabia, or Mr Erdogan of Turkey?" So, in a nutshell, no matter how it happened, the
locals in Ghouta said Jabhat al-Nusra did it; and Syrian Kurds believe this was a false flag to frame
Damascus. By now, any decent lawyer would be asking cui bono? What would be Assad's motive - to cross the "red line" and launch a chemical weapons attack on
the day UN inspectors arrive in Damascus, just 15
kilometers away from their hotel? This is the same US government who sold the world
the narrative of a bunch of unskilled Arabs armed
with box cutters hijacking passenger jets and turning
them into missiles smack in the middle of the most
protected airspace on the planet, on behalf of an evil
transnational organization. So now this same evil organization is incapable of
launching a rudimentary chemical weapons attack
with DIY rockets - a scenario I first outlined even
before Gavlak's report. [4] Here is a good round-up of the "rebels" dabbling with chemical weapons.
Additionally, in late May, Turkish security forces
had already found sarin gas held by hardcore Jabhat
al-Nusra jihadis. So why not ask Bandar Bush? We need to keep coming back over and over again
to that fateful meeting in Moscow barely four weeks
ago between Putin and Bandar Bush. [5] Bandar was brazen enough to tell Putin he would
"protect" the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. He
was brazen enough to say he controls all Chechens
jihadis from the Caucasus to Syria. All they needed
was a Saudi green light to go crazy in Russia's
underbelly. He even telegraphed his next move; "There is no
escape from the military option, because it is the
only currently available choice given that the
political settlement ended in stalemate. We believe
that the Geneva II Conference will be very difficult in
light of this raging situation." That's a monster understatement - because the
Saudis never wanted Geneva II in the first place.
Under the House of Saud's ultra-sectarian agenda of
fomenting the Sunni-Shi'ite divide everywhere, the
only thing that matters is to break the alliance
between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah by all means necessary. The House of Saud's spin du jour is that the world must "prevent aggression against the Syrian
people". But if "the Syrian people" agrees to be
bombed by the US, the House of Saud also agrees.
[6] Compared to this absurdity, Muqtada al-Sadr's
reaction in Iraq stands as the voice of reason.
Muqtada supports the "rebels" in Syria - unlike most
Shi'ites in Iraq; in fact he supports the non-armed
opposition, stressing the best solution is free and
fair elections. He rejects sectarianism - as fomented by the House of Saud. And as he knows what an
American military occupation is all about, he also
totally rejects any US bombing. The Bandar Bush-AIPAC strategic alliance will take
no prisoners to get its war. In Israel, Obama is
predictably being scorned for his "betrayal and
cowardice" in the face of "evil". The Israeli PR
avalanche on congress centers on the threat of a
unilateral strike on Iran if the US government does not attack Syria. As a matter of fact congress would
gleefully vote for both. Their collective IQ may be
sub-moronic, but some may be led to conclude that
the only way to "punish" the Assad government is to
have the US doing the heavy work as the Air Force
for the myriad "rebels" and of course jihadis - in the way the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the
Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq and the anti-Gaddafi
mercenaries in Libya duly profited. So here, in a nutshell, we have the indispensable
nation that drenched North Vietnam with napalm and
agent orange, showered Fallujah with white
phosphorus and large swathes of Iraq with depleted
uranium getting ready to unleash a "limited",
"kinetic" whatever against a country that has not attacked it, or any US allies, and everything based
on extremely dodgy evidence and taking the "moral
high-ground". Anyone who believes the White House spin that this
will be just about a few Tomahawks landing on
some deserted military barracks should rent a condo
in Alice in Wonderland. The draft already circulating
in Capitol Hill is positively scary. [7] And even if this turns out to be a "limited", "kinetic"
whatever, it will only perpetuate the chaos. Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has referred to it as
"controlled chaos". Not really; the Empire of Chaos
is now totally out of control.

The Troodos Conundrum
By Craig Murray

The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in
Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which
the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence
cooperation. The communications intercept
agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US,
share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the
NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave
traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt
and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus.
Even almost all landline telephone communication
in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos. Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown
of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency,
as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not
have their own comparable facility for the Middle
East. I should state that I have actually been
inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the
FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is
fact, not speculation. It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that
John Kerry claims to have access to
communications intercepts of Syrian military and
officials organising chemical weapons attacks,
which intercepts were not available to the British
Joint Intelligence Committee. On one level the explanation is simple. The
intercept evidence was provided to the USA by
Mossad, according to my own well placed source
in the Washington intelligence community.
Intelligence provided by a third party is not
automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be. But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have
nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The
reported content of the conversations fits exactly
with key tasking for Troodos, and would have
tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have
missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a
purely landline route, on which Mossad have a
physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a
number of ways - not least nowadays the purely
landline route. Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian
civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings
and missile strikes over many months. This
absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed
a great many civilians, including children - has
brought no condemnation at all from the West. Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the
United States designed to allow the United States
to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile
campaign. The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple.
Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because
they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John
Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks. More
children may now be blown to pieces by massive
American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the
USA acting at the behest of Israel.

Yes, the Syrian Rebels DO Have
Access to Chemical Weapons

One of the U.S.
government’s
main
justifications
for its claim that the Syrian
government carried out a chemical weapons attack is that the rebels don’t have chemical weapons. However, multiple lines of evidence show that the rebels do have chemical weapons. Potential Looting of Syrian Weapons The Washington Post noted last December: U.S. officials are increasingly worried that Syria’s weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, rogue generals or other uncontrollable factions. Last week, fighters from a group that the Obama administration has branded a terrorist organization were among rebels who seized the Sheik Suleiman military base near Aleppo, where research on chemical weapons had been conducted. Rebels are also closing in on another base near Aleppo, known as Safirah, which has served as a major production center for such munitions, according to U.S. officials and analysts. *** A former Syrian general who once led the army’s chemical weapons training program said that the main storage sites for mustard gas and nerve agents are supposed to be guarded by thousands of Syrian troops but that they would be easily overrun. The sites are not secure, retired Maj. Gen. Adnan Silou, who defected to the opposition in June, said in an interview near Turkey’s border with Syria. “Probably anyone from the Free Syrian Army or any Islamic extremist group could take them over,” he said. *** As the Syrian opposition steadily makes territorial gains, U.S. officials and analysts said the odds are increasing that insurgents will seize control of a chemical weapons site or that Syrian troops guarding the installations will simply abandon their posts. “It’s almost inevitable,” [Michael Eisenstadt, a retired Army officer who directs the military and security studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] said. “It may have already happened, for what we know.” *** Last week, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the al- Nusra Front — an anti-Assad group that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and is also known as Jabhat al-Nusra — had seized a chlorine factory near the town of Safirah, east of Aleppo. “Terrorist groups may resort to using chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” the ministry cautioned. AP reports: Questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores …. A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats — including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored …. U.S. and allied spies have lost track of who controls some of the country’s chemical weapons supplies, according to the two intelligence officials and two other U.S. officials. *** U.S. analysts … are also not certain that when they saw what looked like Assad’s forces moving chemical supplies, those forces were able to remove everything before rebels took over an area where weapons had been stored. AP hit the nail on the head when it wrote: U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said. *** Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war. Looting of Libyan Chemical Weapons Fox News reported in 2011: In August, Fox News interviewed Rep. Mike Rogers, R.-Mich., who said he saw a chemical weapon stockpile in the country during a 2004 trip. At the time, he said the U.S. was concerned about “thousands of pounds of very active mustard gas.” He also said there is some sarin gas that is unaccounted for. The Wall Street Journal noted in 2011: Spread across the desert here off the Sirte-Waddan road sits one of the biggest threats to Western hopes for Libya: a massive, unguarded weapons depot that is being pillaged daily by anti-Gadhafi military units, hired work crews and any enterprising individual who has the right vehicle and chooses to make the trip. In one of dozens of warehouses the size of a single- family home, Soviet-era guided missiles remain wrapped inside crates stacked to the 15-foot ceiling. In another, dusted with sand, are dozens of sealed cases labeled “warhead.” Artillery rounds designed to carry chemical weapons are stashed in the back of another. Rockets, antitank grenades and projectiles of all calibers are piled so high they defy counting…. Convoys of armed groups from all over Libya have made the trek here and piled looted weapons into trailer trucks, dump trucks, buses and even empty meat trucks…. The highly-regarded NTI reported the same year: In the desert near Sirte, there was no security for dozens of small armories at the complex, where weapons are removed every day by opposition fighters, paid contractors and others. In one structure, the word “warhead” was stamped on dozens of sealed containers. At another depot, empty chemical agent munitions were found. There is at present no viable Libyan government- sanctioned force with the capacity to keep freelancer fighters from taking what they please from the warehouses, according to the Journal. *** U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited the Libyan capital, where he said gaining control over the country’s armories was a “very big topic.” “We have a game plan to secure the weapon caches, particularly biological and chemical weapons,” McCain said. The Telegraph reported last year: Al Qaeda terrorists in North Africa could be in possession of chemical weapons, a leading Spanish intelligence officer said on Monday. The head of National Police counter-terrorist intelligence, Commissioner-General Enrique Baron, told a strategic security conference in Barcelona that it was believed that the self-styled Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb – AQMI – could have acquired such arms in Libya or elsewhere during the Arab Spring last year. *** Commissioner Baron told his audience: “The Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb has acquired and used very powerful conventional arms and probably also has non-conventional arms, basically chemical, as a result of the loss of control of arsenals.” The most likely place where this could have happened was in Libya during the uprising which overthrew the Gaddafi regime, said Commissioner Baron. In his position as the head of Spanish National Police intelligence the Commissioner-General works closely with MI6, the CIA and other Western European intelligence services. Remember, the head of the Libyan rebels admitted that the rebels were largely Al Qaeda. CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, and many other mainstream sources confirm that Al Qaeda terrorists
from Libya have since flooded into Syria to fight the Assad regime … bringing their arms with them. And the post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also itself a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition. (CNN notes that the CIA may have had a hand in this operation.) Other Countries A reporter who has written extensively for Associated Press, BBC and National Public Radio reports that locals in the area hit by chemical weapons allege that Saudi Arabia supplied the chemicals. And see this. Bush administration official Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and British MP George Galloway speculate that Israel or another country may have given chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels. We don’t know which countries did or didn’t give chemical weapons to the rebels. The point is that there are quite a few opportunities or possibilities. Evidence of Possession and Use The above, of course, is simply speculation. More important is actual evidence of possession and use. Turkish state newspaper Zaman reported earlier this year (Google translation): The Turkish General Directorate of Security … seized 2 kg of sarin gas in the city of Adana in the early hours of yesterday morning. The chemical weapons were in the possession of Al Nusra terrorists believed to have been heading for Syria. Haaretz reported on March 24th, “Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria“. UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons: There is also evidence that the rebels have recently used chemical weapons. No wonder experts are skeptical.

Yet Another War for Imperial Capitalism
Obama Goes Full Bush on Syria
by ROB URIE

In an interview with filmmaker Oliver Stone Argentina’s former President Nestor Kirchner recalled a conversation he had with U.S. President George W. Bush in which Mr. Bush expressed his view that war is ‘good for the economy.’ Given the context, a high level discussion over the efficacy of government programs to boost ‘the economy,’ Mr. Bush was apparently voicing a crude variant of ‘military Keynesianism,’ the theory that government military spending during WWII brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression. With WWII being one of the greatest slaughters in human history, the difference between the unintended auxiliary ‘benefit’ of the U.S. having the only industrial economy still standing as ‘the West’ was in need of rebuilding and Mr. Bush starting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the lunatic theory war has constructive benefits seems not to have occurred to him. Put differently, as long as ‘the economy’ for which war is considered good is Mr. Bush’s, the costs in terms of death, destruction and misery are apparently debits destined for someone else’s social accounting.

A quick glance at a map of the world shows Syria, the object of current President Barack Obama’s blood lust, just west of Iraq and just north and East of Israel, with Iran to the east of Iraq and Afghanistan to the east of Iran. Mr. Bush’s war on, and occupation of, Iraq sent approximately one million Iraqi refugees fleeing into Syria and opened a Sunni-Shia divide that is a primary factor in current Syrian tensions. U.S. ‘cold’ hostilities with Iran date to the waning days of the (Jimmy) Carter administration when the Iranian people rebelled against the puppet regime the U.S. had installed to ‘secure’ Iranian oil for the company that became British Petroleum (BP). Oil geopolitics explain some fair portion of the U.S.-Israeli ‘alliance,’ the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran by the U.S., the repeated wars the U.S. has launched against Iraq and the geographical importance of Afghanistan to U.S. control of the region. In fact, the continuing presence of the U.S. in the Middle East over the last century has been the central cause of political instability in the region. And bogus rationales were given to suggest that slaughter and destruction were in some way for the benefit of those killed in every military conquest the U.S. has carried out in the last century.

Now we have current U.S. President Barack Obama, himself the leaker of classified ‘intelligence’ that has him personally ordering the extra-legal (illegal) murders of hundreds of women and children through his drone program, the political leader who refused to allow the prosecution of senior Bush administration officials for war crimes related to the war against, and occupation of, Iraq and Commander-in-Chief of a military that is one of the shadow protagonists in the ongoing conflict in Syria, claiming that the U.S. has the legal and moral authority to launch ‘official’ war against the Assad regime in Syria. However, under existing international law Mr. Obama lacks the legal authority to do so, given his own culpability for knowingly murdering hundreds of innocents he lacks the moral authority to do so, and as political leader of one of the shadow protagonists he already bears legal culpability for illegal acts being carried out by the U.S. military and intelligence services in Syria. And to paraphrase the charge made against the U.S. when baby Bush was selling his war on Iraq: how do we know Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons?—because Mr. Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, still has the receipts. Press reports have it that U.S. ally Great Britain was in fact selling the ‘precursor’ chemicals for Sarin gas to at least one side in the Syrian conflict until the EU (European Union) forced them to stop a few months ago.

Mr. Obama’s ‘official’ rationale for launching war on Syria—that chemical weapons represent a special class and their use requires a U.S. response, might be slightly less ludicrous if the U.S. hadn’t so recently launched an illegal war of aggression on Iraq in which over one million people were killed, the country was substantially destroyed and banned white phosphorous, depleted uranium shell casings, cluster bombs and illegal torture were liberally used against the civilian population. Across the Middle East today U.S. military drones are being used to terrorize and murder civilians and the murders are being covered up with the knowingly inaccurate classification of civilians as ‘terrorists.’ The CIA continues to run illegal ‘black sight’ torture facilities across the Middle East (and the world) where people accused of no crime are routinely tortured, raped and murdered against the Geneva Conventions and international law. And in fact the very same Syrian government now being accused of illegal acts was delivered hundreds, if not thousands, of people by the U.S. to be illegally tortured and murdered through the CIA’s and U.S. military’s ongoing ‘extraordinary rendition’ program. Mr. Obama’s cynicism in selling his war as ‘humanitarian’ intervention is nearly heroic in its contempt for U.S. history in the region, for the people who elected him and for his intended victims.

Public relations surrounding wars of imperial plunder have in recent centuries and decades tidied them up with alleged moral authority replacing naked self-interest as their stated intent. However, oil geopolitics alone tie together the last century of U.S. military actions in the Middle East. Much as with the development of ‘AFRICOM,’ the U.S. military adjunct to Western capitalist expansion in Africa, Mr. Obama’s external goal in Syria is to offset competing imperial claims on Middle Eastern oil. In so doing he is following U.S. geopolitical ‘tradition’ by using military force to maintain a ‘balance of power’ with chaos, death, terror and destruction the tools used to gain and maintain control of resources for the benefit of ‘Western’ multi-national corporations. The official U.S. line has been and remains that oil is a strategic resource, but it is strategic by design. Western corporations have engineered modern economies to be dependent on oil. To use this engineered dependence as the ongoing rationale for military conflict demonstrates Western capitalism to be incapable of the introspection needed for basic self-preservation in the face of changing circumstance–history has most decidedly not yet ended.

Part of the near-term pushback against Mr. Obama’s war on Syria is the implicit admission that Mr. Bush’s war on Iraq was an unmitigated disaster. Mr. Bush’s main accomplishment with his war, in addition to creating murder, mayhem and destruction on an industrial scale, was to demonstrate the limits of American military power. And the presence of Russia as the other central shadow protagonist in Syria points to changing circumstance for the U.S. as imperial power. Across the Middle East, Africa and Asia the cost of imperial capitalism is rising as control of the resources necessary for Western capitalist production is more effectively contested and these resources become more broadly distributed. And Mr. Obama’s desire to go to war in Syria is related in a fashion to his revival of Wall Street, the predatory and dysfunctional financial system in the U.S. and Europe—in that rather than addressing the historical trajectory of the increasing costs of the social and economic catastrophes it causes, Mr. Obama’s intent is to maintain this existing system at all costs. And the reason, as it has always been, is that the class that benefits from imperial capitalism and that has ‘led’ U.S. foreign policy from one catastrophe to another over the last century has control of Western political economy. It is hardly an accident that the Wall Street banks Mr. Obama has pledged undying allegiance to are central players in global commodities (oil, food, water) markets.

With the experience of the U.S. catastrophe in Iraq so fresh in Western minds it is unlikely Mr. Obama’s bid for more of the same will come so easily. Regardless of whether or not he gets his war, the Western political economies of engineered dependence will remain dependent on increasingly costly and destructive imperial wars until the economic system that benefits from chaos, death and destruction is replaced by one that has the possibility of working. Mr. Obama’s implied intent to maintain the existing system at all costs demonstrates the incapacity for systemic ‘self’ correction. And how closely liberal Democrat Barack Obama’s policies have followed those of conservative Republican George W. Bush’s is testament to the unity of interests guiding all public policy in the West. That at this point in history dropping bombs retains an internal logic in ‘official’ Washington demonstrates just how small the realm of political imagination is. To be clear, Mr. Obama, like Mr. Bush before him, is calling on the U.S. military to ‘punish’ the political instability the U.S. created and perpetuated along with the use of chemical weapons the U.S. and  / or its allies sold for a ‘profit’ into this manufactured instability, all in an effort to maintain control of oil for the very Western corporations that engineered Western political economies to be dependent on this oil. Perhaps Mr. Bush’s minions had it right, but for the wrong reasons, with their idiot chant of ‘freedom ain’t free.’

War is everywhere and always a moral and economic catastrophe. That its costs and ‘benefits,’ to the extent looting and pillage can be considered benefits even to those doing the looting and pillaging, are unevenly distributed, tend to result from the basest of human power relationships and premise social relations on material gain rather than social cohesion make imperial war a rough analog of capitalism. And while Western economic indicators like GDP (Gross Domestic Product) have long been understood to count devastation and carnage as ‘positives’ because economic destruction is not subtracted while the economic production from rebuilding is counted as a positive, these are quirks of national accounting, not indications that death, destruction and carnage are even in a perverse sense ‘constructive.’ That Mr. Bush (and Mr. Obama) was educated at America’s most elite schools and apparently believes that war is ‘good for the economy’ has a class dimension that likely goes beyond his expressed disinterest in the Keynesian economics grudgingly taught in American schools—the class he was born into has tended to benefit greatly from the looting and pillage of imperial capitalism. It was no accident that his Cabinet was loaded with ‘chicken hawks,’ advocates of wars that other people fight, who also happened to be ‘oil men’ (and women) —it is a class privilege in the U.S. With yet another war for imperial capitalism looming, it is time to end this class privilege.

Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran
by JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth.

President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted “red line” around Syria’s chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.

It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene should that happen.

According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for a US military response.

It is worth remembering that Obama’s supposed “dithering” on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel’s “daring” strikes on Syria – at least three since the start of the year.

It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria.

That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

To understand the respective views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago.

Israel and its ideological twin in Washington, the neoconservatives, rallied to the cause of toppling Saddam Hussein, believing that it should be the prelude to an equally devastating blow against Iran.

Israel was keen to see its two chief regional enemies weakened simultaneously. Saddam’s Iraq had been the chief sponsor of Palestinian resistance against Israel. Iran, meanwhile, had begun developing a civilian nuclear programme that Israel feared could pave the way to an Iranian bomb, ending Israel’s regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The neocons carried out the first phase of the plan, destroying Iraq, but then ran up against domestic opposition that blocked implementation of the second stage: the break-up of Iran.

The consequences are well known. As Iraq imploded into sectarian violence, Iran’s fortunes rose. Tehran strengthened its role as regional sponsor of resistance against Israel – or what became Washington’s new “axis of evil” – that included Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Israel and the US both regard Syria as the geographical “keystone” of that axis, as Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Jerusalem Post this week, and one that needs to be removed if Iran is to be isolated, weakened or attacked.

But Israel and the US drew different lessons from Iraq. Washington is now wary of its ground forces becoming bogged down again, as well as fearful of reviving a cold war confrontation with Moscow. It prefers instead to rely on proxies to contain and exhaust the Syrian regime.

Israel, on the other hand, understands the danger of manoeuvring its patron into a showdown with Damascus without ensuring this time that Iran is tied into the plan. Toppling Assad alone would simply add emboldened jihadists to the troubles on its doorstep.

Given these assessments, Israel and the US have struggled to envision a realistic endgame that would satisfy them both. Obama fears setting the region, and possibly the world, ablaze with a direct attack on Iran; Israel is worried about stretching its patron’s patience by openly pushing it into another catastrophic venture to guarantee its regional hegemony.

In his interview published yesterday by the Jerusalem Post, Michael Oren claimed that Israel had in fact been trying to oust Assad since the civil war erupted more than two years ago. He said Israel “always preferred the bad guys [jihadist groups] who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys [the Assad regime] who were backed by Iran.”

That seems improbable. Although the Sunni jihadist groups, some with links to al-Qaeda, are not natural allies for either the Shia leaders of Iran or Hizbollah, they would be strongly hostile to Israel. Oren’s comments, however, do indicate the degree to which Israel’s strategic priorities are obsessively viewed through the prism of an attack on Iran.

More likely, Israel has focused on using the civil war as a way to box Assad into his heartlands. That way, he becomes a less useful ally to Hizbollah, Iran and Russia, while the civil war keeps both his regime and the opposition weak.

Israel would have preferred a US strike on Syria, a goal its lobbyists in Washington were briefly mobilised to achieve. But the intention was not to remove Assad but to assert what Danny Ayalon, a former deputy Israeli foreign minister, referred to as “American and Israeli deterrence” – code for signalling to Tehran that it was being lined up as the next target.

That threat now looks empty. As Silvan Shalom, a senior government minister, observed: “If it is impossible to do anything against little Syria, then certainly it’s not possible against big Iran.”

But the new US-Russian deal to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons can probably be turned to Israel’s advantage, so long as Israel prevents attention shifting to its own likely stockpiles.

In the short term, Israel has reason to fear Assad’s loss of control of his chemical weapons, with the danger that they pass either to the jihadists or to Hizbollah. The timetable for the weapons destruction should help to minimise those risks – in the words of one Israeli commentator, it is like Israel “winning the lottery”.

But Israel also suspects that Damascus is likely to procrastinate on disarmament. In any case, efforts to locate and destroy its chemical weapons in the midst of a civil war will be lengthy and difficult.

And that may provide Israel with a way back in. Soon, as Israeli analysts are already pointing out, Syria will be hosting international inspectors searching for WMD, not unlike the situation in Iraq shortly before the US-led invasion of 2003. Israel, it can safely be assumed, will quietly meddle, trying to persuade the West that Assad is not cooperating and that Hizbullah and Iran are implicated.

 

In a vein Israel may mine later, a Syrian opposition leader, Selim Idris, claimed at the weekend that Damascus was seeking to conceal the extent of its stockpiles by passing them to Lebanon and Iraq.

Obama is not the only one to have set a red line. Last year, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, drew one on a cartoon bomb at the United Nations as he warned that the world faced an imminent existential threat from an Iranian nuclear weapon.

Israel still desperately wants its chief foe, Iran, crushed. And if it can find a way to lever the US into doing its dirty work, it will exploit the opening – regardless of whether such action ramps up the suffering in Syria.

UK Ministry of Defense sets out how to sell wars to the public

The armed forces should seek to make British
involvement in future wars more palatable to
the public by reducing the public profile of
repatriation ceremonies for casualties,
according to a Ministry of Defence unit that
formulates strategy. Other suggestions made by the MoD thinktank in
a discussion paper examining how to assuage
"casualty averse" public opinion include the
greater use of mercenaries and unmanned
vehicles, as well as the SAS and other special
forces, because it says losses sustained by the elite soldiers do not have the same impact on the
public and press. The document, written in November 2012 and
obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of
Information Act, discusses how public reaction
to casualties can be influenced and recommends
that the armed forces should have "a clear and
constant information campaign in order to influence the major areas of press and public
opinion". It says that to support such a campaign the MoD
should consider a number of steps, one of which
would be to "reduce the profile of the
repatriation ceremonies" – an apparent
reference to the processions of hearses carrying
coffins draped in the union flag that were driven through towns near RAF bases where bodies
were brought back. For four years up to 2011, 345 servicemen killed
in action were brought back to RAF Lyneham
and driven through Royal Wootton Bassett, in
Wiltshire, in front of crowds of mourners. Since
then, bodies have been repatriated via RAF Brize
Norton, in Oxfordshire, with hearses driven through nearby Carterton. The MoD's suggestion received a scathing
reaction from some families of dead military
personnel. Deborah Allbutt, whose husband
Stephen was killed in a friendly fire incident in
Iraq in 2003, described the proposals for
repatriation ceremonies as "brushing the deaths under the carpet". She said: "They are fighting and giving their
lives. Why should they be hidden away? It would
be absolutely disgraceful." Allbutt, with others,
gained a landmark ruling this year that relatives
of killed or injured soldiers can seek damages
under human rights legislation. The paper, by the MoD's development, concepts
and doctrine centre (DCDC), recommends taking
steps to "reduce public sensitivity to the
penalties inherent in military operations" and
says the ministry should "inculcate an attitude
that service may involve sacrifice and that such risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken as a
matter of professional judgment". The paper amounts to what could be considered
a prescient analysis of why the British public and
MPs were so reluctant to support an attack on
Syria. It also says that in any conflict the MoD
should ensure that the reason for going to war is
"clearly explained to the public". The eight-page paper argues that the military
may have come to wrongly believe that the
public, and as a result the government, has
become more "risk averse" on the basis of recent
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "However, this assertion is based on recent,
post-2000 experience and we are in danger of
learning false lessons concerning the public's
attitude to military operations," the paper,
which has no named author, adds. "Historically, once the public are convinced that
they have a stake in the conflict they are
prepared to endorse military risks and will
accept casualties as the necessary consequence
of the use of military force." To back this up, it cites "robust" public support
for earlier conflicts – the Falklands war and
operations in Northern Ireland between 1969
and 2007. "In those cases where the public is
unconvinced of the relevance of the campaign to
their wellbeing they are not prepared to condone military risk and are acutely sensitive to
the level of casualties incurred. "Neither the action in Iraq nor the operations in
Afghanistan have enjoyed public support and we
are in danger of learning a false lesson from the
experience of the last 10 years." The report adds: "The public have become
better informed and our opponents more
sophisticated in the exploitation of the sources
of information with the net result that
convincing the nation of the need to run military
risks has become more difficult but no less essential." Among other suggestions that could contend
with worries about casualty numbers, the DCDC
recommends a major investment in
"autonomous systems for unmanned vehicles",
cyber-operations and the increased use of
mercenaries, referred to as "contractors". Noting that the growth of private security
companies has proceeded at a spectacular rate
during the past 10 years, it adds: "Neither the
media nor the public in the west appear to
identify with contractors in the way that they do
with their military personnel. Thus casualties from within the contractorised force are more
acceptable in pursuit of military ends than those
from among our own forces." Investing in greater numbers of special forces is
also recommended. The paper suggests: "The
public appear to have a more robust attitude to
SF [special forces] losses." In a reference to a
May 1982 helicopter crash, it says: "The loss of
19 SAS soldiers in a single aircraft accident during the Falklands campaign did not arouse
any significant comment." An MoD spokesman said: "It is entirely right that
we publicly honour those who have made the
ultimate sacrifice and there are no plans to
change the way in which repatriation ceremonies
are conducted. A key purpose of the
development, concepts and doctrine centre is to produce research which tests and challenges
established doctrine and its papers are designed
to stimulate internal debate, not outline
government policy or positions. To represent
this paper as policy or a potential shift of policy
is misleading." Christopher Dandeker, a professor of military
sociology at King's College London, said that the
issues raised in the paper were timely as the
public had recently shown that they were
unconvinced by what political elites wanted to
do in relation to the use of force in Syria. It also made sense that the military would pay greater
attention to the role of military families, who
were becoming "a more politically active,
questioning independent stakeholder in the
military community".

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/26/mod-study-sell-wars-public

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Insight: The struggle to tame
Africa's beast of a megacity
By Tim Cocks

A walk along the two kilometers
of light rail that Lagos authorities have managed to
build in three years gives a sense of how hard it is
to impose order on one of Africa's most chaotic
cities. From either side of the concrete structure - no track
has yet been laid - the crowded slums and
highways of Nigeria's lagoon-side commercial hub
teem with activity. Its trademark yellow buses overtake, undertake and
force their way down impossibly narrow side
streets, where women stir pots next to canals
clogged with rubbish. With between 15 million and 21 million people - the
upper estimate is the official one, though no one
really knows - and generating a third of GDP for
Africa's second biggest economy, Lagos has
become almost as alluring to yield-hungry investors
as it is to the 4,000 or so economic migrants who turn up each day. Violent crime, mushrooming slums, police extortion
and widespread fraud have often held investment
back, but in the past decade, authorities have
started trying to tackle some of the obstacles,
especially maddening traffic bottlenecks. "Just keeping Lagos roads moving without rail,
pushing that kind of tonnage just through our road
network, now that's the eighth wonder of the world,"
says Governor Babtunde Fashola. Fashola and his predecessor, Bola Tinubu, have
tried to turn the city from a byword for squalor into a
glitzy business hub. Their success will rest on
projects like the light rail, which has involved
massive and controversial slum clearance. If they manage, it could become an investment hub
in Africa and a model for fast-urbanizing African
nations. If not, it might face a dystopian crime-
ridden future not unlike its past. "WE CAN'T STOP THEM COMING" If Lagos were a country its GDP would make it
Africa's seventh biggest economy - more than twice
the size of Kenya's. Its large consumer market is
already well established for firms like Unilever,
Heineken and Nestle. One of Africa's biggest stock markets sits here, as
does its second biggest market in government
bonds. Industry is hampered by poor power
generation, but the service sector is booming. Lagos accounts for more than half the non-oil
economy of Africa's leading energy producer, says
economist Paul Collier, who sees it as key to
breaking the country's dependence on oil. "Lagos is Africa's best chance of a productive
megacity," he wrote in The Plundered Planet. "As
oil runs down and is replaced by a new economy ...
Nigeria's economic future lies in Lagos." But it faces a daily challenge just trying to keep up
with the pace of population growth, much of it on
the edge of water. Nigeria, already pushing 170 million people, will be
home to 400 million by 2050, making it the world's
fourth most populous country, according to the
global Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Lagos
will have roughly doubled in size by then, Fashola
and demographers agree. On top of Nigeria's high birth rate, there is
migration. "The more successful Lagos is, the more people it
attracts. That's the Catch-22," said Kayode
Akindele, partner in a Lagos-based consultancy.
"Social services can't keep up." Fashola's planning commissioner Ben Akabueze
thinks Lagos could have 35 million people by 2025
on current growth rates. In 1970, authorities say,
there were just 1.4 million Lagosians. "We can't stop them from coming," Akabueze told
Reuters from his office in mainland Lagos's noisy,
heaving Ikeja district. "There's been a net positive
migration almost on a daily basis." To try to cope better, the government is rolling out
a compulsory residents' registration. "Everybody is
welcome," Akabueze says. "But we want to
document the people who stay." VEHICLES FOR CHANGE The influx puts pressure on inadequate housing,
and spawns unemployed youths with few options
for making a living outside the street gangs - the
infamous 'area boys' who informally control territory
and extort money from passers by. But the biggest headache is travel. The transport
authority says there are 9 million road trips a day in
the city. Some Lagosians get up at 4.30 a.m. to
make the office by nine. Things are improving; highways were widened and
police stationed at bottlenecks. New ferry services
now beat traffic by crossing the lagoon in a state
one fifth of which is water. Tutu Adewale, an assistant to a financial
professional, used to spend three or four hours
each way commuting by bus along a tangle of
bridges. Now it takes her 45 minutes by boat. "I made do with it, but it's such a relief now," she
said. The $2.5 billion light rail project will take more time.
China's state-owned China Civil Engineering
Construction Corporation (CCECC) began work in
2010, but there are still 25 km left to build on the
$1.3 billion east-west line, and no work has started
on the 35 km north-south one. The project is behind schedule because there is
barely a stretch of land on which someone isn't
living or trading. Thousands of illegal settlements erected by slum
dwellers have been destroyed this year. No one has
been compensated, because they were never
supposed to be there to begin with. Amnesty International in August condemned the
eviction of 9,000 residents of Badia East and the
razing of their homes in February, leaving many to
sleep in mosquito-infested streets. In one incident, 72 traders from the Igbo ethnic
group were deported to their ancestral lands after
their houses were bulldozed. That appeared to give
slum clearance an ugly ethnic dimension, and
Fashola made a reluctant public apology. "My shop was just right in front of that bridge," said
Igbo trader Uche Okonkwo, 43, surveying the
wreckage of a market trashed to make way for the
rail. "They demolished the warehouse, the shops,
the offices, the showroom, everything." FUTURE FOR THE POOR? Fashola's defenders say slums have to be removed
if projects like the light rail are to happen, but critics
say the heavy-handed approach shows a lack of
sensitivity to the poor. The governor is fixing the city for the besuited
business types, they say, but has been slow on
things like low-cost housing to help those sleeping
under bridges or on rubbish tips. "Much as I admire Fashola, I don't see enough
being done to help those at the bottom," blogger
Tolu Ogunlesi told Reuters in a chic art cafe in the
prestigious Victoria Island, an area housing one the
world's highest concentrations of millionaires. "They're talking about building 1,000 low-cost
housing units a year, but we need hundreds of
thousands a year," he said. There's no shortage of housing projects for the rich.
Moss-dusted colonial-era houses in leafy Ikoyi
district are becoming rare as they get torn down
and swapped for luxury flats. At Bar Beach on the Atlantic Coast, tonnes of sand
is being poured into the ocean to reclaim it for the
proposed Eko Atlantic city, a Dubai-style gated
community that will have chrome skyscrapers,
business parks, palm trees and a marina. Being on water is the only thing it will have in
common with the Makoko slum a few miles away,
where 100,000 fishing people live in houses on
stilts with no sanitation. "MORE ACCOUNTABLE" At his desk piled high with papers, Fashola resents
the notion he has neglected the poor. He points to
projects like massive mains water provision, which
will when finished provide 10-20 liters a day to
Lagosians, even if the city swells to 35 million, he
says. But the state's message is: if you leave the poverty
of your village to live on the streets in Lagos, that's
your lookout. "If you have nowhere to stay, then stay in your
village. You can't simply jump on a bus and come
live under a bridge," Akabueze says. The governor has won praise for dealing with crime.
Many area boys have been co-opted - some as
yellow-shirted traffic cops, while others keep order
in bus terminals. Violent crime has steadily fallen since he took
office in 2007, though there was been a spike in
kidnapping this year. "There was a time security was a big problem,
especially robbery, but you have to hand it to them,
things got a lot better," said Lagos tycoon Tony
Elumelu. Many fret about what will happen when the governor
steps down in 2015. "Everything Fashola's done can easily be reversed.
You'd just have to do nothing, it would be
reversed," said Akindele. Yet a growing number of business people feel the
state's efforts to bring some kind of order to Lagos
may be becoming irreversible. Corruption is rife, but
institutions function; rubbish is collected, streets
are swept, hedges trimmed. "Lagos is depersonalizing politics," United Bank for
Africa CEO Philips Oduoza said. "Institutions are
becoming more important than people, and that
could outlast the governor." Reinforcing this are rocketing tax receipts; 65
percent of state revenues are now non-oil. The governor, who gets up at 7 a.m. and works
until 3 a.m., says his to-do list isn't getting any
shorter. "In a football match, the last 15 minutes can be the
most decisive," he says, creaking back in his
leather chair. "So I intend to finish with as much
pace as we started."

When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill a Million People
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER
COCKBURN

There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage
across the decades of Billy Graham’s various
private dealings with Richard Nixon, as displayed
on the tapes gradually released from the
National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s
papers. We’ll come shortly to the flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the
Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction
between the great evangelist and his commander-
in-chief. Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon
was made public. It took the form of a secret
letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted
after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries
from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the
peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act,
Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight
destroy the economy of North Vietnam”. Graham lent his imprimatur to this
recommendation. Thus the preacher was
advocating a policy to the US Commander in
Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have
killed a million people. The German high
commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss- Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg
for breaching dikes in Holland in World War
Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from
destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in
1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that
irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.) This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war
criminal did not excite any commotion when it
became public in 1989, twenty years after it was
written. No one thought to chide Graham or even
question him on the matter. Very different has
been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about
Jewish domination of the media and Graham
invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the
media. On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, in this 1972 Oval Office
session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham,
the President raises a topic about which “we can’t
talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in
Hollywood and the media. Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative
who was executive producer of the NBC hit,
“Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him
that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to
claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others,
are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K.
Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite
“front men who may not be of that persuasion,”
but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.” “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the
country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s
best-known preacher declares. “You believe that?” Nixon says. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we
might be able to do something,” Graham replies. Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does
not mean “that all the Jews are bad,” but that
most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at
any price except where support for Israel is
concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli
Jews.” “That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs
with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of
Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the
pornographic stuff,” Graham adds. Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are
great friends of mine. They swarm around me
and are friendly to me. Because they know I am
friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know
how I really feel about what they’re doing to this
country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says to
Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this
point about the Jews across.” “It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies. “Well,” says Nixon, “It’s also, the Jews are
irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of
bastards.” Within days of these exchanges becoming public
the decrepit Graham was hauled from his semi-
dotage, and impelled to express public
contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited
as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White
House table talk. Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is
consonant with the standard conversational bill
of fare at 75 per cent of the country clubs in
America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree? Nixon thought that American Jews were lefty
peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party
and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who
had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all
acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they
wanted to kill a million Jews. That’s what Billy Graham said about the
Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat. This essay is excerpted from End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate.

Why Israel Murdered Arafat
by JONATHAN COOK

It seems there are still plenty of parties who would prefer that Arafat’s death continues to be
treated as a mystery rather than as an assassination. It is hard, however, to avoid drawing the logical conclusion from the finding last week by Swiss scientists that the Palestinian leader’s body contained high levels of a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. An inconclusive and much more
limited study by a Russian team published immediately after the Swiss announcement also suggests Arafat died from poisoning. 

It is time to state the obvious: Arafat was killed. And suspicion falls squarely on Israel. 

Israel alone had the means, track record, stated intention and motive. Without Israel’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, it may not be quite enough to secure a conviction in a court of law, but it should be evidence enough to convict
Israel in the court of world opinion. 

Israel had access to polonium from its nuclear reactor in Dimona, and it has a long record of carrying out political assassinations, some
ostentatious and others covert, often using hard- to-trace chemical agents. Most notoriously, Israel tried to quietly kill another Palestinian leader, Khaled Meshal of Hamas, in Jordan in 1997, injecting a poison into his ear. Meshal was saved only because the assassins were caught and Israel was forced to supply an antidote. Israeli leaders have been queuing up to deny
there was ever any malign intent from Israel’s side towards Arafat. Silvan Shalom, the energy minister, claimed last week: “We never made a decision to harm him physically.” Shalom must
be suffering from a memory lapse. 

There is plenty of evidence that Israel wanted Arafat – in the euphemism of that time –
“removed”. In January 2002, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s military chief of staff, was caught on a microphone whispering to Israel’s prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, about Arafat: “We have to get rid of him.” 

With the Palestinian leader holed up for more than two years in his battered compound in
Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, the debate in the Israel government centred on whether he should be exiled or killed. In September 2003, when Shalom was foreign minister, the cabinet even issued a warning that
Israel would “remove this obstacle in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing.” The then-deputy
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, clarified that killing Arafat was “one of the options”. What stayed Israel’s hand – and fuelled its equivocal tone – was Washington’s adamant
opposition. In the wake of these threats, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, warned that a
move against Arafat would trigger “rage throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world and in many other parts of the world”. By April 2004, however, Sharon declared he was no longer obligated by his earlier commitment to President George Bush not to “harm Arafat
physically”. “I am released from that pledge,” he observed. The White House too indicated a
weakening of its stance: an unnamed spokesman responded feebly that the US “opposed any such action”. Unknown is whether Israel was able to carry out
the assassination alone, or whether it needed to recruit a member or members of Arafat’s inner circle, with him inside his Ramallah compound, as accomplices to deliver the radioactive poison. So what about motive? How did Israel gain from
“removing” Arafat? To understand Israel’s thinking, one needs to return to another debate
raging at that time, among Palestinians. The Palestinian leadership was split into two
camps, centred on Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir apparent. The pair had starkly
divergent strategies for dealing with Israel. In Arafat’s view, Israel had reneged on commitments it made in the Oslo accords. He was
therefore loath to invest exclusively in the peace process. He wanted a twin strategy: keeping open channels for talks while maintaining the option of
armed resistance to pressure Israel. For this reason he kept a tight personal grip on the
Palestinian security forces. Abbas, on the other hand, believed that armed resistance was a gift to Israel, delegitimising the
Palestinian struggle. He wanted to focus exclusively on negotiations and state-building, hoping to exert indirect pressure on Israel by
proving to the international community that the Palestinians could be trusted with statehood. His priority was cooperating closely with the US and Israel in security matters. Israel and the US strongly preferred Abbas’s
approach, even forcing Arafat for a time to reduce his own influence by appointing Abbas to a newly created post of prime minister. Israel’s primary concern was that, however much of a prisoner they made Arafat, he would remain
a unifying figure for Palestinians. By refusing to renounce armed struggle, Arafat managed to
contain – if only just – the mounting tensions between his own Fatah movement and its chief rival, Hamas. With Arafat gone, and the conciliatory Abbas
installed in his place, those tensions erupted violently into the open – as Israel surely knew
they would. That culminated in a split that tore apart the Palestinian national movement and led
to a territorial schism between the Fatah- controlled West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza. In Israel’s oft-used terminology, Arafat was the
head of the “infrastructure of terror”. But Israel’s preference for Abbas derived not from respect
for him or from a belief that he could successfully persuade Palestinians to accept a peace deal. Sharon famously declared that Abbas was no more impressive than a “plucked chicken”. Israel’s interests in killing Arafat are evident when one considers what occurred after his
death. Not only did the Palestinian national movement collapse, but the Palestinian leadership got drawn back into a series of futile
peace talks, leaving Israel clear to concentrate on land grabs and settlement building.

Contemplating the matter of whether Israel benefited from the loss of Arafat, Palestinian
analyst Mouin Rabbani observed: “Hasn’t Abu Mazen [Abbas’] exemplary commitment to Oslo
over the years, and maintenance of security cooperation with Israel through thick and thin, already settled this question?” Abbas’ strategy may be facing its ultimate test now, as the Palestinian negotiating team once again try to coax out of Israel the barest
concessions on statehood at the risk of being blamed for the talks’ inevitable failure. The effort
already looks deeply misguided. While the negotiations have secured for the Palestinians only a handful of ageing political
prisoners, Israel has so far announced in return a
massive expansion of the settlements and the
threatened eviction of some 15,000 Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. It is doubtless a trade-off Arafat would have rued.

This is an interesting thread, but it would be better if you formatted the posts so that they were more readable. I see that you did that with 2 or 3 of them, but most aren't like that, unfortunately.

"They killed Gaddafi but they effed up a country"
Roving Eye

Oct 11,
In Libya, Premier Calls Kidnapping Failed ‘Coup’

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan of Libya
said on Friday that his kidnapping the day
before by militia members was no different than a “coup” and had been orchestrated by opponents in the legislature who want to force him from office. Scores of armed gunmen seized Mr. Zeidan from his hotel room in Tripoli early Thursday and released him nine hours later only under pressure from Defense Ministry officials and rival militias.

Oct 24,
Cyrenaica: a divided Libya

Federalists announced a government for
Cyrenaica today. Consisting of a prime minister, deputy prime minister and 24 other ministers, it is viewed as largely the creation of Ibrahim Jadhran, the former Petroleum Facilities Guard commander who is leading the eastern oil terminals blockade and who was elected as head
of the self-proclaimed Cyrenaica Council’s
Political Bureau on 17 August.

It was Jadhran who named Abdraba
Abdulhameed Al-Barasi to be Cyrenaica’s “prime minister” three weeks ago and who today said that the announcement of the government was two days late but that “we fulfilled our promise of a new regional government”.

Barasi said that the reason for the move was because the central authorities “have failed and have shown incompetence and corruption”. They were not to be trusted anymore, he said. Also, Cyrenaica had suffered systematic negligence.His “government”, he declared, took its legitimacy and legal status from the 1951 Kingdom of Libya constitution (which, in fact was amended in 1963, and the three-state federal makeup was replaced by a United Kingdom of Libya with 10 regions).

Nov 10,
Libya PM warns of foreign intervention

. Libya’s Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has warned his people of the possibility of foreign powers intervening unless the country's current chaos ends. "The international community cannot tolerate a state in the middle of the Mediterranean that is a source of violence, terrorism and murder," said Zeidan on Sunday in an appeal aimed at rallying his campaign against militia groups. Citing the example of Iraq, he warned against "the intervention of foreign occupation forces" in Libya. The people must take to the streets ... and support the building up of the army and police. Ali Zeidan, Libya's Prime Minister Zeidan said his country was still subject to a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allows the international community to intervene to protect civilians.

Nov 11,
Libyan separatists take over oil
exports as PM warns of foreign
intervention

A separatist Libyan region has announced an establishment of an independent oil company after taking over several commercial sea ports. As Tripoli struggles to regain control, the PM has warned of
foreign intervention unless central govt rule is restored.

The prime minister of the self-proclaimed Cyrenaica government made a live announcement on nationwide television claiming that an oil firm has been set up in Tobruk next to the Hariga port where
the locals on Friday did refused to allow a
government-chartered tanker to load 600,000 barrels of oil bound for Italy.

Nov 15,
Misrata militia opens fire on protesters
At least 32 people were killed and 391 wounded, a Health Ministry official said. Libyan Defense Minister Abdullah Al-Thani cut short his visit to Jordan and is returning to his home country, LANA reported. The Misrata militia reportedly opened fire with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at protesters as they approached its headquarters in the Gharghour district. According to a Reuters report, the militia fired an anti-aircraft cannon into the crowd, after which the protesters first fled but then returned heavily armed. The report added that the demonstrators stormed the gated building, and kept the militiamen there
until nightfall.

Nov 17
Libya's deputy spy chief kidnapped in Tripoli

Libya's deputy intelligence chief was kidnapped outside Tripoli's international airport on Sunday, a month after the prime minister was snatched by militiamen. Mustafa Noah, the head of agency's espionage unit, was bundled into a vehicle in the car park in the capital, and had no bodyguards with him at the time, two security sources said, without giving further details on the attackers or their motives.

The Wahhabi-Likudnik war of terror
By Pepe Escobar
The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in Beirut - with at least 23 people killed and 170 wounded - was a de facto terror attack happening on 11/19. Numerology-wise, naturally 9/11 comes to mind; and so the case of the
Washington-declared war on terror metastasizing - largely conducted by oozy forms of Saudi "intelligence".

Yet don't expect the "West" to condemn this as terror. Look at the headlines; it's all normalized as "blasts" - as if children were playing with firecrackers.

Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan's (aka Bandar Bush's) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here's another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action.

Nuance also applies. Bandar Bush's strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.

While Hezbollah welcomes the fight, wherever it takes place, Tehran's position is more cautious. It does not want to go all out against the Saudis - at least for now, with the crucial nuclear negotiation on the table in Geneva, and (still) the possibility of a Geneva II regarding Syria. Yet the House of Saud is not welcoming Geneva II anytime soon because it has absolutely nothing to propose except regime change.

On Syria, the main pillar of Bandar Bush's strategy is to turn the previously "Free" Syrian Army into a "national army" of 30,000 or so fully weaponized hardcore fighters - mostly supplied by the "Army of
Islam", which is nothing but a cipher for the Jabhat al-Nusra. King Playstation of Jordan, also known as Abdullah, collaborates as the provider of training camps near the Syrian border. Whatever happens, one thing is certain; expect Bandar Bush's goons to be carrying out more suicide bombings on both Lebanon and Syria.

The Zionist/Wahhabi/Salafi axis The dodgy al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam
Brigades in theory exist since 2005, placing the odd bomb here and there. One sheikh Sijareddin Zreikat tweeted responsibility for the Beirut terror attack.
Curioser and curioser, the claim was "discovered" and translated into English by the Israeli disinformation website SITE.

Yet another Israeli intelligence disinformation site, DEBKAfile, claimed the terror attack was an Iran/Hezbollah false flag, based on a "Saudi warning"
reaching "Western intelligence agencies, including Israel".The rationale, according to "Saudi intelligence", was "to convince Hezbollah fighters consigned against their will to the Syrian battlefield".

This does not even qualify as pathetic. Hezbollah is basically defending the Lebanese-Syrian border, and has only a few hundred fighters inside Syria. Moreover, no string of suicide bombings will deter Hezbollah and Tehran from regaining control of what really matters in the Syrian strategic context; the Qalamoun area.

Qalamoun, ringed by mountains, is a 50-kilometer stretch bordering the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, between Damascus and al-Nabk, and right on the absolutely critical Damascus-Homs corridor of the
M5 highway. The Syrian army is on the offensive in Qalamoun. Recapturing the whole area is just a matter of time. This means controlling the northernapproach to Damascus. Hezbollah is helping in the
offensive out of Bekaa valley. This does not mean they will camp out in Syria afterwards.

Now for the false flag accusation. As far as real false flags are concerned, one just has to re-examine three recent international bombings that supposed victimized Israel. In India the bomb had
no projectiles; it barely injured an Israeli attache. In Azerbaijan the bomb was miraculously "discovered" before it went off. And in Thailand, the bomb exploded too soon, injuring only a nearby Iranian
.
Crass Israeli disinformation is unmasked when it leaps into this conclusion:
"If Tehran is capable of such atrocities merely as a diversionary tactic, then perhaps Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin ought to take a really
hard look at their negotiating partner across the table before signing a major deal Wednesday, Nov. 20, which leaves Iran's nuclear program in place."

So this neatly ties up with the current Israeli hysteria about the Geneva negotiations, which also includes the umpteenth report by a News Corporation outfit, London's Sunday Times, that Saudi Arabia will help Israel to attack Iran.

It also ties up with the proverbial US shills spinning, gloating rather, that, "strategically, this de-facto Israeli alliance with the Saudis is an extraordinary opportunity for Israel".

Even such shills have to admit that the House of Saud is "blocking formation of any government in Lebanon, for example, to obstruct Iran's ally, Hezbollah". "Blocking" of course is a euphemism to
normalize suicide bombing.

And then comes the ultimate wishful thinking disguised as "analysis"; Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu "bidding to replace the United States as military protector of the status quo". Translation; the Likudniks dreaming of becoming the new military Mob boss of petrodollar Wahhabis.

The enablers
Bandar Bush's strategy - weaponizing and providing cover to Salafis, jihadis and every patsy or mercenary in between - will go on unabated. After Bandar Bush convinced Washington to get rid of the
Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qataris, the Saudis are the supreme warfare go-to channel. The Bandar Bush machine has ties with virtually every jihadi outfit in the Levant.

It certainly helps that Bandar has the perfect cover; the fact that he knows and has cajoled every significant player in Washington. In the US, Bandar Bush remains a dashing hero, even eliciting fawning comparisons with Gatsby. Right. And my name is actually Daisy.

Even with its own embassy attacked in Lebanon, Iran is maintaining an extremely calibrated approach. The number-one priority is the nuclear negotiations in Geneva with the partner that really
matters, the US. This explains Iran blaming the Beirut terror attack on the proverbial "Zionists", and not Saudi-enabled jihadis posing as "rebels" and
part of the whole Bandar Bush nebula.

For the moment though, enough of Orwellian newspeak. What happened in Beirut was a terror attack, cheered by Israel, and fully enabled by Saudis; a graphic display by the Likudnik-House of
Saud axis.

Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then
by Peter Beinart

If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was
considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that
he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise,
given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus
requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers
must remember now.

We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of
tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places— Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language
of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”.

In South Africa, it was the Soviet bloc—the same communist governments that were brutally repressing their own people—that helped the ANC fight apartheid. In the 1980s, they were joined by an
American and European anti-apartheid movement willing to overlook the ANC’s communist ties because they refused to see South Africa’s freedom struggle through a Cold War lens. At a time when men like Reagan and Cheney were insisting that the most important thing about Mandela was where he stood in the standoff between Washington and Moscow, millions of citizens across the West insisted that the ANC could be Soviet-backed, communist-influenced, and still lead a movement for freedom.

They were right. When it came to other countries, Mandela’s leftist ties did sometimes blind him to communism’s crimes. In 1991, for instance, he called Fidel Castro “a source of inspiration to all
freedom-loving people.” But at home, where it mattered most, the ANC was a genuine, multiracial movement for democracy. And so the Americans
who best championed South African freedom were the ones who didn’t view freedom as synonymous with the geopolitical interests of the United States.

Therein lies Mandela’s real lesson for Americans today. The Cold War is over, but mini-Cold Wars have followed. And once again, American elites, especially on the right, have a bad habit of using “freedom” as a euphemism for whatever serves American power. Thus, American politicians frequently suggest that by impoverishing the people of Iran with ever-harsher economic sanctions, and
threatening to bomb them, we are promoting their freedom, even though the people risking their life for democracy in Iran—people like dissident journalist Akbar Ganji and Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi—passionately disagree.

Mandela challenged that. Like Martin Luther King, who publicly repudiated Lyndon Johnson’s claim that Vietnam was a war for democracy, Mandela rejected George W. Bush’s idealistic rationalizations of the Iraq War. In 2003, when Bush was promising to liberate Iraq’s people, Mandela said, “All that he wants is Iraqi oil.” When Bush declared Iraq’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons a threat to the planet, Mandela had the bad manners to remind Bush that the only country to have actually used nukes was the United States. Mandela’s message to America’s leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t pretend
you are pure.

As with King, it is this subversive aspect of Mandela’s legacy that is most in danger of being erased as he enters America’s pantheon of sanitized moral icons. But it is precisely the aspect that Americans most badly need. American power
and human freedom are two very different things. Sometimes they intersect; sometimes they do not. Walking in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps requires being able to tell the difference.

Why Many Charities are Corporate Scams
By Brad Yu.

#1 TIPPING 101:
So I’m the owner of Company X. My workers’ used to be paid a whopping 7.25 per/hour because of the ridiculous “minimum wage” labor laws that are seriously cutting into my profits. I only want to pay them 2.13 per/hour, which is
still way too much! If I do this I can save about $5 dollars per hour on every employee. Actually, I don’t want to pay them anything, but I know that won’t fly. They might start asking for a fair wage or even worse: dreaded “union” representation! If I have 50 full-time employees I can make an extra $500,000 extra dollars a year! How can I achieve this? The law is against me. Or is it? DING DING. TIPPING!

So people can come to my restaurant and give TIPS to my workers for “good” service. What if I make tipping account for nearly their entire wage? That way the CUSTOMER has to pay for their labor while I don’t need to pay my workers an EXTRA penny! I don’t even have to include it into the price of the food or on the bill most of the time. It’s just an additional cost the customer should be expected to pay. Now, let’s make it part of the LAW and the CULTURE and VUALA! You got yourself some home grown All-American authentic: CORPORATE CHARITY. What a brilliant CORPORATE SCAM!

Because my customers have morals and don’t want to bear witness to their poor server on the street, begging for loose change; they will act as CHARITY. To top it off, my employees will “work” even harder if their pay is “performance” based – especially if they want to beat minimum wage on slower days. So, if they want acceptable CHARITY TIPS they have to please my customers who, if continue patronizing my establishment, will fully cover the cost of my 3rd vacation home in Florida.


But just to spice up the deal even more, I will pay nearly all the other restaurant workers (hosts, Bussers, food runners, bartenders, counter personnel, etc) 2.13 per/hour and make everyone POOL their TIP money together to SHARE with each other. That way the CHARITY RECIPIENT becomes the CHARITY GIVER! My servants money can then be pooled or “SHARED” to pay my workers so I don’t have to. Sounds communal right?

It’s a sweet deal but not sweet enough. I need to force their obedience by humiliating them as well; especially women. Perhaps I will require them to dress like sluts and flirt with middle age
white men who are certainly the ones PAYING their literal survival. I will require them to BEG for their CHARITY by forcing them to wear tiny company skirts and tank tops (Tilted Kilt, Hooters), dance on the table and tell jokes (Ed Dabevics), and provide bells to ring in a CHARITY SONG like a Pavlov dog experiment (Cold Stone).

Sometimes there just needs to be something extra to trigger the good-grace giving feelings of charity givers to the NEEDY. Even something as simple as a cute little tip jar with some adorable cartoon puppy next to the words: “FEED ME” or “I’M HUNGRY” will do the trick. I know pity often works for those lazy homeless people who choose not work and live on the street. It’s bound to work for my company.

#2 Corporate Charity:

Corporations LOVE charity! WHY?!? Because they get to Bleep up our entire world and we are the lucky ones who end up paying for their EXTERNALITIES – The costs to society to clean up their messes.

So Coca-Cola opens a water bottling factory in India. The water table goes down substantially year after year and locals go thirsty and hungry (because their crops can’t grow without irrigation) as drilling deeper wells becomes increasingly unaffordable. The local community desperately seek help from anyone because their government officials got paid off from Coke and are busy cruising around in their new Rolls Royce
luxury cars. Their neighbors are too busy trying to survive themselves with Pepsi down the street so they can’t help.

In good grace, and because the corporation is such a warm wonderful philanthropic institution, they give some tiny percentage of their profits to some CHARITIES which often makes the
situation just bearable enough to prevent the local people from revolting. (Alfred Nobel’s invention DYNAMITE and is responsible for the killing of uncountable numbers of people around the world; particularly in the mining of minerals
for our iPhones. So what does he do? He forms a CHARITY “PRIZE” FOUNDATION with the word “PEACE” in it.) They also get to proudly display all their charity giving initiatives on the front pages of their websites; next to the company statistics about all their wonderful contributions they have made to society.

So what will the charity do? They will come in and PATCH UP the typically irreversible damage caused by corporate greed through FUND RAISING and VOLUNTEERING of common people. They will come and help dig deeper holes, or reroute water in from another location, or ship some in from outside the country. And who pays for it: in time, money, and energy? WE DO! Of course, without the goodwill of caring common people, what would these people do? Probably die. But does this tackle the source of the problem?

#3 Corporate Welfare
Corporations really do love CHARITY! Actually, they thrive on it. Without charity, people’s situation might be desperate and aware enough to trigger a revolution with the potential to overthrow the very system which makes them rich and powerful. Even so, they still want to pull out funding from medicare, medicaid, unemployment benefits, planned parenthood, education, low income housing subsidies, food share, or anything else directed to benefit working class people for a COPORATE CHARITY tax break.

Wal-Mart now has food donation boxes for its workers who they don’t pay a livable wage to. Ronald Mc. Donald’s House has a box for you to drop your donations for sick children whose parents probably often work at Mc. Donald’s and whose children are often fed the only food their parents can afford or have time to bring home for their kids to eat. ”Would you like fries with that $7.25 pay?” Sorry, you have to super-size your work hours if you want to bring home those factory-farm cancer sticks to your kids. Perhaps $2.13 an hour with customer charity is a more viable profit-over-people solution.

Actually, there is one kind of “CHARITY” which tends to work very consistently well in our society. The public welfare to the rich. We love to subsidize their wealth with our CHARITY GIVING tax breaks and corporate hand outs. We wouldn’t dare want to witness their corporate economy collapse as our $2.13 an hour jobs get
shipped away for even cheaper more exploited labor. We should lace up our work boots and be thankful for all these amazing jobs! We should even worship our billionaires like heroic martyrs: Steve JOBS.

We must look upstream to the source of our suffering. Our options are far broader than Pepsi vs. Coke would like us to think. The only charitable society is an equitable altruistic one where people work in solidarity, not with Ronald Mc Donald, to make a difference for each other and ourselves. So either we keep wasting our
energy trying to patch up a broken system of charity to the rich or work to create new alternatives to this greedy system of human exploitation. The choice is ours.

The Latest in the New Cold War
My Money’s on Putin
by MIKE WHITNEY

“History shows that the United States has
benefited politically and economically from wars in Europe. The huge outflow of capital from Europe following the First and Second World Wars, transformed the U.S. into a superpower … Today, faced with economic decline, the US is trying to precipitate another European war to achieve the same objective.” – Sergey Glazyev, Russian politician and economist “

The discovery of the world’s largest, known gas reserves in the Persian Gulf, shared by Qatar and Iran, and new assessments which found 70 percent more gas in the Levantine in 2007, are key to understanding the dynamics of the conflicts we see today. After a completion of the PARS pipeline, from Iran, through Iraq and Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean coast, the European Union would receive more than an estimated 45 percent of the gas it consumes over the next 100 – 120 years from Russian and Iranian sources. Under non-conflict circumstances, this would warrant an increased integration of the European, Russian and Iranian energy sectors and national economies.” – Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine

The United States failed operation in Syria, has led to an intensification of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. What the Obama administration hoped to achieve in Syria through its support of so called “moderate” Islamic militants was to topple the regime of Bashar al Assad, replace him with a US-backed puppet, and prevent the construction of the critical Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline. That plan hasn’t succeeded nor will it in the near future, which means that the plan for the prospective pipeline will eventually go forward.

Why is that a problem?

It’s a problem because–according to Dr.
Lehmann–”Together with the Russian gas… the EU would be able to cover some 50 percent of its requirements for natural gas via Iranian and Russian sources.” As the primary suppliers of critical resources to Europe, Moscow and Tehran would grow stronger both economically and politically which would significantly undermine the influence of the US and its allies in the region, particularly Qatar and Israel. This is why opponents of the pipeline developed a plan to sabotage the project by fomenting a civil war in Syria. Here’s Lehmann again:

“In 2007, Qatar sent USD 10 billion to Turkey´s Foreign Minister Davotoglu to prepare Turkey´s and Syria´s Muslim Brotherhood for the subversion of Syria. As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help of “rebels”’ (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)

In other words, the idea to arm, train and fund an army of jihadi militants, to oust al Assad and open up Syria to western interests, had its origins in an evolving energy picture that clearly tilted in the favor of US rivals in the region. (Note: We’re not sure why Lehmann leaves out Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the other Gulf States that have also been implicated.)

Lehmann’s thesis is supported by other analysts including the Guardian’s Nafeez Ahmed who explains what was going on behind the scenes of the fake civil uprising in Syria. Here’s a clip from an article by Ahmed titled “Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern”:

“In May 2007, a presidential finding revealed
that Bush had authorised CIA operations against Iran. Anti-Syria operations were also in full swing around this time as part of this covert programme, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. A range of US government and intelligence sources told him that the Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct” of which is “the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups” hostile to the United States and “sympathetic to al-Qaeda.” He noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir
Assad, of Syria”…

According to former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business”, he told French television:

“I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.” … Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

So what was this unfolding strategy to undermine Syria and Iran all about? According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years”, starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.” (“Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern“, The Guardian)

Apparently, Assad was approached by Qatar on the pipeline issue in 2009, but he refused to cooperate in order “to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally.” Had Assad fallen in line and agreed to Qatar’s offer, then the effort to remove him from office probably would have been called off. In any event, it was the developments in Syria that triggered the frenzied reaction in Ukraine. According to Lehmann:

“The war in Ukraine became predictable
(unavoidable?) when the great Muslim
Brotherhood Project in Syria failed during the
summer of 2012. …In June and July 2012 some 20,000 NATO mercenaries who had been recruited and trained in Libya and then staged in the Jordanian border town Al-Mafraq, launched two massive campaigns aimed at seizing the Syrian city of Aleppo. Both campaigns failed and the ”Libyan Brigade” was literally wiped out by the Syrian Arab Army.

It was after this decisive defeat that Saudi Arabia began a massive campaign for the recruitment of jihadi fighters via the network of the Muslim Brotherhoods evil twin sister Al-Qaeda. The International Crisis Group responded by publishing its report ”Tentative Jihad”. Washington had to make an attempt to distance itself ”politically” from the ”extremists”. Plan B, the chemical weapons plan was hedged but it became obvious that the war on Syria was not winnable anymore.” (“The Atlantic Axis and the Making of a War in Ukraine“, New eastern Outlook)

There were other factors that pushed the US
towards a conflagration with Moscow in Ukraine, but the driving force was the fact that US rivals (Russia and Iran) stood to be the dominant players in an energy war that would increasingly erode Washington’s power. Further economic integration between Europe and Russia poses a direct threat to US plans to pivot to Asia, deploy NATO to Russia’s borders, and to continue to denominate global energy supplies in US dollars.

Lehmann notes that he had a conversation with “a top-NATO admiral from a northern European country” who clarified the situation in a terse, two-sentence summary of US foreign policy. He said:

“American colleagues at the Pentagon told me,
unequivocally, that the US and UK never would allow European – Soviet relations to develop to such a degree that they would challenge the US/ UK’s political, economic or military primacy and hegemony on the European continent. Such a development will be prevented by all necessary means, if necessary by provoking a war in central
Europe”.

This is the crux of the issue. The United States is not going to allow any state or combination of states to challenge its dominance. Washington doesn’t want rivals. It wants to be the undisputed, global superpower, which is the point that Paul Wolfowitz articulated in an early draft of the US National Defense Strategy:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-
emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

So the Obama administration is going to do
whatever it thinks is necessary to stop further
EU-Russia economic integration and to preserve the petrodollar system. That system originated in 1974 when President Richard Nixon persuaded OPEC members to denominate their oil exclusively in dollars, and to recycle their surplus oil proceeds into U.S. Treasuries. The arrangement turned out to be a huge windfall for the US, which rakes in more than $1 billion per day via the process. This, in turn, allows the US to over-consume and run hefty deficits. Other nations must stockpile dollars to purchase the energy that runs their machinery, heats their homes and fuels their vehicles. Meanwhile, the US can breezily exchange paper currency, which
it can print at no-expense to itself, for valuable imported goods that cost dearly in terms of labor and materials. These dollars then go into purchasing oil or natural gas, the profits of which are then recycled back into USTs or other dollar- denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, bonds, real estate, or ETFs. This is the virtuous circle that keeps the US in the top spot.

As one critic put it: “World trade is now a game in
which the US produces dollars and the rest of the
world produces things that dollars can buy.” The petrodollar system helps to maintain the
dollar’s monopoly pricing which, in turn, sustains the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It creates excessive demand for dollars which allows the Fed to expand the nation’s credit by dramatically reducing the cost of financing. If oil and natural gas were no longer denominated in USDs, the value of the dollar would fall sharply, the bond market would collapse, and the US economy would slip into a long-term slump.

This is one of the reasons why the US invaded
Iraq shortly after Saddam had switched over to the euro; because it considers any challenge to the petrodollar looting scam as a direct threat to US national security.

Moscow is aware of Washington’s Achilles’s heel and is making every effort to exploit that
weakness by reducing its use of the dollar in its trade agreements. So far, Moscow has persuaded China and Iran to drop the dollar in their bilateral dealings, and they have found that other trading partners are eager to do the same. Recently, Russian economic ministers conducted a “de-dollarization” meeting in which a “currency switch executive order” was issued stating that “the government has the legal power to force Russian companies to trade a percentage of certain goods in rubles.”

Last week, according to RT: “The Russian and Chinese central banks have agreed a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US dollar in bilateral payments. “The draft document between the Central Bank of Russia and the People’s Bank of China on national currency swaps has been agreed by the parties…..The agreement will stimulate further development of direct trade in yuan and rubles on the domestic foreign exchange markets of
Russia and China,” the Russian regulator said. Currently, over 75 percent of payments in
Russia-China trade settlements are made in US dollars, according to Rossiyskaya Gazeta
newspaper.” (“De-Dollarization Accelerates – China/Russia Complete Currency Swap
Agreement“, Zero Hedge)

The attack on the petrodollar recycling system is one of many asymmetrical strategies Moscow is presently employing to discourage US aggression, to defend its sovereignty, and to promote a multi-polar world order where the rule of law prevails. The Kremlin is also pushing for institutional changes that will help to level the playing field instead of creating an unfair advantage for the richer countries like the US. Naturally, replacing the IMF, whose exploitative loans and punitive policies, topped the list for most of the emerging market nations, particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) who, in July, agreed to create a $100 billion Development Bank that will “will counter the influence of Western-based lending institutions and the dollar. The new bank will provide money for infrastructure and development projects in BRICS countries, and unlike the IMF or World Bank, each nation has equal say, regardless of GDP size.

According to RT: “The big launch of the BRICS bank is seen as a first step to break the dominance of the US dollar in global trade, as well as dollar-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both US-based institutions BRICS countries have little influence within… “This mechanism creates the foundation for an
effective protection of our national economies
from a crisis in financial markets,” Russian
President Vladimir Putin said.” (“BRICS establish $100bn bank and currency pool to cut out Western dominance“, RT)

It’s clear that Washington’s aggression in Ukraine has focused Moscow’s attention on retaliation. But rather than confront the US militarily, as Obama and Co. would prefer, Putin is taking aim at the vulnerabilities within the system. A BRICS Development Bank challenges the IMF’s dominant role as lender of last resort, a role that has enhanced the power of the wealthy countries and their industries. The new bank creates the basis for real institutional change, albeit, still within the pervasive capitalist framework. Russian politician and economist, Sergei Glazyev,
summarized Moscow’s approach to the US-
Russia conflagration in an essay titled “US is
militarizing Ukraine to invade Russia.” Here’s an excerpt:

“To stop the war, you need to terminate its
driving forces. At this stage, the war unfolds
mainly in the planes of economic, public relations and politics. All the power of US economic superiority is based on the financial pyramid of debt, and this has gone long beyond sustainability. Its major lenders are collapsing enough to deprive the US market of accumulated US dollars and Treasury bonds. Of course, the collapse of the US financial system will cause serious losses to all holders of US currency and securities. But first, these losses for Russia, Europe and China will be less than the losses caused by American geopolitics unleashing another world war. Secondly, the sooner the exit from the financial obligations of this American
pyramid, the less will be the losses. Third, the
collapse of the dollar Ponzi scheme gives an opportunity, finally, to reform the global
financial system on the basis of equity and
mutual benefit.”

Washington thinks “modern warfare” involves
covert support for proxy armies comprised of
Neo Nazis and Islamic extremists. Moscow thinks modern warfare means undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war through sustained attacks on it’s currency, its institutions, its bond market, and its ability to convince its allies that it is a responsible steward of the global economic system. I’ll put my money on Russia.

"They Pulled Me Back In"
By Eric Margolis

August 16, 2014 "ICH" - Armed humanitarianism 2.0. That’s our new western version of old-fashioned 19th century imperialism, now feminized by President Barack Obama’s lady advisors, painted
pink and accompanied by the kind of soft piano music you hear in ads for women’s products. Last week, the Obama administration latched onto the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis who were being persecuted by those awful ISIS folks – just in jolly good time to divert attention from the massacre in Gaza.

How handy. All three US networks and the
increasingly shackled BBC were ordered to drop Gaza reporting and refocus their camera teams on the suffering Yazidis and, all of a sudden, Iraq’s fleeing Christians.

This was a brilliant media ploy. The world, which was furious at the US for enabling Israel’s savaging of Gaza and killing of almost 2,000 Palestinians, switched its attention to the hitherto unknown Yazidis, and to Iraqi Christians. No one in the US had ever heard of Yazidis but that was ok. Uncle Sam to the rescue.

No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein – even privileged – until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US- engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.

The US and Europe suddenly cheered the ostensible US-French-British `rescue mission.’ Interestingly, those old colonialists, the French and British, were so quick to get involved in oil-rich Iraq: the Brits sent in some of Her Majesty’s Killers, the renowned Special Air Service, or SAS. France and Britain are
sending arms to the Kurdish militia known as `peshmerga.’ Australia, now under a hard right government, may follow suit.

Around 1900, Imperial Britain, France and Russia all claimed the right to intervene in the Levant to supposedly protect its Christians. Such a useful excuse.

America thrilled to see the US Air Force dropped food and water to Yazidi refugees. Even this cynical writer was cheered to see US military power helping the oppressed.

But what of the 1.8 million oppressed Palestinians in Gaza, cut off by Israel and Egypt from food, water, medical supplies and power? What about the millions of refugees in Syria created by western attempts to overthrow its Assad dynasty for backing
Iran? What of millions of internal refugees from the Afghan and Iraq Wars?

Well, Washington did just announced a temporary halt in resupplying deadly US-made Hellfire air to ground missiles to Israel, which has used up its once large supply blowing apart Palestinians in Gaza. Like the fake arms-delivery suspension by the US to Egypt’s brutish regime, it will soon be lifted when
public attention has turned elsewhere.

There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees. What are a handful of Yazidis compared to this sea of homeless? The number and plight of those Yazidi refugees were wildly exaggerated by the western powers to justify their re-intervention in Iraq. Lurid reports of ISIS cruelty may well be true, but this old cynic suspects they are being used and exaggerated to justify intervention. After all, we saw
the similar untruths about Saddam’s regime and al- Qaida’s “threat to the entire globe.”

This kind of stuff, much loved by the British, goes back to bogus stories from 1914 of German soldiers
spiking Belgian babies on their bayonets. Or,
remember the baloney about Kuwaiti babies thrown from their incubators by beastly Iraqis?

Now, the biggest dolts in the US Republican Party like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and my hometown’s own Peter King, claim the US homeland is threatened by pipsqueak ISIS while they try to provoke a real war with Russia over Ukraine. To show just how bizarre US Mideast policy has become: US warplanes are dropping aid to Iraq’s Yazidis (considered devil worshippers by many Iraqi), while they bomb Zaidi tribesmen in northern Yemen who are battling its US-installed military junta in Sa’ana. Yazidis, Zaidis, it’s all very confusing, like those pesky Slovaks and Slovenes. Meanwhile, the White House has ousted its Shia sock puppet in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, in favor of a newer, even more obedient satrap. Maliki was foolish enough to actually believe he was prime minister of Iraq and refused to allow US troops to stay there indefinitely.

Big mistake, Nuri. But shed no tears for him: his vicious death squads murdered and tortured large numbers of Sunni. One of their favorite interrogation tools was an electric drill applied to the kneecap. US generals in Iraq used Shia death squads (patterned on those of El Salvador, a war I covered) to crush Sunni resistance. Now, it’s payback for the Sunnis.

Iraq’s next leader is another CIA-blessed politician who will be expected to make his nation safe for western oil companies. We see the same process in Afghanistan where CIA central casting has produced two ‘candidates’ for president.

As for de facto autonomous Kurds, they have been a western protectorate since 2003 and would be fully independent today were not for fear of a violent reaction by the irritable Turks. Israel has supplied the Kurds with arms since 1970.

Interestingly, the Kurds are now exporting oil
directly to Israel though a Turkish pipeline and
tanker while the regime in Baghdad, cut out of
payments, fumes. There’s long been talk of an
Israeli air base in Kurdistan.

“Just when I though I was out, they pulled me back in.” Michael Corleone’s plaintive line from the “Godfather” is Obama’s tune today. He’s only returning to Iraq for purely humanitarian reasons, a story that markets well to female (mainly Democratic) voters. And because the ISIS Saracens will overrun the Bible Belt soon unless Obama acts. Never mind that the US armed and trained ISIS in Jordan to overthrow Syria’s regime. Now they have gone rogue and must be stopped by a new humanitarian crusade.

So back go American troops into the hellhole of Iraq, an act that defies both military and political logic. But US elections are on the horizon and Hillary Clinton is out there blasting Obama for having left Iraq in the first place. Hillary has just fully aligned herself with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and asserts US troops should have stayed in Iraq…..she who is married to a notorious wartime draft dodger. Republicans are beating the same drum.

Remember the ‘tar baby’ from Uncle Remus’s slave stories of the Deep South. All who touch him get stuck. Well, that’s Iraq for you – in spades. Instead of tar, it’s sticky oil. Obama should have stayed out of Iraq. But politics forced him back in.

How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS
by GARIKAI CHENGU

Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.”

During the 1970′s the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980′s. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

America’s relationship with Al Qaeda has always been a love-hate affair. Depending on whether a particular Al Qaeda terrorist group in a given region furthers American interests or not, the U.S. State Department either funds or aggressively targets that terrorist group. Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy.

The Islamic State is its latest weapon that, much like Al Qaeda, is certainly backfiring. ISIS recently rose to international prominence after its thugs began beheading American journalists. Now the terrorist group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom.

In order to understand why the Islamic State has grown and flourished so quickly, one has to take a look at the organization’s American-backed roots. The 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq created the pre-conditions for radical Sunni groups, like ISIS, to take root. America, rather unwisely, destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state machinery and replaced it with a predominantly Shiite administration. The U.S. occupation caused vast unemployment in Sunni areas, by rejecting socialism and closing down factories in the naive hope that the magical hand of the free market would create jobs. Under the new U.S.-backed Shiite regime, working class Sunni’s lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unlike the white Afrikaners in South Africa, who were allowed to keep their wealth after regime change, upper class Sunni’s were systematically dispossessed of their assets and lost their political influence. Rather than promoting religious integration and unity, American policy in Iraq exacerbated sectarian divisions and created a fertile breading ground for Sunni discontent, from which Al Qaeda in Iraq took root.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq. After 2010 the group rebranded and refocused its efforts on Syria.

There are essentially three wars being waged in Syria: one between the government and the rebels, another between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and yet another between America and Russia. It is this third, neo-Cold War battle that made U.S. foreign policy makers decide to take the risk of arming Islamist rebels in Syria, because Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is a key Russian ally. Rather embarrassingly, many of these Syrian rebels have now turned out to be ISIS thugs, who are openly brandishing American-made M16 Assault rifles.

America’s Middle East policy revolves around oil and Israel. The invasion of Iraq has partially satisfied Washington’s thirst for oil, but ongoing air strikes in Syria and economic sanctions on Iran have everything to do with Israel. The goal is to deprive Israel’s neighboring enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial Syrian and Iranian support.

ISIS is not merely an instrument of terror used by America to topple the Syrian government; it is also used to put pressure on Iran.

The last time Iran invaded another nation was in 1738. Since independence in 1776, the U.S. has been engaged in over 53 military invasions and expeditions. Despite what the Western media’s war cries would have you believe, Iran is clearly not the threat to regional security, Washington is. An Intelligence Report published in 2012, endorsed by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, confirms that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Truth is, any Iranian nuclear ambition, real or imagined, is as a result of American hostility towards Iran, and not the other way around.

America is using ISIS in three ways: to attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat, used to justify the unprecedented expansion of invasive domestic surveillance.

By rapidly increasing both government secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government. Terrorism is an excuse to justify mass surveillance, in preparation for mass revolt.

The so-called “War on Terror” should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military. The two most powerful groups in the U.S. foreign policy establishment are the Israel lobby, which directs U.S. Middle East policy, and the Military-Industrial-Complex, which profits from the former group’s actions. Since George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror” in October 2001, it has cost the American taxpayer approximately 6.6 trillion dollars and thousands of fallen sons and daughters; but, the wars have also raked in billions of dollars for Washington’s military elite.

In fact, more than seventy American companies and individuals have won up to $27 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three years, according to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the study, nearly 75 per cent of these private companies had employees or board members, who either served in, or had close ties to, the executive branch of the Republican and Democratic administrations, members of Congress, or the highest levels of the military.

In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense report stated, “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Truth is, the only way America can win the “War On Terror” is if it stops giving terrorists the motivation and the resources to attack America. Terrorism is the symptom; American imperialism in the Middle East is the cancer. Put simply, the War on Terror is terrorism; only, it is conducted on a much larger scale by people with jets and missiles.

postemail: The China-US 'Brotherhood'
Putin addressing the table: "You want President
Bashar al-Assad to step down? Look at the leaders
you've made in the Middle East in the course of
what you have dubbed the 'Arab Spring'." Putin addressing Obama, Cameron and Hollande:
"You want Russia to abandon Assad and his regime
and go along with an opposition whose leaders don't
know anything except issuing fatwas declaring
people heretics, and whose members - who come
from a bunch of different countries and have multiple orientations - don't know anything except
how to slaughter people and eat human flesh." Putin addressing Obama directly: "Your country
sent its army to Afghanistan in the year 2001 on the
excuse that you are fighting the Taliban and the al-
Qaeda organization and other fundamentalist
terrorists whom your government accused of
carrying out the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington. And here you are today making an
alliance with them in Syria. And you and your allies
are declaring your desire to send them weapons.
And here you have Qatar in which you [the US]
have your biggest base in the region and in the
territory of that country the Taliban are opening a representative office." The best part is that German Chancellor Angela
Merkel then corroborated Putin's every word. And
Chinese President Xi Jinping certainly would have
done the same.

Heil Comrade Putin & Frau Merkel

THE ROVING EYE
Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war? By Pepe Escobar


Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war? By Pepe Escobar Are the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia on a mad spiral leading to yet another war in Europe? Is it inevitable? Far from it.

The US-propelled vassal currently starring in the oligarch dance in Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, last week advanced the proposition that Ukrainians in the near future, after his "reforms", will be asked to vote on whether to join NATO.

Let's be serious here. Many of you will be familiar with the concept of "shatter belt" - territories and peoples that historically have been squeezed between the Germanic Eagle and the Russian Bear.

As we stand, the whole shatter belt - apart from Ukraine and Belarus - has signed up to NATO. A new Berlin wall, this time US-built - from the Baltics to the Black Sea now runs through Kiev. Were Ukraine to become a NATO member in an albeit remote future, the shatter belt buffer zone would disappear. This means NATO - essentially the US - planted right on Russia's western border.

Washington has just announced that it will be pre-positioning more military vehicles in Europe to be used in exercises or "potential military operations". This is perfectly in tune with the
relentless US Think Tankland spin that NATO and the US will be "forced" to balance their commitment to security in Eastern Europe against potential Russian "aggression".

As Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland persist in compounded hysteria about such "aggression", the option of a post-MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) US-Russia nuclear war, terrifying as it must be, is now - casually - back on the discussion table. At least there's a countercurrent: strands of informed Americans are wondering why the US should be paying for Europe's defense when European GDP is larger than that of the US.

[b]Wanna play war, boy?[\b]
Now for the "threat" of nuclear war in Europe - bogus or otherwise. It's pointless to compare the strategic nuclear capabilities of the US and Russia based on numbers, but not on quality.

Take the compounded GDP of US, Germany, France and the UK and compare it to Russia; it's a victory by landslide. Then examine the strategic nuclear scenario, and it's a totally different story. GDP alone does not "win" anything.

Washington/Wall Street elites are now deep into nuclear war paranoia. A Council on Foreign Relations study basically "found out" what Pravda had already reported. Other pieces such as this at least hint at the obvious - glaring US strategic shortcomings.

Consider some of the basics:
•Russian ICBMs armed with MIRVs travel at about 18 Mach; that is way faster than anything in the US arsenal. And basically they are unbeatable.

•The S-400 and S-500 double trouble. Moscow has agreed to sell the S-400 surface-to-air missile system to China. The bottom line is this will make Beijing impermeable to US air power, ICBMs and cruise missiles. Russia, for its part, is already focusing on the state-of-the-art S-500 - which essentially makes the Patriot anti-missile system look like a V-2 from World War II.

•The Russian Iskander missile travels at Mach 7 - with a range of 400 kilometers, carrying a 700 kilogram warhead of several varieties, and with a circular error probability of around five meters. Translation: an ultimate lethal weapon against airfields or logistic infrastructure. The Iskander can reach targets deep inside Europe.

•And then there's the Sukhoi T-50 PAK FA. Talk about a real near-future game-changer.

NATO clowns dreaming of a war on Russia would have to come up with an ironclad system to knock out the Iskanders. They don't have any. Additionally, they would have to face the S-400s, which the Russians can deploy all over the spectrum.

Think of a hefty batch of S-400s positioned at the enclave of Kaliningrad; that would turn NATO air operations deep inside Europe into an absolutely horrendous nightmare. On top of it,
good ol' NATO fighter jets cost a fortune. Imagine the effect of hundreds of destroyed fighter jets on a European Union already
financially devastated and austerity-plagued to death.

As if this was not enough, no one knows the exact extent of NATO's strategic capabilities. Brussels is not talking. Extra- officially, these capabilities are not exactly a marvel. And Russian intelligence knows it.

Still assuming those NATO clowns would insist on playing war, Moscow has already made it very clear Russia would use their awesome arsenal of 5,000-plus tactical nuclear weapons - and whatever else it takes - to defend the nation against a NATO conventional attack. Moreover, a few thousand S-400 and S-500 systems are enough to block a US nuclear attack.

None of this hair-raising Apocalypse Now scenario is even taking into account the Russia-China alliance - the major, game-changing Eurasian story of the 2010s.

Just in case the "pivoting to Asia" gang starts harboring funny ideas about the Middle Kingdom as well, China is massively investing in bouncing lasers off satellites; satellite-hitting missiles; silent submarines that surface beside US aircraft
carriers without prior detection; and a made-in-China anti-missile missile that can hit a reentering satellite moving faster than any ICBM.

In a nutshell, Beijing knows the US surface fleet is obsolete - and undefendable. And needless to add, all of these Chinese modernizing developments are proceeding way faster than
anything in the US.

A modest proposal The spin by the Washington establishment has been relentless: Russia is expanding towards a 21st century empire.

Here, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explains in detail how this is undiluted rubbish. What has actually happened is that Moscow deftly called the Brzezinski-inspired bluff in Ukraine - with all its overtones. No wonder the Empire of Chaos is furious.

And yet there is a solution to defuse the current, hysterical rush to war logic. HereI have examined in some detail how Washington is playing Russian Roulette. Now it's time to advance a modest proposal - as it has been floated by a few concerned analysts from the US, Germany and Asia.

Essentially, it's very simple. It's up to Germany. And it's all about undoing Stalin.

Stalin, at the outset of World War II, took East Prussia from Germany and moved the eastern part of Poland into Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was originally from Russia; it is part of Russia
and was given by Lenin to Ukraine.

So let's have East Prussia returned to Germany; the eastern part of Poland returned to Poland; and eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea - which Khrushchev gave to Ukraine - returned to Russia.

Everyone get their share. No more Stalin. No more arbitrary borders. That's what the Chinese would define as a "triple win" situation. Of course, the Empire of Chaos would fight it to death; there would be no more chaos manipulated to justify a crusade against bogus Russian "aggression".

The ball is in Germany's court. Now it's up to East Prussians to present the facts to Angela Merkel. Let's see if she's able to get the message.