CIA Touts Mediterranean Tsunami of Coups

Ex.: http://tarpley.net/2011/01/16/tunisian-wikileaks-putsch/

Tunisian Wikileaks Putsch: CIA Touts Mediterranean Tsunami of Coups

Libya, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Jordan, Italy All Targeted
US-UK Want New Puppets to Play Against Iran, China, Russia

Obama Retainers Cass Sunstein, Samantha Power, Robert Malley, International Crisis Group Implicated in Destabilizations

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
January 16, 2011

Washington DC, January 16, 2011 - The US intelligence community is now in a
manic fit of gloating over this weekend's successful overthrow of the
Tunisian government of President Ben Ali. The State Department and the CIA,
through media organs loyal to them, are mercilessly hyping the Tunisian
putsch of the last few days as the prototype of a new second generation of
color revolutions, postmodern coups, and US-inspired people power
destabilizations. At Foggy Bottom and Langley, feverish plans are being made
for a veritable Mediterranean tsunami designed to topple most existing
governments in the Arab world, and well beyond. The imperialist planners now
imagine that they can expect to overthrow or weaken the governments of
Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and perhaps others, while the
CIA's ongoing efforts to remove Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi (because
of his friendship with Putin and support for the Southstream pipeline) make
this not just an Arab, but rather a pan-Mediterranean, orgy of
destabilization.

Hunger revolution, not Jasmine revolution

Washington's imperialist planners now believe that they have successfully
refurbished their existing model of CIA color revolution or postmodern coup.
This method of liquidating governments had been losing some of its prestige
after the failure of the attempted plutocratic Cedars revolution in Lebanon,
the rollback of the hated IMF-NATO Orange revolution in Ukraine, the
ignominious collapse of June 2009 Twitter revolution in Iran, and the
widespread discrediting of the US-backed Roses revolution in Georgia because
of the warmongering and oppressive activities of fascist madman Saakashvili.
The imperialist consensus is now that the Tunisian events prefigure a new
version of people power coup specifically adapted to today's reality,
specifically that of a world economic depression, breakdown crisis, and
disintegration of the globalized casino economy.

The Tunisian tumults are being described in the US press as the "Jasmine
revolution," but it is far more accurate to regard them as a variation on
the classic hunger revolution. The Tunisian ferment was not primarily a
matter of the middle class desire to speak out, vote, and blog. It started
from the Wall Street depredations which are ravaging the entire planet:
outrageously high prices for food and fuel caused by derivatives
speculation, high levels of unemployment and underemployment, and general
economic despair. The detonator was the tragic suicide of a vegetable vendor
in Sidi Bouzid who was being harassed by the police. As Ben Ali fought to
stay in power, he recognized what was causing the unrest by his gesture of
lowering food prices. The Jordanian government for its part has lowered food
prices there by about 5%.

Assange and Wikileaks, Key CIA Tools to Dupe Youth Bulge

The economic nature of the current unrest poses a real problem for the
Washington imperialists, since the State Department line tends to define
human rights exclusively in political and religious terms, and never as a
matter of economic or social rights. Price controls, wages, jobless
benefits, welfare payments, health care, housing, trade union rights,
banking regulation, protective tariffs, and other tools of national economic
self-defense have no place whatsoever in the Washington consensus mantra.
Under these circumstances, what can be done to dupe the youth bulge of
people under 30 who now represents the central demographic reality of most
of the Arab world?

In this predicament, the CIA's cyberspace predator drone Julian Assange and
Wikileaks are providing an indispensable service to the imperialist cause.
In Iceland in the autumn of 2009, Assange was deployed by his financier
backers to hijack and disrupt a movement for national economic survival
through debt moratorium, the rejection of interference by the International
Monetary Fund, and re-launching the productive economy through an ambitious
program of national infrastructure and the export of high technology capital
goods, in particular in the field of geothermal energy. Assange was able to
convince many in Iceland that these causes were not nearly radical enough,
and that they needed to devote their energies instead to publishing a series
of carefully pre-selected US government and other documents, all of which
somehow targeted governments and political figures which London and
Washington had some interest in embarrassing and weakening. In other words,
Assange was able to dupe honest activists into going to work for the
imperialist financiers. Assange has no program except "transparency," which
is a constant refrain of the US UK human rights mafia as it attempts to
topple targeted governments across the developing sector in particular.
"Yes we can" or "Food prices are too damn high!"

Tunisia is perhaps the first case in which Assange and Wikileaks can make a
credible claim to have detonated the coup. Most press accounts agree that
certain State Department cables which were part of the recent Wikileaks
document dumps and which focused on the sybaritic excess and lavish
lifestyle of the Ben Ali clan played a key role in getting the Tunisian
petit bourgeoisie into the streets. Thanks in part to Assange, Western
television networks were thus able to show pictures of the Tunisian crowds
holding up signs saying "Yes we can" rather than a more realistic and
populist "Food prices are too damn high!"

Ben Ali had been in power for 23 years. In Egypt, President Mubarak has been
in power for almost 30 years. The Assad clan in Syria have also been around
for about three decades. In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi has been in power for
almost 40 years. Hafez Assad was able to engineer a monarchical succession
to his son when he died 10 years ago, and Mubarak and Gaddafi are trying to
do the same thing today. Since the US does not want these dynasties, The
obvious CIA tactic is to deploy assets like Twitter, Google, Facebook,
Wikileaks, etc., to turn key members of the youth bulge into swarming mobs
to bring down the gerontocratic regimes.

CIA Wants Aggressive New Puppets to Play Against Iran, China, Russia

All of these countries do of course require serious political as well as
economic reform, but what the CIA is doing with the current crop of
destabilizations has nothing to do with any positive changes in the
countries involved. Those who doubt this should remember the horrendous
economic and political record of the puppets installed in the wake of recent
color revolutions - people like the IMF-NATO kleptocrat agents Yushchenko
and Timoshenko in Ukraine, the mentally unstable warmongering dictator
Saakashvili in Georgia, and so forth. Political forces that are foolish
enough to accept the State Department's idea of hope and change will soon
find themselves under the yoke of new oppressors of this type. The danger is
very great in Tunisia, since the forces which ousted Ben Ali have no visible
leader and no visible mass political organization which could help them
fight off foreign interference in the way that Hezbollah was able to do in
checkmating the Lebanese Cedars putsch. In Tunis, the field is wide open for
the CIA to install a candidate of its own choosing, preferably under the
cover of "elections." Twenty-three years of Ben Ali have unfortunately left
Tunisia in a more atomized condition.

Why is official Washington so obsessed with the idea of overthrowing these
governments? The answer has everything to do with Iran, China, and Russia.
As regards Iran, the State Department policy is notoriously the attempt to
assemble a united front of the entrenched Arab and Sunni regimes to be
played against Shiite Iran and its various allies across the region. This
had not been going well, as shown by the inability of the US to install its
preferred puppet Allawi in Iraq, where the pro-Iranian Maliki seems likely
to hold onto power for the foreseeable future. The US desperately wants a
new generation of unstable "democratic" demagogues more willing to lead
their countries against Iran than the current immobile regimes have proved
to be. There is also the question of Chinese economic penetration. We can be
confident that any new leaders installed by the US will include in their
program a rupture of economic relations with China, including especially a
cutoff of oil and raw material shipments, along the lines of what Twitter
revolution honcho Mir-Hossein Mousavi was reliably reported to be preparing
for Iran if he had seized power there in the summer of 2009 at the head of
his "Death to Russia, death to China" rent-a-mob. In addition, US hostility
against Russia is undiminished, despite the cosmetic effects of the recent
ratification of START II. If for example a color revolution were to come to
Syria, we could be sure that the Russian naval presence at the port Tartus,
which so disturbs NATO planners, would be speedily terminated. If the new
regimes demonstrate hostility against Iran, China, and Russia, we would soon
find that internal human rights concerns would quickly disappear from the US
agenda.

Key Destabilization Operatives of the Obama Regime

For those who are keeping score, it may be useful to pinpoint some of the
destabilization operatives inside the current US regime. It is of course
obvious that the current wave of subversion against the Arab countries was
kicked off by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her much touted speech
last week in Doha, Qatar last week, when she warned assembled Arab leaders
to reform their economies ( according to IMF rules) and stamp out
corruption, or else face ouster.

Given the critical role of Assange and Wikileaks in the current phase, White
House regulations czar Cass Sunstein must also be counted among the top
putschists. We should recall that on February 24, 2007 Sunstein contributed
an article entitled "A Brave New Wikiworld" to the Washington Post, in which
he crowed that "Wikileaks.org, founded by dissidents in China and other
nations, plans to post secret government documents and to protect them from
censorship with coded software." This was in fact the big publicity
breakthrough for Assange and the debut of Wikileaks in the US mainstream
press - all thanks to current White House official Sunstein. May we not
assume that Sunstein represents the White House contact man and controller
for the Wikileaks operation?

Every Tree in the Arab Forest Might Fall

Another figure worthy of mention is Robert Malley, a well-known US
left-cover operative who currently heads the Middle East and North Africa
program at the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization reputed to
run on money coughed up by George Soros and tactics dreamed up from Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Malley was controversial during the 2008 presidential campaign
because of the anti-Israeli posturing he affects, the better to dupe the
Arab leaders he targets. Malley told the Washington Post of January 16, 2011
that every tree in the Arab forest could now be about to fall: "We could go
through the list of Arab leaders looking in the mirror right now and very
few would not be on the list." Arab governments would be well advised to
keep an eye on ICG operatives in their countries.

Czar Cass Sunstein is now married to Samantha Power, who currently works in
the White House National Security Council as Special Assistant to the
President and Senior Director (boss) of the Office of Multilateral Affairs
and Human Rights - the precise bureaucratic home of destabilization
operations like the one in Tunisia. Power, like Malley, is a veteran of the
US intelligence community's "human rights" division, which is a past master
of using legitimate beefs about repression to to replace old US clients with
new puppets in a never-ending process of restless subversion. Both Malley
and Power were forced to tender pro forma resignations during the Obama
presidential campaign of 2008 - Malley for talking to Hamas, and Power for
an obscene tirade against Hillary Clinton, who is now her bureaucratic
rival.

Advice to Arab Governments, Political Forces, Trade Unions

The Arab world needs to learn a few fundamental lessons about the mechanics
of CIA color revolutions, lest they replicate the tragic experience of
Georgia, Ukraine, and so many others. In today's impoverished world of
economic depression, a reform program capable of defending national
interests against the rapacious forces of financial globalization is the
number one imperative.

Accordingly, Arab governments must immediately expel all officials of the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and their subset of lending
institutions. Arab countries which are currently under the yoke of IMF
conditionalities (notably Egypt and Jordan among the Arabs, and Pakistan
among the Moslem states) must unilaterally and immediately throw them off
and reassert their national sovereignty. Every Arab state should
unilaterally and immediately declare a debt moratorium in the form of an
open-ended freeze on all payments of interest and principal of international
financial debt in the Argentine manner, starting with sums allegedly owed to
the IMF-World Bank. The assets of foreign multinational monopolistic firms,
especially oil companies, should be seized as the situation requires. Basic
food staples and fuels should be subjected to price controls, with draconian
penalties for speculation, including by way of derivatives. Dirigist
measures such as protective tariffs and food price subsidies can be quickly
introduced. Food production needs to be promoted by production and import
bounties, as well as by international barter deals. National grain
stockpiles must be quickly constituted. Capital controls and exchange
controls are likely to be needed to prevent speculative attacks on national
currencies by foreign hedge funds acting with the ulterior political motives
of overthrowing national governments. Most important, central banks must be
nationalized and reconverted to a policy of 0% credit for domestic
infrastructure, agriculture, housing, and physical commodity production,
with special measures to enhance exports. Once these reforms have been
implemented, it may be time to consider the economic integration of the Arab
world as an economic development community in which the foreign exchange
earnings of the oil-producing states can be put to work on the basis of
mutual advantage for infrastructure and hard commodity capital investment
across the entire Arab world.

The alternative is an endless series of destabilizations masterminded by
foreigners, and, quite possibly, terminal chaos.