«Die Nato bringt uns mit diesem Kurs um, und das mit tatkräftiger Mithilfe der eigenen deutschen Regierung»

Interview mit Willy Wimmer*

Ex: http://www.zeit-fragen.ch

Zeit-Fragen: Die Regierung der Russischen Föderation hat mit dem Jahreswechsel ihre Sicherheitsdoktrin geändert. Müssen wir uns nun von Russ­land bedroht fühlen, oder ist die neue Doktrin eine Reaktion auf eine Bedrohung Russlands?

Willy Wimmer: Wir tun gut daran, uns die Texte der nationalen Sicherheitsdoktrinen genau anzusehen, unabhängig davon, von wem sie stammen. Die Staaten, die sich so etwas erlauben können, publizieren diese Texte sehr verständlich, sei es nun in den USA, in Indien, China oder jetzt Russland. Vor dem Hintergrund unserer Erfahrungen können wir beurteilen, vor welchem Hintergrund diese Texte veröffentlicht worden sind und welcher Mittel sich die Staaten bedienen wollen, um die in diesen Doktrinen festgelegten Ziele umzusetzen. Jeder andere Staat kann dann beurteilen, ob die eingesetzten oder zur Verfügung stehenden Mittel es erlauben, die in den Doktrinen festgelegten Ziele erreichen zu können. Das gilt auch für die neueste russische Ausformung einer nationalen Sicherheitsdoktrin.

Wir kommen nicht umhin, nüchtern zu beurteilen, von welchen allgemein-politischen Annahmen die Verantwortlichen in Moskau ausgegangen sind, bevor sie diesen neuen Text veröffentlichen konnten. Stimmt ihr Weltbild mit unseren Erkenntnissen überein, oder kommen gravierende Unterschiede zutage? Wenn man sich mit dieser Doktrin auseinandersetzt, fallen keine gravierenden Diskrepanzen in der Weltsicht auf. Die Erwartung der Russischen Föderation, nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges in Übereinstimmung mit der Charta von Paris aus dem November 1990 ein «gemeinsames Haus Europa» ansteuern zu können, stiess auf eine USA, die genau das nicht wollten und systematisch die auf friedlichen Ausgleich angelegten Instrumente zwischenstaatlichen Handelns zerstörten. Wir alle wussten es, und in Moskau konnte niemand blind sein: Russland sollte nicht dazu gehören, und man setzte Russland den Stuhl vor die Türe. Für jedermann war in den letzten fünfundzwanzig Jahren klar, dass die USA die bestimmende globale Macht sein wollten und auch in der Russischen Föderation eine Herausforderung für diese Rolle gerade in der friedlichen Zusammenarbeit gesehen haben, ohne dass die Russische Föderation einen Anlass für diese amerikanische Vorgehensweise gegeben hätte oder hätte geben können. Das erinnert an den alten römischen Satz, nach dem Karthago eben zu zerstören sei, weil es Karthago gibt.

Moskau legt aus verständlichen Gründen Wert darauf, selbst über seine nationale ­Politik entscheiden zu können, und verweigert sich einem amerikanischen Kommando. Das ist der Kern der Auseinandersetzung, und die Ukraine-Krise hat deutlich gemacht, was die USA alles unternehmen, um bis auf Armeslänge mit ihrem Militärpotential an Moskau heranzukommen.

Diese Entwicklung, die 1992 zunächst darin gipfelte, die Instrumente der Europäischen Gemeinschaft durch die Nato in Ost-Europa zu überholen, konfrontiert uns jetzt mit einer höchst unangenehmen Frage. Die Frage danach, was eigentlich geschehen wird, wenn der «point of no return» in dieser Moskau aufgezwungenen Fragestellung erreicht sein wird? Mit amerikanischen und verbündeten Truppen 500 Kilometer von Moskau entfernt, dürfte es in Anbetracht aller Potentiale beider Seiten eine ziemlich akademische Frage sein, ob eine militärische Auseinandersetzung auch nur 24 Stunden konventionell sein dürfte und welches Schicksal den amerikanischen Hintersassen in Europa in diesem Kontext beschieden sein würde. Das russische militärische Potential ist in den letzten Jahren in beachtlicher Weise auf Vordermann gebracht worden. Sollte das uns gegenüber in einer Lage eingesetzt werden, die von uns selbst mit herbeigeführt worden sein sollte, würde es unsere Existenz substantiell bedrohen. Eigentlich müsste die für uns logische Konsequenz darin bestehen, zur Charta von Paris zurückzukehren.

Offenbar stellt das die USA vor gravierende Herausforderungen, die sich aus der Insel-Lage erklären. Tun sie doch alles, um einen die anderen Staaten dominierenden mächtigen Fuss auf dem eurasischen Kontinent zu behalten.

Die Welt hat vor zwei Jahren an den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges vor damals einhundert Jahren gedacht. Es war nicht das Einzelereignis in Sarajevo, das die Welt in Brand gesetzt hat. Über viele Jahre wurde an einer Grosswetterlage gestrickt, bei der nur ein Einzelereignis nötig war, den Himmel in Flammen zu setzen. Dazu hat man nur einige Bosnier gebraucht. Die USA haben seit dem Angriff auf Belgrad 1999 alles getan, die Welt auf den grossen Krieg vorzubereiten. Es ist die Frage danach, ob man wieder einen jungen Mann braucht und wann man ihn losschickt.

Wie ist das zu erklären? Einerseits kommt es mit Blick auf Syrien und den IS nach langer Zeit endlich zu einstimmigen Beschlüssen des Sicherheitsrates der Vereinten Nationen, also gemeinsamen Beschlüssen von Russland und den USA, andererseits nehmen die Spannungen zwischen den USA und Russland weiter zu?

Russland hat in den letzten Jahren wieder Muskeln bekommen. Muskeln von einer Qualität, die es Moskau erlaubt haben, unter strikter Beachtung der Regeln des Völkerrechtes und damit der Charta der Vereinten Nationen auf die internationale Bühne zurückkehren zu können, und die USA konnten das nicht mehr verhindern. Alleine diese Möglichkeit hat der Welt in Syrien eine neue Chance gegeben, den grauenhaften Krieg über Verhandlungen letztlich beenden zu können. Das dürfte auch der Grund sein, warum interessierte Kreise in den USA und in anderen Staaten über den türkischen Abschuss einer russischen Maschine diesen Prozess stören oder über die bestialische Hinrichtungswelle in Saudi-Arabien die Feindschaft zwischen Iran und Saudi-Arabien in eine völlige Zerstörung des von Moskau herbeigeführten Verhandlungsansatzes zum syrischen Bürgerkrieg führen wollen. Die USA wollten ihre Ziele in Syrien umsetzen, und da waren das russische Auftreten und der daraus resultierende Verhandlungsansatz extrem hinderlich. Die Rolle Israels, das aktiv in den syrischen Bürgerkrieg eingreift, wird von niemandem erörtert, obwohl dessen Einsatz gravierend ist.

Der nun ganz offen ausgebrochene Konflikt zwischen Saudi-Arabien und Iran ist also ein bewusst gezündetes Störfeuer gegen Fortschritte in Syrien und im Kampf gegen den IS.

Aus meiner Sicht ist es der gravierende Versuch, jeden Verhandlungsansatz unmöglich zu machen, weil man sich das angelsächsische Gesetz des Handelns nicht aus der Hand nehmen lassen will. Wir dürfen nicht ausser Betracht lassen, dass Syrien nur ein Versatzstück zwischen Afghanistan und Marokko ist. Mit den USA an der Spitze ist eine Reihe von Staaten dabei, die Welt südlich von uns neu zu ordnen. Das will man alleine hinkriegen, und da stört Russland mit seinem Verhandlungsansatz, den man nicht umgehen kann, ganz gewaltig.

In Deutschland wird die Politik der Russischen Föderation schon seit geraumer Zeit in den dunkelsten Farben gemalt. Ist das überall in Europa so?

Zum Glück nicht, und man muss nur nach Paris oder Rom blicken, wenn man diese Frage beantworten will. Wenn man auf das eigene Land blickt, dann haben sich die Investitionen in transatlantische Netzwerke, die Politik und Presse umfassen, eindeutig für diejenigen gelohnt, die diese Netzwerke geschaffen haben. Das hat eine Menge mit dem Charakter von Berlin zu tun. Die Stadt ist politisch gesehen in den Händen dieser Netzwerke, die auf den Weg der deutschen Politik einen grösseren Einfluss haben als selbst deutsche Ministerpräsidenten oder gar die deutschen Wähler. Das konnten wir zuletzt bei der Frage bewundern, wer über das höchste deutsche Staatsamt entscheidet. In Moskau und Tel Aviv hat man sich jüngst entschieden, den äusseren Einfluss auf die nationale Politik offenlegen zu müssen oder unterbinden zu können. In Berlin tragen diese Phänomene seit Jahren dazu bei, die deutsche Hauptstadt dem Land und den Wählern gegenüber zu entfremden. Diese Entfremdung ist so gravierend, dass wieder ernste Folgen für Deutschland zu befürchten sind.

Viele sagen, wohl zu Recht, dass Europa und selbstverständlich auch Deutschland ein ureigenes Interesse an guten Beziehungen zur Russischen Föderation haben. Warum folgt man bis heute nicht diesem Interesse, sondern den Vorgaben aus anderen Ländern?

Bei Minsk II haben der französische Präsident und die deutsche Bundeskanzlerin vor dem Ausbruch eines grossen europäischen Krieges zumindest eine temporäre Reissleine gezogen. Das macht aber auch den ganzen verbliebenen Handlungsspielraum der deutschen Politik deutlich. Es ist nicht eine Frage der Nostalgie, wenn ich auf Helmut Kohl und die Chancen der deutschen Politik verweise, einen Beitrag zum Frieden in der Welt leisten zu können. Das steht so in der Verfassung. Jetzt schicken wir wieder Kampfflugzeuge unter Bruch des Völkerrechtes nach Syrien und machen damit deutlich, nur ein Wurmfortsatz der Politik anderer Staaten zu sein. Da war nach dem völkerrechtswidrigen Jugoslawien-Krieg und der deutschen Beteiligung daran sogar Gerhard Schröder beim Irak-Krieg wieder weiter.

Wie denkt man in den anderen Ländern der Welt über den neuen Kalten Krieg? Welche Rolle in diesem Konflikt spielt der grosse «Rest» der Welt?

Es ist niemand zu sehen, der bei klarem Verstand diese amerikanische Herausforderung an die gesamte Welt mitmachen will. Der Heilige Vater spricht ständig davon, dass wir uns an verschiedenen Teilen der Welt in einem dritten Weltkrieg befinden. Er sieht die Dinge klarer, als dies die deutsche katholische Bischofskonferenz oder gar die evangelischen deutschen Bischöfe vermögen, die einem den Krieg herbeiredenden deutschen Bundespräsidenten und ehemaligen Amtsbruder zujubeln. Ich muss mich nicht fragen, wie man in weit entfernten Winkeln der Welt die Dinge sieht. Mir wird es schon schlecht, wenn ich das eigene Land und die staatstragenden Kräfte ansehe.

Die Entstehung von Konflikten wie dem neuen Kalten Krieg entspringt ja nicht Naturgesetzen, sondern politischen Entscheidungen der Akteure. Darüber ist viel geschrieben worden in den vergangenen ein, zwei Jahren. Beim Blick auf die Ursachen wird zum Teil, und auch zu Recht, aber auch weiter zurückgeschaut. Hätte ein Land wie Deutschland eine realistische Möglichkeit gehabt, mit einer anderen Diplomatie gegenzusteuern? Besteht eine solche Möglichkeit auch heute noch?

Das ist eine staatspolitische Notwendigkeit. Sie ist nicht akademischer Natur, weil die Nato einen Kriegskurs regional und global fährt. Die Nato bringt uns mit diesem Kurs um, und das mit tatkräftiger Mithilfe der eigenen deutschen Regierung. Man muss sich nur die Äusserungen deutscher Generale an der vordersten Front gegen Russland anhören. Dann wird einem schon in Deutschland schlecht. Wie soll es einem da in Smolensk oder Moskau gehen.

Mir ist nicht bekannt, dass die Bundesregierung aus den spannungstreibenden Äusserungen dieser Herrschaften personalpolitische Konsequenzen gezogen hätte.

Warum werden Vorträge wie der von George Friedman in Chicago im Februar letzten Jahres1 von der politischen Klasse in Deutschland totgeschwiegen? Wird so etwas gar nicht zur Kenntnis genommen? Oder ist man so in Netzwerke verstrickt, dass man schweigen muss? Hunderttausende Deutsche zum Beispiel nehmen mittlerweile sehr ernst, was man jenseits der Mainstream-Medien lesen kann. Warum wird darüber von der gesamten politischen Klasse beharrlich hinweggegangen? Warum sind Sie eine der wenigen Ausnahmen in Deutschland? Sie gehörten ja früher einmal selbst zur «politischen Klasse» dazu.

Wenn man es nüchtern sieht, ist Deutschland wieder einmal geteilt. Gegen den Mainstream gibt es jene, die sich bei alternativen Medien umsehen und ihre Meinung bilden, oder diejenigen, die im Mainstream kurz davor sind, ihre Abos zu kündigen. Es hat noch nie so viele und gravierende Beschwerden gegen die Programme der Sender gegeben, die nur noch die Kriegstrommel schlagen. Nachdem wir von einem Krieg in den anderen getrieben worden sind, ist vielen Menschen im Lande sehr bewusst, dass es längst nicht mehr darum geht, die Zensur der Presse – siehe Spiegel-Affäre – zu verhindern, sondern der Zensur durch die Presse das Handwerk zu legen. Ich habe dabei eine sehr ungewöhnliche Erfahrung machen können. Als ich mich gegen den Kriegskurs in Sachen Jugoslawien öffentlich aussprach, war ich Vizepräsident der Parlamentarischen Versammlung der OSZE, die damals in Friedensfragen von zentraler Bedeutung in Europa gewesen ist. Sie müssen nicht annehmen, dass ich in irgendeine Gesprächsrunde auf zentraler nationaler Ebene in den Medien eingeladen worden wäre. Erst als Gregor Gysi sich später ähnlich meinen Überlegungen öffentlich äusserte, hat man ihn eingeladen, um publikumswirksam über ihn herfallen zu können. So ist es in meiner Erfahrung auf nationaler Ebene geblieben.

Im Jahr 2015 sind mehr als 1 Million Menschen aus Afrika, aus dem Nahen Osten, aus dem Mittleren Osten und aus den europäischen Balkanstaaten nach Deutschland gekommen. Ein Ende der Migration ist nicht abzusehen. Das Thema füllt jeden Tag die Schlagzeilen. Tatsache ist, dass der grosse Teil der nach Deutschland drängenden Menschen vor Situationen flieht, die der Westen angerichtet hat. Aber die offizielle Rede von der Notwendigkeit der Ursachenbekämpfung klingt bislang wenig glaubwürdig. Welche politischen Folgen der deutschen Migrations­politik erwarten Sie? Sind die Vorkommnisse in Köln und anderswo ein Menetekel? Auf was müssen sich die Deutschen gefasst machen?

Da müssen Sie die noch im Amt befindliche Bundeskanzlerin und die CDU als Partei fragen, die sich auf dem Karlsruher Parteitag Ende Dezember 2015 in der Migrationsfrage bis zu ihrem eigenen Untergang an die Bundeskanzlerin gekettet hat. Niemand in Deutschland und Europa weiss, was die Bundeskanzlerin bewogen hat, die Migration in dieser Grössenordnung zuzulassen, und die verfassungsmässig in erster Linie gefragten Institutionen wollen es auch nicht wissen. Frau Dr. Merkel hat Deutschland und EU-Europa auf den Kopf gestellt und spaltet beide. Es ist überhaupt nicht erkennbar, dass wir zu einer Politik zurückkehren, die Verantwortung gegenüber dem eigenen Land und dem eigenen Volk kennt und den Menschen in anderen Ländern gerecht wird. Das war nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges anders, als wir zwischen Syrien und Marokko die Staaten stärker über die KSZE und die Europäische Gemeinschaft an uns binden und leistungsfähiger machen wollten.2 Die USA und auch Israel hatten andere Vorstellungen, und das Ergebnis sehen wir heute.

Was würden Sie Ihren deutschen Mitbürgern in Anbetracht einer explosiven welt­politischen Lage und einer nicht minder explosiven innenpolitischen Situation empfehlen? Kann der Bürger etwas tun, damit es Silberstreifen am Horizont gibt? Oder worauf sollten wir uns einstellen?

Bei den kommenden Landtagswahlen haben es die Bürger in der Hand, in Berlin eine Bundesregierung zu bekommen, die den deutschen Rechts- und Verfassungsstaat nicht vor die Hunde gehen lässt. Man sollte aber auch klar sehen, dass jetzt der Weg Deutschlands in die Agonie beginnen kann. Was das in Deutschland und Europa bedeutet, kann sich jeder ausrechnen, wie sich aus den vorhergehenden Fragen und Antworten ergibt. In der Schweiz wird wieder in jedem Wohnhaus peinlich genau darauf geachtet, dass die Bunker betriebsbereit sind. Was haben wir seit 1990 eigentlich angestellt? Vor die Wahl zwischen Merkel und Deutschland gestellt, sollten die Menschen Deutschland wählen.

Herr Wimmer, vielen Dank für das Interview.    

(Interview Karl Müller)

*    Willy Wimmer, Jahrgang 1943, war von 1976 bis 2009 direkt gewählter Abgeordneter der CDU im Deutschen Bundestag. Von 1988 bis 1992 war er Parlamentarischer Staatssekretär im deutschen Verteidigungsministerium, von 1995 bis 2000 Vizepräsident der Parlamentarischen Versammlung der OSZE. Gemeinsam mit Wolfgang Effenberger hat er 2014 das Buch «Wiederkehr der Hasardeure. Schattenstrategen, Kriegstreiber, stille Profiteure 1914 und heute» veröffentlicht. Willy Wimmers engagierte Analysen und Stellungnahmen für die Rückkehr zum Recht und gegen die Kriegspolitik finden weit über den deutschsprachigen Raum hinaus grosse Aufmerksamkeit.

_{1    George Friedman, Gründer und Präsident des US-amerikanischen Informationsdienstes Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc), der vom US-Magazin Barron’s als «Schatten-CIA» bezeichnet wird, hielt am 4. Februar 2015 auf Einladung des Chicago Council on Global Affairs einen Vortrag über die strategischen Ziele der USA und ging dabei auch auf die Politik der USA gegenüber Russ­land und Deutschland ein. Dabei sagte er unter anderem: «Das Hauptinteresse der US-Aussenpolitik während des letzten Jahrhunderts, im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Kalten Krieg waren die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Russland […]. Seit einem Jahrhundert ist es für die Vereinigten Staaten das Hauptziel, die einzigartige Kombination zwischen deutschem Kapital, deutscher Technologie und russischen Rohstoff-Ressourcen, russischer Arbeitskraft zu verhindern.» Die gesamte Rede Friedmans kann man nachhören unter: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc
2    Seit Beginn der 90er Jahre gab es zum Beispiel Versuche der KSZE, den gesamten Mittelmeerraum in die Überlegungen für einen Raum der Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit einzubinden und gemeinsam mit den Staaten Nordafrikas und den Mittelmeerländern des Nahen Ostens eine KSZM, eine Konferenz für Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit im Mittelmeerraum, ins Leben zu rufen. Der Versuch scheiterte aber. (vgl. Jens Bortloff. Die Organisation für Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit in Europa. Eine völkerrechtliche Bestandsaufnahme, 1996, S. 94 ff. oder Annette Jünemann. Europas Mittelmeerpolitik im regionalen und globalen Wandel: Interessen und Zielkonflikte; in: Zippel, Wulfdiether (Hrsg.). Die Mittelmeerpolitik der EU, 1999, S. 29–64.)}

Neue Sicherheitsstrategie der Russischen Föderation

km. Am 5. Januar 2016 berichtete die deutsche Ausgabe des russischen Internet-Informationsdienstes Russia today (RT) (https://deutsch.rt.com/international/36166-neue-sicherhei...), der Präsident der Russischen Föderation Wladimir Putin habe Ende 2015 die neue Sicherheitsstrategie der Russischen Föderation unterschrieben (veröffentlicht wurde sie am 31.12.2015, bei RT-Deutsch findet man auch den Link zum russischsprachigen Originaldokument).

RT berichtet, es sei eine nationale Priorität für Russland, den Status als eine der weltweit führenden Kräfte zu sichern und zu festigen. Wörtlich wird aus der neuen Strategie zitiert, «die Sicherung des Status der Russischen Föderation als eine der führenden Weltmächte, eine Rolle, welche auf die Aufrechterhaltung der strategischen Stabilität zielt und auf gegenseitige Partnerschaft in einer polyzentrischen Welt», sei auf lange Sicht ein nationales Interesse Russlands.

Russland legt dabei besonderen Wert auf die Stärkung seiner Verteidigungskraft, die Souveränität, die territoriale und staatliche Integrität des Landes, die Stärkung des nationalen Konsenses, die Verbesserung der Lebensqualität, die Entwicklung und den Erhalt der Kultur sowie die Stärkung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der Wirtschaft des Landes. In der Lebensmittelversorgung will Russland an Unabhängigkeit gewinnen.

Der Einsatz militärischer Gewalt komme nur dann in Frage, wenn sich alle nicht-militärischen Mittel als wirkungslos erwiesen haben. RT-Deutsch zitiert mit Blick auf die russischen Nuklearwaffen: «Zur strategischen Abschreckung und Prävention von militärischen Konflikten wird die Aufrechterhaltung der nuklearen Abschreckung auf einem ausreichenden Niveau beibehalten […].»

Die neue Sicherheitsstrategie geht davon aus, dass die Gefahr einer weltweiten finanzwirtschaftlichen Krise weiterhin besteht. Mit Blick auf die ­Politik der USA und der EU heisst es erläuternd dazu, der Versuch einzelner Staaten, mit Hilfe wirtschaftlicher Methoden ihre jeweiligen geopolitischen Interessen durchzusetzen, schwäche das internationale Wirtschaftssystem. Die anhaltende Abhängigkeit Russlands vom Export von Rohstoffen sei auch deshalb eine Gefahr für das Land. Dieser Gefahr sei mit einer stärkeren wirtschaftlichen Diversifikation zu begegnen.

Russland will seine Beziehungen zu den GUS-Staaten verbessern. Die Beziehungen zu China sind ein «Schlüsselfaktor bei der Aufrechterhaltung der globalen und regionalen Stabilität».

Mit Blick auf den Westen heisst es hingegen: «Die von der Russischen Föderation betriebene selbständige Innen- und Aussenpolitik ruft bei den USA und ihren Verbündeten, die ihre Dominanz in den Weltangelegenheiten beibehalten wollen, Widerstand hervor. Die von ihnen gestaltete Politik der Eindämmung Russ­lands sieht einen politischen, wirtschaftlichen, militärischen und Informationsdruck vor.»

Ausdrücklich wird nun wieder die Nato als «Gefahr für die nationale Sicherheit» betrachtet; denn die Nato versuche nach wie vor, sich weiter nach Osten, das heisst gegen Russland gerichtet, auszudehnen. Zudem befinde sich auf dem Territorium der Nachbarstaaten Russlands ein Netz biologisch-militärischer Labore, die von den USA betrieben werden. Neben der direkten militärischen Bedrohung werden auch Umsturzversuche mittels sogenannter farbiger Revolutionen als Bedrohung der Sicherheit des Landes betrachtet.
Ein Stück weit ist die neue Sicherheitsstrategie der Russischen Föderation wohl auch eine Reaktion auf die neue Sicherheitsstrategie der USA vom Juni 2015 (www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Publications/2015_National_Military_Strategy.pdf). Dort wird Russland als internationaler Outlaw tituliert und an erster Stelle der Staaten genannt, welche die nationale Sicherheit der USA gefährden würden. Wenige Tage später hatte der designierte (und nun amtierende) Generalstabschef der USA, General Joseph F. Dunford, Russland als «existentielle Bedrohung für die Vereinigten Staaten» bezeichnet. Und Seymour M. Hersh kommt in seiner jüngsten Analyse über die US-Politik in Syrien («Military to Military»; www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military) zum Ergebnis, dass es in der Führung des Pentagons nun keine Stimmen mehr gebe, die einer aggressiven antirussischen US-Politik noch kritisch gegenüberstehen.

Trotzdem lädt auch die neue Sicherheitsstrategie der Russischen Föderation die USA und ihre Verbündeten zum gemeinsamen Handeln ein. Würden die USA und Russland zum Wohle der Stabilität der Welt zusammenarbeiten, wären sie in der Lage, einige der gravierendsten globalen Probleme zu lösen.

Helmut Schmidt: «Aus Deutschland ein Einwanderungsland zu machen ist absurd.»

Der kürzlich verstorbene Altbundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt (SPD) bewies im Jahr 1992 im Interview mit der «Frankfurter Rundschau» [vom 12.9.1992] einen Weitblick von – aus heutiger Sicht – geradezu erschreckender Präzision: «Die Vorstellung, dass eine moderne Gesellschaft in der Lage sein müsse, sich als multikulturelle Gesellschaft zu etablieren, mit möglichst vielen kulturellen Gruppen, halte ich für abwegig. Man kann aus Deutschland mit immerhin einer tausendjährigen Geschichte seit Otto I. nicht nachträglich einen Schmelztiegel machen. Weder aus Frankreich, noch aus England, noch aus Deutschland dürfen Sie Einwanderungsländer machen. […] Das ertragen die Gesellschaften nicht. Dann entartet die Gesellschaft.
Die Vorstellung, wie sie etwa Heiner Geissler jahrelang verbreitet hat, dass wir mehrere Kulturen nebeneinander haben könnten, habe ich immer für absurd gehalten. […] Da wir in einer Demokratie leben, müssen wir uns auch ein bisschen, bitte sehr, nach dem richten, was die Gesellschaft will, und nicht nach dem, was sich Professoren ausgedacht haben. Aus Deutschland ein Einwanderungsland zu machen ist absurd. Es kann kommen, dass wir überschwemmt werden.»

Quelle: Vertrauliche Mitteilungen vom 12. Januar 2016, Nr. 4165

 

Analyse der deutschen Geheimdienste «zur Lage der Nation im Blick auf die heranbrandenden Flüchtlingswellen»

Angela Merkel hat keine «Kreide gefressen». Die Tatsachen haben sie und ihre Partei überrollt und aufgeweckt. Die Silvestervorfälle in Köln sind ein klares Fanal. Aufgeweckt aber hat die deutsche Regierung eine höchst vertrauliche «Schnell»-Analyse der deutschen Geheimdienste «zur Lage der Nation im Blick auf die heranbrandenden Flüchtlingswellen». Das Dokument zeichnet sich auch dadurch aus, dass es unverblümt – und ohne Rücksicht auf innerparteiliche Belange – ein umfassendes realistisches Bild der Ist-Situation und einen «Worst-Case-Ausblick» gibt. Was hier festgehalten ist, zeigt klar die Möglichkeiten, wie unsere europäische kulturelle und soziale Kultur in Kürze und nachhaltig aufgeweicht und dann konsequent zerstört werden könnte. Fanatiker haben uns den Krieg erklärt. Für den IS ist es klar: «Der nächste, entscheidende Kriegsschauplatz wird das gesamte Europa sein.»

Der Bericht zeichnet auf, dass der IS in der Flüchtlingswelle des letzten Jahres 2015 nach Europa bis zu 200 000 potentielle Krieger nach Europa «verbracht» hat. Einschliesslich von 20 000–30 000 Schläfern, die jederzeit eingesetzt werden könnten. Und sie alle lassen sich von ihren erklärten Feinden beherbergen und bewirten. Setzt der Flüchtlingsstrom nach der wetterbedingten Bremse (stürmisches Meer und Kälte in Europa) im Frühjahr wieder auf dem Vorjahresniveau ein, so ist mit einem Zustrom von weiteren 200 000 potentiellen Kriegern zu rechnen. Kroatien ist wie ein offenes Eingangstor, vor Lampedusa betätigt sich die Marine als «Schleusertruppe», statt von militärischen Möglichkeiten Gebrauch zu machen. Und der griechischen Aussengrenze hat die EU den Schutz ihrer eigenen Grenze, bizarrerweise für viele Euro-Milliarden (!), dem Nachbarstaat Türkei übertragen. Das alles ist nicht Meinungsmache von uns, sondern Inhalt der Geheimdienstberichte an die Berliner Regierung. Weltgeschichtlich wohl einmalig, wird entsprechend kommentiert.
Die bisherigen «2015er-Einwanderer» haben das Terrain schon entsprechend vorbereitet, lässt sich zwischen den Zeilen lesen. «Europa ist für uns ein offenes Scheunentor, ein Schlaraffenland par excellence.»

Nach einer weiteren Phase der «Überschwemmung von Europa» soll die zweite Stufe aufgebaut und zur gegebenen Zeit gezündet werden.

Wir zeichnen hier das Worst-Case-Szenario für Sie auf, damit Sie die Bandbreite des Schreckens kennen, das der IS in Europa vom Zaune reisst, durchbomben und durchmorden will. Das Endziel des IS ist klar definiert: Eliminierung von Millionen von «Ungläubigen» und dann schrittweise Errichtung eines islamischen Staates! «Paris und andere Anschlagsorte waren ‹harmlose› Trainingsaufgaben für die Organisatoren», wird nüchtern festgehalten. Mit dem zweiten Flüchtlings­tsunami ist auch die schrittweise Abwanderung der bereits tätigen IS-Armee aus Syrien nach Westeuropa (!) geplant.

Quelle: «Vertraulicher Schweizer Brief», Nr. 1454 vom 12. Januar 2016

The neocon psychopaths are driving the world towards extinction

The neocon psychopaths are driving the world towards extinction

Paul Craig Roberts
Sputnik News

My warning that the neoconservatives have resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was removed by Reagan and Gorbachev, is also being given by Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of the neoconservatives' aggressive policies toward Russia and China.

Daily we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington is pressuring Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the break-away Russian republics.

Washington refuses to cooperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for the destruction of MH-17, while preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that the conflict in Ukraine was caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, not by Washington's coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.

The list is long. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral, non-political world organization, has been suborned into the fight against Russia. Under Washington's pressure, the IMF has abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of Ukraine's debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF has announced that it will lend to Ukraine in order to pay the Ukraine's Western creditors despite the fact that Ukraine has renounced repayment of loans from Russia.

Michael Hudson believes, correctly in my view, that this new IMF policy will also be applied to those countries to whom China has made loans. The IMF's plan is to leave Russia and China as countries who lack the usual enforcement mechanism to collect from debtors, thus permitting debtors to default on the loans without penalty.

In other words, the IMF is presenting itself, although the financial media will not notice, as a tool of US foreign policy.

What this shows, and what should concern us, is that the institutions of Western civilization are in fact tools of American dominance. The institutions are not there for the noble reasons stated in their founding documents.

The bottom line is that Western Capitalism is simply a looting mechanism that has successfully suborned Western governments and all Western "do-good" institutions.

As in George Orwell's '1984', the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions — the West vs. the BRICS.

To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives' pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington's lies, not Russia's truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe.

In other words, Russia was misled by believing that the West respects and abides by the values that it professes. In fact, these "Western values" are merely a cover for the unbridled evil of which the West consists.

The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understand that the "war on terror" is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington's unilateral, hegemonic power.

The problem for the neocon unilateralists is that Russia and China-although misinformed by their "experts" educated abroad in the neoliberal tradtion, people who are de facto agents of Washington without even knowing it-are powerful military powers, both nuclear and conventional. Unless Russia and China are content to be Washington's vassal states, for the neoconservatives, who control Washington and, therefy, the West, to press these two powerful countries so hard can only lead to war. As Washington is not a match for Russia and China in conventional warfare, the war will be nuclear, and the result will be the end of life on earth.

Whether ironic or paradoxical, the US is pushing a policy that means the end of life. Yet, the majority of Western governments support it, and the insouciant Western peoples have no clue.

But Putin has caught on. Russia is not going to submit. Soon China will understand that US dependency on China's workforce and imports is not a protection from Washington's aggression. When China looks beyond its MIT and Harvard miseducated neoliberal economists to the writing on the wall, Washington is going to be in deep trouble.

What will Washington do? Confronted with two powerful nuclear militaries, will the crazed neocons back off? Or will their confidence in their ideology bring us the final war?

This is a real question. The US government pays many Internet trolls to ridicule such questions and their authors. To see the people who sell out humanity for money, all you have to do is to

read the comments on the numerous websites that reproduce this column.

Nevertheless, the question remains, unanswered by the Western presstitute media and unanswered by the bought-and-paid-for stooges in the US Congress and all Western "democracies."

Indications are that Russia has had enough of American arrogance. The Russian people have elevated a leader as they always do, and which Western countries seldom, if ever, do. The West has triumphed by technology, not by leadership. But Vladimir Putin is Russia's choice of a leader, and he is one. Russia also has the technology and a sense of itself that no longer exists in the diversified West.

There is nothing like Putin anywhere in the West, over which presides a collection of bought-and-paid-for-puppets who report to private interest groups, such as Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber).

At the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations (September 28), Putin, backed by the President of China, announced that half of the world no longer accepts American unilateralism. Additionally, Putin said that Russia can no longer tolerate the state of affairs in the world that results from Washington's pursuit of hegemony.

Two days later Putin took over the fight against ISIS in Syria.

Putin, still relying on agreements with Washington, relied on the agreement that Russia would announce beforehand its attacks on ISIS installations in order to prevent any NATO-Russian air encounters. Washington took advantage of this trust placed in Washington by Russia, and arranged for a Turkish jet fighter to ambush an unsuspecting Russian fighter-bomber.

This was an act of war, committed by Washington and Turkey, and thereby Washington's European NATO vassal states against a nuclear power capable of exterminating all life in every one of the countries, including the "superpower US."

This simple fact should make even the American super-patriots, who wear the flag on their sleeve, wonder about the trust they place in "their" government and in Fox "news," CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes who continually lie every minute of every broadcast.

But it won't. Americans and Europeans are too insouciant. They are locked tightly in The Matrix, where the impotent creatures are content to live without understanding reality.

Realizing that it is pointless to attempt to communicate to the Western sheeple, who have no input into their government's policy, Putin now sends his message directly to Washington.

Putin's message is loud and clear in his order directed against any US/NATO operations against Russia in its Syrian operations against ISIS:

Any targets threatening the Russian groups of forces or land infrastructure must be immediately destroyed.

Putin followed up this order with another order to the Russian Defense Ministry Board:

Special attention must be paid to strengthening the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces and implementing defense space programs. It is necessary, as outlined in our plans, to equip all components of the nuclear triad with new arms.

 

Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported at the Defense Ministry meeting that 56 percent of Russia's nuclear forces are new and that 95 percent are at a permanent state of readiness. The few Western news sources that report these developments pretend that Russia is "saber-rattling" without cause.

To make it clear even for the insouciant Western populations, everything that Reagan and Gorbachev worked for has been overthrown by crazed, demented, evil American neoconservatives whose desire for hegemony over the world is driving the world to extinction.

These are the same bloodthirsty war criminals who have destroyed seven countries, murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of Muslim peoples, and sent millions of refugees from the neocon wars into Europe. None of these war criminals are protected from terrorist attack. If the alleged "Muslim threat" was real, every one of the war criminals would be dead by now, not the innocent people sitting in Paris cafes or attending parties in California.

Neocons are the unhumans who created on purpose the "war against terror" in order to gain a weapon against Russia and China. You can witness these unhumans every day on talk TV and read them in the Weekly Standard, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the British, German, Australian, Canadian, and endless Western newspapers.

In the West lies prevail, and the lies are driving the world to extinction. An expert reminds us that it only takes one mistake and 30 minutes to destroy life on earth.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

 

The Second Cold War

The Second Cold War

By Steffen A. Wöll

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

In the light of the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, there has been much talk about the clouding of US-Russian relations. Some voices in the Internet’s alternative media sections have conjured the possibility that these conflicts might lead to a new major war, while social networks like Twitter saw the usage of the hashtags #WorldWarIII and #WorldWar3 explode after Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 jet in the vicinity of the Syrian border. Headlines in mainstream media outlets like Foreign Policy and the Guardian also proclaimed, “Welcome to Cold War III” and asked “are we going back to the bad old days?”.

This article suggests that although the ideological division of the Cold War ended de facto with the collapse of the Soviet Union, American geopolitical schemes to contain Russian power abroad have never really been abandoned. Throughout the 1990s and until today, US policymakers have been determined to wage overt or covert proxy wars with the aim of curbing its former adversary’s political, economic, and military influence. Chechnya, Ukraine, and Syria are the key spots where the logic of this second Cold War is played out.

A short glance over the state of the world today and its representation in the media suffices to identify a growing number of actual and potential centers of conflicts: Civil war is raging in parts of Ukraine, military tensions are growing in the South Chinese Sea, and the Middle East is more of a mess than ever. Nonetheless, some have suggested that the actual number of armed conflicts has actually reached a historical low. But this assertion is solely based on statistical preference. It is true that interstate (conflicts between two or more states) wars are on the decline. Instead, wars today are much more likely to take the form of intrastate conflicts between governments and insurgents, rather than national armies fighting over territory. As demonstrated to an outstanding degree in Syria, these conflicts are more and more internationalized and involve a bulk of non-state actors and countries who try to reach their goals through proxies rather than direct involvement, which would require “boots on the ground.”

But let’s start at the end. The end of the Cold War, that is. The situation during the years of systemic antagonism between the Eastern and Western Blocs has sometimes been captured in the image of three separate “worlds”: the capitalist First World, the socialist Second World, and a Third World. The latter term was not used as a marker for impoverishment and instability as it is commonly understood today, but as a postcolonial alternative “third way” for those newly independent states that struggled to avoid their renewed absorption by the two towering ideological empires. One strategy through which developing countries attempted to duck the neocolonial policies of the Cold War Blocs was by founding the informal Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in 1961, initiated by India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia. Counting 120 members as of now—in fact a large part of the global South—the movement’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonial stance has lost much of its bargaining power after the end of the Cold War.

Still, the final document of the movement’s 1998 summit in Durban, South Africa suggests that the end of the long-standing bipolar power configuration has by no means led to the betterment of those countries’ situation. Unipolar American dominance and the collapse of the Soviet Union instigated what was understood to be “a worrisome and damaging uni-polarity in political and military terms that is conducive to further inequality and injustice and, therefore, to a more complex and disquieting world situation.” This analysis turned out to be correct in many respects, particularly concerning the period of the 1990s.

While the Clinton years of domestic prosperity saw the US economy achieve the rarity of a budget surplus, the citizens of its erstwhile antagonist were (probably with the exception of Boris Yeltsin) experiencing the more sobering effects of Russia’s political and economic paradigm shift. Democratic Russia struggled to consolidate its deeply shaken economy in an environment ripe with organized crime, crippling corruption, and under the doubtful patronage of oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky who controlled the influential television channel ORT and whom Ron Unz in “Our American Pravda” described as “the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s.”

The actual situation in the former Soviet heartland during the 1990s was utterly different from what American elites and media often depicted as a “golden age” of newfound democracy and a ballooning private sector. From the perspective of many US elites, the country’s plundering by oligarchs, ruthless criminal gangs, kleptocratic politicians, and corrupt military officers was welcomed as a convenient, self-fulfilling mechanism to permanently destabilize its mortally wounded adversary. But Russia never completed all the stages of collapse, not least because Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin eventually took legal action to put such “businessmen” like Roman Abramovich and Berezovsky out of business. The latter was forced to seek refuge in London, from where he threatened to use his £850m private fortune to plot “a new Russian revolution” and violently remove his former protégé from the Kremlin.

The chaotic and aimless term of the alcoholic Yeltsin is often regarded as a chiefly positive time in which the East and the West closed ranks, although politicians and neoconservative think tanks in reality conducted the political and economic sellout of Russia during these years. The presidency of Vladimir Putin, while anything but perfect and with its own set of domestic issues, still managed to halt the nation’s downward spiral in many areas. Nevertheless, it is persistently depicted by Western elites and their “Pravda” as dubious, “authoritarian,” and semi-democratic at best.

Thus, in spite of Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist proclamation of the “End of History” after the fall of the Berlin wall that supposedly heralded the universal rein of liberal democracy, the legacy of the Cold War is anything but behind us. Ostensibly, the current geopolitical situation with its fragmented, oblique, and often contradictory constellations and fault lines is utterly different from the much more straightforward Cold War dualism. Of the Marxist ideology only insular traces remain today, watered down and institutionalized in China, exploited in a system of nationalistic iconography in Cuba, and arranged around an absurdly twisted personality cult in North Korea. As of 2015, Russia is an utterly capitalistic nation, highly integrated in the globalized economy and particularly interdependent with the members of the European economic zone. Its military clout and budget ($52 billion) are dwarfed by US military spending of $598.5 billion in 2015. Even more importantly, after 1991 Russia had to close down or abandon many of its important bases, ports and other military installations as a result of the NATO’s eastward expansion.

Nevertheless, the sheer size of its territory and its command of a substantial nuclear weapon arsenal, cement Russia’s role as a primary threat to American national interests. This is illustrated by the fact that since three and a half decades, the US has covertly supported radical Islamic movements with the goal to permanently destabilize the Russian state by entrapping it in a succession of messy and virtually unwinnable conflicts. Pursued openly during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, this scheme continued to be employed throughout the 1990s during both Chechen Wars, as well as in Russia’s so-called “near abroad” spheres of influence: Dagestan, Ingushetia, South Ossetia, and other former Soviet vassal republics in the Caucasus, which have constantly suffered from extremists who exploit the lack of governmental pervasion in their remote mountain regions. These regions are home to over 25 million ethnic Russians and important components of the country’s economy. After the Soviet-Afghan War and the CIA’s buildup of Osama bin-Laden’s “resistance fighters,” American policymakers recognized the destabilizing potential inherent in the volatile political and sectarian configurations in the Islamic countries that encircle the post-Soviet Russian borderlands.

Hence, despite many political ceremonies, pledges of cooperation, and the opening of Moscow’s first McDonalds in 1990, this policy was never fully abandoned. As a matter of fact, peaceful political coexistence and economic convergence never were the primary goals. Democratic Russia with its allies, military potential, and possible Eurasian trade agreements that threaten to isolate or hamper US hegemony was and still is considered a menace to American ambitions of unipolar, universal dominance.

Since the First Chechen War in 1994, Russia’s prolonged struggle against Islamic terrorism has for the most part been disregarded by Western media. Particularly after 9/11, the “war on terror” acted like a black hole that sucked up the bulk of the Western media’s attention. When the acts of terrorism on Russian soil became too horrifying to ignore—the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 Beslan school siege in particular—the massive death tolls were blamed on the drastic responses of Russian security forces who were not adequately prepared and overwhelmed by the vicious and meticulously planned attacks. In Beslan, the death of hundreds of innocents (186 children were murdered on their first day at school) was indirectly condoned and sardonically depicted as the consequences of the “separatist movement [and its] increasingly desperate attempts to break Russia’s stranglehold on its home turf.” Truly, to describe those who shoot children in front of their parents and vice versa as “separatists” and glorify them as “rebels” who act in self defense against an “authoritarian” regime demands a very special kind of callous apathy.

In a 2013 article that examined the Chechen descent of the suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombing, retired FBI agent and 2002 Time Person of the Year Coleen Rowley exposed “how the Chechen ‘terrorists’ proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians.” She explicitly refers to a 2004 Guardian piece by John Laughland, in which the author connects the anti-Russian sentiments in the BBC and CNN coverage of the Beslan massacre to the influence of one particular organization, the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), whose list of members reads like “a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically (sic) support the ‘war on terror,’” among them Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney. Laughland describes the ACPC as an organization that heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable “Muslim” causes, Bosnia and Kosovo – implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there.

There are three key elements in the organization’s lobbying strategy to denigrate Russia and promote an intervention in Chechnya that serve to unmask a larger pattern behind the US foreign policy after 9/11. First, the labeling of a particular leader or government as “authoritarian” or in some other way “undemocratic” (Vladimir Putin, in this case). Second, the concept of an oppressed yet positively connoted population that strives for freedom and democracy (Chechen terrorists with ties to a-Qaeda, in this case). Finally, the stressing of “human rights violations” that warrant an intervention or economic embargo.

If all of these conditions are satisfied, the violation of the borders of a sovereign state is seen as justified (UN mandate not needed), enabling the US to emerge as a knight in shining armor and champion of human rights, bolting to the rescue of the world’s downtrodden, while covertly achieving an utterly different goal: To further the logic of a second Cold War through proxy warfare and weaken Russian by diminishing its foothold in its surrounding “near abroad” regions, which in many respects represent vital interests, both economically and strategically.

Swap out names and dates and it becomes evident that the same tripartite strategy was used to justify every recent intervention of the US and other NATO members, in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (since 2011). Interventions that were legitimized under the banner of humanitarian relief through the removal of “authoritarian” tyrants and supposed dictators and which have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500.000 people, in Iraq alone. When the ASPC’s made its appeal regarding Chechnya in 2004, mind you, only one year had passed since the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked and two years since the first inmates arrived in the extralegal detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Regarding the sweltering conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the key dynamics are similar. President Viktor Yanukovych, accused by the Euromaidan movement—fueled by aggressive US and EU media propaganda and enticed with promises of lucrative NATO and EU memberships—of “abusing power” and “violation of human rights,” was forced to resign and replaced with a ultranationalist, anti-Russian and pro-Western government. Again, this campaign had nothing to do with actual humanitarian relief or concerns about the country’s democratic integrity. Instead, the hopes of a whole generation for a better future under Western influence were exploited by US policymakers who hoped to stifle Russia’s geostrategic elbowroom by ousting the naval bases of its Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea.

These bases, mostly located in the city of Sevastopol, have been the home port of the Russian navy for over 230 years, and are vital because they provide the only direct access to the Black Sea and (through the Bosporus strait in Turkey) to the Mediterranean. Any expansion of NATO towards these bases had to be regarded as a direct threat, leaving the Russian government practically no choice but to protect them with all means necessary. However, in the stories emanating from Western mainstream media, these bases were showcased as an occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory and used as proof of Russia’s aggressive, “authoritarian,” and imperial aspirations. In reality, Ukraine and Russia signed a Partition Contract in 1997, in which the Ukraine agreed to lease major parts of its facilities to the Russian Black Sea Fleet until 2017, for an annual payment of $98 million.

Along the lines of the currently revitalized genre of alternate history, let’s briefly indulge in the notion that we were still living in the ideologically divided world of the Cold War, in which the Warsaw Pact still existed. For a second, imagine if Mexico or Guatemala or Canada expressed their desire to join said pact and invited its troops to conduct military exercises at their shared border with the US. Even without the existence of an American naval base in that country, how do you think the US would react to such a scenario? Would it stand by idly and let itself be surrounded by its adversaries? For an even more striking parallel, take the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The American military actually has a naval base there—Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous detention camp. Many historians see the deployment of Soviet missiles and troops on the island as the closest that humanity ever came to entering World War III and mutually assured destruction (MAD).  With its support for “regime change” in Ukraine and extension of the NATO to the Russian borders, the US today is engaged in the same old Cold War superpower games that the Soviets played in Cuba 53 years ago. In fact, we should think of Ukraine as being situated in Mother Russia’s “backyard.”

Thousands of miles away from the coasts of North America, the Middle East is the region that Uncle Sam seems to regard as his very own backyard. Many consider George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” after 9/11 and the subsequent interventions in Iraq and (to a lesser degree) Afghanistan as those catastrophic policy decisions that resulted in the sociopolitical destabilization of large parts of this region, resulting in the death, injury, and displacement of millions. In Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the spurious US rhetorical agenda of removing “tyrants” and endowing the local demographics with the liberating gift of democracy has in fact produced vast ungoverned spaces where militant groups like the al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) were able to carve out their “caliphates” and claim other territorial prices. For a long time, the rapid expansion of the Islamic State and its death-loving, apocalyptic ideology was resisted only by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the paramilitary National Defense Forces (NDF), and Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG). The SAA alone has lost as much as 200.000 soldiers in its struggle against various terrorist factions since March 2011.

US politicians and media have expressed their hopes that the Russian intervention to assist the Syrian government in its resistance against these Western, Saudi, and Turkey-backed groups will result in a military and economic debacle, comparable to the Soviet-Afghan war, which lasted well over nine years. It was during the course of this brutal and protracted conflict that US policymakers realized that there was really no need to shed American blood in order to deal the death blow to the Soviet Union. They drew their lessons from the CIA’s countless ventures in South American “nation building,” where a government’s legitimacy and an opposition’s status as either terrorists or freedom fighters depended on their usefulness for American national interests, often accoutered in pithy terms like the “war on drugs.”

Since the days of Pablo Escobar, however, US foreign policy has shifted its main focus towards the Middle East, where the long-term goal has been to weaken the enemies of Israel and strengthen the enemies of Iran. Other goals are to guarantee American access to oil and other natural resources, to establish military bases and consolidate the network of troops abroad, and to secure arms deals for the one-percenters who preside over what president Eisenhower cautioned his nation about in his farewell address: the “military-industrial complex.” As a consequence of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has shifted its strategy towards aerial and drone only warfare combined with the support and (illusion of) control over local militant factions.

Among the many groups fighting in Syria, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), also known as “moderate rebels,” is the US faction of choice. Much like the bin Laden’s Mujahideen fighters in 1980s Afghanistan, they are armed with the help of the CIA. In spite of their apparent moderation, however, a wealth of evidence suggests that this group is directly responsible for a multitude of massacres, mass executions, the ethnic cleansing of non-Sunni citizens, and eating the hearts of their fallen enemies.

The FSA has also been a suspect in the 2013 Ghouta chemical attacks, which some have claimed the US used as a false flag operation to engender international support for the violent removal of the Syrian government. The subsequent UN investigation however failed to establish any conclusive evidence concerning the perpetrator of the war crime and concluded that the sarin gas used in the attacks had most certainly been removed from government arsenals. Based on this information, US, UK, and French leaders and media outlets insisted that the Syrian government had to be the culprit, and immediately pressed the international community to support an intervention with the goal of eradicating Syria’s alleged arsenal of nerve gas and other potential WMDs. This all begins to sound very familiar. Of course, they also requested the bolstering of the “moderate opposition.” Interestingly, though, the official UN report, “careful not to blame either side,” let on that investigators were actually being accompanied by rebel leaders at all times. Moreover, they repeatedly encountered “individuals […] carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.” On page 13, the report goes on to state that

[a] leader of the local opposition forces […] was identified and requested to take ‘custody’ of the Mission […] to ensure the security and movement of the Mission, to facilitate the access to the most critical cases/witnesses to be interviewed and sampled by the Mission […].

Recently, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have protested that their “moderate rebels” were being targeted unjustly by Russian airstrikes in Syria, complaining that “from their [i.e., the Kremlin’s] perspective, they’re all terrorists.” Sometimes, one is inclined to advise them, it can be wise and healthy to assume an outsider’s perspective and check if your reality still coincides with the facts that so many know are true about the FSA. These facts can be broken down to a very short yet concise formula: If it looks like a terrorist, if it talks like a terrorist, if it behaves like a terrorist—it probably is a terrorist.

Instead, the CIA is still supplying the “activists” with outdated-yet-deadly weapons from Army surplus inventories, including hundreds of BGM-71 TOW (“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided”) anti-tank missile systems, which the terrorists use against hard and soft targets alike. The same weapon platform can be seen in action in a recent FSA video that shows the destruction of a Russian helicopter that was sent to extract the Russian pilots at the crash site of their downed Su-24 plane on November 24, 2015. On the same day, another US-supplied TOW missile was used in an ambush targeting a car occupied by RT news journalists Roman Kosarev, Sargon Hadaya, and TASS reporter Alexander Yelistratov in Syria’s Latakia province.

The FSA and other groups, branded as “moderates” who fight against the “authoritarian” forces of tyranny (just like a certain “Saudi businessman” back in the day), function as US proxies in Syria, just like al-Qaeda did in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan War. They are dangerously unstable pawns in a global strategy to secure American and Israeli interests in the Middle East, irrespective of the millionfold suffering and uprooting of entire societies caused by their crimes, the majority of which is directed towards other Muslims.

Commenting on the Russian military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian government, Mr. Obama said that he had no interest in turning this civil war into a proxy war between Russia and the United States, emphasizing that “this is not some superpower chessboard contest.” But this is exactly what US foreign policy, both Republican and Democrat, has done, starting with the end of the Soviet Union and lasting until this very moment. The only difference now being that the Libya-proven rhetorical strategy of (illegal and mandate-less) intervention via “no-fly zones,” “humanitarianism,” and “regime change” did not have the desired effect in Syria because Iran, Lebanon, and Russia did not abandon their ally. Their combined effort succeeded in fending off an unprecedented onslaught of extremists that infiltrated the country, often across the Southern Turkish border, armed with the money of American taxpayers and Wahhabi sheiks.

The Syrian conflict can no longer be described as a civil war. It may have started as one during the ill-fated “Arab Spring” of 2011, when armed “protesters” (i.e., FSA terrorists) murdered several policemen and set government buildings on fire in Daraa, provoking a violent backlash from government forces. The ensuing nationwide chaos was spun by the Western mainstream media troika, namely those media outlets that serve as propaganda tools for the US political and financial elites and who fabricated the myth of the tyrant who massacred peaceful protestors—to be readily sucked up by their indoctrinated clientele.

As a result of the “moderate’s” recent setbacks, the official American position, insofar as its mixed messages can be deciphered, has boiled down to a butt-hurt attitude and passive aggressive lecturing about how to distinguish between varying degrees of moderation among mass-murdering lunatics. Outmaneuvered and publicly exposed, all that is left for Mr. Obama seems to be to pick up the pieces and save some face by accepting Mr. Putin’s offer to join a united front against terrorism in Syria. But such a step seems unthinkable in this ongoing Cold War between Russia and the US. Instead, the most powerful man on earth talks about climate change as the most pressing problem of our times. When it comes to ISIS, he has said he wanted to “contain” them. Meanwhile, tensions are rising as Turkish president Erdogan, on an power trip after his surprising landslide victory in November’s general elections, apparently collaborated with ISIS and risked provoking an NATO Article 5 response by downing a Russian Su-24. On the other side of the equation, Russia’s decision to intervene on behalf of the Syrian government reveals a twofold strategy: On the one hand, through its direct action it positions the Putin government as being opposed to the fatal logics of proxy warfare. On the other hand, it simultaneously exposes the catastrophic flaws of Mr. Obama’s strategies in Syria and the Middle East.

All these developments do not necessarily mean that we are heading for World War III—although logic dictates that it will happen at some point in the future. In reality, though, a full-on nuclear confrontation would require a massive unraveling of the still sufficiently functional channels of political cooperation and interstate diplomacy. International security and economic communities as well as overlapping alliances like the United Nations, NATO, OSCE, and BRIC all indicate a high level of international integration.

Nonetheless, the geopolitical decisions of the last years herald the start of a new period in political history that indeed corresponds to a Cold War constellation. Particularly US foreign policy is currently undergoing the revival of a more offensive realism, visible in recent demonstrations of power in NATO’s Eastern border states, pushing of the TPP agreement in the Pacific economic area, and aggressive patrolling of the South Chinese Sea. In fact, the avoidance of superpower confrontation at all costs seems to increasingly take a back seat to these high-risk maneuvers.

In the late 1940s the first Cold War began as a war of the words when the powers who had together defeated Nazi Germany started to level criticism at their respective global policies. With the help of their media and propaganda sources, their different stances and perspectives solidified and eventually developed into monolithic ideologies. These in turn spawned the geopolitical doctrines that warranted the replacement of any open (i.e., nuclear) confrontation with confined proxy wars as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. A similar erosion of mutual trust, respect, and solidarity is taking place now as the outsourced US-Russian conflicts in Ukraine and Syria remain unsolved. Again, the second Cold War arises as a war of the words while negative sentiments are allowed to petrify and the glacial rhetorics of mistrust and veiled threats gradually begin to replace talk about common interests and cooperation. The influential and policy-shaping Foreign Affairs magazine already struck the right chords of the passive-aggressive Cold War parlance by titling, “Putin’s Game of Chicken: And How the West Can Win.”

At the end of the day, this exact attitude could be one of the reasons why the US might come out on the losing side of this conflict. Because they have not yet realized this is not a “game of chicken” anymore. In fact, this is no longer the same easy game of manipulation that the US played during the 1990s by throwing cheap shots at a collapsing state. The deployment of its air force in Syria is not least a signal to the American establishment that Russia in 2015 no longer stands at the sidelines and watches begrudgingly as the US and its allies commence their disastrous policies in the Middle East.

When Mr. Obama asserted that “this is not some superpower chessboard contest,” he therefore either told a lie or he demonstrated his government’s utter cluelessness with regard to the actual situation and consequences of their actions in Ukraine, Syria, the South Chinese Sea, and other hotspots of the second Cold War. Both possibilities do not bode well for the future.

Steffen A. Wöll [send him mail] is currently enrolled in the American Studies Master’s program at Leipzig University. His research interests include foreign policy, the Middle East, popular culture, as well as radical millennialist and environmentalist movements in the US.

Stumbling to War With Russia?

Stumbling to War With Russia?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act.

That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space, crashed and burned — in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A Russian marine was killed.

“A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists,” said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.

As it is impossible to believe Turkish F-16 pilots would fire missiles at a Russian plane without authorization from President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, we must ask: Why did the Turkish autocrat do it?

Why is he risking a clash with Russia?

Answer: Erdogan is probably less outraged by intrusions into his air space than by Putin’s success in securing the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, whom Erdogan detests, and by relentless Russian air strikes on Turkmen rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.

Imperiled strategic goals and ethnicity may explain Erdogan. But what does the Turkish president see down at the end of this road?

And what about us? Was the U.S. government aware Turkey might attack Russian planes? Did we give Erdogan a green light to shoot them down?

These are not insignificant questions.

For Turkey is a NATO ally. And if Russia strikes back, there is a possibility Ankara will invoke Article V of NATO and demand that we come in on their side in any fight with Russia.

And Putin was not at all cowed. Twenty-four hours after that plane went down, his planes, ships and artillery were firing on those same Turkmen rebels and their jihadist allies.

Politically, the Turkish attack on the Sukhoi Su-24 has probably aborted plans to have Russia join France and the U.S. in targeting ISIS, a diplomatic reversal of the first order.

Indeed, it now seems clear that in Syria’s civil war, Turkey is on the rebel-jihadist side, with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on the side of the Syrian regime.

But whose side are we on?

As for what strategy and solution President Obama offers, and how exactly he plans to achieve it, it remains an enigma.

Nor is this the end of the alarming news.

According to The Times of Israel, Damascus reports that, on Monday, Israel launched four strikes, killing five Syrian soldiers and eight Hezbollah fighters, and wounding others.

Should Assad or Hezbollah retaliate, this could bring Israel more openly into the Syrian civil war.

And if Israel is attacked, the pressure on Washington to join her in attacking the Syrian regime and Hezbollah would become intense.

Yet, should we accede to that pressure, it could bring us into direct conflict with Russia, which is now the fighting ally of the Assad regime.

Something U.S. presidents conscientiously avoided through 45 years of Cold War — a military clash with Moscow — could become a real possibility. Does the White House see what is unfolding here?

Elsewhere, yet another Russia-NATO clash may be brewing.

In southern Ukraine, pylons supporting the power lines that deliver electricity to Crimea have been sabotaged, blown up, reportedly by nationalists, shutting off much of the electric power to the peninsula.

Repair crews have been prevented from fixing the pylons by Crimean Tatars, angry at the treatment of their kinfolk in Crimea.

In solidarity with the Tatars, Kiev has declared that trucks carrying goods to Crimea will not be allowed to cross the border.

A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea.

Russia is retaliating, saying it will not buy produce from Ukraine, and may start cutting off gas and coal as winter begins to set in.

Ukraine is as dependent upon Russia for fossil fuels as Crimea is upon Ukraine for electricity. Crimea receives 85 percent of its water and 80 percent of its electricity from Ukraine.

Moreover, Moscow’s hopes for a lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, imposed after the annexation of Crimea, appear to be fading.

Are these events coordinated? Has the U.S. government given a go-ahead to Erdogan to shoot down Russian planes? Has Obama authorized a Ukrainian economic quarantine of Crimea?

For Vladimir Putin is not without options. The Russian Army and pro-Russian rebels in southeast Ukraine could occupy Mariupol on the Black Sea and establish a land bridge to Crimea in two weeks.

In Syria, the Russians, with 4,000 troops, could escalate far more rapidly than either us or our French allies.

As of today, Putin supports U.S.-French attacks on ISIS. But if we follow the Turks and begin aiding the rebels who are attacking the Syrian army, we could find ourselves eyeball to eyeball in a confrontation with Russia, where our NATO allies will be nowhere to be found.

Has anyone thought this through?

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

Copyright © 2015 Creators.com

Previous article by Patrick J. Buchanan: Europe Is Run by Hollow Men

Léo Strauss, maître à penser des néo-conservateurs criminels

Auteur : RI

Ex: http://zejournal.mobi

Il y a consensus pour blâmer les instigateurs et les exécutants des guerres, révolutions, assassinats, bombardements, renversement des gouvernements et autres actes criminels qui ont ensanglanté des régions étendues de la planète, tout particulièrement depuis 2001, date charnière, qui a donné suite aux évènements du 11 Septembre de la même année.

Chacun y va de sa harangue, et désigne qui ceux-ci, qui ceux-là. À raison évidemment. L’empire du chaos est bien sûr omniprésent au cœur des désignés. Mais remontons un peu plus loin, au programme source, jusqu’à celui qui a concocté l’idéologie qui a déclenché en cascades tous ces crimes planétaires auxquels la Russie et Poutine s’efforcent de mettre fin aujourd’hui. La géostratégie mondiale menée par les pays puissants est fortement inspirée par les idéologies qui la sous-tend. Les politiques intérieures des états le sont également. Qui pourrait nier que l’idéologie socialiste et néo-libérale n’a pas d’impact sur la politique intérieure de la France ?

Certaines idéologies sont connues mondialement, avec leurs idéologues. On pense évidemment à Karl Marx par exemple, à l’idéologie fasciste, sioniste ou socialiste aussi. Mais d’autres idéologues, à peine connus du grand public et même des dissidents les plus affûtés, ont influencé directement des groupes puissants qui ont incité à semer guerres et destructions au cours des 15 à 20 dernières années. Léo Strauss a nourri directement les délires des néo-conservateurs américains qui ont, depuis leur fameux Project for a New American Century (PNAC de 1995), sous-tendu les politiques criminelles des Présidents américains, de George Bush à Obama, même si celui-ci s’en détourne encore trop timidement au cours de son deuxième mandat.

Il n’est pas surfait de craindre que ce qui se joue actuellement, en Syrie notamment, avec la Russie et Poutine, sera prolongé d’une guerre, ou bien non. Cette issue, qui pourrait s’avérer fatale même pour beaucoup d’entre nous, dépendra de la réponse américaine, et du résultat des luttes intestines au sein de son gouvernement et de son administration entre Américains patriotes et néo-conservateurs liberticides et hégémoniques, en grande partie, il faut bien le dire, inspirés par le sionisme fanatique aussi présent en Amérique qu’il l’est dans l’entité qui se fait appeler Israël.

Léo Strauss, né en 1899 d’une famille de juifs orthodoxes des environs de Marbourg, en Allemagne, vécut aux Etats-Unis de 1938 jusqu’à sa mort, en 1973. Professeur de philosophie politique à l’université de Chicago de 1953 à 1973, Strauss a créé toute une génération d’idéologues et de politiciens qui, aujourd’hui, sont infiltrés dans le gouvernement américain et dans le milieu néo-conservateur, et qui ont eu une influence énorme sur le Président Bush et qui sont encore là avec Obama. Léo Strauss était idéologue. On sait que les idéologies sont souvent le substrat des stratégies politiques dangereuses. Le fascisme était l’idéologie de l’Allemagne nazie, le marxisme celle du stalinisme. Les nazis ont tué des dizaines de millions de gens. Le straussisme était l’idéologie des faucons de Bush et celle des faucons néolibéraux d’Obama. Bush, ignare à son arrivée à la Maison Blanche (il l’est resté jusqu’au bout), avait endossé cette idéologie de A à Z. Les dégâts considérables dans les pays Arabo-Musulmans qu’on connaît et qu’on déplore aujourd’hui sont directement à associer à l’influence néfaste de Léo Strauss.

J’emprunte à « solidarité et progrès » ainsi qu’à plusieurs journaux américains certaines révélations sur le mouvement straussien qui est organisé en réseaux aux États-Unis : le principal idéologue qui se réclame de Léo Strauss dans l’administration Bush est le vice-ministre de la Défense, Paul Wolfowitz, qui a étudié auprès d’Allan Bloom à l’université de Chicago. Depuis les années 70, il compte parmi ses collaborateurs Richard Perle, Steven Bryen et Elliot Abrams. On peut en citer un autre, l’ancien directeur de la CIA, James Woolsey, membre du « Defense Policy Board », et adjoint du Général Garner qui a dirigé le gouvernement irakien. Dans le domaine des médias, on peut citer John Podhoretz, rédacteur du New York Post et ancien éditeur du Weekly Standard, ainsi qu’Irving Kristol, éditeur de Public Interest, l’organe des néo-conservateurs, et collaborateur de l’American Entreprise Institute (A.E.I), lieu privilégié de Bush pour ses discours de propagande. Son fils William Kristol est un des idéologues du parti républicain. Citons encore Werner Dannhauser, un protégé personnel de Strauss qui a quitté le monde universitaire pour assurer la rédaction de Commentary, après le départ à la retraite de Norman Podhoretz, ainsi que deux autres membres de la rédaction du Weekly Standard, David Brook et Robert Kagan, le fils d’un professeur straussien de Yale, Donald Kagan.

Dans le domaine du département de la justice, des straussiens inconditionnels sont le juge de la Cour suprême, Clarence Thomas, et l’ex ministre de la Justice, John Ashcroft. Pour ce qui est du gouvernement Bush à l’époque, on y trouve Lewis Libby, directeur de cabinet de l’ex vice-président Richard Cheney et ancien élève de Wolfowitz à l’université de Yale. Après le 11 septembre 2001, insatisfait des renseignements fournis par la CIA et l’intelligence militaire, Abram Shulsky fut nommé à la tête d’une unité de renseignements au sein de la bureaucratie civile du Pentagone, créée pour produire, au besoin inventer, tous les montages dont les faucons avaient besoin pour justifier la guerre contre l’Irak. Straussien convaincu, Shulsky anime encore aujourd’hui des débats sur la pensée du « maître ». Parmi les « penseurs » et stratèges, on compte l’auteur du Choc des civilisations, Samuel Huntington, ainsi que Francis Fukuyama et Allan Bloom, qui lui est décédé.

Alors qu’ils avaient été tenus totalement à l’écart du gouvernement américain pendant la présidence de Bill Clinton, les straussiens ne sont cependant pas restés inactifs. Outre l’élaboration de doctrines militaires, dont celles qui ont cours actuellement, ils ont notamment rédigé un document pour le gouvernement israélien (Clean Break), prévoyant la fin des accords d’Oslo. Plusieurs disciples de Strauss et de Bloom avaient d’ailleurs émigré en Israël où ils militaient contre la paix. L’Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) a été créé à Washington et à Jérusalem en 1984, afin de promouvoir le libre-échange et explicitement, dès 1996, la pensée de Strauss.

Début 1997, William Kristol et Robert Kagan, deux « intellectuels dans la tradition de Strauss », ont lancé à Washington, en collaboration avec l’American Entreprise Institute, une organisation intitulée « Project for the New American Century », dont le but déclaré est de promouvoir la présence militaire américaine partout dans le monde, pour y tenir littéralement le rôle de « gendarme du globe », à commencer par l’Irak. Le 3 juin 1997, cette organisation a publié un acte de fondation, appelant à une nouvelle politique étrangère basée sur l’« hégémonie globale bienveillante » des Etats-Unis. Parmi les signataires de cette lettre : Elliot Abrams, William Bennett, Jeb Bush (frère du Président de l’époque), Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld et Paul Wolfowitz.

Project for the New American Century

Maintenant que l’on connaît le nom des straussiens les plus influents de l’ex gouvernement Bush, et qu’il est aisé d’imaginer l’influence écrasante qu’ils ont eu et veulent encore avoir sur la politique américaine et le cours des évènements mondiaux, il nous reste à décrire les grandes lignes de l’idéologie de Léo Strauss.

Le philosophe, pour Léo Strauss, c’est l’homme rare, capable de supporter la vérité. Cette vérité, c’est qu’il n’y pas de Dieu, que l’univers n’a que faire de l’homme et de l’espèce humaine et que l’entièreté de l’histoire humaine n’est qu’une minuscule poussière insignifiante sur la croûte de l’univers, dont la naissance coïncide quasiment avec la disparition. Il n’existe ni moralité, ni bien ni mal, et toute discussion sur l’au-delà n’est que commérage. Mais évidemment, l’immense majorité de la population est si incapable de faire face à la vérité qu’elle appartient quasiment à une autre race, ce que Nietzsche appelait « le troupeau » ou encore « les esclaves ». Ils ont besoin d’un Dieu « père fouettard », de la crainte d’une punition après la vie, et de la fiction du bien et du mal. Sans ces illusions, ils deviendraient fous et se révolteraient, ce qui empêcherait toute forme d’ordre social. Puisque la nature humaine est ainsi faite et ne changera jamais, selon Strauss, ce sera toujours comme ça. C’est le surhomme ou « philosophe » qui fournit au troupeau les croyances religieuses, morales et autres, dont il a besoin, mais dont il sait très bien, lui, qu’elles sont erronées. En réalité, les « philosophes » n’utilisent ces manigances que pour plier la société à leurs propres intérêts. Par ailleurs, les philosophes font appel à toutes sortes de gens utiles, y compris les « gentlemen » qui sont formatés dans les connaissances publiques. On les dresse à croire à la religion, à la moralité, au patriotisme et à la chose publique et certains deviennent hauts fonctionnaires. Bien sûr, en plus de ces vertus, ils croient aussi aux philosophes qui leur ont enseigné toutes ces bonnes choses. Ces « gentlemen », qui deviennent des politiques, continueront à écouter à vie les conseils des philosophes. La gouvernance du monde par l’intermédiaire de ces golems implantés dans les gouvernements est ce que Strauss appelle le « Royaume secret » et pour beaucoup de ses élèves, c’est la mission de leur vie.

Ça vous semble du délire ? Ça l’est ! Imaginez vous que l’Amérique, le plus puissant pays au monde, était dirigée par un Président, George W. Bush, qui est tombé totalement et inconditionnellement sous l’influence de l’idéologie straussienne, décrite plus haut. Une trentaine de faucons de l’administration Bush sont pétris de cette idéologie, et la relève a été assurée aujourd’hui auprès d’Obama. Vous n’aurez aucun mal à établir la longue liste d’idéologues néo-conservateurs qui polluent encore au premier degré les politiques et inspirent les prétentions des Etats-Unis.

Les conséquences possibles de cette situation font frémir. Sans foi, ni loi, ni moralité, manipulant les autres, méprisant les masses, d’un racisme consommé, les straussiens américains ont commencé à étendre leur ombre malfaisante sur le monde. Le nôtre, dans lequel on vit, celui qui aura à souffrir de l’idéologie de Léo Strauss, qui n’a rien à envier au fascisme qui a noirci les plus belles pages de l’histoire du XX ème siècle. Mort en 1973, Léo Strauss aura marqué les premières années du XXI ème siècle et pourrait encore exercer son influence mortifère au cours des prochaines années.

Les relations entre les États-Unis et nos gouvernements qui se targuent d’être démocratiques risquent de tourner court, tant que l’idéologie straussienne dictera les politiques américaines, ce qui fut le cas à 100% avec George W. Bush et qui le reste encore trop avec Obama. D’ailleurs qu’en sera t-il avec le prochain Président, homme ou femme, aux Etats-Unis ? Une réponse qui aura un impact essentiel sur le reste du monde car cela dictera la politique extérieure américaine. D’un côté une idéologie barbare et archaïque, de l’autre des principes humanistes, religieux, moraux, sur lesquels sont fondés notre civilisation.

Il faut savoir nommer son ennemi, le désigner. On dit : les Américains mettent le monde à feu et à sang, comme si ce peuple de lui-même agissait de façon démoniaque. Ce ne sont pas les Américains qu’il faut blâmer, ce sont leurs gouvernements, directement influencés depuis les 15 à 20 dernières années par des groupes de pression puissants comme les néo-conservateurs, eux-mêmes nourris par des idéologies mortifères comme celle de Léo Strauss. On notera une fois de plus que la presque totalité de ces néo-conservateurs straussiens sont des binationaux, qui détiennent à la fois des passeports américains et israéliens. Serait-ce une coïncidence ?

Le néo-conservatisme straussien s’appuie sur six caractéristiques principales, qui se recoupent en grande partie :

– la volonté d’employer rapidement la force militaire ;

– un dédain pour les organisations multilatérales ;

– une faible tolérance pour la diplomatie ;

– une focalisation sur la protection d’Israël et donc un interventionnisme orienté et tronqué au Moyen-Orient ;

– une insistance sur la nécessité pour les États-Unis d’agir de manière unilatérale ;

– une tendance à percevoir le monde en termes binaires (bon/mauvais).

Ces caractéristiques, que vous reconnaîtrez de toute évidence, vous font-elles penser aux « Américains » ? C’est plutôt le néo-conservatisme straussien qu’il faut reconnaître et condamner. C’est là, in fine, que le mal absolu s’est logé, là d’où tout est parti, et qui est la source d’un chaos invraisemblable qui submerge la planète.

Algarath

- Source : RI

Zo dreigt de NAVO binnen enkele jaren oorlog met Rusland te veroorzaken

Zo dreigt de NAVO binnen enkele jaren oorlog met Rusland te veroorzaken

 

Ex: http://xandernieuws.punt.nl

Bevolking Europa en Amerika heeft niet veel tijd meer om WO-3 te voorkomen

Het is 2018. President Hillary Clinton (God verhoede het!) beschuldigt de Russen ervan haar ‘no fly zone’ boven Syrië te hebben geschonden. Damascus staat op het punt te vallen. Islamitische terreurgroepen die deels bewapend en gesteund worden door de VS bereiden een sloffensief voor om de hoofdstad in te nemen. Een Russisch gevechtsvliegtuig komt bijna in botsing met een Amerikaans toestel, dat de opdracht heeft de ‘gematigde’ moslimrebellen te beschermen. Ondertussen bereidt het door de CIA geïnstalleerde ultranationalistische regime in Kiev een aanval op de Krim voor met de bedoeling het schiereiland te ‘heroveren’. De aan de grenzen verzamelde troepen van Oost en West worden in hoogste staat van paraatheid gebracht...

Het Oekraïense leger heeft de afgelopen jaren grote hoeveelheden nieuwe wapens van de VS en Europa gekregen, en staat klaar voor een invasie van de Krim. Aan het front staat de neonazistische Azov Brigade, die het bevel heeft om de controle te nemen over Mariupol, dat in een door het Westen ‘illegaal’ verklaard volksreferendum voor aansluiting bij Rusland heeft gekozen.

In Kaliningrad, de geïsoleerde Russische enclave tussen Polen, Litouwen en de Baltische Zee in, worden door de EU georganiseerde en gefinancierde demonstraties gehouden waarin de hereniging met Duitsland wordt geëist. Rusland, dat zich bedreigd voelt door de almaar groter wordende NAVO troepenmacht in de Baltische staten, stuurt een sterke legermacht naar zijn grenzen.

Terwijl president Clinton de nucleaire strijdkrachten in Duitsland, die zojuist zijn gemoderniseerd, in alarmfase brengt, kondigt president Vladimir Putin aan dat Rusland zich uit het INF verdrag, dat destijds door president Reagan werd ondertekend om de kernwapens voor de middellange afstand te beperken, terugtrekt. Door de hoog opgelopen spanningen wisselden Amerika en Rusland sinds 2016 al geen informatie meer over deze wapens met elkaar uit, waardoor beide partijen geen zicht meer op elkaars activiteiten hadden.

Dan pikt een NAVO radarstation in het oosten van Duitsland signalen op van wat mogelijk een squadron Russische gevechtsvliegtuigen is dat richting Kaliningrad vliegt. Het sinds vorig jaar actief geworden raketafweersysteem in Polen wordt geactiveerd. Terwijl in Europa een nieuwe wereldoorlog dreigt los te barsten, gaat bij Hillary Clinton midden in de nacht de rode telefoon rinkelen...

NAVO heeft Koude Oorlog tegen Rusland hervat

Gezien de hervatting van de Koude Oorlog in de afgelopen jaren is het bovenstaande scenario –of een variant daarvan- niet alleen heel goed mogelijk, maar zelfs bijna onvermijdelijk. Het INF verdrag dreigt inderdaad uit elkaar te vallen nu de NAVO steeds meer troepen en materieel naar de Russische grenzen transporteert, en het Kremlin weinig anders kan doen dan daar op reageren.

De Amerikaans-Europese staatsgreep in Oekraïne, Georgiës aanstaande toetreding tot de NAVO, het moderniseren van de Amerikaanse kernwapens in Duitsland, en de steeds extremer wordende anti-Russische propaganda in de Westerse media hebben in korte tijd het gevaar van een kernoorlog, waarvan we na de val van de Muur en het communisme dachten voorgoed te zijn verlost, doen oplaaien.

Beschuldigingen dat Rusland het INF verdrag reeds geschonden heeft zijn vooralsnog niet bewezen. Wèl bewezen is het verplaatsen van zware wapens door de NAVO naar de oostelijke grenzen, en het verdubbelen van de ‘snelle reactiemacht’ in Europa. Rusland kondigde vervolgens een modernisering van zijn kernwapens aan, maar loopt in dat opzicht nog altijd ver achter op de VS, omdat het weliswaar veel raketten heeft, maar veel minder lanceerplatforms om deze af te schieten.

Niet Rusland, maar Amerika brak met verdragen

Het was Amerika dat in 2002 eenzijdig het ABM (anti-ballistische raket) verdrag opzegde en deze verboden wapensystemen in twee Oost Europese landen stationeerde. Tegelijkertijd werd de NAVO -tegen alle eerdere beloften aan Moskou in- uitgebreid naar het Oosten, bijna tot aan ‘de poorten’ van de Russische hoofdstad. Het verdrag over de beperking van de gewapende strijdkrachten in Europa, dat in 1990 door de presidenten Bush sr. en Gorbachev werd ondertekend, werd eveneens door de VS gebroken toen er militaire bases in Roemenië en Bulgarije werden gebouwd.

Vijf jaar later trokken ook de Russen zich uit het ABM verdrag terug, daartoe gedwongen door de anti-raketsystemen die Amerika in Oost Europa opzette. Het Kremlin zag met argusogen hoe de Amerikanen stap voor stap Rusland omsingelden, niet alleen in Europa, maar ook in Centraal Azië. Zo werd ook in Oezbekistan een militaire basis gebouwd, en wordt een luchtmachtbasis in Kirgizië gebruikt voor de bevoorrading van Amerikaanse troepen in Afghanistan.

Mensenrechten – alleen als het uitkomt

Vragen over de slechte mensenrechtensituatie in Oezbekistan worden niet op prijs gesteld. Immers, Washington –en in zijn slaafse kielzog Brussel- brengt alleen mensenrechten ter sprake als Putin daarmee (valselijk) beschuldigd kan worden. Van de arrestatie en gevangenneming van talloze journalisten in bijvoorbeeld ‘bondgenoten’ Oekraïne en Turkije wordt zelden of nooit enige melding gemaakt, laat staan dat er tegen wordt geprotesteerd.

Oorlogszuchtige presidentskandidaten

Deze Westerse politieke- en media hetze tegen Putin en Rusland wordt almaar heftiger. Hillary Clinton noemt de Russen een ‘bedreiging’ en is inderdaad voor het instellen van een Amerikaanse no-flyzone boven Syrië, wat onmiddellijk een confrontatie met Rusland –dat daar in tegenstelling tot de VS wèl op uitnodiging van de wettig gekozen Syrische regering opereert- zal veroorzaken.

De Republikeinse presidentskandidaat Marco Rubio vindt zelfs dat Russische vliegtuigen gewoon uit de lucht moeten worden geschoten, dat er nog meer ABM-systemen in Europa moeten worden opgezet, en dat Oekraïne lid moet worden van de NAVO. Gelukkig is er niet zoveel kans dat Rubio de Republikeinse genomineerde wordt en daarna tot president wordt gekozen, want hij zou met deze acties zonder twijfel een ‘hete’ oorlog met Rusland ontketenen.

Maar ook de andere kandidaten uiten zich in vergelijkbare oorlogszuchtige taal, met uitzondering van Rand Paul –die al helemaal geen kans maakt- en Donald Trump, die nog steeds mateloos populair is onder het volk, maar vanwege zijn anti-establishment houding en dito opvattingen gehaat wordt door bijna de hele Republikeinse top.

‘War on terror’ werd ‘war on Russia’

De spanningen tussen het Westen en Rusland zijn hoe dan ook tot een gevaarlijke hoogte opgelopen, die enkel te vergelijken is met het toppunt van de Koude Oorlog. Washington heeft de ‘war on terror’ ingeruild voor een politiek die duidelijk aanstuurt op een militaire confrontatie met Rusland. Daarbij hebben de Westerse plannenmakers de islam en tal van islamistische terreurgroepen tot hun bondgenoten gemaakt.

Bevolking moet in opstand komen

Helaas gaat het demoniseren van Putin door ‘onze’ politici en media nog altijd onverminderd door. Toch hopen we dat de gewone Europeanen en Amerikanen de eerlijke informatie die ze in de alternatieve media kunnen lezen aannemen en in opstand komen, voordat ‘onze’ leiders ons in al hun ‘wijsheid’ in weer een verwoestende oorlog storten, die tevens onze aandacht moet afleiden van andere gigantische problemen, zoals de onoplosbare Europese schuldencrisis en natuurlijk de massale immigratie van miljoenen moslims, die de stabiliteit, vrede en welvaart van onze samenleving in hoog tempo ondermijnt.

Niet veel tijd meer om WO-3 te voorkomen

De Derde Wereldoorlog is nog te voorkomen, maar er is niet veel tijd meer. De Amerikanen en Europeanen moeten massaal in opstand komen tegen de huidige gevestigde orde, en leiders aanstellen die een totaal ander beleid gaan volgen, zoals het onmiddellijk afsluiten van de grenzen, het herstellen van de soevereiniteit van de nationale parlementen door het opheffen van de EU en een terugkeer naar de EG, en het weghalen van alle extra troepen en wapensystemen bij de grenzen met Rusland, zodat er weer een ontspanning en toenadering tot het Kremlin mogelijk wordt, er gezamenlijk een oplossing voor Oekraïne en Syrië worden gevonden, en er wellicht zelfs een nieuwe tijd van samenwerking, voorspoed en welvaart voor alle volken in zowel Oost als West aanbreekt.

Eén ding is zeker: alles blijft niet ‘bij het oude’, alles wordt nooit meer zoals het was, zolang we totalitaire verraders zoals Obama, Merkel en Juncker aan het roer richting een inmiddels bijna niet meer te vermijden nieuwe wereldbrand laten staan.

Xander

(1) Zero Hedge

Ron Paul Discusses Evangelical Zionists’ Support for US Wars

Ron Paul Discusses Evangelical Zionists’ Support for US Wars

By Adam Dick
Ron Paul Institute & http://www.lewrockwell.com

Ron Paul, the former United States presidential candidate and Republican House of Representatives member from Texas, discussed in an August 8 radio interview evangelical Zionists who support the US government’s wars overseas. Paul examines the matter with Patriot’s Lament show host Joshua Bennett on KFAR radio of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Asked by Bennett why so many religious people in America are pro-war, Paul responds that, while the reasons vary from one person to the next, evangelical Zionism, which is taught by preachers at some churches, “has a lot to do with it.” Paul continues that the use of Christianity to support preventative or preemptive wars is “a gross distortion” of what Paul believes “the Christian faith is all about.” Paul explains in the interview that he sees Jesus as “the Prince of Peace.”

Also discussed in the 24-minute interview are Paul’s new book Swords into Plowshares — in which Paul writes extensively regarding the relationship among religion, war, and peace — as well as three projects Paul has undertaken since leaving the House in January of 2013 — the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, and the Ron Paul Curriculum.

Listen to Paul’s complete interview here.

Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams and Senior Fellow Adam Dick have also been guests on the KFAR radio show.

Listen to McAdams’ interview here.

Listen to Dick’s interview here.

P. Buchanan: Our Next Mideast War - Syria

Our Next Mideast War - Syria

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq.

When he figures it out, hopefully, our would-be president will focus in on the campaign to drag us into yet another Mideast war — this time to bring down Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.

While few would mourn the passing of the Assad dynasty, there is a problem: If Assad falls, a slaughter of Christians will follow and the battle for control of Damascus will be between the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, the Nusra Front, and the crazed terrorists of the Islamic State.

Victory for either would be a disaster for America.

Where is the evidence of an unholy alliance to bring this about?

Turkey, which turned a blind eye to ISIS volunteers slipping into Syria, has aided the Nusra Front in setting up its own capital in Idlib, near the Turkish border, to rival the ISIS capital of Raqqa.

In the fall of Idlib, said Bashar Assad, “the main factor was the huge support that came through Turkey; logistic support, and military support, and of course financial support that came through Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”

Why would Turks, Saudis and Qataris collude with Sunni jihadists?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan detests Assad. The Saudis and Gulf Arabs are terrified of Shiite Iran and see any ally of Tehran, such as Assad, as their mortal enemy.

This also explains the seven weeks of savage Saudi bombing of the Houthi rebels, who dumped over a U.S.-Saudi puppet in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, then seized the second and third cities of Taiz and Aden.

But while the Houthis bear no love for us, they have been fighting al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the Saudi bombing has given AQAP, the most dangerous terrorist foe we face, freedom to create sanctuaries and liberate hundreds of fellow terrorists from prison.

The Israelis seem to be in on the game as well. While they have taken in rebels wounded on the Golan Heights and returned them to their units, there are reports of Israel aiding the Nusra Front with intelligence and even air strikes.

This week, an Israeli official bluntly warned that Hezbollah has amassed 100,000 short-range rockets capable of striking northern Israel, thousands of which could hit Tel Aviv. The rockets are said to be hidden in Shiite villages in southern Lebanon.

Israel is preparing, writes The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner, “for what it sees as an almost inevitable next battle with Hezbollah.”

As Hezbollah has been the most effective fighting ally of Assad, an Israeli war on Hezbollah could help bring Assad down.

But, again, who rises if Assad falls? And who else, besides Christians and Alawites, starts digging their graves?

As one might expect, Sen. Lindsey Graham is all in. Late in April, he declared, “Assad has to go. … We’re going to have to send some of our soldiers back into the Middle East.”

Graham is willing to commit 10,000 U.S. ground troops.

“I would integrate our forces within a regional army. There is no other way to defend this nation than some of us being on the ground over there doing the fighting.”

Wednesday, The Washington Post laid out the game plan for war on Syria. While we cannot create a NATO with kings, emirs, sheiks, and sultans, says the Post,

“[T]here is a way that Mr. Obama could serve both the U.S. interests and those of the Gulf allies: by attacking the Middle East’s most toxic, and destabilizing force, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Syria’s dictatorship is Iran’s closest ally in the region, and its barbarity opened the way for the rise of the Islamic State. Recently, it has suffered battlefield reverses, in part because of increased Gulf aid to rebel forces.

”If Mr. Obama were to … create safe zones in northern and southern Syria for the rebels, the balance could be tipped against Damascus and Tehran — and U.S. allies would have tangible reason to recommit to U.S. leadership.”

Consider what is being recommended here.

The Post wants Obama to bomb a Syrian nation that has not attacked us, without congressional authorization — to aid rebels whose most effective fighters are al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists.

And we’re to fight this war — to nullify ultra-rich but unhappy Gulf Arabs?

Obama must also “do more about Iranian aggression,” says the Post.

But against whom is Iran committing aggression?

In Syria, Iran is backing a regime we recognized until a few years ago, that is under attack by terrorist rebels we detest. In Iraq, Iran is backing the government we support, against ISIS rebels we detest.

Bottom line: A U.S. attack on Syria is being pushed by the War Party to propel us into a confrontation with Iran, and thereby torpedo any U.S. nuclear deal with Iran.

Cui bono? For whose benefit?

The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

Copyright © 2015 Creators.com

Previous article by Patrick J. Buchanan: Is a British Crackup Ahead?

L’impérialisme US mène une guerre permanente afin d’éviter son effondrement inévitable

L’impérialisme US mène une guerre permanente afin d’éviter son effondrement inévitable

Auteur : Danny Haiphong

Traduction Will Summer

Ex: http://zejournal.mobi

Les USA ont toujours été un État belliciste. Toutefois, la nature du bellicisme impérialiste US a radicalement changé. Pendant plus de deux siècles, l’objectif derrière la nature guerrière du régime US – que ce soit contre les peuples indigènes (les guerres amérindiennes, ndlr), les peuples originaires d’Afrique noire (les guerres d’esclavage, ndlr), ou des nations à travers le monde (Mexique, Haïti, Hawaï, Espagne, Philippines avant même le début du XXè siècle, ndlr) – était d’accroître les forces productrices de l’exploitation capitaliste. La guerre précédait les énormes bénéfices s’accumulant de l’esclavage en cheptel, de l’usurpation des terres et de l’extraction des ressources de l’Afrique, de l’Asie et de l’Amérique Latine. Les fondements de la suprématie blanche et du capitalisme ont permis au régime US de consolider son expansion malgré des épisodes de crises périodiques. De récents événements, en parallèle avec un déclin constant du taux de bénéfice engendré par le capitalisme, indiquent que le bellicisme impérialiste US ne produit plus la domination que recherche le système. Maintenant plus que jamais, l’impérialisme US mène des guerres dans le but d’éviter son effondrement inévitable.

L’impérialisme US est en recul partout sur la planète. La récente victoire de Cuba qui a négocié pour elle-même son retrait de la liste soi-disant « terroriste » en est l’exemple validant le fait. Pendant presque six décennies, la révolution cubaine avait été un phare d’espérance en plein cœur de la misère imposée par l’impérialisme US en Amérique Latine. Le refus persistant de Cuba d’extrader Assata Shakur et son système socialiste offrant gratuitement les soins médicaux, l’éducation et le logement, ont gardé la nation insulaire sur la liste des ennemis de l’État US. Pourtant, à partir de décembre 2014, Cuba a négocié la libération des 5 de Cuba et conclu un accord pour des relations plus fraternelles avec Washington. Ces victoires majeures pour la révolution cubaine ont fait sévèrement reculer le plan US, vieux de plusieurs générations et visant à établir un gouvernement néocolonialiste dans l’île. Bien que Cuba demeure confrontée à des attaques issues de l’impérialisme US tant que celui-ci existe, de telles victoires diplomatiques apportent une sécurité fortement requise, dans une période hostile.

Les gains majeurs de Cuba dans l’arène diplomatique sont emblématiques du déclin de l’impérialisme US en Amérique Latine en général. La direction de Cuba et du Venezuela a été le fer de lance d’un mouvement de construction d’une Amérique Latine intégrée et indépendante, surtout par l’intermédiaire d’institutions comme UNASUR et ALBA. Ce qui, naguère, était la première sphère d’influence de l’impérialisme US, n’est plus. Afin de contrer la révolte contre le néolibéralisme en Amérique Latine, l’impérialisme US a continué de chercher à renverser le Venezuela, l’Équateur et d’autres nations non-alignées, tout en étendant sa portée militaire en Afrique et en Asie. En 2014, les USA ont mené 674 opérations militaires à travers l’Afrique, et aidé à coordonner la destruction de la Libye socialiste en 2011. En outre, Washington a poursuivi une politique de déstabilisation, de concert avec ses alliés israéliens et du Conseil de Coopération du Golfe (Persique, ndlr), en soutenant des terroristes en Syrie tout en menant une guerre frauduleuse contre « ISIS » en Irak.

Ces développements sont indicatifs d’une tendance géopolitique antagoniste à l’hégémonie US. Alors que les multinationales US et les banques financières inondent le monde de marchés parasitaires qui asphyxient les peuples et les nations, la crise de l’impérialisme a initié le développement d’un monde multipolaire. Les relations croissantes entre la Chine et la Russie, de tandem avec la formation de la Banque Asiatique d’Infrastructure et des BRICS, ont frappé de peur l’économie impériale US faiblissante. La Guerre au Terrorisme a fourni, dans ces conditions, à la guerre impérialiste US d’endiguement et de pillage l’équivalent d’un lifting. Ce faisant, l’impérialisme US a assassiné des millions de personnes en Irak, en Afghanistan, en Libye, en Syrie et en Somalie, et militarisé les frontières de la Russie et de la Chine dans l’effort de retarder l’émergence d’un consensus global de développement indépendant.

L’Iran est vu par l’impérialisme US comme un acteur majeur dans le développement d’un monde multipolaire. Les entreprises militaires meurtrières de l’impérialisme US cherchent à isoler et à éventuellement renverser l’Iran. En fait, le général Wesley Clark de l’OTAN l’a très clairement exprimé à l’audience de Democracy Now! en 2007, lorsqu’il a déclaré que le dessein impérial de Washington au Moyen-Orient avait l’Iran pour cible. Mais l’Iran est sorti des négociations avec les USA et leurs alliés avec sa souveraineté intacte, et des systèmes de missiles russes S-300 comme élément supplémentaire de défense. Il apparaît que les sanctions US à l’encontre de la République Islamique ainsi que leur guerre par procuration en Syrie et dans la région ont, pour le moment, échoué à fournir à l’impérialisme US son ultime désir, de chute de l’Iran. Et avec l’accord de la Russie de distribuer des S-300 à la République Islamique, le potentiel d’intervention militaire pour l’accomplissement de ce désir est sévèrement handicapé.

Tout comme les révélations d’Ed Snowden n’ont pas empêché le FBI de continuer à fabriquer des attaques soi-disant terroristes aux USA comme justification pour un État de surveillance massive, ainsi l’impérialisme US continue également sa marche vers la guerre à travers le monde, en dépit du changement géopolitique qui s’oppose à lui. Peu de temps après que l’Iran ait accepté l’accord nucléaire proposé par l’impérialisme, Washington a envoyé deux navires de guerre au Yémen pour prétendûment intercepter « des livraisons navales iraniennes d’armements ». Ceci n’est guère représentatif d’un geste d’apaisement des relations. La réalité est que la motivation première de l’impérialisme US est de garantir les ressources et la main d’œuvre nécessaires aux profits de Wall Street. Toutefois, dans le cas de l’Iran, les manœuvres de Washington représentent un choix calculé de refus des bénéfices économiques provenant du commerce avec cette nation riche en pétrole en faveur de l’application d’un frein au développement indépendant de la région, le tout en collusion avec ses alliés sionistes et du Golfe.

L’impérialisme US connaît une crise permanente. La guerre est le mécanisme primaire de défense du système pour éviter l’effondrement. Mais une telle vulnérabilité violente ne fournira pas, à elle seule, une situation révolutionnaire et transformatrice. Pour que ceci se produise le mouvement contre le racisme, le meurtre programmé par l’État et l’exploitation croissante des opprimés aux USA doit construire une relation de solidarité avec les victimes des guerres US à travers le monde. De sérieux acteurs politiques ont pour tâche de mener cela à bien alors que croît un regain de fascisme et que déclinent fortement les voix anti-guerre dans le paysage politique US. De plus, la question de la solidarité internationale ne peut être évitée. En elle se tient une pièce importante du puzzle menant à l’émancipation mondiale, hors de l’impérialisme.

- Source : Danny Haiphong-Traduction Will Summer

 

"Hillary Is the Worst Option": How Moscow Sees American Politics

"Hillary Is the Worst Option": How Moscow Sees American Politics

LUKYANOV, Fyodor & FISHER, Max

Ex: http://www.valdaiclub.com

Everyone in Moscow tells you that if you want to understand Russia's foreign policy and its view of its place the world, the person you need to talk to is Fyodor Lukyanov.

Lukyanov is the chair of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, as well as the editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, which are something like the Russian equivalents of America's Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs — though the Russian versions are considered much closer to the state and its worldview.

Widely considered both an influential leader and an unofficial interpreter of Russia's foreign policy establishment, Lukyanov is frequently sought out by Western policymakers and journalists who wish to understand Russia's approach to the world. During a recent trip to Moscow, Amanda Taub and I met Lukyanov around the corner from the looming Foreign Ministry compound (his office is nearby), at a small Bohemian cafe that serves French and Israeli food to a room packed with gray suits.

We discussed Russia's foreign policy, the country's role in the world, and how its leaders think about the problems and opportunities facing their nation. Lukyanov, hunched over his coffee, had clearly spent a great deal of time with policymakers in and outside of Moscow, and he peppered his answers with references to political science terminology and wonky policy jargon. But he also reflected the official views of Moscow, which makes his answers a revealing glimpse into how his country sees the world.

What follows is a transcript of the section of our conversation that touched on Russia's relationship with the United States. Sections on Russia's approach to the Middle East and on its increasingly dangerous tensions with Europe will be published separately. This has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Max Fisher: We talked earlier about the disagreements within the Russian foreign policy establishment over the Iran nuclear deal. Given that the United States wants to make the deal happen and that there is so much tension currently between the US and Russia, is this affecting the view within Moscow toward the Iran talks? Maybe some people oppose the Iran deal because it would be seen as beneficial to the US, or they support the Iran deal because it could be an opening to ease tensions with Washington?

Fyodor Lukyanov: It's not part of the discussion at all, to decrease tensions with the West. It's not an issue.

Public opinion is pretty mobilized because of Ukraine. A lot of policymakers, even those who used to lean more toward some kind of rapprochement with the West, are irritated by sanctions and so on, so it's not part of the discussion.

So if Russia does something, it's not necessarily to try to explain it as an effort to decrease tensions with the West. It might be a consequence, but it's not the goal.

Max Fisher: It certainly seems that there’s no political appetite in Moscow for a rapprochement with the West. Is that preference widely held within the foreign policy establishment, as well? Or is there a faction that is arguing for rapprochement?

Fyodor Lukyanov: There is a faction, but it’s smaller than it used to be. And even many of those belonging to this faction say that, realistically speaking, they don’t see any options for it in the future, because on the American side there’s a very high level of polarization in the political establishment. And with the election campaigns about to start, it’s the worst time to try to launch something.

No American politician will gain anything positive by being softer on Russia. It’s not a central issue, but maybe candidates could use it in swing states, where many Eastern Europeans [who are generally skeptical of Russia] live.

So I don’t hear any expectations of this, especially since there’s a good chance that Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic candidate. I think there’s a widespread view that with Hillary there would be no chance at all. For her and for her team, since the 1990s, Russia is a failure. One of the biggest failures of Bill Clinton was that he wanted to transform Russia. He was very sincere in his view of how he wanted to transform Russia and to help this transformation, but by the end of his tenure he was terribly disappointed.

Psychologically, for Hillary and for people like [Clinton-era Deputy Secretary of State] Strobe Talbott and many others, Russia is an unfinished job.

Max Fisher: What it is that they want to accomplish?

Fyodor Lukyanov: Many people here believe they will try to come back to the line of the 1990s to encourage Russia into an internal transformation.

Max Fisher: Does that mean regime change?

Fyodor Lukyanov: As a long-term goal, yes. Not by force, of course, but to encourage some kind of social development that will upend the current system and will promote a new one.

Max Fisher: So it’s expected here that Clinton would take a hostile approach to Russia?

Fyodor Lukyanov: Yes, a very hostile approach. Hillary is the worst option of any president [from the Russian view], maybe worse than any Republican.

Max Fisher: Even though she led the US-Russia reset as secretary of state?

Fyodor Lukyanov: She led the reset, but it was done by Obama. She was a disciplined official and did what the White House decided to do. Formally she was in charge, but in real terms she never dealt with this. It was a direct project of Obama and of [former US Ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul. Hillary pushed the button, but that was just a symbolic move, and then she was never active in this.

By the end of her time as secretary of state, when she’d already announced she would leave, she made a couple of statements without being diplomatic anymore. Statements about Russia, about this re-Sovietization of post-Soviet space, about Putin, that demonstrated her real feelings.

I think there is a widespread view that she personally hates Putin and personally dislikes [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov. So in the case of her presidency it will be not very good chemistry between them.

Max Fisher: Some people we’ve spoken to have said something similar about Obama — that Obama dislikes Putin, that he’s motivated by personal animus, and that once he leaves office maybe the sanctions will weaken because they’re driven personally by Obama.

Fyodor Lukyanov: There is a widespread view that Obama dislikes Putin very much. It’s obvious they don’t like each other.

I think Obama actually is not at all an emotional person. He looked at first very human and appealing, but he’s not at all. He’s a very calculating and cold guy without a lot of emotions and feelings. I don’t think his personal perception of Putin plays such a big role. He made a big miscalculation because it seemed like he and McFaul really believed [current Russian Prime Minister and former President Dmitry] Medvedev might become president for a second term, which was a wrong expectation. He did not hide disappointment when Medvedev decided to step down.

Obama sees Russia as a big problem that consumes so much of his time that he would like to dedicate to other issues. He mostly would like to keep distance from Russia, to settle the most acute challenges, but after that he doesn't have interest.

The reset was not because he wanted to make Russia the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda but because actually he failed with other issues. Russia was meant to be supportive and became the biggest achievement, with the reset and the New START [2010 nuclear arms reduction] agreement. But the reset was exhausted by New START and by the Russian accession to the World Trade Organization [in 2012]. They did not have any other agenda. They could have developed a new agenda if the situation had remained favorable as it was under Medvedev, but Putin settled that.

For Obama, Russia turned into a permanent headache. And a headache irritates. It’s not such a strong feeling that other [US] politicians have about Russia.

Max Fisher: Let me ask about the flip side of that. How do you think Putin sees the US now?

Fyodor Lukyanov: He’s utterly anti-American, deeply and sincerely. And it’s not about Obama or Bush or Clinton. It’s about his perception of America as a destructive power.

The most interesting foreign policy statement he made was published one week before his third term began in 2012. The article, "Russia and the changing world," was extremely interesting and substantial. He expressed everything that happened after. His core perception was that the United States is a country that misuses its might and creates even more chaos in the contemporary world, which is anyway very chaotic and unpredictable. Americans, by what they do, just worsen the situation.

The idea was not to challenge America, but to protect Russia. This is how he sees the world, with the United States as a really destructive and destabilizing power.

Max Fisher: Is there anything you believe the Russian leadership misunderstands about the United States, or that you wish they understood better?

Fyodor Lukyanov: The Russian leadership has no clue about how the American system works, how complicated it is.

For example, after Putin’s 2011 decision to exchange with Medvedev [in which the two switched positions of prime minister and president], he said, "Look at the United States. Obama and Hillary both ran for the presidency, but then they sat down and decided who would be president, and Obama won that." How the American system works, it’s not a big interest to our leadership.

I think right now there’s a better understanding of the differences between your president and your Congress. Before, it was the perception that the American president can do anything he wants, and all of these references to a hostile Congress are just bullshit. But now I think there’s a better understanding that Congress can be extremely disruptive to whatever the administration is trying to do. This has become another argument that it doesn’t make sense to try with them.

Max Fisher: Is there no effort to play Congress and the president off of one another?

Fyodor Lukyanov: No, because contrary to Europe, where there are all options to use splits, in the United States, Russia has absolutely no influence in Congress. We don’t have a lobby; we don’t have special leverage there.

Max Fisher is Founder, Rushmore Beekeepers.

Fyodor Lukyanov is Chairman of the  Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Editor-in-Chief, Russia in Global Affairs journal, scientific director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

This interview was originally published on www.vox.com

La cécité de l’Union européenne face à la stratégie militaire des États-Unis

Auteur : Thierry Meyssan

Ex: http://zejournal.mobi

Les responsables de l’Union européenne se trompent complètement sur les attentats islamistes en Europe et les migrations vers l’Union de gens fuyant les guerres. Thierry Meyssan montre ici que tout ceci n’est pas la conséquence accidentelle des conflits au Moyen-Orient élargi et en Afrique, mais un objectif stratégique des États-Unis.

Les dirigents de l’Union européenne se trouvent soudainement confrontés à des situations inattendues. D’une part des attentats ou tentatives d’attentats perpétrées ou préparées par des individus n’appartenant pas à des groupes politiques identifiés ; d’autre part un afflux de migrants via la Méditerranée, dont plusieurs milliers meurent à leurs portes.

En l’absence d’analyse stratégique, ces deux événements sont considérés a priori comme sans relation et sont traités par des administrations différentes. Les premiers ressortent du Renseignement et de la police, les seconds des douanes et de la Défense. Ils ont pourtant une origine commune : l’instabilité politique au Levant et en Afrique.

L'Union européenne s’est privée des moyens de comprendre

Si les académies militaires de l’Union européenne avaient fait leur travail, elles auraient étudié depuis une quinzaine d’années la doctrine du « grand frère » états-unien. En effet, depuis de très longues années, le Pentagone publie toutes sortes de documents sur la « théorie du chaos » empruntée au philosophe Leo Strauss. Il y a quelques mois encore, un fonctionnaire qui aurait dû être à la retraite depuis plus de 25 ans, Andrew Marshall, disposait d’un budget de 10 millions de dollars annuels pour mener des recherches à ce sujet. Mais aucune académie militaire de l’Union n’a sérieusement étudié cette doctrine et ses conséquences. À la fois parce que c’est une forme de guerre barbare et parce qu’elle a été conçue par un maître à penser des élites juives états-uniennes. Or, c’est bien connu, les États-Unis-qui-nous-ont-sauvés-du-nazisme ne peuvent préconiser de telles atrocités.

Si les hommes politiques de l’Union européenne avaient voyagé un tant soit peu, non seulement en Irak, en Syrie, en Libye, dans la corne de l’Afrique, au Nigeria et au Mali, mais aussi en Ukraine, ils auraient vu de leurs propres yeux l’application de cette doctrine stratégique. Mais, ils se sont contentés de venir parler dans un bâtiment de la zone verte à Bagdad, sur une estrade à Tripoli ou sur la place Maïdan de Kiev. Ils ignorent ce que vivent les populations et, sur requête de leur « grand frère », ont souvent fermé leurs ambassades de sorte qu’ils se sont privés d’yeux et d’oreilles sur place. Mieux, ils ont souscrit, toujours à la requête de leur « grand frère », à des embargos, de sorte qu’aucun homme d’affaire n’ira non plus sur place voir ce qui s’y passe.

Le chaos n’est pas un accident, c’est le but

Contrairement à ce qu’a dit le président François Hollande, la migration des Libyens n’est pas la conséquence d’un « manque de suivi » de l’opération « Protecteur unifié », mais le résultat recherché par cette opération dans laquelle son pays jouait un rôle leader. Le chaos ne s’est pas installé parce que les « révolutionnaires libyens » n’ont pas su se mettre d’accord entre eux après la « chute » de Mouammar el-Kadhafi, il était le but stratégique des États-Unis. Et ceux-ci y sont parvenus. Il n’y a jamais eu de « révolution démocratique » en Libye, mais une sécession de la Cyrénaïque. Il n’y a jamais eu d’application du mandat de l’Onu visant à « protéger la population », mais le massacre de 160 000 Libyens, dont trois quart de civils, sous les bombardements de l’Alliance (chiffres de la Croix-Rouge internationale).

Je me souviens, avant que je n’intègre le gouvernement de la Jamahiriya arabe libyenne, avoir été sollicité pour servir de témoin lors d’une rencontre à Tripoli entre une délégation états-unienne et des représentants libyens. Lors de cette longue conversation, le chef de la délégation US a expliqué à ses interlocuteurs que le Pentagone était prêt à les sauver d’une mort certaine, mais exigeait que le Guide leur soit livré. Il a ajouté que lorsque el-Kadhafi serait mort, la société tribale ne parviendrait pas à valider un nouveau leader avant au moins une génération, le pays serait alors plongé dans un chaos qu’il n’a jamais connu. J’ai relaté cet entretien dans de nombreuses circonstances et n’ai cessé, dès le lynchage du Guide, en octobre 2011, de prédire ce qui advient aujourd’hui.

La « théorie du chaos »

Lorsqu’en 2003, la presse états-unienne a commencé à évoquer la « théorie du chaos », la Maison-Blanche a riposté en évoquant un « chaos constructeur », laissant entendre que l’on détruirait des structures d’oppression pour que la vie puisse jaillir sans contrainte. Mais jamais Leo Strauss, ni le Pentagone jusque-là, n’avaient employé cette expression. Au contraire, selon eux, le chaos devait être tel que rien ne puisse s’y structurer, hormis la volonté du Créateur de l’Ordre nouveau, les États-Unis.

Le principe de cette doctrine stratégique peut être résumé ainsi : le plus simple pour piller les ressources naturelles d’un pays sur une longue période, ce n’est pas de l’occuper, mais de détruire l’État. Sans État, pas d’armée. Sans armée ennemie, aucun risque de défaite. Dès lors, le but stratégique de l’armée US et de l’alliance qu’elle dirige, l’Otan, c’est exclusivement de détruire des États. Ce que deviennent les populations concernées n’est pas le problème de Washington.

Ce projet est inconcevable pour des Européens qui, depuis la guerre civile anglaise, ont été convaincus par le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes qu’il est nécessaire de renoncer à certaines libertés, voire même d’accepter un État tyrannique, plutôt que d’être plongé dans le chaos.

L’Union européenne dénie sa complicité dans les crimes US

Les guerres d’Afghanistan et d’Irak ont déjà coûté la vie à 4 millions de personnes. Elles ont été présentées au Conseil de sécurité comme des ripostes nécessaires « en légitime défense », mais il est admit aujourd’hui qu’elles avaient été planifiées bien avant le 11-Septembre dans un contexte beaucoup plus large de « remodelage du Moyen-Orient élargi » et que les raisons évoquées pour les déclencher n’étaient que des fabrications de propagande.

Il est d’usage de reconnaître les génocides commis par le colonialisme européen, mais rares sont ceux qui aujourd’hui admettent ces 4 millions de morts malgré les études scientifiques qui l’attestent. C’est que nos parents étaient « mauvais », mais nous sommes « bons » et ne pouvons pas être complices de ces horreurs.

Il est commun de se moquer de ce pauvre peuple allemand qui conserva jusque à la fin sa confiance dans ses dirigeants nazis et ne prit conscience qu’après sa défaite des crimes commis en son nom. Mais nous agissons exactement pareil. Nous conservons notre confiance dans notre « grand frère » et ne voulons pas voir les crimes dans lesquels il nous implique. Surement, nos enfants se moqueront de nous…

Les erreurs d’interprétation de l’Union européenne

- Aucun dirigeant ouest-européen, absolument aucun, n’a osé envisager publiquement que les réfugiés d’Irak, de Syrie, de Libye, de la corne de l’Afrique, du Nigeria et du Mali ne fuient pas des dictatures, mais le chaos dans lequel nous avons volontairement, mais inconsciemment, plongé leurs pays.

- Aucun dirigeant ouest-européen, absolument aucun, n’a osé envisager publiquement que les attentats « islamistes » qui touchent l’Europe ne sont pas l’extension des guerres du « Moyen-Orient élargi », mais sont commandités par ceux qui ont également commandités le chaos dans cette région. Nous préférons continuer à penser que les « islamistes » en veulent aux juifs et aux chrétiens, alors que l’immense majorité de leurs victimes ne sont ni juives, ni chrétiennes, mais musulmanes. Avec aplomb, nous les accusons de promouvoir la « guerre des civilisations », alors que ce concept a été forgé au sein du Conseil de sécurité nationale des États-Unis et reste étranger à leur culture.

- Aucun dirigeant ouest-européen, absolument aucun, n’a osé envisager publiquement que la prochaine étape sera l’ « islamisation » des réseaux de diffusion de drogues sur le modèle des Contras du Nicaragua vendant des drogues dans la communauté noire de Californie avec l’aide et sous les ordres de la CIA. Nous avons décidé d’ignorer que la famille Karzaï a retiré la distribution de l’héroïne afghane à la mafia kosovare et l’a transmise à Daesh.

Les États-Unis n’ont jamais voulu que l’Ukraine rejoigne l’Union

Les académies militaires de l’Union européennes n’ont pas étudié la « théorie du chaos » parce qu’elle se le sont vu interdire. Les quelques enseignants et chercheurs qui se sont aventurés sur ce terrain ont été lourdement sanctionnés, tandis que la presse a qualifié de « conspirationnistes » les auteurs civils qui s’y intéressaient.

Les politiciens de l’Union européenne pensaient que les événements de la place Maïdan étaient spontanés et que les manifestants souhaitaient quitter l’orbite autoritaire russe et entrer dans le paradis de l’Union. Ils ont été stupéfaits lors de la publication de la conversation de la sous-secrétaire d’État, Victoria Nuland, évoquant son contrôle secret des événements et affirmant que son but était de « baiser l’Union » (sic). À partir de ce moment-là, ils n’ont plus rien compris à ce qui se passait.

S’ils avaient laissé la recherche libre dans leurs pays, ils auraient compris qu’en intervenant en Ukraine et en y organisant le « changement du régime », les États-Unis s’assuraient que l’Union européenne resterait à leur service. La grande angoisse de Washington, depuis le discours de Vladimir Poutine à la Conférence sur la sécurité de Munich de 2007, c’est que l’Allemagne réalise où se trouve son intérêt : pas avec Washington, mais avec Moscou. En détruisant progressivement l’État ukrainien, les États-Unis coupent la principale voie de communication entre l’Union européenne et la Russie. Vous pourrez tourner et retourner dans tous les sens la succession d’événements, vous ne pourrez pas leur trouver d’autre sens. Washington ne souhaite pas que l’Ukraine rejoigne l’Union, comme l’attestent les propos de Madame Nuland. Son unique but est de transformer ce territoire en une zone dangereuse à traverser.

La planification militaire US

Nous voici donc face à deux problèmes qui se développent très rapidement : les attentats « islamistes » ne font que commencer. Les migrations ont triplé en Méditerranée en une seule année.

Si mon analyse est exacte, nous verrons au cours de la prochaine décennie les attentats « islamistes » liés au Moyen-Orient élargi et à l’Afrique se doubler d’attentats « nazis » liés à l’Ukraine. On découvrira alors qu’al-Qaïda et les nazis ukrainiens sont connectés depuis leur congrès commun, en 2007 à Ternopol (Ukraine). En réalité, les grands-parents des uns et des autres se connaissaient depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Les nazis avaient alors recruté des musulmans soviétiques pour lutter contre Moscou (c’était le programme de Gerhard von Mende à l’Ostministerium). À la fin de la guerre, les uns et les autres avaient été récupérés par la CIA (le programme de Frank Wisner avec l’AmComLib) pour conduire des opérations de sabotage en URSS.

Les migrations en Méditerranée, qui pour le moment ne sont qu’un problème humanitaire (200 000 personnes en 2014), continueront à croître jusqu’à devenir un grave problème économique. Les récentes décisions de l’Union d’aller couler les navires des trafiquants en Libye ne serviront pas à enrayer les migrations, mais à justifier de nouvelles opérations militaires pour maintenir le chaos en Libye (et non pour le résoudre).

Tout cela provoquera des troubles importants dans l’Union européenne qui paraît aujourd’hui un havre de paix. Il n’est pas question pour Washington de détruire ce marché qui lui reste indispensable, mais de s’assurer qu’il ne se placera jamais en compétition face à lui, et de limiter son développement.

En 1991, le président Bush père chargea un disciple de Leo Strauss, Paul Wolfowitz (alors inconnu du grand public), d’élaborer une stratégie pour l’ère post-soviétique. La « Doctrine Wolfowitz » expliquait que la suprématie des États-Unis sur le reste du monde exige, pour être garantie, de brider l’Union européenne. En 2008, lors de la crise financière aux États-Unis, la présidente du Conseil économique de la Maison-Blanche, l’historienne Christina Rohmer, expliqua que le seul moyen de renflouer les banques était de fermer les paradis fiscaux des pays tiers, puis de provoquer des troubles en Europe de sorte que les capitaux refluent vers les États-Unis. En définitive, Washington se propose aujourd’hui de faire fusionner l’Alena et l’Union européenne, le dollar et l’euro, et de rabaisser les États membres de l’Union au niveau du Mexique.

Malheureusement pour eux, ni les Peuples de l’Union européenne, ni leurs dirigeants n’ont conscience de ce que le président Barack Obama leur prépare.

- Source : Thierry Meyssan

BHL n’est-il qu’une marque publicitaire?

BHL n’est-il qu’une marque publicitaire?

 

À force d’être la caricature de lui-même, BHL ne peut plus être pris au sérieux. Il offre un spectacle, au fond, divertissant. Malheureusement, ce sont les autres qui trinquent.

 

Jean-Michel Léost

Professeur honoraire

Ex: http://www.bvoltaire.fr

Il ne nous appartient pas de juger du parcours controversé de celui qu’on n’appelle plus que par ses initiales, comme s’il était devenu une marque publicitaire. Les nouveaux philosophes, enfantés par la crise de Mai 68, ont eu des destins divers : BHL est resté fidèle à l’image qu’il définissait de l’intellectuel dans La Barbarie à visage humain. Envers et contre tout. Ce qui le conduit à un travers que François Mitterrand avait décelé en lui, lorsqu’il était son conseiller dans les années 70, et dont il espérait qu’il se débarrasserait avec le temps : « J’accepte qu’il dépense encore beaucoup d’orgueil avant de l’appeler vanité. » Las ! Il semble que l’orgueil ait perduré : ce philosophe, qui devrait douter de tout et surtout de lui-même, est le prédicateur de ses propres certitudes.

Interrogé sur France Inter par Léa Salamé, le 22 avril, il a de nouveau justifié l’intervention de 2011 en Libye, reconnaissant seulement qu’aujourd’hui la Libye « n’est pas aussi belle qu’on pouvait l’escompter ». De cette situation, il ne se sent aucunement responsable : « Ceux qui pourraient peut-être se sentir une certaine responsabilité, c’est ceux qui, par exemple, ont laissé faire la guerre en Syrie. ». Cet intellectuel, prompt à dénoncer les erreurs d’autrui, ne se remet jamais en question, il a la conscience tranquille. Le chaos qui règne actuellement en Libye ? Il faut faire confiance aux hommes et aux femmes libyens. Un peu de temps sera certes nécessaire, mais « les fruits de la liberté sont amers », n’est-ce pas ? On voit que ce n’est pas lui qui les savoure. Du reste, Kadhafi ne constituait un rempart qu’à mi-temps : « Il faisait le boulot un an sur deux. » Jean-Pierre Chevènement, qui avait critiqué le choix d’une opération militaire, déclarait sur Europe 1, en 2014, que « la Libye de Mouammar Kadhafi avait beaucoup de défauts mais exerçait un contrôle sur ses frontières » : c’est sans doute un ignare en politique, voire un complice des tyrans du Moyen-Orient, puique BHL a toujours raison !

Lire aussi : BHL s’engage à fond pour les Peshmergas… à Saint-Germain-des-Prés !

Notre intellectuel ne s’inquiète donc guère de l’afflux des migrants qui partent des rivages libyens. Il faut sauver les « gens » en mer, « tout le reste est discutaillerie ». Et de répéter : « La source de cette abomination qu’est cette hécatombe en mer, qu’est cette transformation de la Méditerranée en cimetière, la source, c’est la non-intervention en Syrie, c’est le collapse en Somalie et c’est la dictature en Érythrée. » Oui, mais la Libye… N’insistez pas. Tout est dit. D’ailleurs, dans quelques années, l’Allemagne va manquer de sept millions de salariés. De quoi se plaint l’Europe ? Elle va pouvoir s’approvisionner !

Finalement, quand on entend de tels propos, on finit par en plaindre l’auteur. Il est tellement enfoncé dans le ciment de ses certitudes qu’il ne se rend pas compte de ses errements. À force de parler pour s’écouter, à force de se défausser, à force de se confondre avec la marque qu’il s’est forgée, à force d’être la caricature de lui-même, BHL ne peut plus être pris au sérieux. Il offre un spectacle, au fond, divertissant. Malheureusement, ce sont les autres qui trinquent.

Jean-Michel Léost

L'Amérique prépare une nouvelle guerre du Pacifique

par Jean-Paul Baquiast

Ex: http://www.europesolidaire.eu

Ceci paraîtra une plaisanterie, mais il n'en est rien. Dans cette guerre, l'ennemi ne sera plus le Japon, mais la Chine. Pour s'en convaincre, il suffit de lire un document que Washington vient de rendre public, intitulé " A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower: Forward, Engaged, Ready ” dit aussi CS21R (référence ci-dessous)

 

Ce document, préparé par l'US Navy, les corps de Marine et les Gardes côtes, actualise l'ancienne stratégie maritime définie en 2007. Il marque un changement profond d'orientation, traduisant ce que Barack Obama a nommé le « pivot vers l'Asie ». Il insiste sur l'importance croissante au plan stratégique de ce qu'il nomme l' «  Indo-Asia-Pacific region ». Cette importance, aux plans économique, militaire et géographique impose aux Etats-Unis de pouvoir s'appuyer sur des forces navales capables de protéger les intérêts américains.

 

Le CS21R insiste sur le fait qu'il est impératif pour les Etats-Unis de maintenir « une prédominance navale globale » afin d'empêcher les adversaires de l'Amérique de faire usage contre elle des théâtres océaniques mondiaux. La possibilité de mener dans les eaux internationales des opérations loin des côtes américaines constitue un élément essentiel de cette prédominance.

Le principal (et seul) de ces adversaires, bien que non nommé, est la Chine. Le Pentagone a prévu dans le même temps des plans de guerre contre la Chine connus sous le nom de “AirSea Battle”. Ils reposent sur la capacité de monter contre la Chine une opération massive, aérienne et à base de missiles, très en profondeur sur le territoire chinois lui-même. Il s'agira de détruire les infrastructures militaires et économiques chinoises, ce qui sera suivi d'un blocus économique. Au prétexte d'assurer la liberté de navigation dans les grandes voies maritimes, le Pentagone se met en état de bloquer les routes utilisées par la Chine dans l'océan Indien lui permettant d'importer des produits pétroliers et des matières premières en provenance de l'Afrique et du Moyen-Orient.

A cette fin, le CS21R prévoit de « rebalancer » 60% des forces navales et aériennes des Etats-Unis vers la zone Indo-Pacifique. L'US Navy entretiendra au Japon un groupe de porte-avions d'attaque et des forces d'intervention rapide aéro-navales adéquates (Carrier Strike Group, Carrier Airwing and Amphibious Ready Group). Elle ajoutera de nouveaux sous-marins d'attaque et navires de combat littoral à ceux existants déjà à Guam et Singapour.

 

 

Renvoyons au document pour plus de détail concernant l'énorme force déjà en place et les renforts à lui apporter d'ici les 5 prochaines années. Apparemment les crédits ne vont pas manquer, non plus que l'accord de tous les pays qui seront nécessairement impliqués, avec ou sans leur consentement éclairé, dans ces opérations de guerre. Comment la Chine va-t-elle prendre tout ceci?  La question apparemment n'est pas posée. Certains diront que tout document stratégique prévoit la possibilité de mener des guerres contre d'autres puissances, même si de telles guerres ne sont jamais engagées. Mais en ce cas, la seule et unique puissance visée est la Chine, et tout semble indiquer que le document est destiné à préparer contre elle des interventions militaires qui n'auront rien de théorique. .

Dans le même temps, chacun a pu noter les cris d'alarme poussés par les spécialistes américains de la défense à l'annonce faite par la Chine selon laquelle celle-ci se préparait à construire un 2e porte-avions, destiné à compléter le vieux bâtiment déjà en service, reconditionné à partir d'un PA datant de l'ex URSS et fourni par la Russie.

Sources

* http://www.navy.mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf

Voir aussi Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cooperative_Strategy_for_21st_Century_Seapower

* Sur le nouveau porte avions chinois, lire

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/China_building_second_aircraft_carrier_PLA_colonel_999.html

Beware of Neocon Intellectuals!

Kristol, Wolfowitz and Cheney

Rationalizing Lunacy

Beware of Neocon Intellectuals!

By Andrew J. Bacevich
TomDispatch.com

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Policy intellectuals — eggheads presuming to instruct the mere mortals who actually run for office — are a blight on the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance — well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch — belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the Great Lakes.

It all began innocently enough.  Back in 1933, with the country in the throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first imported a handful of eager academics to join the ranks of his New Deal.  An unprecedented economic crisis required some fresh thinking, FDR believed. Whether the contributions of this “Brains Trust” made a positive impact or served to retard economic recovery (or ended up being a wash) remains a subject for debate even today.   At the very least, however, the arrival of Adolph Berle, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and others elevated Washington’s bourbon-and-cigars social scene. As bona fide members of the intelligentsia, they possessed a sort of cachet.

Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep thinkers, their agenda now focused on “national security.”  This eminently elastic concept — more properly, “national insecurity” — encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design, decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters said to be of vital importance to the nation’s survival.  National insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world’s equivalent of the gift that just keeps on giving.

People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to be known as “defense intellectuals.”  Pioneers in this endeavor back in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional academic institutions.  Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman Kahn, who took pride in “thinking about the unthinkable,” and Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining “the delicate balance of terror.”

In this wonky world, the coin of the realm has been and remains “policy relevance.”  This means devising products that convey a sense of novelty, while serving chiefly to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise. The ultimate example of a policy-relevant insight is Dr. Strangelove’s discovery of a “mineshaft gap” — successor to the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” that, in the 1950s, had found America allegedly lagging behind the Soviets in weaponry and desperately needing to catch up.  Now, with a thermonuclear exchange about to destroy the planet, the United States is once more falling behind, Strangelove claims, this time in digging underground shelters enabling some small proportion of the population to survive.In a single, brilliant stroke, Strangelove posits a new raison d’être for the entire national insecurity apparatus, thereby ensuring that the game will continue more or less forever.  A sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s movie would have shown General “Buck” Turgidson and the other brass huddled in the War Room, developing plans to close the mineshaft gap as if nothing untoward had occurred.

The Rise of the National Insecurity State

Yet only in the 1960s, right around the time that Dr. Strangelove first appeared in movie theaters, did policy intellectuals really come into their own.  The press now referred to them as “action intellectuals,” suggesting energy and impatience.  Action intellectuals were thinkers, but also doers, members of a “large and growing body of men who choose to leave their quiet and secure niches on the university campus and involve themselves instead in the perplexing problems that face the nation,” as LIFE Magazineput it in 1967. Among the most perplexing of those problems was what to do about Vietnam, just the sort of challenge an action intellectual could sink his teeth into.

Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger, and legitimate self-defense.  On various occasions, each of these, alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight.  Vietnam marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence.  More surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in failure.

In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas were.

As Exhibit A, Professor Appy presents McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser first for President John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon Johnson.  Bundy was a product of Groton and Yale, who famously became the youngest-ever dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having gained tenure there without even bothering to get a graduate degree.

For Exhibit B, there is Walt Whitman Rostow, Bundy’s successor as national security adviser.  Rostow was another Yalie, earning his undergraduate degree there along with a PhD.  While taking a break of sorts, he spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.  As a professor of economic history at MIT, Rostow captured JFK’s attention with his modestly subtitled 1960 bookThe Stages of Economic Growth:  A Non-Communist Manifesto, which offered a grand theory of development with ostensibly universal applicability.  Kennedy brought Rostow to Washington to test his theories of “modernization” in places like Southeast Asia.

Finally, as Exhibit C, Appy briefly discusses Professor Samuel P. Huntington’s contributions to the Vietnam War.  Huntington also attended Yale, before earning his PhD at Harvard and then returning to teach there, becoming one of the most renowned political scientists of the post-World War II era.

What the three shared in common, apart from a suspect education acquired in New Haven, was an unwavering commitment to the reigning verities of the Cold War.  Foremost among those verities was this: that a monolith called Communism, controlled by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, posed an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but to the very idea of freedom itself.  The claim came with this essential corollary: the only hope of avoiding such a cataclysmic outcome was for the United States to vigorously resist the Communist threat wherever it reared its ugly head.

Buy those twin propositions and you accept the imperative of the U.S. preventing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. North Vietnam, from absorbing the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, into a single unified country; in other words, that South Vietnam was a cause worth fighting and dying for.  Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington not only bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, but then exerted themselves mightily to persuade others in Washington to buy it as well.

Yet even as he was urging the “Americanization” of the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy already entertained doubts about whether it was winnable.  But not to worry:  even if the effort ended in failure, he counseled President Johnson, “the policy will be worth it.”

How so?  “At a minimum,” Bundy wrote, “it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.”  If the United States ultimately lost South Vietnam, at least Americans would have died trying to prevent that result — and through some perverted logic this, in the estimation of Harvard’s youngest-ever dean, was a redeeming prospect.  The essential point, Bundy believed, was to prevent others from seeing the United States as a “paper tiger.”  To avoid a fight, even a losing one, was to forfeit credibility.  “Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk” — that was the problem to be avoided at all cost.

Rostow outdid even Bundy in hawkishness.  Apart from his relentless advocacy of coercive bombing to influence North Vietnamese policymakers, Rostow was a chief architect of something called the Strategic Hamlet Program.  The idea was to jumpstart the Rostovian process of modernization by forcibly relocating Vietnamese peasants from their ancestral villages into armed camps where the Saigon government would provide security, education, medical care, and agricultural assistance.  By winning hearts-and-minds in this manner, the defeat of the communist insurgency was sure to follow, with the people of South Vietnam vaulted into the “age of high mass consumption,” where Rostow believed all humankind was destined to end up.

That was the theory.  Reality differed somewhat.  Actual Strategic Hamlets were indistinguishable from concentration camps.  The government in Saigon proved too weak, too incompetent, and too corrupt to hold up its end of the bargain.  Rather than winning hearts-and-minds, the program induced alienation, even as it essentially destabilized peasant society.  One result: an increasingly rootless rural population flooded into South Vietnam’s cities where there was little work apart from servicing the needs of the ever-growing U.S. military population — hardly the sort of activity conducive to self-sustaining development.

Yet even when the Vietnam War ended in complete and utter defeat, Rostow still claimed vindication for his theory.  “We and the Southeast Asians,” he wrote, had used the war years “so well that there wasn’t the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to intervene.”  Indeed, regionally Rostow spied plenty of good news, all of it attributable to the American war.

”Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other countries of that region with Japan and the West.  In Thailand we have seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs.  Malaysia and Singapore have become countries of diverse manufactured exports.  We can see the emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia.”

So there you have it. If you want to know what 58,000 Americans (not to mention vastly larger numbers of Vietnamese) died for, it was to encourage entrepreneurship, exports, and the emergence of technocrats elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Appy describes Professor Huntington as another action intellectual with an unfailing facility for seeing the upside of catastrophe.  In Huntington’s view, the internal displacement of South Vietnamese caused by the excessive use of American firepower, along with the failure of Rostow’s Strategic Hamlets, was actually good news.  It promised, he insisted, to give the Americans an edge over the insurgents.

The key to final victory, Huntington wrote, was “forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.”  By emptying out the countryside, the U.S. could win the war in the cities.  “The urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.”  The language may be a tad antiseptic, but the point is clear enough: the challenges of city life in a state of utter immiseration would miraculously transform those same peasants into go-getters more interested in making a buck than in signing up for social revolution.

Revisited decades later, claims once made with a straight face by the likes of Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington — action intellectuals of the very first rank — seem beyond preposterous.  They insult our intelligence, leaving us to wonder how such judgments or the people who promoted them were ever taken seriously.

How was it that during Vietnam bad ideas exerted such a perverse influence?  Why were those ideas so impervious to challenge?  Why, in short, was it so difficult for Americans to recognize bullshit for what it was?

Creating a Twenty-First-Century Slow-Motion Vietnam

These questions are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose bullshit underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.

The present-day successors to Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington subscribe to their own reigning verities.  Chief among them is this: that a phenomenon called terrorism or Islamic radicalism, inspired by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden away in various quarters of the Greater Middle East, poses an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but — yes, it’s still with us — to the very idea of freedom itself.  That assertion comes with an essential corollary dusted off and imported from the Cold War: the only hope of avoiding this cataclysmic outcome is for the United States to vigorously resist the terrorist/Islamist threat wherever it rears its ugly head.

At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two decades prior to that date, U.S. policymakers have taken these propositions for granted.  They have done so at least in part because few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity have bothered to question them.

Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address such questions.  Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting genuine intellectual activity.  More or less like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.

The fact that the enterprise itself has become utterly amorphous may actually facilitate such efforts.  Once widely known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, it has been transformed into the War with No Name.  A little bit like the famous Supreme Court opinion on pornography: we can’t define it, we just know it when we see it, with ISIS the latest manifestation to capture Washington’s attention.

All that we can say for sure about this nameless undertaking is that it continues with no end in sight.  It has become a sort of slow-motion Vietnam, stimulating remarkably little honest reflection regarding its course thus far or prospects for the future.  If there is an actual Brains Trust at work in Washington, it operates on autopilot.  Today, the second- and third-generation bastard offspring of RAND that clutter northwest Washington — the Center for this, the Institute for that — spin their wheels debating latter day equivalents of Strategic Hamlets, with nary a thought given to more fundamental concerns.

What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter’s return to the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth secretary of defense.  Carter himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard and in “the Building.”  He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with a PhD. from Oxford.  “Ash” — in Washington, a first-name-only identifier (“Henry,” “Zbig,” “Hillary”) signifies that you have truly arrived — is the author of books and articles galore, including one op-ed co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea.  Military action “undoubtedly carries risk,” he bravely acknowledged at the time. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater” — just the sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter.

As Carter has taken the Pentagon’s reins, he also has taken pains to convey the impression of being a big thinker.  As one Wall Street Journal headline enthused, “Ash Carter Seeks Fresh Eyes on Global Threats.”  That multiple global threats exist and that America’s defense secretary has a mandate to address each of them are, of course, givens.  His predecessor Chuck Hagel (no Yale degree) was a bit of a plodder.  By way of contrast, Carter has made clear his intention to shake things up.

So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all.  Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today.  For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound — we just need to try harder — who better to consult than Pollack, O’Hanlon, and Kagan (any Kagan)?

Was Carter hoping to gain some fresh insight from his dinner companions?  Or was he letting Washington’s clubby network of fellows, senior fellows, and distinguished fellows know that, on his watch, the prevailing verities of national insecurity would remain sacrosanct?  You decide.

Soon thereafter, Carter’s first trip overseas provided another opportunity to signal his intentions.  In Kuwait, he convened a war council of senior military and civilian officials to take stock of the campaign against ISIS.  In a daring departure from standard practice, the new defense secretary prohibited PowerPoint briefings.  One participant described the ensuing event as “a five-hour-long college seminar” — candid and freewheeling.  “This is reversing the paradigm,” one awed senior Pentagon official remarked.  Carter was said to be challenging his subordinates to “look at this problem differently.”

Of course, Carter might have said, “Let’s look at a different problem.” That, however, was far too radical to contemplate — the equivalent of suggesting back in the 1960s that assumptions landing the United States in Vietnam should be reexamined.

In any event — and to no one’s surprise — the different look did not produce a different conclusion.  Instead of reversing the paradigm, Carter affirmed it: the existing U.S. approach to dealing with ISIS is sound, he announced.  It only needs a bit of tweaking — just the result to give the Pollacks, O’Hanlons, and Kagans something to write about as they keep up the chatter that substitutes for serious debate.

Do we really need that chatter? Does it enhance the quality of U.S. policy? If policy/defense/action intellectuals fell silent would America be less secure?

Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently — just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England. Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let’s see if we are able to make do without them even for a month or two.

In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how best to deal with ISIS.  Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might turn up?

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The American Hegemony

The Neoconservative Threat to International Order

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Ex: http://www.counterpunch.org

Last week I was invited to address an important conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.  Scholars from Russia and from around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year the friendly relations between America and Russia that President Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing.  All of Russia is distressed that Washington alone has destroyed the trust between the two major nuclear powers that had been created during the Reagan-Gorbachev era, trust that had removed the threat of nuclear armageddon. Russians at every level are astonished at the virulent propaganda and lies constantly issuing from Washington and the Western media. Washington’s gratuitous demonization of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has rallied the Russian people behind him.  Putin has the highest approval rating ever achieved by any leader in my lifetime.

Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the trust achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility of nuclear war from the grave in which Reagan and Gorbachev buried it.  Again, as during the Cold War the specter of nuclear armageddon stalks the earth.

Why did Washington revive the threat of world annihilation?  Why is this threat to all of humanity supported by the majority of the US Congress, by the entirety of the presstitute media, and by academics and think-tank inhabitants in the US, such as Motyl and Weiss, about whom I wrote recently?

It was my task to answer this question for the conference.  You can read my February 25 and February 26 addresses below.  But first you should understand what nuclear war means.  You can gain that understanding here.

The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative Ideology of American Hegemony,

Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Hosted by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Moscow, February 25, 2015,  Hon. Paul Craig Roberts

Colleagues,

What I propose to you is that the current difficulties in the international order are unrelated to Yalta and its consequences, but have their origin in the rise of the neoconservative ideology in the post-Soviet era and its influence on Washington’s foreign policy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only constraint on Washington’s power to act unilaterally abroad.  At that time China’s rise was estimated to require a half century. Suddenly the United States found itself to be the Uni-power, the “world’s only superpower.”  Neoconservatives proclaimed “the end of history.”

By the “end of history” neoconservatives mean that the competition between socio-economic-political systems is at an end.  History has chosen “American Democratic-Capitalism.” It is Washington’s responsibility to exercise the hegemony over the world given to Washington by History and to bring the world in line with History’s choice of American democratic-capitalism.

In other words, Marx has been proven wrong.  The future does not belong to the proletariat but to Washington.

The neoconservative ideology raises the United States to the unique status of being “the exceptional country,” and the American people acquire exalted status as “the indispensable people.”

If a country is “the exceptional country,” it means that all other countries are unexceptional.  If a people are “indispensable,” it means other peoples are dispensable. We have seen this attitude at work in Washington’s 14 years of wars of aggression in the Middle East. These wars have left countries destroyed and millions of people dead, maimed, and displaced. Yet Washington continues to speak of its commitment to protect smaller countries from the aggression of larger countries.  The explanation for this hypocrisy is that Washington does not regard Washington’s aggression as aggression, but as History’s purpose.

We have also seen this attitude at work in Washington’s disdain for Russia’s national interests and in Washington’s propagandistic response to Russian diplomacy.

The neoconservative ideology requires that Washington maintain its Uni-power status, because this status is necessary for Washington’s hegemony and History’s purpose.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world supremacy is most clearly and concisely stated by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative who has held many high positions: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Director of Policy Planning US Department of State, Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to Indonesia, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank.

In 1992 Paul Wolfowitz stated the neoconservative doctrine of American world supremacy:

“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.”

For clarification, a “hostile power” is a country with an independent policy (Russia, China, Iran, and formerly Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad).

This bold statement struck the traditional American foreign policy establishment as a declaration of American Imperialism.  The document was rewritten in order to soften and disguise the blatant assertion of supremacy without changing the intent.  These documents are available online, and you can examine them at your convenience.

Softening the language allowed the neoconservatives to rise to foreign policy dominance. The neoconservatives are responsible for the Clinton regime’s attacks on Yugoslavia and Serbia. Neoconservatives, especially Paul Wolfowitz, are responsible for the George W. Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives are responsible for the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi in Libya, the assault on Syria, the propaganda against Iran, the drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen, the color revolutions in former Soviet Republics, the attempted “Green Revolution” in Iran, the coup in Ukraine, and the demonization of Vladimir Putin.

A number of thoughtful Americans suspect that the neoconservatives are responsible for 9/11, as that event gave the neoconservatives the “New Pearl Harbor” that their position papers said was necessary in order to launch their wars for hegemony in the Middle East.  9/11 led directly and instantly to the invasion of Afghanistan, where Washington has been fighting since 2001. Neoconservatives controlled all the important government positions necessary for a “false flag” attack.

Neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is married to another neoconservative, Robert Kagan, implemented and oversaw Washington’s coup in Ukraine and chose the new government.

The neoconservatives are highly organized and networked, well-financed, supported by the print and TV media, and backed by the US military/security complex and the Israel Lobby.  There is no countervailing power to their influence on US foreign power.

The neoconservative doctrine goes beyond the Brzezinski doctrine, which dissented from Detente and provocatively supported dissidents inside the Soviet empire. Despite its provocative character, the Brzezinski doctrine remained a doctrine of Great Power politics and containment. It is not a doctrine of US world hegemony.

While the neoconservatives were preoccupied for a decade with their wars in the Middle East, creating a US Africa Command, organizing color revolutions, exiting disarmament treaties, surrounding Russia with military bases, and “pivoting to Asia” to surround China with new air and naval bases, Vladimir Putin led Russia back to economic and military competence and successfully asserted an independent Russian foreign policy.

When Russian diplomacy blocked Washington’s planned invasion of Syria and Washington’s planned bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives realized that they had failed the “first objective” of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and had allowed “the re-emergence of a new rival . . . on the territory of the former Soviet Union” with the power to block unilateral action by Washington.

The attack on Russia began. Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine and cultivating Ukrainian politicians.  The NGOs were called into the streets. The extreme nationalists or nazi elements were used to introduce violence, and the elected democratic government was overthrown. The intercepted conversation between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev, in which the two Washington operatives choose the members of the new Ukrainian government, is well known.

If the information that has recently come to me from Armenia and Kyrgyzstan is correct, Washington has financed NGOs and is cultivating politicians in Armenia and the former Soviet Central Asian Republics.  If the information is correct, Russia can expect more “color revolutions” or coups in other former territories of the Soviet Union.  Perhaps China faces a similar threat in Uyghurstan.

The conflict in Ukraine is often called a “civil war.”  This is incorrect.  A civil war is when two sides fight for the control of the government.  The break-away republics in eastern and southern Ukraine are fighting a war of secession.

Washington would have been happy to use its coup in Ukraine to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base as this would have been a strategic military achievement.  However, Washington is pleased that the “Ukraine crisis” that Washington orchestrated has resulted in the demonization of Vladimir Putin, thus permitting economic sanctions that have disrupted Russia’s economic and political relations with Europe. The sanctions have kept Europe in Washington’s orbit.

Washington has no interest in resolving the Ukrainian situation.  The situation can be resolved diplomatically only if Europe can achieve sufficient sovereignty over its foreign policy to act in Europe’s interest instead of Washington’s interest.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world hegemony is a threat to the sovereignty of every country.  The doctrine requires subservience to Washington’s leadership and to Washington’s purposes.  Independent governments are targeted for destabilization. The Obama regime overthrew the reformist government in Honduras and currently is at work destabilizing Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and most likely also Armenia and the former Central Asian Soviet Republics.

Yalta and its consequences have to do with Great Power rivalries.  But in the neoconservative doctrine, there is only one Great Power–the Uni-power.  There are no others, and no others are to be permitted.

Therefore, unless a moderate foreign policy arises in Washington and displaces the neoconservatives, the future is one of conflict.

It would be a strategic error to dismiss the neoconservative ideology as unrealistic. The doctrine is unrealistic, but it is also the guiding force of US foreign policy and is capable of producing a world war.

In their conflict with Washington’s hegemony, Russia and China are disadvantaged. The success of American propaganda during the Cold War, the large differences between living standards in the US and those in communist lands, overt communist political oppression, at times brutal, and the Soviet collapse created in the minds of many people nonexistent virtues for the United States. As English is the world language and the Western media is cooperative, Washington is able to control explanations regardless of the facts. The ability of Washington to be the aggressor and to blame the victim encourages Washington’s march to more aggression.

This concludes my remarks.  Tomorrow I will address whether there are domestic political restraints or economic restraints on the neoconservative ideology.

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts, Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Moscow, February 26, 2015

Colleagues,

At the plenary session yesterday I addressed the threat that the neoconservative ideology poses to international relations.  In this closing session I address whether there are any internal restraints on this policy from the US population and whether there are economic restraints.

Just as 9/11 served to launch Washington’s wars for hegemony in the Middle East, 9/11 served to create the American police state.  The  Constitution and the civil liberties it protects quickly fell to the accumulation of power in the executive branch that a state of war permitted.

New laws, some clearly pre-prepared such as the PATRIOT Act, executive orders, presidential directives, and Department of Justice memos created an executive authority unaccountable to the US Constitution and to domestic and international law.

Suddenly Americans could be detained indefinitely without cause presented to a court. Habeas corpus, a constitutional protection which prohibits any such detention, has been set aside.

Suddenly people could be tortured into confessions in violation of the right against self-incrimination and in violation of domestic and international laws against torture.

Suddenly Americans and Washington’s closest allies could be spied on indiscriminately without the need of warrants demonstrating cause.

The Obama regime added to the Bush regime’s transgressions the assertion of the right of the executive branch to assassinate US citizens without due process of law.

The police state was organized under a massive new Department of Homeland Security.  Almost immediately whistleblower protections, freedom of the press and speech, and protest rights were attacked and reduced.

It was not long before the director of Homeland Security declared that the department’s focus has shifted from Muslim terrorists to “domestic extremists,” an undefined category. Anyone can be swept into this category.  Homes of war protesters were raided and grand juries were convened to investigate the protesters. Americans of Arab descent who donated to charities–even charities on the State Department’s approved list–that aided Palestinian children were arrested and sentenced to prison for “providing material support to terrorism.”

All of this and more, including police brutality, has had a chilling effect on protests against the wars and the loss of civil liberty.   The rising protests from the American population and from soldiers themselves that eventually forced Washington to end the Vietnam War have been prevented in the 21st century by the erosion of rights, intimidation, loss of mobility (no-fly list), job dismissal, and other heavy-handed actions inconsistent with a government accountable to law and the people.

In an important sense, the US has emerged from the “war on terror” as an executive branch dictatorship unconstrained by the media and barely, if at all, constrained by Congress and the federal courts. The lawlessness of the executive branch has spread into governments of Washington’s vassal states and into the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, all of which violate their charters and operate outside their legal powers.

Jobs offshoring destroyed the American industrial and manufacturing unions. Their demise and the current attack on the public employee unions has left the Democratic Party financially dependent on the same organized private interest groups as the Republicans.  Both parties now report to the same interest groups.    Wall Street, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries (oil, mining, timber) control the government regardless of the party in power. These powerful interests all have a stake in American hegemony.

The message is that the constellation of forces preclude internal political change.

Hegemony’s Achilles heel is the US economy. The fairy tale of American economic recovery supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar’s value up, the stock market up, and interest rates down.  However, there is no economic information that supports this fairy tale.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s. There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years. The labor force is shrinking. The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio. The 5.7 percent reported unemployment rate is achieved by not counting discouraged workers as part of the work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find a job and has given up looking.)

A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term (less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported, stands at 11.2 percent.  The US government stopped including long-term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994.  If the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate in the US stands at 23.2 percent.

The offshoring of American manufacturing and professional service jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology has decimated the middle class. The middle class has not found jobs with incomes comparable to those moved abroad. The labor cost savings from offshoring the jobs to Asia has boosted corporate profits, the performance bonuses of executives and capital gains of shareholders. Thus all income and wealth gains are concentrated in a few hands at the top of the income distribution.  The number of billionaires grows as destitution reaches from the lower economic class into the middle class.  American university graduates unable to find jobs return to their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes and work as waitresses and bartenders in part-time jobs that will not support an independent existence.

With a large percentage of the young economically unable to form households, residential construction, home furnishings, and home appliances suffer economic weakness.  Cars can still be sold only because the purchaser can obtain 100 percent financing in a six-year loan.  The lenders sell the loans, which are securitized and sold to gullible investors, just as were the mortgage-backed financial instruments that precipitated the 2007 US financial crash.

None of the problems that created the 2008 recession, and that were created by the 2008 recession, have been addressed.  Instead, policymakers have used an expansion of debt and money to paper over the problems. Money and debt have grown much more than US GDP, which raises questions about the value of the US dollar and the credit worthiness of the US government.  On July 8, 2014, my colleagues and I pointed out that when correctly measured, US national debt stands at 185 percent of GDP.

This raises the question: Why was the credit rating of Russia, a country with an extremely low ratio of debt to GDP, downgraded and not that of the US?  The answer is that the downgrading of Russian credit worthiness was a political act directed against Russia in behalf of US hegemony.

How long can fairy tales and political acts keep the US house of cards standing?  A rigged stock market.  A rigged interest rate. A rigged dollar exchange value, a rigged and suppressed gold price.  The current Western financial system rests on world support for the US dollar and on nothing more.

The problem with neoliberal economics, which pervades all countries, even Russia and China, is that neoliberal economics is a tool of American economic imperialism, as is Globalism.  As long as countries targeted by Washington for destabilization support and cling to the American doctrines that enable the destabilization, the targets are defenseless.

If Russia, China, and the BRICS Bank were willing to finance Greece, Italy, and Spain, perhaps those countries could be separated from the EU and NATO.  The unraveling of Washington’s empire would begin.

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

Book Reviews from http://www.atimes.com

Book Reviews from http://www.atimes.com

To read full review, click on title

Pakistan's proclivity for war The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World by T V Paul Author T V Paul adds to the numerous unflattering descriptions of Pakistan with his depiction of a "warrior state" whose security forces have outgrown all other institutions and activities and where radical Islamization and its attendant obscurantism have been the consequences of state policy. His explanation for why this continues is elaborate and thought-provoking. - Ehsan Ahrari (Jul 28, '14)

 

The US-Pakistan ties that bind No Exit from Pakistan: America's Tortured Relationship with Islamabad by Daniel S Markey The author argues that even as Pakistanis grow increasingly hostile to the United States', America's interests in South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East mean that Washington can ill-afford to disengage from Pakistan. Maneuvers by the Obama administration such as managing anti-Americanism sentiment by keeping a lower profile ring true with the policy prescriptions presented, yet the book suffers in places from simplistic reasoning. - Majid Mahmood (Jun 20, '14)

 

US stuck between dispensability and decline Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat by Vali Nasr While offering a harsh critique of the President Barack Obama's policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and across the Arab World, the author argues that the United States is not declining. This ignores that while the United States became an "indispensable nation" by implementing its stimulating post-World War II vision, it has failed since to develop a comparable vision for the future that is both realistic and doable. - Ehsan M Ahrari (Jun 13, '14)

 

A struggle against Israeli soft power The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah The author believes the Palestinian struggle will benefit from a growing awareness of Israeli actions brought about by a "boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement" similar to that which increased international isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. One of the more interesting parts of the work is its exploration of how neoliberal economic patterns have been imposed on Palestine. - Jim Miles (Jun 6, '14)

 

Re-imagining the caliphate The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present by Reza Pankhurst A forceful and authoritative attempt at elevating debate over the Islamic caliphate beyond Western elitist perceptions of extremism and radicalization, this book offers a clear-sighted analysis of the movements that have placed the caliphate at center of their revivalist discourse. The book's biggest flaw is arguably the author's reductionist approach toward the potential constituency of the caliphate. - Mahan Abedin (May 23, '14)

 

Keeping peace with total war To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and With All Nations by Angelo M Codevilla White Anglo-Saxon Protestant interpretations of history are central to the argument this book propounds: that the US needs constant, decisive warfare to ensure its own interests and security. While the thesis suffers because the author fails to recognize that a Washington focused on maintaining control doesn't share his populist values, it offers useful insights into the thinking of the American conservative right. - Jim Miles (May 16, '14)

 

Shaking the pillars of Israel's history The Idea of Israel - A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe This exploration of how Israel shaped a historic narrative to create a sense of nationhood and political direction recounts the attacks on historians in the 1990s who challenged the traditional Zionist discourse. The takeaway from this complex book is that issues surrounding the manipulation of victimhood have the potential to erode the foundations that the modern state is built on. - Jim Miles (May 2, '14)

Kagan + Nuland: Liberal Interventionists

Kagan + Nuland: Liberal Interventionists

By Michael S. Rozeff

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Why is Victoria Nuland reliably confrontational and antagonistic toward Russia? Why does she push power, force, and military might to the forefront in Ukraine? Why does she risk war with Russia? Why does she even care about Russia’s relations with Ukraine enough to inject the U.S. government into their affairs and conflicts?

Her philosophy is the same as her husband’s, Robert Kagan. One article calls them “THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN POWER COUPLE“. It says “Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan fell in love ‘talking about democracy and the role of America in the world’ on one of their first dates. It’s a shared passion that hasn’t faded over time.” Presumably that inner quote is from one or both of them.

For a brief profile of Robert Kagan’s ideas, shared by Victoria Nuland, see here. That article contains some criticism of their positions coming from the academic side. It is enough to know that Kagan supports Hillary Clinton in foreign policy and that she appointed Nuland to see that in foreign policy Americans at the moment have no major party presidential choice except more of the same.

Kagan and Nuland advocate U.S. activism and intervention throughout the world. Kagan has always endorsed more and more and more U.S. commitments worldwide. In September, 2003, he endorsed “a ‘generational commitment’ to bringing political and economic reform to the long-neglected Middle East–a commitment not unlike that which we made to rebuild Europe after the Second World War.” (The phrase “generational commitment’ is Condoleezza Rice’s.) The article’s title is “Do what it takes in Iraq”, which is never enough to suit Kagan. This is one of his excuses for why the policies of war and might that he advocates have failed. The U.S. doesn’t try hard enough to suit him. The U.S. tried very, very hard in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, however. It still did not produce what Kagan and Kristol glowingly wanted in any of these countries and in Libya: “American ideals and American interests converge in such a project, that a more democratic Middle East will both improve the lives of long-suffering peoples and enhance America’s national security.” The very opposite has resulted!

The projection of American power and might into these lands has not produced what Kagan and Kristol forecasted would be the result.

The ideas and policies of Kagan and Nuland are influential in Washington and on Obama. They are always the most hawkish. In a Sept. 5, 2014 essay, Kagan wrote “The most hawkish members of Congress don’t think it safe to argue for a ground attack on the Islamic State or for a NATO troop presence in Ukraine.”

Kagan wants both an American ground attack on IS, which would mean attacks in three or more countries, and NATO in Ukraine. Nuland has constantly made provocative statements about Russia and she supports every move by Washington deeper and deeper into Ukraine’s politics and military campaigns. If Poroshenko is removed from office by another coup, Nuland will be there to influence and control the new leaders. She will anoint and bless them, even if they are neo-nazis.

The same article contains Kagan’s distorted interpretation of history. Kagan stands for the liberal values that came out of the Enlightenment and characterize the Western states. But he also believes that these states are pansies who need to be muscular in defense of these values. “Muscular” means interventionist and ever-willing to insert force and arms in foreign lands; not in classic self-defense but on a pro-active, preemptive basis. In other words, to maintain liberal values and promote liberalism worldwide, the liberal states have to behave illiberally. They have to attack other countries that they deem threatening. They have to be provocative toward any country that doesn’t meet their standards of liberality.

Kagan prefers the title “liberal interventionist” (Nuland presumably is the same.) This policy position is self-contradictory. A liberal position allows for self-defense, but it does not allow for remaking the world and attacking other countries. It is not necessarily the case that when the U.S. government provokes and confronts, or even invades, other nations that have different political setups, this benefits Americans.

Kagan’s idea is that there are military solutions to what he assumes are American problems in Syria and Ukraine. He bemoans “‘There is no military solution’ is the constant refrain of Western statesmen regarding conflicts from Syria to Ukraine…”, implying that there are such solutions. But are these lands actually problems for Americans in the first place? It’s hardly obvious that they are. They become problems only when the U.S. government follows the Kagan-Nuland philosophy of liberal interventionism and inserts itself into these conflicted lands. Kagan wants military solutions for problems that he has helped to create by his constant support and promotion of interventions.

Kagan’s justification of pro-active and preemptive military interventions and military solutions goes back to his interpretation of 20th century history, in particular, the role of Germany and Japan versus the western powers. He sees appeasement as a basic component of World War II. And he argues that Germany and Japan had grievances and resentments that could not be assuaged by concessions or accommodations from the West. He transfers this argument to the present and sees new enemies and threats in Russia, China and the Middle East.

Kagan’s ideas about Japan are oversimplified. The history of Japanese-American relations has to go back to armed U.S. naval expeditions in 1846, 1848 and 1852. It has to go back to friction over the Open Door Policy and U.S. immigration policy. China became an important bone of contention. Appeasement is hardly a consideration in any of this. Just the opposite. It is American resistance to Japan’s policies in China that is a nexus of frictions.

To engage in appeasement is to make a concession over what one owns or has a legitimate interest or obligation in. What concessions or legitimate interests did the U.S. sacrifice in order to avoid war with Japan and Germany? The U.S. did not have a treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia. The U.S. didn’t sign the Munich Agreement. The U.S. didn’t undertake to enforce Wilson’s idea of self-determination of nations when they came under threat from larger powers. It cannot be said that the U.S. appeased Germany. Furthermore, the U.S. participation in World War I, which would have been approved of by the Kagan-Nuland philosophy, had results that led to World War II. It cannot be argued that the U.S. appeased Germany in and before World War I.

With respect to the U.S. and NATO, it cannot be argued today that Ukraine is another Sudetenland or Czechoslovakia. The U.S. has no treaties with Ukraine to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine or prevent it from breaking apart in a civil war. If it did have such a treaty, as it does with a good many other countries, it would only be asking for trouble.

Kagan’s understanding of the 19th century and appeasement is subject to serious questions. And when one considers how different the situations are today with respect to those states or countries that he seeks to replace Germany and Japan with, such as Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Islamic State, Russia and China, the Kagan-Nuland philosophy of American force projection is far more simply needless provocation and war-making than the non-appeasement that Kagan and Nuland envision it to be. Furthermore, the military intrusions of the U.S. can hardly be said to have appeased anyone; and they have done nothing to promote those liberal interventionist aims that Kagan and Nuland fell in love over.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Previous article by Michael S. Rozeff: The Neocon ‘Long War’

Great War of the American Empire or Great War II

Great War of the American Empire or Great War II

By Michael S. Rozeff

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.org

Looking at a map of current American military engagements overseas, one cannot help but notice their wide geographical spread and their seemingly interminable nature. Battles have raged in Europe (Yugoslavia and Ukraine), in Africa, in the Middle East, and in central Asia. The American Empire has launched this country into a series of battles that have no end in sight and no location that may not become a focal point of military force. These battles, each a war in its own right, have drawn in forces and resources from U.S. allies in Europe through NATO and even drawn in Japan. The scope of this war is global. In fact, one part of this war has been called the Global War on Terror. To understand this war and grasp its meaning, in the hope of bringing it to an end, a descriptive name is needed that tells us what this war is about. The name suggested here is the “Great War of the American Empire”. Since World War I, another disastrous war that American joined, is called the Great War, we can refer to the Great War of the American Empire also as Great War II.

Great War II comprises a number of sub-wars. The American Empire is the common element and the most important driver in all the sub-wars mentioned below. American involvement has never been necessary in these sub-wars, but the decisions to make them America’s business have come from the Empire’s leaders. The name “Great War of the American Empire” emphasizes the continuity of all the sub-wars to produce one Great War, and the responsibility of the American Empire in choosing to participate in and create this Great War. Had America’s leaders chosen the radically different path of non-intervention and true defense of this continent, rather than overseas interventions, Great War II would not have occurred and not still be occurring.

The Great War of the American Empire began 25 years ago. It began on August 2, 1990 with the Gulf War against Iraq and continues to the present. Earlier wars involving Israel and America sowed the seeds of this Great War. So did American involvements in Iran, the 1977-1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Even earlier American actions also set the stage, such as the recognition of Israel, the protection of Saudi Arabia as an oil supplier, the 1949 CIA involvement in the coup in Syria, and the American involvement in Lebanon in 1958. Poor (hostile) relations between the U.S. and Libya (1979-1986) also contributed to a major sub-war in what has turned out to be the Great War of the American Empire.

The inception of Great War II may, if one likes, be moved back to 1988 and 1989 without objection because those years also saw the American Empire coming into its own in the invasion of Panama to dislodge Noriega, operations in South America associated with the war on drugs, and an operation in the Philippines to protect the Aquino government. Turmoil in the Soviet Union was already being reflected in a more military-oriented foreign policy of the U.S.

Following the Gulf War, the U.S. government engages America and Americans non-stop in one substantial military operation or war after another. In the 1990s, these include Iraq no-fly zones, Somalia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Liberia, Albania, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Serbia. In the 2000s, the Empire begins wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and gets into serious military engagements in Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria. It has numerous other smaller military missions in Uganda, Jordan, Turkey, Chad, Mali, and Somalia. Some of these sub-wars and situations of involvement wax and wane and wax again. The latest occasion of American Empire intervention is Ukraine where, among other things, the U.S. military is slated to be training Ukrainian soldiers.

Terror and terrorism are invoked to rationalize some operations. Vague threats to national security are mentioned for others. Protection of Americans and American interests sometimes is made into a rationale. Terrorism and drugs are sometimes linked, and sometimes drug interdiction alone is used to justify an action that becomes part of the Great War of the American Empire. On several occasions, war has been justified because of purported ethnic cleansing or supposed mass killings directed by or threatened by a government.

Upon close inspection, all of these rationales fall apart. None is satisfactory. The interventions are too widespread, too long-lasting and too unsuccessful at what they supposedly accomplish to lend support to any of the common justifications. Is “good” being done when it involves endless killing, frequently of innocent bystanders, that elicits more and more anti-American sentiment from those on the receiving end who see Americans as invaders? Has the Great War II accomplished even one of its supposed objectives?

The Great War of the American Empire encompasses several sub-wars, continual warfare, continual excuses for continual warfare, and continual military engagements that promise Americans more of the same indefinitely. There is a web site called “The Long War Journal”that catalogs events all over the globe that are part of the Great War II, what the site calls the Long War. This site is a project of the “Foundation for Defense of Democracies”, which is a neocon organization that is promoting the Great War of the American Empire.

What they see, and accurately see, as a Long War is a portion of what is here called the Great War of the American Empire. The difference is that all the interventions and sub-wars of the past 25 years and all the military outposts of the U.S. government that provide the seeds of future wars and interventions are included in the Great War II. They all spring from the same source, even though each one has a different specific character.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Previous article by Michael S. Rozeff: US Escalation

 

“I urged him to bomb..."

The Warmongering Record of Hillary Clinton

by GARY LEUPP

Ex: http://www.counterpunch.org

If reason and justice prevailed in this country, you’d think that the recent series of articles in the Washington Times concerning the U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects.

Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State at that time knew that Libya was no threat to the U.S. She knew that Muammar Gadhafi had been closely cooperating with the U.S. in combating Islamist extremism. She probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social base due in part to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively equitable distribution of oil income in Libya.

But she wanted to topple Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates but responding to the urgings of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason advertised at the time. (Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafy was preparing a massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in 1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international community” had failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by Clinton and other top officials, as a shameful precedent that must not be repeated. It had also been deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999, when he waged war on Serbia, grossly exaggerating the extent of carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect of “genocide” to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect gross cynicism.)

No, genocide was not the issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo. According to the Washington Times, high-ranking U.S. officials indeed questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario in Libya. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed about 400 rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found evidence for troops firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of mass killing. It did not have a good estimate on the number of civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence that most had fled. It had intelligence that Gadhafy had ordered that troops not fire on civilians but only on armed rebels.

The Pentagon doubted that Gadhafi would risk world outrage by ordering a massacre. One intelligence officer told the Washington Times that the decision to bomb was made on the basis of “light intelligence.” Which is to say, lies, cherry-picked information such as a single statement by Gadhafi (relentlessly repeated in the corporate press echoing State Department proclamations) that he would “sanitize Libya one inch at a time” to “clear [the country] of these rats.” (Similar language, it was said, had been used by Hutu leaders in Rwanda.) Now that the rats in their innumerable rival militias control practically every square inch of Libya, preventing the emergence of an effective pro-western government, many at the Pentagon must be thinking how stupid Hillary was.

No, the attack was not about preventing a Rwanda-like genocide. Rather, it was launched because the Arab Spring, beginning with the overthrow of the two dictators, President Ben Ali of Tunisia and President Mubarak of Egypt, had taken the west by surprise and presented it with a dilemma: to retain longstanding friendships (including that with Gadhafi, who’d been a partner since 2003) in the face of mass protests, or throw in its lot with the opposition movements, who seemed to be riding an inevitable historical trend, hoping to co-opt them?

Recall how Obama had declined up to the last minute to order Mubarak to step down, and how Vice President Joe Biden had pointedly declined to describe Mubarak as a dictator. Only when millions rallied against the regime did Obama shift gears, praise the youth of Egypt for their inspiring mass movement, and withdraw support for the dictatorship. After that Obama pontificated that Ali Saleh in Yemen (a key ally of the U.S. since 2001) had to step down in deference to protesters. Saleh complied, turning power to another U.S. lackey (who has since resigned). Obama also declared that Assad in Syria had “lost legitimacy,” commanded him to step down, and began funding the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria. (The latter have at this point mostly disappeared or joined al-Qaeda and its spin-offs. Some have turned coat and created the “Loyalists’ Army” backing Assad versus the Islamist crazies.)

Hillary, that supposedly astute stateswoman, believed that the Arab Spring was going to topple all the current dictators of the Middle East and that, given that, the U.S. needed to position itself as the friend of the opposition movements. Gadhafy was a goner, she reasoned, so shouldn’t the U.S. help those working towards his overthrow?

Of course the U.S. (or the combination of the U.S. and NATO) couldn’t just attack a sovereign state to impose regime change. It would, at any rate, have been politically damaging after the regime change in Iraq that had been justified on the basis of now well discredited lies. So the U.S. arm-twisted UNSC members to approve a mission to protect civilians in Libya against state violence. China and Russia declined to use their veto power (although as western duplicity and real motives became apparent, they came to regret this). The Libya campaign soon shifted from “peace-keeping” actions such as the imposition of a “no-fly” zone to overt acts of war against the Gadhafy regime, which for its part consistently insisted that the opposition was aligned with al-Qaeda.

The results of “Operation Unified Protector” have of course been absolutely disastrous. Just as the U,S. and some of its allies wrecked Iraq, producing a situation far worse than that under Saddam Hussein, so they have inflicted horrors on Libya unknown during the Gadhafi years. These include the persecution of black Africans and Tuaregs, the collapse of any semblance of central government, the division of the country between hundreds of warring militias, the destabilization of neighboring Mali producing French imperialist intervention, the emergence of Benghazi as an al-Qaeda stronghold, and the proliferation of looted arms among rebel groups. The “humanitarian intervention” was in fact a grotesque farce and huge war crime.

But the political class and punditry in this country do not attack Hillary for war crimes, or for promoting lies to promote a war of aggression. Rather, they charge her and the State Department with failure to protect U.S. ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and other U.S. nationals from the attack that occurred in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. And they fault her for promoting the State Department’s initial “talking point” that the attack had been a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube film rather than a calculated terrorist attack. They pan her for sniping at a senator during a hearing, “What difference does it make (whether the attack had been launched by protestors spontaneously, or was a terrorist action planned by forces unleashed by the fall of the Gadhafi regime)”?

In other words: Hillary’s mainstream critics are less concerned with the bombing of Libya in 2011 that killed over 1100 civilians, and produced the power vacuum exploited by murderous jihadis, than by Hillary’s alleged concealment of evidence that might show the State Department inadequately protected U.S. diplomats from the consequences of the U.S.-orchestrated regime change itself. In their view, the former First Lady might have blood on her hands—but not that, mind you, of Libyan civilians, or Libyan military forces going about their normal business, or of Gadhafi who was sodomized with a knife while being murdered as Washington applauded.

No, she’s held accountable for the blood of these glorified, decent upstanding Americans who’d been complicit in the ruin of Libya.

This version of events is easy to challenge. It’s easy to show that Clinton skillfully—in full neocon mode, spewing disinformation to a clueless public—steered an attack an attack on Libya that has produced enormous blowback and ongoing suffering for the Libyan people. If a right-wing paper like Washington Times can expose this, how much more the more “mainstream” press? Could they at least not raise for discussion whether what Rand Paul calls “Hillary’s war” was, like the Iraq War (and many others) based on lies? Shouldn’t Hillary be hammered with the facts of her history, and her vaunted “toughness” be exposed as callous indifference to human life?

* * *

While championing the rights of women and children, arguing that “it takes a village” to raise a child, Clinton has endorsed the bombing of villages throughout her public life. Here are some talking points for those appalled by the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

*She has always been a warmonger. As First Lady from January 1993, she encouraged her husband Bill and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright to attack Serbian forces in the disintegrating Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1994 and Serbia in 1999. She’s stated that in 1999 she phoned her husband from Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she boasts. These Serbs were (as usual) forces that did not threaten the U.S. in any way. The complex conflicts and tussles over territory between ethnic groups in the Balkans, and the collapse of the Russian economy following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, gave Bill Clinton an excuse to posture as the world’s savior and to use NATO to impose order. Only the United States, he asserted, could restore order in Yugoslavia, which had been a proudly neutral country outside NATO and the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War. President Clinton and Albright also claimed that only NATO—designed in 1949 to counter a supposed Soviet threat to Western Europe, but never yet deployed in battle—should deal with the Balkan crises.

The Bosnian intervention resulted in the imposition of the “Dayton Accord” on the parties involved and the creation of the dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Kosovo intervention five years later (justified by the scaremongering, subsequently disproven reports of a Serbian genocidal campaign against Kosovars) involved the NATO bombing of Belgrade and resulted in the dismemberment of Serbia. Kosovo, now recognized by the U.S. and many of its allies as an independent state, is the center of Europe’s heroin trafficking and the host of the U.S.’s largest army base abroad. The Kosovo war, lacking UN support and following Albright’s outrageous demand for Serbian acquiescence—designed, as she gleefully conceded, “to set the bar too high” for Belgrade and Moscow’s acceptance—of NATO occupation of all of Serbia, was an extraordinary provocation to Serbia’s traditional ally Russia. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get,” Albright said at the time, as NATO prepared to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945.

*Clinton has been a keen advocate for the expansion of an antiquated Cold War military alliance that persists in provoking Russia. In the same year that NATO bombed Belgrade (1999), the alliance expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But Clinton’s predecessor George H. W. Bush had promised Russia in 1989 that NATO would not expand eastward. And since the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved in 1991, and since Russia under Boris Yeltsin hardly threatened any western countries, this expansion has understandably been viewed in Russia as a hostile move. George Kennan, a former U.S. ambassador to the USSR and a father of the “containment” doctrine, in 1998 pronounced the expansion a “tragic mistake” with “no reason whatsoever.” But the expansion continued under George W. Bush and has continued under Obama. Russia is now surrounded by an anti-Russian military alliance from its borders with the Baltic states to the north to Romania and Bulgaria. U.S.-backed “color revolutions” have been designed to draw more countries into the NATO camp. Hillary as secretary of state was a big proponent of such expansion, and under her watch, two more countries (Albania and Croatia) joined the U.S.-dominated alliance.

(To understand what this means to Russia, imagine how Washington would respond to a Russia-centered “defensive” military alliance requiring its members to spend 2% of their GDPs on military spending and coordinate military plans with Moscow incorporating Canada and all the Caribbean countries, surrounding the continental U.S., and now moving to include Mexico. Would this not be a big deal for U.S. leaders?)

*As New York senator Clinton endorsed the murderous ongoing sanctions against Iraq, imposed by the UN in 1990 and continued until 2003. Initially applied to force Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the sanctions were sustained at U.S. insistence (and over the protests of other Security Council members) up to and even beyond the U.S. invasion in 2003. Bill Clinton demanded their continuance, insisting that Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) secret WMD programs justified them. In 1996, three years into the Clinton presidency, Albright was asked whether the death of half a million Iraq children as a result of the sanctions was justified, and famously replied in a television interview, “We think it was worth it.” Surely Hillary agreed with her friend and predecessor as the first woman secretary of state. She also endorsed the 1998 “Operation Desert Fox” (based on lies, most notably the charge that Iraq had expelled UN inspectors) designed to further destroy Iraq’s military infrastructure and make future attacks even easier.

*She was a strident supporter of the Iraq War. As a New York senator from 2001 to 2009, Hillary aligned herself with the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, earning a reputation as a hawk. She was a fervent supportive of the attack on Iraq, based on lies, in 2003. On the floor of the Senate she echoed all the fictions about Saddam Hussein’s “chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.” She declared, “He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.” She suggested that her decision to support war was “influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.” (Presumably by the latter she meant the threats posed by Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.) Her loss to Obama in the Democratic primary in 2008 was due largely to Obama’s (supposed) antiwar position contrasting with her consistently pro-war position. She has only vaguely conceded that her support for the invasion was something of a mistake. But she blames her vote on others, echoing Dick Cheney’s bland suggestion that the problem was “intelligence failures.” “If we knew know then what we know now,” she stated as she began her presidential campaign in late 2006, “I certainly wouldn’t have voted” for the war.

*She actively pursued anti-democratic regime change in Ukraine. As secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton as noted above endorsed NATO’s relentless expansion. She selected to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs the neocon Victoria Nuland, who had been the principal deputy foreign advisor to Cheney when he was vice president. The wife of neocon pundit Robert Kagan, Nuland is a war hawk whose current mission in life is the full encirclement of Russia with the integration of Ukraine into the EU and then into NATO. The ultimate goal was the expulsion of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimean Peninsula (where it has been stationed since 1783). She has boasted of the fact that the U.S. has invested five billion dollars in supporting what she depicts as the Ukrainian people’s “European aspirations.” What this really means is that the U.S. exploited political divisions in Ukraine to topple an elected leader and replace him with Nuland’s handpicked prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyev, deploying neo-Nazi shock troops in the process and generating a civil war that has killed over 5000 people.

Clinton has increasingly vilified Vladimir Putin, the popular Russian president, absurdly comparing the Russian re-annexation of the Crimean Peninsula following a popular referendum with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. She is totally on board the program of producing a new Cold War, and forcing European allies to cooperate in isolating the former superpower.

*She wanted to provide military assistance to the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria, to effect regime change, and after leaving office criticized Obama for not supplying more than he did. In 2011 Clinton wanted the U.S. to arm rebels who quickly became aligned with the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate) and other extreme Islamists, in order to bring down a secular regime that respects religious rights, rejects the implementation of Sharia law, and promotes the education of women. The U.S. indeed has supplied arms to anti-Assad forces from at least January 2014, But as it happens the bulk of U.S. aid to the “moderate rebels” has been appropriated by Islamists, and some of it is deployed against U.S. allies in Iraq. It is now widely understood that the bulk of “moderate” rebels are either in Turkish exile or directed by CIA agents, while the U.S. plans to train some 5000 new recruits in Jordan. Meanwhile Assad has won election (as fair as any held in a U.S. client state like Afghanistan or Iraq) and gained the upper hand in the civil war. U.S. meddling in Syria has empowered the Islamic State that now controls much of Syria and Iraq.

*She has been an unremitting supporter of Israeli aggression, whenever it occurs. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described her last year as “Israel’s new lawyer” given her sympathetic view of Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza and even his desire to maintain “security” throughout the occupied West Bank. She postured as an opponent of Israel’s unrelenting, illegal settlements of Palestinian territory in 2009, but backed down when Netanyahu simply refused to heed U.S. calls for a freeze. In her memoir she notes “our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work”—as though she’s apologizing for it.

In 1999 as First Lady, Hillary Clinton hugged and kissed Yassir Arafat’s wife Suha during a trip to the West Bank. She advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state. She changed her tune when she ran for the New York Senate seat. When it comes to the Middle East, she is a total, unprincipled opportunist.

*Hillary tacitly endorsed the military coup against elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009, refusing to call it such (even though Obama did). She made common cause with those who feared his effort to poll the people about constitutional reform would weaken their positions, made nice with the ensuing regime and made sure Zelaya would not return to office.

*She provoked China by siding with Japan in the Senkaku/ Daioyutai dispute. Departing from the State Department’s traditional stance that “we take no position” on the Sino-Japanese dispute about sovereignty over the Senkaku/ Daioyutai islands in the East China Sea, seized by Japan in 1895, Clinton as secretary of state emphasized that the islands fall within the defense perimeters of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. The warmongering neocon National Review in a piece entitled “In Praise of Hillary Clinton” praised her for “driving the Chinese slightly up a wall.”

*She helped bring down a Japanese prime minister who heeded the feelings of the people of Okinawa, who opposed the Futenma Marine Corps Air Force Station on the island. The new president Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan defeated the slavishly pro-U.S. Liberal Democratic Party in the general election of 2009, had promised to move the hated U.S. base in the heart of Ginowan city for the noise, air pollution and public safety hazards it causes. Clinton met with him, listened sympathetically, and said “no.” Hatoyama was obliged to apologize to the people of Okinawa, essentially conceding that Japan remains an occupied nation that doesn’t enjoy sovereignty. Nationwide his public support ratings fell from 70 to 17% and he was obliged to resign in shame after eight months in office.

*She made countless trips to India, signing bilateral economic and nuclear cooperation agreements with a country her husband had placed under sanctions for its nuclear tests in 1998. While castigating North Korea for its nuclear weapons program, and taking what a CIA analyst called a “more hard line, more conditional, more neoconservative [approach] than Bush during the last four years of his term,” she signaled that India’s nukes were no longer an issue for the U.S. India is, after all, a counterweight to China.

What can those who revere her point to in this record that in any way betters the planet or this country? Clinton’s record of her tenure in the State Department is entitled Hard Choices, but it has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.

This is a country of 323 million people. 88% of those over 25 have graduated high school. The world respects U.S. culture, science, and technology. Why is it that out of our well-educated, creative masses the best that the those who decide these things—the secretive cliques within the two official, indistinguishable political parties who answer to the 1% and who decide how to market electoral products—can come up with is the likely plate of candidates for the presidential election next year? Why is it that, while we all find it ridiculous that North Korea’s ruled by its third Kim, Syria by its second Assad, and Cuba by its second Castro, the U.S. electorate may well be offered a choice between another Clinton and another Bush? As though their predecessors of those surnames were anything other than long-discredited warmongering thugs?

GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: [e-mail]

Ukraine : le quotidien Le Monde répond à la voix de son maître

Ukraine : le quotidien Le Monde répond à la voix de son maître

Par Guillaume Borel

Ex: http://arretsurinfo.ch

Après l’offensive de propagande médiatique du weekend dernier appelant à armer le gouvernement ukrainien dans une opération punitive contre les indépendantistes de l’est du pays, relayée notamment par les quotidiens Libération, Le Figaro, et le Nouvel Observateur, c’est autour du Monde de répondre à la voix de son maître.

Dans un éditorial paru le 3 février sous le titre « Faut-il armer l’Ukraine ? » le quotidien Le Monde milite en effet pour un soutien armé direct à l’armée ukrainienne. Cet article, comme les précédents, est basé sur une accumulation de mensonges. On peut d’abord lire :

« Chaque jour qui passe, les milices ukrainiennes pro-russes, encadrées sur le terrain par l’armée russe, dépècent un peu plus ce malheureux pays qu’est l’Ukraine. Elles accroissent le pseudo-Etat qu’elles se sont taillé dans l’est du pays. Sauf à se payer de mots, il faut décrire cette réalité pour ce qu’elle est : un pays, la Russie, en agresse un autre, l’Ukraine – par la guerre. Ce n’est pas une guerre froide, c’est une guerre chaude, et qui fait essentiellement des morts parmi les civils. »

Le fait que l’armée russe combatte sur le terrain aux côtés des indépendantistes et qui sous-tend les accusations colportées par les médias occidentaux d’une « agression russe » contre l’Ukraine, a pourtant été démentie ces derniers jours par le chef de l’état-major ukrainien en personne, Viktor Muzhenko, qui a déclaré lors d’un point presse :

« A ce jour nous n’avons que des faits de cas de participation individuelle des citoyens russes dans les actions militaires des groupes armés illégaux. Des actions militaires contre les unités de l’armée russe, nous n’en menons pas non plus à ce jour. »

Le Monde est factuel sur les morts, essentiellement civils, du conflit. Mais ce qu’il omet de préciser, c’est que ces victimes civiles sont des citoyens russophones de l’est du pays qui tombent sous les exactions des bataillons néonazis de la garde nationale ukrainienne, ceux-là même que Le Monde et les médias occidentaux appellent à armer. Pour mémoire, un charnier de 400 corps a été découvert fin septembre 2014 par les forces Armées de Novorossia au nord de Donetsk sur les anciennes positions tenues par la garde nationale ukrainienne.

Le bureau des Nations-Unies chargé de la coordination des affaires humanitaires évaluait en décembre dernier les victimes civiles à plus de 4600 et les personnes déplacées, qui ont essentiellement trouvé refuge en Russie, à plus d’un million.

On retrouve également dans l’article du Monde la fable de « l’annexion » de la Crimée :

« Celles-ci [les sanctions] ont eu un impact certain sur l’économie russe, mais pas au point de dissuader M. Poutine d’amputer l’Ukraine de sa partie orientale après avoir annexé, en 2014, l’ensemble de la Crimée. »

Rappelons donc une fois encore pour les journalistes du Monde que les habitants de Crimée se sont prononcés par référendum pour un rattachement à la Russie. L’annexion par voie référendaire constitue certes un nouveau concept journalistique audacieux, mais cela ne lui donne pas pour autant une quelconque réalité.

« Le Kremlin viole un cessez-le-feu conclu en septembre 2014. Il se refuse à toute négociation sérieuse. Ces dernières semaines, des centaines de chars, pièces d’artillerie autotractées, blindés divers, porte-missiles, stations radars ont été livrés aux milices. Inévitablement, le ton monte aux Etats-Unis. Des voix de plus en plus nombreuses, y compris dans les milieux officiels, se prononcent en faveur d’une livraison massive d’armes défensives à Kiev. »

Les journalistes du Monde pourront se référer à ce sujet à mon précédent article listant les violations du cessez-le-feu de la part de l’armée ukrainienne, et plus particulièrement les bataillons de la garde nationale, durant l’automne 2014 : « Ukraine: l’armée continue son offensive avec le soutien des États-Unis, en violation des accords de Minsk »

Ils y apprendront notamment que les observateurs de l’OSCE présents sur le terrain ont constaté début novembre 2014 plus de « 2400 violations du cessez-le-feu par des groupes d’activistes », les « groupes d’activistes » désignant principalement les bataillons de la garde nationale ukrainienne.

Le 27 janvier, la correspondante du magazine russe Expert, Marina Akhmedova, interviewait un officier de l’armée régulière ukrainienne près de Slaviansk, sous couvert d’anonymat, voici ce qu’il déclarait :

« […] il y a beaucoup d’unités qui ne respectent tout simplement pas le haut commandement. Il n’y a pas de structure claire. Il y a seulement le ministère de l’Intérieur avec ses propres bataillons de volontaires qui, selon ses dires, est formé par le ministère même. » Le président russe Vladimir Poutine parlait ainsi à propos des bataillons de volontaires de la garde nationale, financés en grande partie par l’oligarque israélo-ukrainien Ihor Kolmoyski, d’une « légion étrangère de l’OTAN ».

Quant aux accusations de livraison de matériel lourd par la Russie, elles relaient là aussi les affabulations du gouvernement ukrainien et du président Poroshenko qui expliquent tous leurs échecs militaires par la présence de troupes russes, que n’ont jamais confirmée les observateurs de l’OSCE présents sur le terrain. Après l’échec de l’offensive de l’armée ukrainienne contre l’aéroport de Donetsk, le 18 janvier, en violation du cessez-le-feu et des accords de Minsk, le président ukrainien déclarait que les insurgés bénéficiaient du soutien de « 9000 soldats de la Fédération de Russie » et de « plus de 500 tanks, pièces d’artillerie lourde et véhicules de transport de troupes ». Ces affirmations ont été démenties par le chef d’état-major de l’armée ukrainienne, le général  Viktor Muzhenko, mais également par les représentants de l’OSCE qui se sont déclarés « incapables de confirmer ou démentir ces informations » et ont ajouté : « qu’avant de faire des déclarations retentissantes, il fallait tenir compte de la guerre de l’information en cours ».

L’éditorial du Monde se termine par un appel à armer le gouvernement ukrainien, sous l’euphémisme manipulateur d’une « assistance technologique » qui répond à la fausse interrogation posée dans le titre :

« Commençons par accéder à cet ensemble de demandes : sanctions, assistance technologique et aide financière. M. Poutine doit savoir que la guerre qu’il mène aura un coût de plus en plus élevé. »

Le fait que cet appel à armer le régime ukrainien soit publié sous la forme d’un éditorial engage la responsabilité collective des journalistes et rédacteurs du Monde qui se retrouvent ainsi embrigadés dans l’offensive de propagande globale menée par la presse française, dans un contexte militaire défavorable au régime ukrainien. Rappelons ici que les Forces Armées de Novorossia ont répliqué à l’attaque de l’armée ukrainienne de la fin janvier en lançant une vaste contre-offensive qui a conduit à la sécurisation de l’aéroport de Donetsk, à la progression vers la ville de Marioupol, et à la reprise de certaines localités de la banlieue de Donestk depuis lesquelles des unités de la garde nationale bombardaient les habitations civiles. 8000 hommes de l’armée régulière sont actuellement sur le point d’être totalement encerclés dans un « chaudron » au niveau de la ville de Debaltsevo.

Dans le même temps, le gouvernement ukrainien ne parvient plus à mobiliser les citoyens dans une guerre qui est de plus en plus largement perçue par la population comme instrumentalisée par les oligarques et contraire aux intérêts de l’Ukraine. Une quatrième vague de mobilisation a été lancée le 12 janvier par le régime de Kiev et se heurte à l’opposition croissante des ukrainiens.

Sur son compte Facebook, cité par la radio russe Sputnik, le conseiller du président Porochenko, Iouri Birioukov rapporte les éléments suivants :

« Les chefs de 14 conseils ruraux de la régon d’Ivano-Frankovsk ont refusé de recevoir les ordres de convocation. 57 % des habitants de la région d’Ivano-Frankovsk astreints au service et ayant reçu un ordre de convocation ne se sont pas rendus à la commission médicale. 37 % des habitants de la région ayant reçu un ordre de convocation ont quitté le territoire de l’Ukraine. »

Un officier de l’armée ukrainienne interviewé par la journaliste russe  Marina Akhmedova près de Slaviansk déclarait également :

« Je ne sais pas ce que pensent les dirigeants… Eux ne veulent sans doute pas que ça se termine. Les commandants des unités qui, avec leurs hommes, pourrissent dans les tranchées…Croyez-moi, nous en avons assez de cette guerre. »

Il y a quelques jours, Viktoria Shilova, leader du mouvement ukrainien « Anti-guerre », députée du conseil régional de la région de Dniepropetrovsk, a publié une vidéo sur Youtube appelant les citoyens ukrainiens à refuser la mobilisation. Elle y qualifie notamment les membres du gouvernement de « criminels de guerre » et déclare que « l’armée ne veut plus faire la guerre ».

Quels sont les commanditaires de la propagande de guerre dans les médias français ?

Le mardi 27 janvier, le texte d’un appel intitulé « BHL et Soros lancent un SOS pour l’Ukraine » est paru sur le blog de Bernard-Henri Levy « La règle du jeu ». Cet appel a également été publié, « dans douze quotidiens américains et européens, dont en France Libération ».

Levy et Soros présentent le gouvernement ukrainien actuel, décrit par Victoria Shilova précédemment comme composé de « criminels de guerre » comme :

« une expérience rare de démocratie participative et de construction d’une nation par ses citoyens eux-mêmes. C’est une belle et noble aventure menée par un peuple rassemblé dans le projet commun de s’ouvrir à la modernité, à la démocratie, à l’Europe. »

Ils exhortent ensuite les dirigeants de l’Union Européenne à voler au secours du pays, au nom de l’expérience démocratique, confronté selon eux à « une agression russe » :

« Ou bien les dirigeants européens persistent dans leur inquiétante prudence et, alors, non seulement Poutine poursuivra sa double agression, mais il arguera que les problèmes rencontrés par sa propre économie sont dus à l’hostilité de l’Ouest et gagnera ainsi sur tous les tableaux à la fois. »

Les deux auteurs insistent également sur « la mise en place d’une société ouverte fondée sur le système des check and balances » et d’un modèle économique basé sur le libre-échange contre le modèle « soviétique » du « dirigisme d’Etat ».

Il faut noter ici que les réformes menées jusqu’à présent par le gouvernement d’Arseni Iatseniouk ont respecté à la lettre la « feuille de route » de M Georges Soros et Bernard-Henri Levy.

Selon le nouveau programme économique présenté pour la période 2015-2017, le budget de l’état devrait diminuer de 10%. Cet objectif sera atteint notamment en supprimant 10% des effectifs de la fonction publique, dans les secteurs de la santé et de l’éducation. Les dépenses d’éducation devraient ainsi baisser de 20%, notamment par la fermeture d’écoles en milieu rural, et les dépenses de santé de 40%. Cette politique budgétaire est la conséquence de l’octroi par le FMI de différents prêts en échange de « réformes structurelles » et de la nécessité d’augmenter les crédits militaires. L’âge de la retraite a également été porté à 65 ans et les pensions ont été diminuées de 10% pour les fonctionnaires. Elles ne sont plus indexées sur l’inflation, qui atteignait 14% fin 2014. Les prix et le secteur de l’énergie ont  été déréglementés, ce qui s’est traduit pour les ukrainiens par une hausse de 50% du prix du gaz. Une vague de privatisations à grande échelle a touché les secteurs les plus rentables de l’économie, notamment celui du gaz, du charbon, et de l’industrie lourde. 37 mines de charbon vont être privatisées d’ici 2019. La principale société bénéficiaire de cette vague de libéralisations dans le secteur de l’énergie est la Burisma Holding, première compagnie privée. Le fils du vice-président américain Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, a été nommé en mai 2014 à son conseil d’administration…

Pour Bernard-Henri Levy et Georges Soros, cette véritable casse sociale qui a déjà conduit à une paupérisation massive de la population est cependant la preuve que le pays s’est ouvert « à la modernité, à la démocratie, à l’Europe. »

Le fait que Bernard-Henri Levy soit à l’origine de cette offensive médiatique en faveur d’une aide militaire au régime ukrainien est tout sauf une surprise. L’agent d’influence est omniprésent dans la presse française. Il tient une chronique dans l’hebdomadaire Le Point, propriété de François Pinault, et dont son ami Franz-Olivier Giesbert est le directeur. Il fut membre du conseil de surveillance du journal Libération, propriété de Patrick Drahi depuis l’été 2014, suite au rachat du journal par Edouard de Rotschild en 2005, dont il est proche. En 2010, il est entré au conseil de surveillance du journal Le Monde suite à son rachat par le trio Pigasse, Pierre Bergé, et Xavier Niel. On constate donc que Bernard-Henri Levy possède ses entrées dans les principaux organes de presse français sur lesquels il peut exercer, de par ses fonctions d’administrateur et son réseau relationnel, une influence certaine.

Lors de la guerre en Libye en 2011, il fut l’un des principaux agents d’influence occidentaux et a notamment œuvré avec Nicolas Sarkozy afin d’imposer les milices armées, par l’intermédiaire du CNT, comme l’interlocuteur légitime de l’opposition au régime de Kadhafi sur la scène internationale. Ces mêmes milices armées composées de militants takfiristes sèment depuis le chaos et la mort dans le pays. Bernard-Henri Levy milite également depuis le début du conflit syrien pour une intervention occidentale contre Bachar-al-Assad.

Le milliardaire américano-israélien Georges Soros a également été engagé, notamment par l’intermédiaire de sa fondation Open Society, dans toute une série d’actions d’ingérence contre des pays de l’ex-union soviétique et notamment l’Ukraine. Dans une interview sur CNN le 25 mai 2014, il reconnaissait l’implication de sa fondation dans le coup d’état du Maïdan qui avait abouti à la fuite du président Yanoukovitch et à l’accès de la mouvance néonazie au pouvoir. Il déclara notamment au journaliste Fareed Zakaria :

« J’ai créé une fondation en Ukraine avant que cette dernière ne devienne indépendante de la Russie. Cette fondation n’a pas suspendu son activité depuis lors et a joué un rôle important dans les événements auxquels nous avons récemment assisté. »

L’Open Society de Georges Soros a également financé le mouvement serbe Otpor ayant conduit à la chute du régime de Slobodan Milosevic en 2000, et la révolution dite « des roses » en 2003 en Géorgie qui a débouché sur la démission du président Edouard Chevardnadze et l’accès au pouvoir en 2004 du candidat financé par cette même Open Society, Mikhail Saakachvili.

Les grands organes de presse français se sont donc faits les porte-voix de Bernard-Henri Levy et de Georges Soros, deux agents d’influence qui suivent selon toute vraisemblance l’agenda des néoconservateurs américains en Ukraine. Les médias nationaux sont de fait devenus des officines de propagande destinées à influencer l’opinion publique française dans le sens d’un soutien armé au régime ukrainien. Un régime qui s’est rendu coupable de crimes de guerre et utilise des bataillons de mercenaires néonazis comme principaux outils de la répression militaire engagée depuis bientôt un an contre la rébellion des provinces russophones de l’est du pays. La presse française a fait le choix de la lâcheté, du mensonge et de la collaboration, comme elle l’a déjà fait dans le passé. Elle a failli à sa mission d’information pour se faire la complice de criminels de guerre et se prêter à des opérations d’intoxication à grande échelle.

Guillaume Borel

Source: http://arretsurinfo.ch/ukraine-le-quotidien-le-monde-repond-a-la-voix-de-son-maitre/

Ukraine: Obama veut-il la guerre totale?

Ukraine: Obama veut-il la guerre totale?

 

Qui alimente le brasier?

 

Jean-Michel Vernochet

Écrivain

Ancien grand reporter au Figaro Magazine

Ex: http://www.bvoltaire.fr

 

La guerre fait rage au Donbass. L’est de l’Ukraine n’aura pas connu la trêve hivernale que beaucoup attendaient ou espéraient. Une guerre que trop de journalistes s’entêtent à qualifier de « civile »… En avril 2014, le nouveau pouvoir, issu du coup d’État du Maïdan du 22 février 2014, lance une vaste opération « antiterroriste » contre les régionalistes russophones du Donbass. Ceux-ci, devant l’intransigeance de Kiev, se radicalisent peu à peu et réclament l’autonomie au sein d’une fédération ukrainienne. Las, l’affaire dégénère vite après le massacre d’Odessa le 2 mai et le régionalisme se mue en séparatisme. D’après les Nations unies, le conflit aurait fait au total quelque 5.000 victimes civiles. Depuis le 9 janvier, l’intensité des combats ne cesse d’augmenter et parallèlement le nombre des morts… alors que plusieurs milliers de soldats gouvernementaux se trouvent pris au piège du « chaudron » de Debaltsevo.

Mais qui alimente le brasier ? Kiev ne cesse de clamer que la Russie fournit des armes et des hommes aux nouvelles républiques autonomes de Donetsk et Lougansk. Moscou oppose, pour sa part, démentis sur démentis à ces accusations, les dénonçant comme infondées, les autorités ukrainiennes n’ayant jusqu’à présent jamais fourni la moindre preuve à l’appui de leurs dires. Un certain écart apparaît d’ailleurs à ce sujet entre les déclarations des politiques et celles des militaires ukrainiens : le 31 janvier dernier, le général Victor Moujenko, chef d’état-major général, n’a-t-il pas avoué que « l’armée ukrainienne ne combattait pas contre des unités régulières de l’armée russe… la participation de citoyens et militaires russes aux combats n’étant que des faits isolés » ? Des propos à comparer avec ceux, aussi péremptoires que contradictoires, du président ukrainien Petro Porochenko, du secrétaire général de l’OTAN Jens Stoltenberg et, aux États-Unis, du belliqueux sénateur McCain.

Du côté américain, le 2 février, Washington confirmait une information du New York Times selon laquelle le commandant en chef des forces de l’OTAN, le général Philip Breedlove, serait favorable à la fourniture à l’armée ukrainienne d’armes défensives – élégant euphémisme — et autres équipements. La veille, un mémo d’experts cosigné par une brochette de diplomates et de militaires de haut rang était rendu public sous la forme d’un rapport pour Le maintien de l’indépendance ukrainienne et l’opposition à l’agression russe. Ce que doivent faire les États-Unis et l’OTAN*. Ce document, publié sous l’égide de l’Atlantic Council, de la Brookings Institution et du Conseil de Chicago pour les affaires globales, recommande fortement l’envoi au profit de l’armée ukrainienne d’équipements militaires létaux, parmi lesquels les fameux lance-missiles antichars Javelin… ceci pour un montant 3 milliards de dollars.

Une très mauvaise idée pour Berlin car « une solution militaire, ce n’est pas celle que le gouvernement fédéral voit comme issue possible à cette crise ». Déclaration frappée au sceau du bon sens de la porte-parole du gouvernement allemand, Christiane Wirtz. Celle-ci rejoignait la position exprimée à la Maison-Blanche par Ben Rhodes, conseiller adjoint à la Sécurité nationale du président Obama. Celui-ci estime en effet de façon dissonante que « la livraison d’armes aux forces ukrainiennes n’aiderait pas à régler le conflit dans le Donbass ». Dont acte !

Restera finalement à savoir si les intentions affichées à Washington auront été purement déclaratives, ou si le camp des partisans de la confrontation Est/Ouest, notamment au Sénat, parvient à l’emporter. En ce cas, l’escalade risque bien de se transformer très rapidement en montée aux extrêmes. Demain la guerre aux frontières de l’Union ?

* Parmi les signataires figurent l’ex-ambassadeur américain à l’OTAN Ivo Daalder, l’ancienne sous-secrétaire à la Défense Michèle Flournoy, l’ancien sous-secrétaire d’État Strobe Talbott, les anciens ambassadeurs des États-Unis en Ukraine Steven Pifer et John Herbst et l’ancien commandant adjoint du commandement de l’OTAN en Europe James Stavridis.

Jean-Michel Vernochet

Wiederkehr der Kriegsstrategien

Wiederkehr der Kriegsstrategien

von Helmut Roewer

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de

Was verbindet den Ersten Weltkrieg und die heutige weltpolitische Situation? Helmut Roewer, selbst Autor zum Ersten Weltkrieg, versucht in dieser Rezension, die Frage zu beantworten.

Zwischen diesen Buchdeckeln befinden sich gleich zwei Bücher. Sie könnten kaum unterschiedlicher gedacht werden. Ihre Verbindungsklammer ist das Nachdenken über die USA, über den Ersten Weltkrieg und den daraus folgenden, heutigen Standpunkt Deutschlands.

Am Anfang steht das Buch von Wolfgang Effenberger. Es ist eine mit langem Atem erzählte Vor– und dann zusammengeraffte Ereignis– und Nachgeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs. Das Dargebotene ragt wie ein Fels aus dem Flachland deutscher Historiker-​Ängstlichkeiten heraus.

Aggression von allen Seiten – mehr oder weniger

Kriegsgeschichte, das ist für den ehemaligen Offizier Effenberger klar, ist eine Geschichte von Freund und Feind. Ein Krieg, zumal einer von solchen Ausmaßen, ist kein Ergebnis irgendeiner Krise, sondern eine Angelegenheit mit langem Vorlauf. Rüstung, Planung und In-​Position-​Bringen heißt dieses Geschäft. Zu dessen Verständnis gehört, dass Kriegführung zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts noch als eine ganz normale Fortsetzung der Politik mit unfriedlichen Mitteln angesehen wurde.

Die Staaten in dieser Zeit waren mehr oder minder alle aggressiv. An der Spitze standen wohl die USA, Großbritannien und Russland. Diese Feststellungen hängen keineswegs im Raum, sondern werden durch eine Unzahl von Fakten untermauert. Daneben wirkt Deutschland fast wie ein Waisenknabe. Doch gemach ‒ das hier ist keine Weißwaschanlage. Effenberger zieht mit guten Gründen gegen die wichtigsten Gerüchtelieferanten und –denunzianten zu Felde. Der Möchtegern-​NS-​Widerstandskämpfer und spätere Historiker Fritz Fischer wird als das beschrieben, was er war. Denn er stellte nicht mehr als eine mehr oder minder kleine Nazi-​Nummer dar, die pünktlich zu Kriegsende entdeckte, dass sie immer schon dagegen war, gar Widerstand geleistet habe. Sein Schüler Klaus Rainer Röhl, der Jahrzehnte lang seinen Deutschenhass ausgelebt hat, wird ebenfalls auf Normalmaß zurückgeschnitten. Dessen absurden Behauptungen über Wilhelm II. werden von Effenberger gewogen und als zu leicht befunden.

Faktensatt und breitgefächert

Breiten Raum nimmt das heuchlerische Tun der US-​amerikanischen Ostküstenelite ein. Für diese war der Krieg von Anfang an beschlossene Sache. Das Sponsoring der Alliierten blieb – im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes – ein Bombengeschäft. Schrecklich waren auch die Lügen, die gebraucht wurden, um das kriegsunwillige amerikanische Volk in den Krieg zu zwingen. Doch der erschien den USA schließlich als notwendig, weil Ende 1916 England und seine Verbündeten den Krieg zu verlieren drohten. Eine Mega-​Pleite stand ins Haus. Das wird faktensatt erzählt. Gut, dass es mal einer tut.

Das kann aber bei solch einem umfangreichen Buch nur eine kleine Auswahl sein. Hinzu kommen das aggressive Serbien, britische Weltbeherrschungs-​Phantasien, Flottenbau, die Rolle der Banken und vieles andere. Und immer wieder die USA: Der innenpolitische Kampf zwischen den demokratischen Imperialisten und den wohl eher bodenständigen Republikanern. Natürlich ist es nicht so, dass für die USA im Ersten Weltkrieg die Weltmission erst begann. Das aggressive Vorrücken, das Anzetteln von Kriegen und das Vorschieben von Friedensmissionen ist älteren Datums. Der Erste Weltkrieg brachte schließlich den Ausbruch aus dem amerikanischen Doppelkontinent. Diese konsequente Geschichte der US-​amerikanischen weltumspannenden Kriegführung reicht bei Effenberger bis ins Jahr 2014.

Die Obama-​USA als neuer Kriegstreiber

Hier spielt auch das zweite, wesentlich kürzere Buch des ehemaligen CDU-​Bundestagsabgeordneten Willy Wimmer. Zur Überraschung macher präsentiert sich hier ein weißer Rabe. Dieser Mann ist offensichtlich auf der Suche nach dem heutigen Standort von Deutschland. Dass dieses Deutschland heute nicht viel anderes als eine Vasallenrolle innehat, spricht er gleich mehrfach aus. Zugleich lässt er uns an seinen Erfahrungen als Außen– und Sicherheitspolitiker teilhaben. Denn Wimmer hat als verteidigungspolitischer Sprecher der CDU /​CSU, in Zusammenarbeit mit der „Organisation für Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit in Europa“ (OSZE) und als deutscher Repräsentant einiges von der Welt gesehen. Am eindrucksvollsten bleiben seine Beobachtungen in China und seine Schlussfolgerungen hinsichtlich der erfolgten Interessenabgrenzungen zwischen Russland und China.

Wenn sie denn stimmen, erklärt das am plausibelsten, warum die US-​amerikanischen Kriegsherren mit Blick auf Russland so aggressiv reagieren. In diesem Zusammenhang mag sich der eine oder andere daran erinnern, wie der Mainstream uns vor wenigen Jahren den Messias Obama in die Wohnzimmer transportierte. Wimmer sieht dies anders. Sein Text enthält eine Vielzahl von Zitaten dieses angeblichen Hoffnungsträgers, die nur eine Folgerung erlauben: Dieser Mann ist ein Kriegshetzer.

Aufruhr, Krise, Konflikt, Krieg

Nein, das Buch von Wimmer kann nicht freundlich genannt werden. Es benennt die einschlägigen, durchaus schriftlich fixierten Strategien. Denn für jeden Offensivschritt gibt es vier Eskalationsstufen: Aufruhr, Krise, Konflikt, Krieg. Wimmer tippt mit dem Finger auf den Globus und fragt sich: „Was ist im Moment wo?“ Wir haben uns so an dieses Prozedere gewöhnt, dass kaum noch einer fragt, ob das in meinem oder in unserem Interesse ist.

Die Besetzung des Mainstreams mit US-​hörigen Imperialisten ist erschreckend weit fortgeschritten. Wer versucht, öffentlich gegenzuhalten, wird ausgegrenzt oder totgeschwiegen. Neuster Fall, wie aus dem Propaganda-​Anleitungsbuch, ist Helmut Schmidt (SPD), der ehemalige Kanzler. Ihm wurde seine Vergangenheit als Hitlerjunge und Soldat vorgeworfen. Er sei „von Nazi-​Ideologie kontaminiert“ gewesen, beschuldigte ihn seine Biographin Sabine Pamperrien. So leben wir unter dem US-​amerikanischen Atomschirm. Nicht jeder findet das beruhigend.

Wolfgang Effenberger, Willy Wimmer: Wiederkehr der Hasardeure: Schattenstrategen, Kriegstreiber, stille Profiteure 1914 und heute. Höhr-​Grenzhausen: Verlag zeitgeist Print & Online 2014. 640 Seiten. 29,90 Euro.

The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War

The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War

By David Stockman

David Stockman's Corner

Committee for the Republic & http://www.lewrockwell.com

Washington DC January 20, 2015

My humble thesis tonight is that the entire 20^th Century was a giant mistake.

And that you can put the blame for this monumental error squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson——-a megalomaniacal madman who was the very worst President in American history……..well, except for the last two.

His unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of national interest. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.

Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was to obtain a seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.

But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.

Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it:  Intervention positioned Wilson to play “The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.  America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World.

Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention. It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists—-when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.

By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20^th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.

These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial complex.

They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary central planning.

So, too, flowed the Bush’s wars of intervention and occupation,  their fatal blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the imperialist map-makers at Versailles and the resulting endless waves of blowback and terrorism now afflicting the world.

And not the least of the ills begotten in Wilson’s war is the modern rogue regime of central bank money printing, and the Bernanke-Yellen plague of bubble economics which never stops showering the 1% with the monumental windfalls from central bank enabled speculation.

Consider the building blocks of that lamentable edifice.

First, had the war ended in 1917 by a mutual withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front, as it was destined to, there would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government, or subsequent massive mutiny in Petrograd that enabled Lenin’s flukish seizure of power in November. That is, the 20^th century would not have been saddled with a Stalinist nightmare or with a Soviet state that poisoned the peace of nations for 75 years, while the nuclear sword of Damocles hung over the planet.

Likewise, there would have been no abomination known as the Versailles peace treaty; no “stab in the back” legends owing to the Weimar government’s forced signing of the “war guilt” clause; no continuance of England’s brutal post-armistice blockade that delivered Germany’s women and children into starvation and death and left a demobilized 3-million man army destitute, bitter and on a permanent political rampage of vengeance.

So too, there would have been no acquiescence in the dismemberment of Germany and the spreading of its parts and pieces to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Austria and Italy—–with the consequent revanchist agitation that nourished the Nazi’s with patriotic public support in the rump of the fatherland.

Nor would there have materialized the French occupation of the Ruhr and the war reparations crisis that led to the destruction of the German middle class in the 1923 hyperinflation; and, finally, the history books would have never recorded the Hitlerian ascent to power and all the evils that flowed thereupon.

In short, on the approximate 100^th anniversary of Sarajevo, the world has been turned upside down.

The war of victors made possible by Woodrow Wilson destroyed the liberal international economic order—that is, honest money, relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration—-which had blossomed during the 40-year span between 1870 and 1914.

That golden age had brought rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment, prolific technological progress and pacific relations among the major nations——a condition that was never equaled, either before or since.

Now, owing to Wilson’s fetid patrimony, we have the opposite: A world of the Warfare State, the Welfare State, Central Bank omnipotence and a crushing burden of private and public debts. That is, a thoroughgoing statist regime that is fundamentally inimical to capitalist prosperity, free market governance of economic life and the flourishing of private liberty and constitutional safeguards against the encroachments of the state.

So Wilson has a lot to answer for—-and my allotted 30 minutes can hardly accommodate the full extent of the indictment. But let me try to summarize his own “war guilt” in eight major propositions——a couple of which my give rise to a disagreement or two.

Proposition #1:  Starting with the generic context——the Great War was about nothing worth dying for and engaged no recognizable principle of human betterment. There were many blackish hats, but no white ones.

Instead, it was an avoidable calamity issuing from a cacophony of political incompetence, cowardice, avarice and tomfoolery.

Blame the bombastic and impetuous Kaiser Wilhelm for setting the stage with his foolish dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, failure to renew the Russian reinsurance treaty shortly thereafter and his quixotic build-up of the German Navy after the turn of the century.

Blame the French for lashing themselves to a war declaration that could be triggered by the intrigues of a decadent court in St. Petersburg where the Czar still claimed divine rights and the Czarina ruled behind the scenes on the hideous advice of Rasputin.

Likewise, censure Russia’s foreign minister Sazonov for his delusions of greater Slavic grandeur that had encouraged Serbia’s provocations after Sarajevo; and castigate the doddering emperor Franz Joseph for hanging onto power into his 67^th year on the throne and thereby leaving his crumbling empire vulnerable to the suicidal impulses of General Conrad’s war party.

So too, indict the duplicitous German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, for allowing the Austrians to believe that the Kaiser endorsed their declaration of war on Serbia; and pillory Winston Churchill and London’s war party for failing to recognize that the Schlieffen Plan’s invasion through Belgium was no threat to England, but a unavoidable German defense against a two-front war.

But after all that—- most especially don’t talk about the defense of democracy, the vindication of liberalism or the thwarting of Prussian autocracy and militarism.

The British War party led by the likes of Churchill and Kitchener was all about the glory of empire, not the vindication of democracy; France’ principal war aim was the revanchist drive to recover Alsace-Lorrain—–mainly a German speaking territory for 600 years until it was conquered by Louis XIV.

In any event, German autocracy was already on its last leg as betokened by the arrival of universal social insurance and the election of a socialist-liberal majority in the Reichstag on the eve of the war; and the Austro-Hungarian, Balkan and Ottoman goulash of nationalities, respectively, would have erupted in interminable regional conflicts, regardless of who won the Great War.

In short, nothing of principle or higher morality was at stake in the outcome.

Proposition # 2:  The war posed no national security threat whatsoever to the US.  Presumably, of course, the danger was not the Entente powers—but Germany and its allies.

But how so?  After the Schlieffen Plan offensive failed on September 11, 1914, the German Army became incarcerated in a bloody, bankrupting, two-front land war that ensured its inexorable demise. Likewise, after the battle of Jutland in May 1916, the great German surface fleet was bottled up in its homeports—-an inert flotilla of steel that posed no threat to the American coast 4,000 miles away.

As for the rest of the central powers, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires already had an appointment with the dustbin of history. Need we even bother with the fourth member—-that is, Bulgaria?

Proposition #3:  Wilson’s pretexts for war on Germany—–submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram—-are not half what they are cracked-up to be by Warfare State historians.

As to the so-called freedom of the seas and neutral shipping rights, the story is blatantly simple. In November 1914, England declared the North Sea to be a “war zone”; threatened neutral shipping with deadly sea mines; declared that anything which could conceivably be of use to the German army—directly or indirectly—-to be contraband that would be seized or destroyed; and announced that the resulting blockade of German ports was designed to starve it into submission.

A few months later, Germany announced its submarine warfare policy designed to the stem the flow of food, raw materials and armaments to England in retaliation.  It was the desperate antidote of a land power to England’s crushing sea-borne blockade.

Accordingly, there existed a state of total warfare in the northern European waters—-and the traditional “rights” of neutrals were irrelevant and disregarded by both sides. In arming merchantmen and stowing munitions on passenger liners, England was hypocritical and utterly cavalier about the resulting mortal danger to innocent civilians—–as exemplified by the 4.3 million rifle cartridges and hundreds of tons of other munitions carried in the hull of the Lusitania.

Likewise, German resort to so-called “unrestricted submarine warfare” in February 1917 was brutal and stupid, but came in response to massive domestic political pressure during what was known as the “turnip winter” in Germany.  By then, the country was starving from the English blockade—literally.

Before he resigned on principle in June 1915, Secretary William Jennings Bryan got it right. Had he been less diplomatic he would have said never should American boys be crucified on the cross of Cunard liner state room so that a few thousand wealthy plutocrat could exercise a putative “right” to wallow in luxury while knowingly cruising into in harm’s way.

As to the Zimmerman telegram, it was never delivered to Mexico, but was sent from Berlin as an internal diplomatic communique to the German ambassador in Washington, who had labored mightily to keep his country out of war with the US, and was intercepted by British intelligence, which sat on it for more than a month waiting for an opportune moment to incite America into war hysteria.

In fact, this so-called bombshell was actually just an internal foreign ministry rumination about a possible plan to approach the Mexican president regarding an alliance in the event that the US first went to war with Germany.

Why is this surprising or a casus belli?  Did not the entente bribe Italy into the war with promises of large chunks of Austria? Did not the hapless Rumanians finally join the entente when they were promised Transylvania?  Did not the Greeks bargain endlessly over the Turkish territories they were to be awarded for joining the allies?  Did  not Lawrence of Arabia bribe the Sherif of Mecca with the promise of vast Arabian lands to be extracted from the Turks?

Why, then, would the German’s—-if at war with the USA—- not promise the return of Texas?

Proposition #4:  Europe had expected a short war, and actually got one when the Schlieffen plan offensive bogged down 30 miles outside of Paris on the Marne River in mid-September 1914.  Within three months, the Western Front had formed and coagulated into blood and mud——a ghastly 400 mile corridor of senseless carnage, unspeakable slaughter and incessant military stupidity that stretched from the Flanders coast across Belgium and northern France to the Swiss frontier.

The next four years witnessed an undulating line of trenches,  barbed wire entanglements, tunnels, artillery emplacements and shell-pocked scorched earth that rarely moved more than a few miles in either direction, and which ultimately claimed more than 4 million casualties on the Allied side and 3.5 million on the German side.

If there was any doubt that Wilson’s catastrophic intervention converted a war of attrition, stalemate and eventual mutual exhaustion into Pyrrhic victory for the allies, it was memorialized in four developments during 1916.

In the first, the Germans wagered everything on a massive offensive designed to overrun the fortresses of Verdun——the historic defensive battlements on France’s northeast border that had stood since Roman times, and which had been massively reinforced after the France’s humiliating defeat in Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

But notwithstanding the mobilization of 100 divisions, the greatest artillery bombardment campaign every recorded until then, and repeated infantry offensives from February through November that resulted in upwards of 400,000 German casualties, the Verdun offensive failed.

The second event was its mirror image—-the massive British and French offensive known as the battle of the Somme, which commenced with equally destructive artillery barrages on July 1, 1916 and then for three month sent waves of infantry into the maws of German machine guns and artillery. It too ended in colossal failure, but only after more than 600,000 English and French casualties including a quarter million dead.

In between these bloodbaths, the stalemate was reinforced by the naval showdown at Jutland that cost the British far more sunken ships and drowned sailors than the Germans, but also caused the Germans to retire their surface fleet to port and never again challenge the Royal Navy in open water combat.

Finally, by year-end 1916 the German generals who had destroyed the Russian armies in the East with only a tiny one-ninth fraction of the German army—Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff —were given command of the Western Front. Presently, they radically changed Germany’s war strategy by recognizing that the growing allied superiority in manpower, owing to the British homeland draft of 1916 and mobilization of forces from throughout the empire, made a German offensive breakthrough will nigh impossible.

The result was the Hindenburg Line—a military marvel based on a checkerboard array of hardened pillbox machine gunners and maneuver forces rather than mass infantry on the front lines, and an intricate labyrinth of highly engineered tunnels, deep earth shelters, rail connections, heavy artillery and flexible reserves in the rear. It was also augmented by the transfer of Germany’s eastern armies to the western front—-giving it 200 divisions and 4 million men on the Hindenburg Line.

This precluded any hope of Entente victory. By 1917 there were not enough able-bodied draft age men left in France and England to overcome the Hindenburg Line, which, in turn,  was designed to bleed white the entente armies led by butchers like Generals Haig and Joffre until their governments sued for peace.

Thus, with the Russian army’s disintegration in the east and the stalemate frozen indefinitely in the west by early 1917, it was only a matter of months before mutinies among the French lines, demoralization in London, mass starvation and privation in Germany and bankruptcy all around would have led to a peace of exhaustion and a European-wide political revolt against the war makers.

Wilson’s intervention thus did not remake the world. But it did radically re-channel the contours of 20^th century history. And, as they say, not in a good way.

Proposition #5:  Wilson’s epochal error not only produced the abomination of Versailles and all its progeny, but also the transformation of the Federal Reserve from a passive “banker’s bank” to an interventionist central bank knee-deep in Wall Street, government finance and macroeconomic management.

This, too, was a crucial historical hinge point because Carter Glass’ 1913 act forbid the new Reserve banks to even own government bonds; empowered them only to passively discount for cash good commercial credits and receivables brought to the rediscount window by member banks; and contemplated no open market interventions in debt markets or any remit with respect to GDP growth, jobs, inflation, housing or all the rest of modern day monetary central planning targets.

In fact, Carter Glass’ “banker’s bank” didn’t care whether the growth rate was positive 4%, negative 4% or anything in-between; its modest job was to channel liquidity into the banking system in response to the ebb and flow of commerce and production.

Jobs, growth and prosperity were to remain the unplanned outcome of millions of producers, consumers, investors, savers, entrepreneurs and speculators operating on the free market, not the business of the state.

But Wilson’s war took the national debt from about $1 billion or $11 per capita—–a level which had been maintained since the Battle of Gettysburg—-to $27 billion, including upwards of $10 billion re-loaned to the allies to enable them to continue the war. There is not a chance that this massive eruption of Federal borrowing could have been financed out of domestic savings in the private market.

So the Fed charter was changed owing to the exigencies of war to permit it to own government debt and to discount private loans collateralized by Treasury paper.

In due course, the famous and massive Liberty Bond drives became a glorified Ponzi scheme. Patriotic Americans borrowed money from their banks and pledged their war bonds; the banks borrowed money from the Fed, and re-pledged their customer’s collateral.  The Reserve banks, in turn, created the billions they loaned to the commercial banks out of thin air, thereby pegging interest rates low for the duration of the war.

When Wilson was done saving the world, America had an interventionist central bank schooled in the art of interest rate pegging and rampant expansion of fiat credit not anchored in the real bills of commerce and trade; and its incipient Warfare and Welfare states had an agency of public debt monetization that could permit massive government spending without the inconvenience of high taxes on the people or the crowding out of business investment by high interest rates on the private market for savings.

Proposition # 6:   By prolonging the war and massively increasing the level of debt and money printing on all sides, Wilson’s folly prevented a proper post-war resumption of the classical gold standard at the pre-war parities.

This failure of resumption, in turn, paved the way for the breakdown of monetary order and world trade in 1931—–a break which turned a standard post-war economic cleansing into the Great Depression, and a decade of protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor currency manipulation and ultimately rearmament and statist dirigisme.

In essence, the English and French governments had raised billions from their citizens on the solemn promise that it would be repaid at the pre-war parities; that the war bonds were money good in gold.

But the combatant governments had printed too much fiat currency and inflation during the war, and through domestic regimentation, heavy taxation and unfathomable combat destruction of economic life in northern France had drastically impaired their private economies.

Accordingly, under Churchill’s foolish leadership England re-pegged to gold at the old parity in 1925, but had no political will or capacity to reduce bloated war-time wages, costs and prices in a commensurate manner, or to live with the austerity and shrunken living standards that honest liquidation of its war debts required.

At the same time, France ended up betraying its war time lenders, and re-pegged the Franc two years later at a drastically depreciated level. This resulted in a spurt of beggar-thy-neighbor prosperity and the accumulation of pound sterling claims that would eventually blow-up the London money market and the sterling based “gold exchange standard” that the Bank of England and British Treasury had peddled as a poor man’s way back on gold.

Yet under this “gold lite” contraption, France, Holland, Sweden and other surplus countries accumulated huge amounts of sterling liabilities in lieu of settling their accounts in bullion—–that is, they loaned billions to the British. They did this on the promise and the confidence that the pound sterling would remain at $4.87 per dollar come hell or high water—-just as it had for 200 years of peacetime before.

But British politicians betrayed their promises and their central bank creditors September 1931 by suspending redemption and floating the pound——-shattering the parity and causing the decade-long struggle for resumption of an honest gold standard to fail.  Depressionary contraction of world trade, capital flows and capitalist enterprise inherently followed.

Proposition # 7:  By turning America overnight into the granary, arsenal and banker of the Entente, the US economy was distorted, bloated and deformed into a giant, but unstable and unsustainable global exporter and creditor.

During the war years, for example, US exports increased by 4X and GDP soared from $40 billion to $90 billion.  Incomes and land prices soared in the farm belt, and steel, chemical, machinery, munitions and ship construction boomed like never before—–in substantial part because Uncle Sam essentially provided vendor finance to the bankrupt allies in desperate need of both military and civilian goods.

Under classic rules, there should have been a nasty correction after the war—-as the world got back to honest money and sound finance.  But it didn’t happen because the newly unleashed Fed fueled an incredible boom on Wall Street and a massive junk bond market in foreign loans.

In today economic scale, the latter amounted to upwards of $2 trillion and, in effect, kept the war boom in exports and capital spending going right up until 1929. Accordingly, the great collapse of 1929-1932 was not a mysterious failure of capitalism; it was the delayed liquidation of Wilson’s war boom.

After the crash, exports and capital spending plunged by 80% when the foreign junk bond binge ended in the face of massive defaults abroad; and that, in turn, led to a traumatic liquidation of industrial inventories and a collapse of credit fueled purchases of consumer durables like refrigerators and autos. The latter, for example, dropped from 5 million to 1.5 million units per year after 1929.

Proposition # 8:  In short, the Great Depression was a unique historical event owing to the vast financial deformations of the Great War——deformations which were drastically exaggerated by its prolongation from Wilson’s intervention and the massive credit expansion unleashed by the Fed and Bank of England during and after the war.

Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.

But this trauma was thoroughly misunderstood, and therefore did give rise to the curse of Keynesian economics and did unleash the politicians to meddle in virtually every aspect of economic life, culminating in the statist and crony capitalist dystopia that has emerged in this century.

Needless to say, that is Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s worst sin of all.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Corner.

The Best of David Stockman

Former Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics. His latest book is The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. He's the editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's Contra Corner. He was an original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every morning.

Copyright © 2015 David Stockman

Previous article by David Stockman: The Market Is Off Its Lithium

États-Unis: le premier danger pour le monde, avant l’islam

États-Unis: le premier danger pour le monde, avant l’islam

Jamais nous n’avons été aussi près d’une guerre nucléaire!

Ex: http://www.bvoltaire.fr

Jamais nous n’avons été aussi près d’une guerre nucléaire. Ce sont des « gôchistes » américains comme Noam Chomsky qui le déclarent. Loin d’être « gôchiste », mes observations, comme mes échanges avec des personnalités de haut rang russes et allemandes, me mènent à la même conclusion. Les analyses du journaliste américain de référence, Paul Craig Roberts, ne manquent pas d’aller dans ce sens. Ainsi que celles du très sérieux Deutsche Wirtschaft, qu’on ne saurait classer à « gôche ». J’entends déjà les procès en complotisme ! Non, depuis Bill Clinton, l’Amérique n’est plus une démocratie. Les administrations consécutives de ce grand pays sont devenues des entités d’assassins sans scrupules, qui s’affranchissent des lois internationales. La dernière menace est Obama, faux démocrate, qui dénonce les « comportements illégaux » du président Poutine qu’il a comparé à Ebola durant le G20 à Brisbane, et que Hillary Clinton traitait préalablement de « Hitler ». Déclarations provocatrices, que les Européens suivent comme des vassaux. La France se distingue particulièrement par son aplaventrisme politico-médiatique. Elle sert les États-Unis, occupés à mettre en œuvre leur nouvel ordre mondial, qui servira leurs seuls intérêts. Ça n’est pas de bon augure pour le monde. C’est pourquoi il est urgent que l’Europe se reprenne – et la France en particulier – pour se rapprocher de la Russie, de la Chine, de l’Inde, de l’Amérique du Sud, et contrer l’hégémonie de l’administration américaine, dont l’évolution politique ne garantit plus la paix mondiale.

L’administration américaine entreprend la déstabilisation de deux grandes puissances nucléaires – la Chine et la Russie – comme s’il s’agissait du Honduras ou de la Grenade. C’est sans précédent. Ils fomentent des émeutes et des guerres en Géorgie, en Ukraine. Des protestations à Hong Kong, et très récemment en Hongrie et en Tchéquie, où les manifestants manipulés scandaient par milliers : « Nous refusons d’être les esclaves des Russes. » Pas un mot ici. Comme si la Russie était toujours l’URSS. Les États-Unis incitent les pays baltes et la Serbie, à se détourner de la Russie. En réponse à toutes ces manigances, destinées à déstabiliser la Russie, une association militaire entre la Chine et le pays de Poutine est en train de se construire. Des premiers exercices sont prévus au printemps 2015 en Méditerranée, puis en mer de Chine, dans le but de montrer aux USA qu’ils ne se laisseront pas intimider. Les États-Unis font monter la pression depuis cette semaine, en déclarant qu’ils vont armer l’Ukraine, alors qu’ils se contentaient jusqu’à présent de livrer des fournitures militaires non létales. La Russie le leur déconseille vivement… Nous sommes dans une escalade mortifère. Nous estimions que l’islam était le plus grand danger mortel mais, depuis quelques semaines, un danger bien plus important s’annonce. L’administration américaine va-t-en-guerre qui ne veut pas reconnaître que les choses ont changé et que, désormais, un monde multipolaire est en train de se construire. Dont ils sont seuls responsables, puisqu’ils en sont les instigateurs malgré eux.

A Permanent Infrastructure for Permanent War

A Permanent Infrastructure for Permanent War

 

Ex: http://www.tomdispatch.com

In a September address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obama spoke forcefully about the “cycle of conflict” in the Middle East, about “violence within Muslim communities that has become the source of so much human misery.” The president was adamant: “It is time to acknowledge the destruction wrought by proxy wars and terror campaigns between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East.” Then with hardly a pause, he went on to promote his own proxy wars (including the backing of Syrian rebels and Iraqi forces against the Islamic State), as though Washington’s military escapades in the region hadn’t stoked sectarian tensions and been high-performance engines for “human misery.”

Not surprisingly, the president left a lot out of his regional wrap-up. On the subject of proxies, Iraqi troops and small numbers of Syrian rebels have hardly been alone in receiving American military support. Yet few in our world have paid much attention to everything Washington has done to keep the region awash in weaponry.

Since mid-year, for example, the State Department and the Pentagon have helped pave the way for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) launchers and associated equipment and to spend billions more on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles; for Lebanon to purchase nearly $200 million in Huey helicopters and supporting gear; for Turkey to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of AIM-120C-7 AMRAAM (Air-to-Air) missiles; and for Israel to stock up on half a billion dollars worth of AIM-9X Sidewinder (air-to-air) missiles; not to mention other deals to aid the militaries of Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

For all the news coverage of the Middle East, you rarely see significant journalistic attention given to any of this or to agreements like the almost $70 million contract, signed in September, that will send Hellfire missiles to Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, or the $48 million Navy deal inked that same month for construction projects in Bahrain and the UAE.

The latter agreement sheds light on another shadowy, little-mentioned, but critically important subject that’s absent from Obama’s scolding speeches and just about all news coverage here: American bases. Even if you take into account the abandonment of its outposts in Iraq -- which hosted 505 U.S. bases at the height of America’s last war there -- and the marked downsizing of its presence in Afghanistan -- which once had at least 800 bases (depending on how you count them) -- the U.S. continues to garrison the Greater Middle East in a major way.  As TomDispatch regular David Vine, author of the much-needed, forthcoming book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Overseas Harm America and the World, points out in his latest article, the region is still dotted with U.S. bases, large and small, in a historically unprecedented way, the result of a 35-year-long strategy that has been, he writes, “one of the great disasters in the history of American foreign policy.” That’s saying a lot for a nation that’s experienced no shortage of foreign policy debacles in its history, but it’s awfully difficult to argue with all the dictators, death, and devastation that have flowed from America’s Middle Eastern machinations. Nick Turse

The Bases of War in the Middle East 
From Carter to the Islamic State, 35 Years of Building Bases and Sowing Disaster 

By David Vine

With the launch of a new U.S.-led war in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (IS), the United States has engaged in aggressive military action in at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. In that time, every American president has invaded, occupied, bombed, or gone to war in at least one country in the region. The total number of invasions, occupations, bombing operations, drone assassination campaigns, and cruise missile attacks easily runs into the dozens.

As in prior military operations in the Greater Middle East, U.S. forces fighting IS have been aided by access to and the use of an unprecedented collection of military bases. They occupy a region sitting atop the world’s largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves and has long been considered the most geopolitically important place on the planet. Indeed, since 1980, the U.S. military has gradually garrisoned the Greater Middle East in a fashion only rivaled by the Cold War garrisoning of Western Europe or, in terms of concentration, by the bases built to wage past wars in Korea and Vietnam.

In the Persian Gulf alone, the U.S. has major bases in every country save Iran. There is an increasingly important, increasingly large base in Djibouti, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. There are bases in Pakistan on one end of the region and in the Balkans on the other, as well as on the strategically located Indian Ocean islands of Diego Garcia and the Seychelles. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there were once as many as 800 and 505 bases, respectively. Recently, the Obama administration inked an agreement with new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to maintain around 10,000 troops and at least nine major bases in his country beyond the official end of combat operations later this year. U.S. forces, which never fully departed Iraq after 2011, are now returning to a growing number of bases there in ever larger numbers.

In short, there is almost no way to overemphasize how thoroughly the U.S. military now covers the region with bases and troops. This infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is so taken for granted that Americans rarely think about it and journalists almost never report on the subject. Members of Congress spend billions of dollars on base construction and maintenance every year in the region, but ask few questions about where the money is going, why there are so many bases, and what role they really serve. By one estimate, the United States has spent $10 trillion protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies over the past four decades.

Approaching its 35th anniversary, the strategy of maintaining such a structure of garrisons, troops, planes, and ships in the Middle East has been one of the great disasters in the history of American foreign policy. The rapid disappearance of debate about our newest, possibly illegal war should remind us of just how easy this huge infrastructure of bases has made it for anyone in the Oval Office to launch a war that seems guaranteed, like its predecessors, to set off new cycles of blowback and yet more war.

 

 

On their own, the existence of these bases has helped generate radicalism and anti-American sentiment. As was famously the case with Osama bin Laden and U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, bases have fueled militancy, as well as attacks on the United States and its citizens. They have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, even though they are not, in fact, necessary to ensure the free flow of oil globally. They have diverted tax dollars from the possible development of alternative energy sources and meeting other critical domestic needs. And they have supported dictators and repressive, undemocratic regimes, helping to block the spread of democracy in a region long controlled by colonial rulers and autocrats.

After 35 years of base-building in the region, it’s long past time to look carefully at the effects Washington’s garrisoning of the Greater Middle East has had on the region, the U.S., and the world.

“Vast Oil Reserves”

While the Middle Eastern base buildup began in earnest in 1980, Washington had long attempted to use military force to control this swath of resource-rich Eurasia and, with it, the global economy. Since World War II, as the late Chalmers Johnson, an expert on U.S. basing strategy, explained back in 2004, “the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world.”

In 1945, after Germany’s defeat, the secretaries of War, State, and the Navy tellingly pushed for the completion of a partially built base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, despite the military’s determination that it was unnecessary for the war against Japan. “Immediate construction of this [air] field,” they argued, “would be a strong showing of American interest in Saudi Arabia and thus tend to strengthen the political integrity of that country where vast oil reserves now are in American hands.”

By 1949, the Pentagon had established a small, permanent Middle East naval force (MIDEASTFOR) in Bahrain. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy’s administration began the first buildup of naval forces in the Indian Ocean just off the Persian Gulf. Within a decade, the Navy had created the foundations for what would become the first major U.S. base in the region -- on the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia.

In these early Cold War years, though, Washington generally sought to increase its influence in the Middle East by backing and arming regional powers like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, and Israel. However, within months of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s 1979 revolution overthrowing the Shah, this relatively hands-off approach was no more.

Base Buildup

In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced a fateful transformation of U.S. policy. It would become known as the Carter Doctrine. In his State of the Union address, he warned of the potential loss of a region “containing more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil” and “now threatened by Soviet troops” in Afghanistan who posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.”

Carter warned that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.” And he added pointedly, “Such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

With these words, Carter launched one of the greatest base construction efforts in history. He and his successor Ronald Reagan presided over the expansion of bases in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region to host a “Rapid Deployment Force,” which was to stand permanent guard over Middle Eastern petroleum supplies. The air and naval base on Diego Garcia, in particular, was expanded at a quicker rate than any base since the war in Vietnam. By 1986, more than $500 million had been invested. Before long, the total ran into the billions.

Soon enough, that Rapid Deployment Force grew into the U.S. Central Command, which has now overseen three wars in Iraq (1991-2003, 2003-2011, 2014-); the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2001-); intervention in Lebanon (1982-1984); a series of smaller-scale attacks on Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011); Afghanistan (1998) and Sudan (1998); and the "tanker war" with Iran (1987-1988), which led to the accidental downing of an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 passengers. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA helped fund and orchestrate a major covert war against the Soviet Union by backing Osama Bin Laden and other extremist mujahidin. The command has also played a role in the drone war in Yemen (2002-) and both overt and covert warfare in Somalia (1992-1994, 2001-). 

 

 

During and after the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon dramatically expanded its presence in the region. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the war against Iraqi autocrat and former ally Saddam Hussein. In that war’s aftermath, thousands of troops and a significantly expanded base infrastructure were left in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Elsewhere in the Gulf, the military expanded its naval presence at a former British base in Bahrain, housing its Fifth Fleet there. Major air power installations were built in Qatar, and U.S. operations were expanded in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent occupations of both countries, led to a more dramatic expansion of bases in the region. By the height of the wars, there were well over 1,000 U.S. checkpoints, outposts, and major bases in the two countries alone. The military also built new bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (since closed), explored the possibility of doing so in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, and, at the very least, continues to use several Central Asian countries as logistical pipelines to supply troops in Afghanistan and orchestrate the current partial withdrawal.

While the Obama administration failed to keep 58 “enduring” bases in Iraq after the 2011 U.S. withdrawal, it has signed an agreement with Afghanistan permitting U.S. troops to stay in the country until 2024 and maintain access to Bagram Air Base and at least eight more major installations.

An Infrastructure for War

Even without a large permanent infrastructure of bases in Iraq, the U.S. military has had plenty of options when it comes to waging its new war against IS. In that country alone, a significant U.S. presence remained after the 2011 withdrawal in the form of base-like State Department installations, as well as the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad, and a large contingent of private military contractors. Since the start of the new war, at least 1,600 troops have returned and are operating from a Joint Operations Center in Baghdad and a base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, Erbil. Last week, the White House announced that it would request $5.6 billion from Congress to send an additional 1,500 advisers and other personnel to at least two new bases in Baghdad and Anbar Province. Special operations and other forces are almost certainly operating from yet more undisclosed locations.

At least as important are major installations like the Combined Air Operations Center at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base. Before 2003, the Central Command’s air operations center for the entire Middle East was in Saudi Arabia. That year, the Pentagon moved the center to Qatar and officially withdrew combat forces from Saudi Arabia. That was in response to the 1996 bombing of the military’s Khobar Towers complex in the kingdom, other al-Qaeda attacks in the region, and mounting anger exploited by al-Qaeda over the presence of non-Muslim troops in the Muslim holy land. Al-Udeid now hosts a 15,000-foot runway, large munitions stocks, and around 9,000 troops and contractors who are coordinating much of the new war in Iraq and Syria.

Kuwait has been an equally important hub for Washington’s operations since U.S. troops occupied the country during the first Gulf War. Kuwait served as the main staging area and logistical center for ground troops in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. There are still an estimated 15,000 troops in Kuwait, and the U.S. military is reportedly bombing Islamic State positions using aircraft from Kuwait’s Ali al-Salem Air Base.

As a transparently promotional article in the Washington Post confirmed this week, al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates has launched more attack aircraft in the present bombing campaign than any other base in the region. That country hosts about 3,500 troops at al-Dhafra alone, as well as the Navy's busiest overseas port.  B-1, B-2, and B-52 long-range bombers stationed on Diego Garcia helped launch both Gulf Wars and the war in Afghanistan. That island base is likely playing a role in the new war as well. Near the Iraqi border, around 1,000 U.S. troops and F-16 fighter jets are operating from at least one Jordanian base. According to the Pentagon’s latest count, the U.S. military has 17 bases in Turkey. While the Turkish government has placed restrictions on their use, at the very least some are being used to launch surveillance drones over Syria and Iraq. Up to seven bases in Oman may also be in use.

 

 

Bahrain is now the headquarters for the Navy’s entire Middle Eastern operations, including the Fifth Fleet, generally assigned to ensure the free flow of oil and other resources though the Persian Gulf and surrounding waterways. There is always at least one aircraft carrier strike group -- effectively, a massive floating base -- in the Persian Gulf. At the moment, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson is stationed there, a critical launch pad for the air campaign against the Islamic State. Other naval vessels operating in the Gulf and the Red Sea have launched cruise missiles into Iraq and Syria. The Navy even has access to an “afloat forward-staging base” that serves as a “lilypad” base for helicopters and patrol craft in the region.

In Israel, there are as many as six secret U.S. bases that can be used to preposition weaponry and equipment for quick use anywhere in the area. There’s also a “de facto U.S. base” for the Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. And it’s suspected that there are two other secretive sites in use as well. In Egypt, U.S. troops have maintained at least two installations and occupied at least two bases on the Sinai Peninsula since 1982 as part of a Camp David Accords peacekeeping operation.

Elsewhere in the region, the military has established a collection of at least five drone bases in Pakistan; expanded a critical base in Djibouti at the strategic chokepoint between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean; created or gained access to bases in Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Seychelles; and set up new bases in Bulgaria and Romania to go with a Clinton administration-era base in Kosovo along the western edge of the gas-rich Black Sea.

Even in Saudi Arabia, despite the public withdrawal, a small U.S. military contingent has remained to train Saudi personnel and keep bases “warm” as potential backups for unexpected conflagrations in the region or, assumedly, in the kingdom itself. In recent years, the military has even established a secret drone base in the country, despite the blowback Washington has experienced from its previous Saudi basing ventures.

Dictators, Death, and Disaster

The ongoing U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, however modest, should remind us of the dangers of maintaining bases in the region. The garrisoning of the Muslim holy land was a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks. (He called the presence of U.S. troops, “the greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the prophet.”) Indeed, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization” since a suicide bombing killed 241 marines in Lebanon in 1983. Other attacks have come in Saudi Arabia in 1996, Yemen in 2000 against the U.S.S. Cole, and during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Research has shown a strong correlation between a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Part of the anti-American anger has stemmed from the support U.S. bases offer to repressive, undemocratic regimes. Few of the countries in the Greater Middle East are fully democratic, and some are among the world’s worst human rights abusers. Most notably, the U.S. government has offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government as it has violently cracked down on pro-democracy protestors with the help of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

 

 

Beyond Bahrain, U.S. bases are found in a string of what the Economist Democracy Index calls “authoritarian regimes,” including Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Yemen. Maintaining bases in such countries props up autocrats and other repressive governments, makes the United States complicit in their crimes, and seriously undermines efforts to spread democracy and improve the wellbeing of people around the world.

Of course, using bases to launch wars and other kinds of interventions does much the same, generating anger, antagonism, and anti-American attacks. A recent U.N. report suggests that Washington’s air campaign against the Islamic State had led foreign militants to join the movement on “an unprecedented scale.”

And so the cycle of warfare that started in 1980 is likely to continue. “Even if U.S. and allied forces succeed in routing this militant group,” retired Army colonel and political scientist Andrew Bacevich writes of the Islamic State, “there is little reason to expect” a positive outcome in the region. As Bin Laden and the Afghan mujahidin morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban and as former Iraqi Baathists and al-Qaeda followers in Iraq morphed into IS, “there is,” as Bacevich says, “always another Islamic State waiting in the wings.”

The Carter Doctrine’s bases and military buildup strategy and its belief that “the skillful application of U.S. military might” can secure oil supplies and solve the region’s problems was, he adds, “flawed from the outset.” Rather than providing security, the infrastructure of bases in the Greater Middle East has made it ever easier to go to war far from home. It has enabled wars of choice and an interventionist foreign policy that has resulted in repeated disasters for the region, the United States, and the world. Since 2001 alone, U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen have minimally caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and possibly more than one million deaths in Iraq alone.

The sad irony is that any legitimate desire to maintain the free flow of regional oil to the global economy could be sustained through other far less expensive and deadly means. Maintaining scores of bases costing billions of dollars a year is unnecessary to protect oil supplies and ensure regional peace -- especially in an era in which the United States gets only around 10% of its net oil and natural gas from the region. In addition to the direct damage our military spending has caused, it has diverted money and attention from developing the kinds of alternative energy sources that could free the United States and the world from a dependence on Middle Eastern oil -- and from the cycle of war that our military bases have fed.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. His new book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, will appear in 2015 as part of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). For more of his writing, visit www.davidvine.net.

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Copyright 2014 David Vine