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.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2014 David Vine

Defective Faith

Defective Faith

By Laurence M. Vance

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Review of Malcolm D. Magee, What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy (Baylor University Press, 2008), x + 189 pgs., hardcover.

Although I purchased this book soon after it was published, other commitments compelled me to add it to my mountainous stack of books “to be read.” Since this year is the one hundredth anniversary of World War I, and I have already reviewed two books on World War I (Jack Beatty’s The Lost History of 1914 and Philip Jenkins’ The Great and Holy War), I figured that if I was ever going to read What the World Should Be, I might as well read it this year.

George W. Bush was not the first president to have a “faith-based” foreign policy. Most people know that Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was the U.S. president from 1913 to 1921. Some perhaps know that he was the governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. But few probably know that he was the son of a Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton University—then a Presbyterian institution that had always been headed by clergymen until Wilson—from 1902 to 1910, and had a faith-based policy of his own.

But like the faith-based foreign policy of Bush, Wilson’s was shaped by a defective faith.

Malcolm Magee is the director of The Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture, “an academic research organization,” not “affiliated with any church or religious organization,” that “examines the intersection of religion, and particularly the Christian faith, and its surrounding culture.”

He doesn’t specifically say in his important and insightful book What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy (hereafter What the World Should Be) why he became so interested in Wilson, but it is clear that Wilson among all the U.S. presidents is the president who is the most suitable candidate for studying the intersection of religion and culture

Magee plainly states the book’s thesis in his introduction: “The thesis of this book is that the future president was immersed in a particular Princeton and Southern Presbyterian tradition that he absorbed, quite literally, at the knees of his father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, his devout mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson, and the religiously active clergy, family, and friends he was surrounded by from his youth onward.”

What the World Should Be “is an attempt to let Wilson be Wilson, the man who throughout his life used such terms as covenant and freedom not in terms of their modern secular definitions but in terms of a very specific Calvinist rhetorical tradition, one largely unfamiliar today, especially among scholars of American foreign relations.”

After his important introduction, Magee develops his thesis in four chapters:

1. The Development of Woodrow Wilson’s Thought to 1913

2. The Challenge of the Present Age: The Persistence of the International Order

3. Keeping to the Principles in Peace and War

4. Negotiating the Tablets of Stone

After a brief epilogue, there are four appendixes, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Magee deems Wilson to be “one of the most complicated individuals to occupy the White House.” To understand Wilson and his approach to foreign policy “requires an awareness of the religious convictions that informed his world view, his ideals, his assumptions and prejudices.” Wilson’s “religion was inseparable from the other aspects of his philosophy.” Magee believes that John Maynard Keynes’ “insight” that Wilson “thought like a Presbyterian minister, with all the strengths and weaknesses of that manner of thinking” is “missing, for the most part, from modern historical scholarship concerning U.S. foreign relations during the Wilson presidency.”

Wilson, who supported the views of his uncle James Woodrow on Theistic Darwinism (see Gary North for more detail on this), “believed the United States was divinely chosen to do God’s will on earth.” The United States was the “redeemer nation” destined by God to “instruct and lead the world.” While president of Princeton, Wilson said in a speech that the mighty task before us was “to make the United States a mighty Christian nation, and to Christianize the world.” Wilson viewed himself as “the divinely appointed messenger.” The United States was his parish, and he would “be an evangelist, a missionary, for the export of Christian democracy.” He compared himself to the prophet Ezekiel. He equated patriotism with Christianity and the United States with God’s chosen people.

What is of most interest in What the World Should Be is how Wilson viewed himself and the United States during World War I. He said soon after the war began that it “may have been a godsend.” Comments Magge: “He was unshaken by the conflict since, despite the carnage, it seemed to open possibilities for his own mission to bring God’s order to the world. He was called by God.” Being “predisposed to be an Anglophile,” Wilson interpreted information “in a way that favored British interests and penalized Germany while continuing to believe that he and the country were being absolutely neutral.” Wilson had some strange ideas about neutrality. His “active” neutrality “allowed America to act on behalf of the righteous.” The United States would “use its power as an aggressive neutral to conquer the forces of disorder and selfishness in the world on all sides.” Wilson referred to his policy of neutrality as the “peaceful conquest of the world.” U.S. neutrality would “conquer, convert, and change the nations.” The United States was chosen by God to be the “mediating nation of the world.” America was the “house of the Lord” and the “city on a hill.” The entrance of the United States into the war meant “salvation” to the Allies.” Wilson believed in using “neutral force to mediate peace.” Even as American soldiers were dying in Europe, the United States was “neutral in spirit” in fighting a “righteous war.” Naturally, before he led the country into war, Wilson advocated an increase in the military, the reserves, and military spending, but “purely for defense.” If war became necessary, it “must be a peacemaking war.” He wanted a “new international order” that would prevent such a war from happening in the future. The Versailles Treaty would allow him as president to “do great good for the downtrodden inhabitants of the world.” The paternalistic Wilson had a tendency to “see the nonwhite peoples as being in need of instruction.”

Everything that Magee says about Wilson’s religious political ideas is well documented, and he writes in a neutral tone. The problem with Wilson, as I see it, is not that he rejected his faith, but that his faith was defective. For another old-time Presbyterian whose views were contrary to those of Wilson, see J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), a New Testament scholar who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1906 to 1929.

There are only two redeeming things about Wilson. One, he vetoed the Volstead Act, but his veto was overridden. And two, he criticized the 1846 Mexican War, but later sent U.S. troops to Mexico in 1914. And, of course, we can “thank” Wilson for the signing into law the Federal Reserve Act and the Revenue Act of 1913.

For a recent analysis of Wilson that is anything but neutral, see Judge Napolitano’s Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedoms.

The Best of Laurence M. Vance

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, The Revolution that Wasn't, The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom, and Social Insecurity. His latest books are War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism and War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy. Visit his website.

 

Previous article by Laurence M. Vance: It’s Worship-the-Veterans Day

Freedom and Democracy Are No Excuse for U.S. Interventions Overseas

Freedom and Democracy Are No Excuse for U.S. Interventions Overseas

By Michael S. Rozeff

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

When U.S. governments take Americans into war, we hear them justify it as a fight for freedom. Often they rationalize it as an anti-tyranny fight, a pro-peace fight and a pro-democracy fight.

Freedom appeals to Americans. It is a core American value, even if it’s not honored in practice here at home.

When politicians use freedom to justify war, they are making an emotional, not a reasoned, appeal. Why? It’s because freedom, while a good thing, is never alone a sufficient reason for the government to commit Americans to a fight for freedom in some foreign land. The war may cost Americans more than they benefit, and America’s wars have. American interventions may cost foreigners more than they gain, and America’s interventions have.

To justify American interventions on grounds of reason or rational interest, the government needs to present arguments. Costs and benefits have to enter the picture. Leaders are reluctant to make such arguments for fear of exposing their war policies as lacking justification from the point of view of American welfare. When they do present their arguments, they are invariably faulty, weak, deficient, exaggerated, illogical and mistaken. They are nonsense. Leaders cannot tell Americans what their real reasons for intervention are, if indeed they themselves are aware of them.

President Truman addressed the nation several times about American intervention in South Korea, such as on July 19, 1950 and September 1, 1950. He made the case for sending American armed forces to Korea. Consequently, between 1950 and 1953, Americans lost 33,686 dead and suffered 92,134 wounded.

The July address made a domino theory argument:

“This attack has made it clear, beyond all doubt, that the international Communist movement is willing to use armed invasion to conquer independent nations. An act of aggression such as this creates a very real danger to the security of all free nations.”

We now know that great doubt surrounded the meaning of the North Korean attack and its motivation. We now know that there was no monolithic international Communist movement, and that this imagined entity was not on any march to conquer independent nations of which South Korea was the first. There was no “very real danger” to America’s national security or other free nations far from Korea.

Truman went on with a freedom appeal: “This [attack] is a direct challenge to the efforts of the free nations to build the kind of world in which men can live in freedom and peace.”

The assertion he made is that war in Korea somehow undermined the work of other nations to live in freedom and peace. Somehow a war anywhere challenges peace everywhere. This linkage makes no obvious sense unless the war in question is the work of an incipient or active empire that has the intent of territorial expansion. Regional wars do not routinely meet that condition. North Korea was not such a power.

However, despite the limited nature of the war, Truman argued a second domino theory version:

“The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930′s. That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.”

The lessons of the 1930s are that America should not have entered World War I, should not have created a monetary system that led to inflation and a Great Depression, and should have stayed out of Europe’s wars. The victors in World War I should not have imposed a draconian peace at Versailles. Not all aggressions must be met by American force. Not all neutrality is appeasement. Not all aggression creates further aggression. Not all situations parallel those in the 1930s. Not all dictators are Hitlers. Truman’s domino theory of appeasement did not justify American intervention in Korea.

Truman’s September address deepened his appeals. He added that the war was for the sake of peace, and he embedded the freedom appeal in the millennia of history:

“These men of ours are engaged once more in the age-old struggle for human liberty. Our men, and the men of other free nations, are defending with their lives the cause of freedom in the world. They are fighting for the proposition that peace shall be the law of this earth.”

This passage includes an appeal to universal, earth-wide law and order, brought about by American soldiers in Korea.

Truman appealed again to a third domino theory: “If the rule of law is not upheld we can look forward only to the horror of another war and ultimate chaos.” The argument is that without someone like America upholding the international rule of law of the UN, war and chaos will result.

This theory is false. Not only have U.S. interventions created war and chaos, but many wars have been launched after 1950 despite the fact that the U.S. government chose to intervene in Korea, Vietnam and other places, with or without international approval.

Such welcome peace as there has been as compared with the two world wars has causes far afield from the U.S. intervening to keep the peace or intervening in places like Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Mali, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

The upholding of international law by American force, a pax Americana, is imaginary. This is neither a necessary condition for peace nor a sufficient condition for peace.

To gain domestic support for an unpopular war, Truman raised the ante in his freedom appeal:

“It is your liberty and mine which is involved. What is at stake is the free way of life–the right to worship as we please, the right to express our opinions, the right to raise our children in our own way, the right to choose our jobs, the fight to plan our future and to live without fear. All these are bound up in the present action of the United Nations to put down aggression in Korea.

“We cannot hope to maintain our own freedom if freedom elsewhere is wiped out. That is why the American people are united in support of our part in this task.”

None of these exaggerations were true in 1950. None are true in 2014. They are no more true than the recent false idea that jihadists are intent on wiping out American freedoms.

Lyndon Baines Johnson continued the same rhetoric in his message to Congress of August 5, 1964:

“1. America keeps her word. Here as elsewhere, we must and shall honor our commitments.

“2. The issue is the future of southeast Asia as a whole. A threat to any nation in that region is a threat to all, and a threat to us.

“3. Our purpose is peace.. We have no military, political, or territorial ambitions in the area.

“4. This is not just a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.”

His point #1 adds a new rationale, which is the circular rationale that we will fight to maintain our credibility, having earlier made a statement or signed a treaty that we would fight. This is not an independent justification.

#2 is a domino theory, and #4 is Truman’s grandiose idea that this particular war is a much larger war to defend freedom. Truman’s idea no doubt has earlier roots too. #3 is an argument that we can go into this war because we have no ambitions but the noble one of peace. This argument is as false as the others. There are always other ambitions that may be called imperial.

Bill Clinton’s rhetoric on intervention in Kosovo is like that of his predecessors. He invoked the appeasement theory, once again referring to the irrelevant Hitler analogy. He provided a twist on a domino theory by worrying about the conflict spreading to neighboring lands. (This argument hasn’t bothered Bush or Obama In the Middle East.)

And Clinton added a new argument that American prosperity depended on Europe being “safe, secure, free, united, a good partner”. Whew! War for international bankers and international companies! Kosovo matters!

This argument is highly implausible, and it never explains why Europeans cannot intervene on their own if Kosovo’s so important. Now, just extend Clinton’s argument to all the rest of the world in which Americans have trade and investment relations and you have the makings of interventions anywhere on the planet.

The question arises as to whether the U.S. government exists to further American economic relations with the rest of the world, using war as one means. This is hardly what is meant by keeping the peace or defending the nation.

As for Bush, let us note one phrase in his Iraq speech that echoes Truman:

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

Bush’s phrase “leaves no doubt” eerily matches Truman’s “beyond all doubt”. Bush was totally wrong on this score, as wrong as was Truman in his day. Presidents have to make big and unproven claims because they are taking America into war, and war is big. They do not have to be false claims. Why then are they false? After all, in his speech, LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, as the U.S. Navy detailed account now admits:

“Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.”

This rhetoric, this emotional appeal to intervene militarily in some remote land for the preservation of freedom in America, continues to this day. This is Hillary Clinton:

“There really is no viable alternative. No other nation can bring together the necessary coalitions and provide the necessary capabilities to meet today’s complex global threats.”

“The things that make us who we are as a nation — our diverse and open society, our devotion to human rights and democratic values — give us a singular advantage in building a future in which the forces of freedom and cooperation prevail over those of division, dictatorship and destruction.”

Like Truman, Hillary still wrongly thinks that American forces are necessary and sufficient to produce peace. Additionally, she adds that only America is capable of this task, i.e., America is the indispensable nation in keeping the peace. Icing on the cake is her belief  that America has a comparative advantage in understanding and therefore implementing freedom and cooperation.

Wow! Aren’t we Americans great?!

Hillary’s rhetoric is unanchored to reality. She sweeps under the rug the long list of U.S. foreign policy debacles while grossly impugning and insulting the peoples of other lands.

It is easy for war advocates to speak of spreading freedom and democracy or defending them. This is a justification for possibly making war that is altogether too vague and too broad. This justification can never suffice for such legislation because a multitude of foreign situations fall into these categories or can be construed as falling into these categories. Specific interference by the U.S. needs specific justification, but when has that justification been accurate? Not in the case of Vietnam, not in Iraq, not in Serbia, not in Afghanistan, not in Korea, and not even in World War I. The U.S. interference that led to Pearl Harbor is another instance.

Is it the policy of the U.S. government to assure freedom and democracy in every land on earth and for all of its peoples? This is a practical impossibility that results in continual war. If it ever succeeded, the result would be global tyranny. Have Americans appointed themselves the unilateral and universal crusaders and administrators of freedom and democracy? This role is impossible too. It runs up against the individual developments in one nation after another. It runs aground on the ambiguities of what freedom means, what democracy means, and the flaws of democracy. It runs aground on the self-interests and imperial interests of those who control the U.S. government. This too is why freedom and democracy are not sufficient arguments for interventions.

Those who want to justify U.S. interference in Ukraine or Syria or anywhere else cannot use freedom and democracy as justification. They do not hold up. Being invited in doesn’t hold up. Stopping an aggression doesn’t hold up. A supposed foreign need doesn’t hold up. Upholding a mutual defense treaty doesn’t hold up, for these are really guarantees of the protection of a U.S. military umbrella.

Freedom and democracy are invoked by American leaders in favor of interventions overseas as if they were arguments, when they are nothing more than emotional appeals. America has declared itself a god, indispensable and uniquely qualified. Americans collectively are the god. Americans will enforce freedom and democracy everywhere. America goes to war under the banner of peace, freedom and democracy. Heathens shall be converted by the sword if need be. The freedom appeal is religious. Just as people fall away from religions, they fall away from allegiance to endless wars. The preachers stir them back up and incite them with new enemies and new fears. Your freedoms are under attack. You must fight or chaos will follow.

One president after another uses the rhetoric of freedom and democracy to bolster the appeal of their wars and interventions. They use them by themselves and linked to actual arguments. The linked arguments are typically domino theories or appeasement theories. These are either known to be false at the time or shown to be false later. Presidents assert certainties and absence of doubts when in fact the circumstances surrounding events are clouded and much more complex than they allege.

Should Americans believe what their presidents tell them when they make important war messages? The general answer seems to be that they should not. Do presidents systematically lie in their war messages? The answer is not clear. It is hard to assess this without deeper study of the circumstances surrounding their speeches. But because the messages are so faulty and mistaken as a rule, it appears that either presidents lie or else they intentionally exaggerate or else they believe in their own largely false rhetoric or else their information is poor. No matter what’s going on, the fact remains that if history is any guide, Americans should not believe what their presidents tell them when they ask them to go to war.

Common sense should tell Americans the same thing, not to believe these war messages, because most of the wars involve no direct attacks on America anyway. Germany didn’t attack the U.S. in either world war. Russia never attacked the U.S. during the Cold War. North Korea didn’t attack the U.S., and neither did Serbia, Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Haiti or Syria, all places in which the U.S. has intervened, usually accompanied by some sort of justifications coming out of the White House.

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 Real Reasons for the War on Terror

OTAN: 65 años inventando enemigos

por Vicky Peláez

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

Ningún plan militar, por bien preparado que esté, tiene garantizada su supervivencia más allá del primer encuentro con el enemigo (mariscal de campo Helmuth von Moltke, 1800-1891)

Para que surgiera un pacto militar como la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN) hace 65 años, tenía que existir alguno o varios enemigos de los países de Europa Occidental o los tenía que inventar.

Estados Unidos, el mayor beneficiado en términos financieros, políticos, económicos y geoestratégicos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, decidió establecer su control absoluto en esta parte de Europa.

La mano derecha de cada hegemonía es la fuerza militar, por eso Washington inventó la idea de la inseguridad de los europeos occidentales debido a la existencia de la Unión Soviética que, de acuerdo a los estrategas del departamento de Estado, representaba un permanente peligro latente para la democracia occidental debido a su ideología comunista.

Tras seis años de guerra, Europa estaba devastada sufriendo una severa crisis económica y también la espiritual, como lo describió De Gaulle en sus memorias. Sólo Estados Unidos tenía la capacidad de ayudar para recomponer la economía europea.

Washington percibió el momento adecuado para fortalecer su posición en Europa a través del Plan Marshall para la reconstrucción de los países europeos aportando 13 mil millones de dólares entre 1948 y 1951 que se gastaron en materias primas, productos semimanufacturados, comida, fertilizantes, maquinaria, vehículos y combustible.

Un año después del inicio del Plan Marshall surgió la idea de un pacto militar llamado OTAN cuyo propósito inicial, según el primer Secretario General de esta organización, Lord Ismay, era “mantener a los rusos afuera, a los norteamericanos dentro y a los alemanes abajo”.

Posteriormente el presidente norteamericano John F. Kennedy declaró: “Quiero construir dos torres en la OTAN, una norteamericana y la otra europea”. Al comienzo no siempre hubo acuerdo entre los miembros de esta organización y en 1966 Francia salió de la OTAN al considerar su presidente Charles De Gaulle que la “alianza estaba dominada inaceptablemente por los EEUU”.

Recién con Nicolas Sarcozy Francia retomó su membresía en la OTAN. Durante los primeros 42 años de la existencia de la Alianza hasta la disolución de la Unión Soviética en 1991 y el campo socialista en 1989 existió para el occidente un enemigo bien definido: la URSS “comunista” que, según la doctrina de la OTAN elaborada en los Estados Unidos, obligaba a la alianza estar preparada permanentemente para la guerra convencional contra aquel enemigo.

En aquellos 42 años la OTAN se convirtió en un brazo armado del Pentágono siendo su jefe principal no el Secretario General, que siempre había sido de origen europeo sino el Supremo Comandante Aliado nombrado por el departamento de Defensa norteamericano y por supuesto tenía que ser un general de las Fuerzas Armadas estadounidenses, manteniéndose esta tradición hasta ahora.

Hasta la desaparición del campo socialista, la definición del enemigo había sido una tarea simple para los miembros de la Alianza que se basaba en términos ideológicos como la lucha contra el comunismo y su principal pilar: la URSS.

Los problemas con la selección del próximo enemigo surgieron después que el presidente norteamericano George Bush padre declaró en 1990 que “un mundo antes dividido entre dos campos armados reconoce que ya sólo existe una potencia permanente: los Estados Unidos de América”.

La Guerra Fría había terminado pero Washington no podía permitirse el lujo de disolver la OTAN para no perder su hegemonía en Europa. Para esto Norteamérica había creado el Concepto Estratégico de la Alianza para 1991-1999, el primer período en el Siglo XX de la unipolaridad mundial, redefiniendo el papel de la OTAN, su estrategia y táctica.

En la reunión de los jefes de Estado y de gobierno de la Alianza en 1991 en Roma, el presidente Bush hizo dos propuestas: primero, dotar a la OTAN de capacidad de actuar fuera de la zona asignada en el período 1949 – 1990 modificando el Artículo V de la Alianza y segundo, vincular la defensa europea a la de los EE.UU. En la misma reunión el Secretario General de la organización, Willy Claes, afirmó que “actualmente el integrismo musulmán representa el mayor desafío para Europa desde la caída del enemigo soviético”.

Es decir, el “nuevo enemigo” fue definido. Además se discutieron otros peligros inminentes relacionados con los futuros conflictos en Cáucaso; la dispersión del armamento nuclear en Rusia, Bielorrusia, Ucrania y Kazajstán; los prontos conflictos en los Balcanes; y el posible surgimiento del nacionalismo expansionista en las ex repúblicas soviéticas. Así terminó la incertidumbre respecto a la necesidad de un “enemigo” para la existencia de la OTAN. Si no lo hay se lo inventa, una antigua táctica de todos los imperios.

En este mismo período se inició la expansión de la OTAN hacia el este incorporando en su seno ex repúblicas socialistas. Los 12 miembros con que nació la organización en 1949 crecieron a 28 y el liderazgo de Washington se convirtió en algo sagrado e indiscutible que otorgó a la Alianza el derecho de intervenir en cualquier parte del mundo.

Para esto fue elaborado el Segundo Concepto Estratégico de la OTAN para 1999 – 2010. Sus resultados eran la guerra en los Balcanes y la disolución de la República Federal de Yugoslavia, la participación de la Alianza en la guerra contra Afganistán e Irak.

Precisamente en este tiempo se decidió en 2009, aprovechando el ambiente de cierto acercamiento entre Estados Unidos y Rusia, bautizado como “Perezagrusca”, establecer cierta cooperación de la OTAN con Rusia. En realidad fue un tanteo de la posibilidad de una suave y bien camuflada expansión del dominio norteamericano hacia este país.

De allí surgió en la reunión de Lisboa de la Alianza en 2010, a la que asistió el presidente de Rusia, Dmitri Medvédev, considerado en Washington como pro atlantista, el “Consejo de la OTAN – Rusia” prometiendo la seguridad y prosperidad para el pueblo de aquel país. Sin embargo, lo que Medvédev y Obama caracterizaron como un momento “histórico” en relaciones entre la OTAN y Rusia no duró mucho.

El principio de igualdad que reclamaba el presidente Medvédev en relaciones con la Alianza nunca fue aceptado por la mayoría de sus miembros y en especial por Polonia y los países bálticos. Todo fue un juego de distracción y de desinformación. Mientras Barack Obama hablaba del acercamiento con Rusia, la OTAN puso en marcha un plan secreto para instalar bases militares en Polonia, Lituania, Estonia y Letonia y concretaba detalles de la instalación de Sistemas Antimisiles en estos países. También estaba en su fase final la preparación de un golpe de Estado en Ucrania. Los futuros pro nazi miembros de Maidan ya estaban recibiendo la preparación militar en Polonia y Lituania.

El Nuevo Concepto Estratégico para los años 2010 – 2020 elaborado en Lisboa formalizó en realidad lo que uno de los famosos especialistas en el Sistema Económico Mundial, Samir Amin, llamó el concepto del “imperialismo colectivo” que se ve claramente en la guerra mediática, económica y financiera contra Rusia que emprendió la OTAN bajo el liderazgo de Washington aprovechando el golpe de Estado que ellos mismos promovieron en Ucrania. La desinformación hábilmente propagada reemplazó la verdad convirtiendo a Rusia que no tenía nada que ver en “agresor” y a los nazis ucranianos en “víctimas”.

A la vez Polonia y los países bálticos siguiendo las instrucciones del departamento de Estado norteamericano iniciaron una campaña histérica sobre una inminente invasión rusa. Aprovechando el momento, uno de sus curadores del norte, el Director de Asuntos Europeos en el Consejo de Seguridad Nacional, Charles Kupchan, hizo una advertencia precisamente un día antes de la visita de Obama a Estonia que “Rusia no debe ni pensar meterse en Estonia o en cualquier otro miembro de la OTAN”. También el jefe real de la OTAN, el general norteamericano Philip Breedlove lanzó una amenaza a Rusia ordenando reforzar la capacidad bélica de la Alianza en “el aire, tierra y mar”.

Se espera que en la cumbre de esta semana de la OTAN que se celebrará en Cardiff, Reino Unido, se modificará el llamado Nuevo Concepto Estratégico de la Alianza elaborado para el período 2010 – 2020 teniendo en cuenta los acontecimientos en Ucrania, Siria e Irak, dando el visto bueno a la creación de bases militares permanentes en Polonia y los países bálticos utilizando el Acta de Prevención de la Agresión Rusa (RAPA) elaborado por el Congreso norteamericano y dirigido hacia el rearme de Europa del Este. También Washington, que paga el 73 por ciento del presupuesto de la OTAN, exigirá mayor aporte de los miembros al mantenimiento de la capacidad bélica de la Alianza y poner en orden las fuerzas armadas de cada país que reciben menos de un por ciento del presupuesto estatal.

Para darse cuenta de la situación de las fuerzas armadas de los miembros de la OTAN que inventaron a Rusia como el “nuevo enemigo” habría que citar lo que la más importante revista alemana Der Spiegel reveló sobre el estado de preparación de los militares alemanes para una posible confrontación. Dice la publicación que de los 109 aviones Euro Fighters solamente 8 son disponibles para el combate y de los 67 helicópteros CH-53 sólo siete pueden volar. Esta es la situación en la mayoría de los miembros de la Alianza.

La Apariencia y la Realidad están en completa contradicción en la OTAN, igual como pasó en la “Guerra de las Galaxias” difundida hábilmente por el aparato propagandístico del gobierno de Reagan en los años 1980 que hizo asustar a los dirigentes soviéticos iniciándose la incertidumbre. Ahora la OTAN está lanzando una campaña propagandística parecida olvidándose que la Rusia de ahora aprendió de las experiencias del pasado y sabe perfectamente lo que significa la frase escrita por el poeta alemán Friederich Freiher von Hardenberg: ”Cuando veas un gigante, examina antes la posición del sol; no vaya a ser la sombra de un pigmeo”.

Fuente: RIA Novosti

The World Is Doomed By Western Insouciance

The World Is Doomed By Western Insouciance

Don’t expect to live much longer

By Paul Craig Roberts

PaulCraigRoberts.org & http://www.lewrockwell.com

European governments and the Western media have put the world at risk by enabling Washington’s propaganda and aggression against Russia.

Washington has succeeded in using transparent lies to demonize Russia as a dangerous aggressive country led by a new Hitler or a new Stalin, just as Washington succeeded in demonizing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Qaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, Chavez in Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.

The real demons–Clinton, Bush, Obama–are “the exceptional and indispensable people” above the reach of demonization. Their horrific real crimes go unnoticed, while fictitious crimes are attributed to the unexceptional and dispensable people and countries.

The reason that Washington demonizes a leader and a country is to permit the creation of circumstances that Washington can use to act with force against a leader and a country.

Washington’s incessant lies alleging “Russian aggression” have created Russian aggression out of thin air. John Kerry and the State Department’s Marie Harf issue new lies daily, but never any supporting evidence. With the stage set, the US Senate, the NATO commander and the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff are busy at work energizing the wheels of war.

Senate bill 2277 provides for beefing up forces on Russia’s borders and for elevating Ukraine’s status to “ally of the US” so that US troops can assist the war against “terrorists” in Ukraine.http://un.ua/eng/article/522930.html See also: http://www.globalresearch.ca/collapse-of-ukraine-government-prime-minister-yatsenyuk-resigns-amidst-pressures-exerted-by-the-imf/5393168

NATO commander Breedlove is preparing his plans for stockpiling war material on Russia’s borders so that US/NATO troops can more quickly strike Russia. http://rt.com/news/175292-nato-poland-supply-base/

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, is at work preparing American opinion for the upcoming war.

On July 24 Dempsey told the Aspen Security Forum, a high level group where US opinion is formed, that Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is comparable to Stalin’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and that the Russian threat was not limited to Ukraine or Eastern Europe but was global.http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/25/gen-dempsey-were-pulling-out-our-cold-war-military-plans-over-ukraine

The intellects in the Aspen Forum did not break out laughing when Dempsey told them that Russia’s (alleged but unproven) involvement in Ukraine was the first time since 1939 that a country made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. No one asked Dempsey what Washington has been doing during the last three presidential regimes: Clinton in Serbia, Bush and Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, Obama in Libya and Syria.

Here are Dempsey’s words: “You’ve got a Russian government that has made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. It’s the first time since 1939 or so that that’s been the case. They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently not just in Eastern Europe, but Europe in the main, and towards the United States.”

Washington’s view that the world is its oyster is so ingrained that neither Dempsey nor his upper echelon audience at the Aspen Forum noticed the absurdity of his statement. Washington and the brainwashed US population take if for granted that the “exceptional, indispensable nation” is not limited in its actions by the sovereignty of other countries.

Washington takes for granted that US law prevails in other countries over the countries’ own laws–just ask France or Switzerland, that Washington can tell foreign financial institutions and corporations with whom they can do business and with whom they cannot–just ask every country and company prevented from doing business with Iran, that Washington can invade any country whose leader Washington can demonize and overthrow–just ask Iraq, Honduras, Libya, Serbia, and so forth, and that Washington can conduct military operations against peoples in foreign countries, such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which Washington is not at war.

All of this is possible, because Washington has claimed the title from Israel of being “God’s Chosen People.” Of course, Israel’s loss of the title has not stopped Israel from acting the same way.

Washington now has in motion the wheels of war. Once the wheels of war begin to turn, momentum carries them forward. The foolish, indeed utterly stupid, governments and media in Europe seem unaware of Washington’s orchestration of their future or lack thereof, or they are indifferent to it. They are dooming themselves and all of humanity by their insouciance. Heaven help if the British PM or French president or German chancellor were not invited to the White House or the Polish nonentity did not get his Washington stipend.

Readers who cannot tolerate problems without solutions always request solutions. OK, here is the solution:

The only possibility of avoiding war is that Putin take his case to the UN. If Washington can send Colin Powell to the UN unarmed with any truth to make Washington’s case for war against Iraq, Putin should be able to take his case to the UN against Washington’s war against Russia.

The case that the emperor has no clothes is an easy one to make.

Unlike Washington, Putin is willing to share the evidence that Russia has about who is doing what in Ukraine. It is a simple matter to establish that Washington organized a coup that overthrew an elected government, supports violence against those who object to the coup, and has turned a deaf ear to Russia’s repeated pleas for Kiev and the separatists to negotiate their differences.

Putin should make it clear to the world that Washington continues with provocative military steps against Russia, with force buildups on Russia’s borders and calls for more buildups, with S.2277 which reads like a US preparation for war, with provocative actions and accusations by top US generals and government officials against Russia, and with efforts to isolate Russia and to inflict economic and political injury on Russia.

Putin should make it clear to the world that there is a limit to the provocations that Russia can accept and that Russia believes that Russia is in danger of preemptive nuclear attack by Washington. Putin can describe Washington’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty, the construction of ABM bases on Russia’s borders, and the announced change in Washington’s war doctrine that elevates US nuclear forces from a retaliatory role to a preemptive first strike role. These actions are clearly directed at Russia (and China–wake up China! You are next!).

Putin must state clearly that the likely consequence of the world continuing to enable Washington’s lies and aggression will be not merely another disastrous war but the termination of life.

The governments of the world, especially Washington’s vassals in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, need to be told that it is their responsibility to stop their enabling of Washington’s aggression or to accept their responsibility for World War III.

At least we could all have the enjoyment of watching the arrogant Samantha Powers and the craven British lapdog rise and walk out of the UN proceedings. There is no doubt whatsoever that Washington is unable to answer the charges.

Here again is the Wolfowitz Doctrine that controls US foreign policy and that condemns Planet Earth to death:

“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 posses 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.”

A hostile power is defined as any country that is not a Washington vassal.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine commits the United States, its peoples, Washington’s gullible EU allies and those peoples to war with Russia and China. Unless Russia and China surrender, the world will be destroyed.

The destruction of the world is what the idiot EU governments and the presstitute Western media are fostering by their enablement of Washington’s lies and aggression.

 

The Best of Paul Craig Roberts    

 

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Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2014 Paul Craig Roberts

Previous article by Paul Craig Roberts: Scheming Aggressive War

BHL veut faire la guerre à la Russie: s’engagera-t-il?         

par Nicolas Bonnal

Ex: http://www.bvoltaire.fr

 

BHL est à Marcel Proust ce que Doc Gynéco est à Jean-Philippe Rameau.

   

    

Bernard-Henri Lévy vient d’accuser les Européens de lâcheté dans le New York Times. Il demande la guerre contre la Russie – qui servira à anéantir le Vieux Continent. Mais que ne fera-t-on pas pour éviter le Munich numéro 1000 des « néocons » à la française ?

Le bougre occupe depuis quarante ans le devant de la scène intellectuelle française, comme on dit. Il est l’intellectuel institutionnel que l’on doit écouter et le commandeur des croyants auquel on se doit maintenant d’obéir, le doigt sur la couture du pantalon, surtout quand on est président de la République et que l’on rêve de n’importe quel exploit martial pour éviter de trop ramer dans les sondages. Et cela, alors que le ludion en question était déconsidéré depuis longtemps par tous ses pairs, Aron, Sartre et Bourdieu y compris.

L’escogriffe plumitif traîne depuis bien longtemps au Quartier latin sa carcasse de précieux dégoûté. Aussi, je ne me moquerai pas de son riad avec laquais, de ses chemises à 700 euros, de son dandysme de Prisunic, de sa discourtoise insuffisance. Je ne soulignerai pas non plus que ses succès en librairie ont vingt ou trente ans, qu’il vend maintenant à 3.000 exemplaires, que ses postures ont fini par lasser le grand public qui le découvrait il y a maintenant 40 ans ou presque, au temps du toujours extasié Pivot. Car BHL est à Marcel Proust ce que Doc Gynéco est à Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Par ses poses, il me fait penser aux libéraux américains ou même russes. On sait donc que tout libéral qui se respecte déteste son pays, son histoire et ses racines, et l’idée même d’identité. On sait que, comme tout libéral qui se respecte, il n’a de cesse de souligner que ce pays est viscéralement raciste et antisémite. Et l’on sait que, comme tout aigri qui se respecte, il n’a de cesse de dénoncer comme nationaliste ou populiste tout esprit qui s’opposera à ses schématisations artisanales et à ses imprécations teigneuses : cf. sa diatribe sur le populisme américain et le maccarthysme local toujours renaissant qui refusait de faire de ce cancre las l’émule de Tocqueville !

Puissance malfaisante, ce représentant attitré de la gauche caviar et du néo-conservatisme azimuté synthétise toutes les tares de la charia moderne : le monde ne sera vivable que lorsqu’il sera en tout point identique et mort. C’est le rallye mondain du Paris-Qatar. Les moins riches se loueront une chambre à Gaza en remerciant les journaux de lutter contre le racisme.

Il serait temps pourtant que je reconnaisse ses intenses mérites, que je lui tresse des lauriers. Car c’est ici qu’avec son argent, son bagout, ses réseaux, son sens du chantage il m’impressionne et maintenant me fait peur. Ce nouveau grand inquisiteur triomphe avec toute la force de sa mauvaise volupté.

Je fais un pari : après la Libye, il imposera sa guerre mondiale à la foule fatiguée des zombies européens.

Les Etats-Unis cherchent la guerre au moyen de l’arme énergétique

par Eberhard Hamer

Ex: http://horizons-et-debats.ch

Les Etats-Unis n’hésitent pas à boycotter les livraisons d’énergie quand il s’agit de préparer une guerre. Comme toutes les sanctions cela correspond au début d’une guerre économique. Les Etats-Unis sont rois en la matière.

• Lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les Etats-Unis ont privé le Japon d’énergie et de ce fait, obligé les Japonais à entrer dans l’affrontement militaire.
• Il en est de même de la guerre en Irak, commencée par les Etats-Unis par le boycott des exportations de pétrole.
• Il y eu un boycottage économique et pétrolier contre l’Iran – et cela aurait pu aboutir plusieurs fois à un affrontement militaire qui fut, heureusement, rejeté par l’armée américaine.
• Si le boycottage du pétrole contre l’Iran n’a pas vraiment fonctionné, c’est que la Chine s’est offerte comme client de substitution et que la Russie en est resté son client.
• Actuellement, dans le cas de l’Ukraine, l’arme énergétique est utilisée contre la Russie. Les sanctions des Etats-Unis et de leurs satellites correspondent à un début d’hostilité et ce, parce que la Russie s’oppose à abandonner l’Ukraine aux industries américaines, à l’OTAN et aux missiles américains.

Ce n’est pas un hasard que la construction de l’oléoduc South Stream allant de la Russie vers l’Autriche et passant par la Bulgarie, ait été stoppée lorsque le ministre des Affaires étrangères américain accompagné de trois sénateurs l’exigeait avec insistance. L’oléoduc South Stream aurait rendu l’Europe du Sud aussi sûre en matière énergétique – grâce au pétrole et au gaz russe – que l’aurait fait l’oléoduc North Stream traversant la mer Baltique l’Europe du Nord grâce à Gazprom.

Si l’oléoduc principal de la Russie vers l’Allemagne et passant par l’Ukraine et la Pologne était peu sûr, c’est que l’Ukraine s’était branché plusieurs fois clandestinement sur cet oléoduc et étant donné sa non-solvabilité s’était vu privé de livraisons. Des spécialistes américains viennent de faire sauter justement cet oléoduc pour prouver aux Européens l’incertitude des livraisons de pétrole russe.

La lutte menée par le gouvernement américain contre le fait que l’Europe s’approvisionne en énergie en Russie a maintes raisons:

1. Les Etats-Unis considèrent comme danger pour leur propre autorité économique en Europe le lien économique étroit que leurs provinces satellites européennes ont avec la Russie. Pour cette raison ils tentent de perturber toute relation positive entre l’Europe et la Russie.
2. D’après la doctrine de Brzezinski postulant l’encerclement de la Russie, et en contradiction du consentement donné en 1990 dans le contexte de la Réunification allemande, à savoir que l’OTAN ne s’élargirait pas vers l’Est en traversant l’Oder et la Neisse, les Américains n’ont pas seulement attiré l’Allemagne, mais aussi les pays baltes, la Pologne, la Hongrie, la Roumanie et la Turquie au sein de l’OTAN, ils ont donc systématiquement déplacé la zone de déploiement des missiles américains en direction de Moscou.
3. En Ukraine, on ne voulait pas seulement élargir l’espace économique américain (UE) et l’OTAN, mais on voulait en même temps affaiblir la Russie de manière décisive.
4. Le budget de l’Etat russe repose principalement sur l’exportation d’énergie. Qui veut donc affaiblir la Russie doit empêcher ces exportations. C’est pourquoi Obama a évoqué le «manque de fiabilité» des livraisons de pétrole russe et exigé que l’Europe achète du pétrole et du gaz américains (ce qui n’est guère possible à court terme).
5. Parallèlement à la guerre énergétique c’est aussi une guerre monétaire qui est menée. Les Etats-Unis ont lancé non seulement des sanctions contre des compagnies et des banques russes, mais ils menacent aussi les investissements russes de par le monde. En réponse à ces sanctions, la Russie vient de se séparer de ses réserves en dollars (200 milliards) et en accord avec la Chine, l’Inde et l’Iran ne pratique plus le commerce extérieur moyennant des dollars, mais en utilisant la monnaie des pays correspondants. Une façon d’affaiblir considérablement l’empire du dollar d’autant plus que les Etats-Unis n’ont pratiquement plus d’or et que le dollar est donc une «monnaie sans couverture ni valeur».

Jusqu’ici il n’y a pas d’indices – hormis les conjurations américaines – qui laissent supposer que l’approvisionnement en énergie de l’Europe est peu sûr. Les Russes ont toujours été fidèles aux contrats et sont existentiellement intéressés à poursuivre leurs livraisons de gaz à l’Europe. Donc pas de quoi s’inquiéter et pas de raison de changer de fournisseur de gaz en faveur des Etats-Unis.

La destruction à l’explosif de l’oléoduc ukrainien montre que la CIA pourrait également faire sauter l’oléoduc North Stream en mer Baltique pour provoquer des pénuries sur le marché de l’énergie entre la Russie et l’Europe.

Si l’on considère les sanctions des Etats-Unis et de leurs satellites contre la Russie, la guerre monétaire déjà en cours et maintenant aussi le combat mené par les Etats-Unis contre l’approvisionnement en pétrole de l’Europe par la Russie. Et si l’on prend en considération que le soulèvement sur la place du Maïdan de Kiev s’est fait grâce à l’argent américain, aux agents américains et aux troupes de mercenaires américains (Blackwater), et si l’on y ajoute que l’OTAN, à l’origine une alliance défensive, s’est transformé en une troupe de mercenaires au service des Etats-Unis, disponible dans le monde entier, alors le risque d’une guerre en Europe n’a jamais été aussi grand depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale à cause des diverses offensives menées par les Etats-Unis contre la Russie. Une fois de plus nous pourrions nous retrouver dans une guerre que personne n’a voulue.

Ce n’est pas Poutine qui est l’agresseur, mais Obama, respectivement l’oligarchie financière qui tire les ficelles. L’«amitié transatlantique» devrait signifier pour nous d’empêcher les Etats-Unis de s’aventurer en attaquant davantage de pays au lieu de les suivre aveuglement et en toute obédience. Au plus tard avec la guerre du pétrole, nous sommes maintenant directement concernés.   

(Traduction Horizons et débats)

L'avenir des relations entre l'Europe et la Russie se joue peut-être en ce moment

par Jean-Paul Baquiast

Ex: http://www.europesolidaire.eu

 

De quelles relations parlons-nous ? Ou bien d'une coopération stratégique eurorusse de longue durée, dans tous les domaines importants sur lesquels reposera demain la puissance des grands États, ou bien d'une hostilité pouvant déboucher sur des conflits ouverts, imposée par les États-Unis à une Europe considérée par eux comme une simple base arrière de l'Otan.

La question n'est pas que théorique. Aujourd'hui Washington a clairement relancé une guerre, sinon chaude, du moins tiède, contre Vladimir Poutine. L'objectif est de pousser le Président de la Fédération de Russie à une intervention militaire en Ukraine, aux conséquences qui seraient catastrophiques pour l'image internationale de la Russie. Mais si Poutine n'intervenait pas, cela pourrait provoquer une rébellion contre lui des forces politiques russes radicales, l'accusant de mollesse. Poutine pourrait être renversé par des aventuriers beaucoup plus durs que lui. Cette perspective conviendrait parfaitement à Washington, qui pourrait alors agiter le spectre d'une Russie redevenue stalinienne.

Or l'Europe, plus particulièrement l'Allemagne et la France, n'auraient rien a gagner à suivre les États-Unis dans cette aventure. Elles ruineraient au contraire les perspectives prometteuses d'une future alliance euroBRICS, qui commencerait nécessairement par une alliance eurorusse 1). Certains signes montrent qu'Angela Merkel, et dans une moindre mesure François Hollande (qui apparaît comme un suiveur), l'avaient compris. Ils avaient mis en place avec la Russie un groupe dit des trois, dont l'objectif était de rechercher des solutions communes sur la question ukrainienne. Malheureusement ce groupe des trois, face au développement des combats en Ukraine entre "légitimistes" et "résistants de l'Est", semble être entré en sommeil. Il serait urgent au contraire de le réactiver, et mieux encore, de lui fixer de nouvelles ambitions. Avec un peu de bonne volonté partagée, il pourrait s'intéresser à des dossiers chauds sur lesquels Obama accumule les erreurs et les prises de risque pour la paix du monde : l'Irak, l'Iran, la question israélo-palestinienne notamment.

Mais pour qu'un tel groupe se poursuive et se renforce, il faudrait une démarche positive des gouvernements européens, sortant de leur addiction à un atlantisme de plus en plus dangereux. Il leur faudrait expliquer à leurs opinions publiques, notamment en Allemagne et en France, pays plus réceptifs que ceux de l'Europe orientale, que le vrai allié de l'Europe est désormais Vladimir Poutine. Ce ne peut plus être désormais Obama et son entourage de « néocons » bellicistes. Ceux-ci sont en train de prendre l'Amérique toute entière en otage de leurs délires anti-russes, y compris une Amérique à laquelle beaucoup d'Européens sont restés attachés, à tort ou à raison, depuis la deuxième guerre mondiale.

1) Nous consacrerons prochainement une étude sur cette question,  actualisant des articles précédemment publiés ici.

Reprise et mise à jour d'un article publié le 12 juillet sur The French Saker
http://www.vineyardsaker.fr/2014/07/12/lavenir-des-relations-entre-leurope-et-la-russie-se-joue-peut-etre-en-ce-moment/

 

Raus aus der Ukraine!

Raus aus der Ukraine!

von Johannes Schüller

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de

Patrick „Pat“ J. Buchanan ist der einflussreichste rechte Publizist der USA. In Sendern wie „Fox News” verteidigt er Putin.

Ein Gespräch über die ukrainische Krise.

Blaue​Narzisse​.de: Die deutsche Bild–Zeitung behauptet, 400 Söldner von einer US-​amerikanischen Sicherheitsfirma wären bereits in der Ukraine. Was halten Sie davon?

Pat Buchanan: Ich habe diese Nachrichten gelesen, weiß aber nicht, ob sie wahr oder falsch sind. Ich habe keine Kenntnisse von US-​Soldaten in den ostukrainischen Städten Luhansk oder Donezk.

Der Konflikt in der Ukraine erscheint wie ein großes geopolitisches Schlachtfeld. Aber es gibt auch eine Frontlinie zwischen einem konservativen Russland und einer liberalistischen USA. Was sind die eigentlichen Motive hinter dem Konflikt?

Der tiefe Graben zwischen den USA und Russland hat viele Gründe. In erster Linie nehmen die Russen wahr, dass die USA Vorteile ausnutzen. Diese haben sich besonders aus dem Rückzug der russischen Armee aus Mittel– und Osteuropa sowie dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion ergeben. Die Vereinigten Staaten, so die russische Perspektive, brachten dadurch ein halbes Dutzend ehemaliger Staaten des Warschauer Pakts und drei Sowjetrepubliken in die Nato. Wir haben unser Bündnis aus dem Kalten Krieg in den russischen Raum und vor Russlands Zentrum ausgedehnt. Viele US-​Amerikaner lehnten diese Expansion der Nato nach Osteuropa und ins Baltikum ab. Sie erschien ihnen damals als provokative Torheit.

In kultureller und sozialer Hinsicht sehen viele Russen Amerika weniger als Führungsnation christlicher Werte, die sie einst war. Sie erscheint ihnen vielmehr als weltweite Inkarnation dessen, was man „Hollywood-​Werte” nennen könnte. Die Traditionalisten in den USA befinden sich in einem erbitterten Kampf gegen diese, an Antonio Gramsci orientierte Kulturrevolution. Ebenso scheint eine wachsende Zahl von Russen ihnen ebenso zu widerstreben.

Was wäre eine angemessene Außenpolitik für die USA und für die EU in der Ukraine?

Das Ziel beider Mächte sollte eine unabhängige, freie und neutrale Ukraine außerhalb jedes Militärbündnisses sein. Darüber hinaus müsste sie ein dezentral geordnetes Land werden. Die USA und die EU sollten sich als Ziel setzen, dass die ukrainischen Regionen, ebenso wie die US-​Bundesstaaten, ein maximales Maß an Selbstbestimmung zugesichert bekommen. Diese Regionen könnten zugleich in Einklang mit der nationalstaatlichen Union stehen. Denn wir wollen weder einen Bürgerkrieg in der Ukraine noch einen zweiten Kalten Krieg mit Russland.

Die Ukraine erscheint in diesem Konflikt aber nur als Spielball fremder Mächte. Ist denn so etwas wie eine eigene und unabhängige Politik für diese Nation überhaupt denkbar?

Das ukrainische Volk hat schreckliches in seiner Geschichte ertragen müssen. Das fängt bei der von Stalin initiierten Hungersnot, dem Holodomor, an, setzt sich über Hitlers Eroberungsfeldzug fort und reicht bis zur Teilung im Zweiten Weltkrieg sowie im Kalten Krieg. Deshalb mag, auch wegen der ethnischen Unterschiede zwischen den Ukrainern, nationale Einheit ein utopisches Ideal bleiben. In meiner letzten Analyse dazu habe ich deshalb betont, dass eine Teilung dem Bürgerkrieg vorzuziehen wäre. Aber das müssen die Ukrainer selbst entscheiden.

Wie ist das gesellschaftliche Klima dazu in den USA? Existiert so etwas wie eine neue Friedensbewegung, die sich gegen Interventionen in der Ukraine und Syrien wendet?

Eine Friedensbewegung? Nein, niemand denkt hierzulande noch, dass die USA einen Krieg beginnen werden. Die meisten US-​Amerikaner wollen, dass sich die Vereinigten Staaten aus einem ethnischen Konflikt in einem Land, das sie nicht mal auf der Karte finden, heraushalten.

Als es im August 2013 möglich schien, dass Präsident Barack Obama Luftangriffe gegen Syrien beginnen könnte, stand die Nation auf, um „Nein!” zu sagen. Nach dem Irak und Afghanistan wollen die Amerikaner, dass ihr Land auf Kriege verzichtet, die keine unserer lebensnotwendigen Interessen berühren.

Trotzdem: Diese Situation kann sich ändern. Die Dämonisierung von Präsident Putin steigert sich schnell und die Neigung der politischen und medialen Eliten zur Intervention, etwa mittels dem Entsenden von Verteidigungswaffen, wächst. Wenn die Ukraine in einem langen Bürgerkrieg versinkt, wird sich die Aufmerksamkeit der USA noch stärker auf sie richten. Dann wird das gewichtige Argument folgen, die Vereinigten Staaten müssten unbedingt etwas unternehmen.

Aber momentan wiederholen selbst die erbittertsten neokonservativen „Falken” bzw. Interventionisten eher diesen Refrain: „Keine amerikanischen Stiefel auf diesen Boden!” Sie kennen eben die Stimmung in den USA. Ein Land, das einen Kampf sucht, sieht anders aus.

Welche Position sollten Konservative auf dem großen Schlachtfeld Ukraine wählen?

Die Ukraine ist nicht unser Schlachtfeld! Es ist ein Konflikt zwischen Ukrainern sowie zwischen Russland und der Ukraine. Wir haben dabei keine andere Rolle als Zar Alexander II. während des US-​amerikanischen Bürgerkrieges. Und wir sollten weder Truppen noch Waffen in die Ukraine senden, noch Kiew irreführen und davon überzeugen, dass wir es wollen.

Konservative sollten sich gegen eine militärische Invention und gegen die Spaltung der Ukraine wenden. Ebenso müssen sie aber erkennen, dass das Schicksal der Ukraine nicht unseres ist. Wir können darüber weder bestimmen noch entscheiden.

Mr. Buchanan, thank you very much!

Hier geht es zum ersten und zum zweiten Teil des Buchanan-​Porträts aus der Feder seines Weggefährten Paul Gottfried.

Usa : Une impuissante arrogance

Usa : Une impuissante arrogance

 

La politique internationale américaine a perdu sa boussole

 

Jean Bonnevey
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Les Usa continuent à se comporter comme s’ils étaient le phare du monde et l’unique super puissance. Ils se mêlent donc de tout, jugent et interviennent quand ils le peuvent. Ils le font sans tenir compte de leurs erreurs passées. Ils n’arrivent plus à s’en tenir à une doctrine cohérente et efficace. En fait, ils ont été incapables de s’adapter raisonnablement à la chute de l’URSS. Ils sont devenus relativement surpuissants au moment même où leur domination internationale reculait. Ils ne l’ont pas admis, ni géré. Il y a un échec américain et même un aventurisme qui rend le monde moins sûr depuis la fin des deux blocs. 

La lutte contre le terrorisme islamique aurait pu être la colonne vertébrale d’une diplomatie combattante contre les tenants d’un obscurantisme religieux universel. Mais il n’en a rien été. Le péché original reste sans doute la guerre inutile et imbécile contre l’Irak. Ce pays n’existe plus. Le modèle  de démocratie multiculturelle et ethnique que les Usa voulaient offrir au monde arabo-musulman est un chaos sanglant. Un  pays divisé, éclaté, une insécurité qui explose et des élections inutiles sont là pour le prouver. Le retrait américain avant toute stabilisation de l’Irak est la preuve de la faiblesse américaine et de son incapacité à agir dans un temps long. Cette preuve est confirmée par la recrudescence de la violence en Afghanistan alors que les élections vont confirmer dans ce pays les clivages ethniques. Le soutient aux révolutions égyptiennes et tunisiennes n’ont pas été menées à bien. L’intervention contre la Lybie, même modeste, aux cotés des Français et des Anglais a déstabilisé non seulement un pays mais l’ensemble du Sahel et au-delà certaines régions de l’Afrique noire. On prend en Syrie, malgré tout cela, des risques inconsidérés par rapport à toute la région. Enfin, une fois de plus, les Usa ont échoué dans leur tentative de relancer le dialogue entre Israël et les palestiniens. Ils n’osent pas défier l’état juif dans sa vision de ce qu’il doit être de la région et de la paix qu’il veut imposer.

Tant d’échecs devraient pousser les Etats-Unis à une mise à plat de leur politique internationale ou, en tout cas, à moins d’arrogance. Et pourtant, l’Ukraine le prouve, les Usa veulent régenter, au nom de la démocratie, toutes les puissances susceptibles de la concurrencer sur le plan politique, militaire et surtout énergétique. La Russie a le sentiment que Washington veut l’enfermer dans un  espace réduit et contrôlé par des états soumis à l'influence américaine. C’est indiscutable. Les Usa en ont-ils encore les moyens alors que leur leadership est contesté également par la Chine en attendant le tour de l’Inde où les nationalistes hindous vont certainement prendre le pouvoir.

L’arrogance américaine est en contradiction avec la réalité internationale et les conséquences de la politique des Usa dans le monde depuis le début du siècle. Washington veut que le XXIème siècle soit comme le XXème un siècle américain. Ce pari s’annonce irréaliste et déjà largement perdu. Il met en danger les équilibres mondiaux historiques et civilisationnels avec tous les risques que cela comporte à moyen terme.

Or How We are Hoodwinked into Accepting a New World War

The Strangelove Effect

by JOHN PILGER

 

Ex: http://www.counterpunch.org

I watched Dr. Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major T.J. “King” Kong goes “toe to toe with the Rooskies” and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it’s left to General “Buck” Turgidson to reassure the President. Strike first, says the general, and “you got no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops.”

President Merkin Muffley: “I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler.”

General Turgidson: “Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.”

The genius of Stanley Kubrick’s film is that it accurately represents the cold war’s lunacy and dangers.  Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today, because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant; yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same “invisible government”, as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.

In 1964, the year Strangelove was made, “the missile gap” was the false flag. In order to build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John Kennedy approved the CIA’s  propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. This filled front pages as the “Russian threat”. In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in the production of ICBMs, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its “Nato Enlargement Project”. Reneging a US promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucuses, Nato’s military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.

In February, the United States mounted one of its proxy “colour” coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia.  Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler’s Nazis, who were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The UPA was the military wing, inspiring today’s Svoboda party.

Since Washington’s putsch in Kiev — and Moscow’s inevitable response in Russian Crimea, to protect its Black Sea Fleet — the provocation and isolation of Russia have been inverted in the news to the “Russian threat”. This is fossilised propaganda. The US Air Force general who runs Nato forces in Europe  – General Breedlove, no less — claimed more than two weeks ago to have pictures showing 40,000 Russian troops “massing” on the border with Ukraine. So did Colin Powell claim to have pictures of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What is certain is that Obama’s rapacious, reckless coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.

Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, then invented a “nuclear rogue” in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone.

A Nato Membership Action Plan or MAP — straight from the war room of Strangelove — is General Breedlove’s gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. “Rapid Trident” will put US troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games throughout eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on America’s borders. Cue General “Buck” Turgidson.

And there is China. On 24 April, President Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his “Pivot to China”. The aim is to convince his “allies” in the region, principally Japan, to re-arm and prepare for the eventual possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war.

In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Jeju less than 400 miles from the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US.  Obama’s “pivot” is designed to undermine China’s influence in its region. It is as if world war has begun by other means.

This is not a Strangelove fantasy. Obama’s defence secretary, Charles “Chuck” Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a menacing warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea with China’s complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. “You cannot go around the world,” said Hagel with a straight face, “and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation”. As for America’s massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is “a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide”.

Obama is currently seeking a greater budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Strangelove. The United States is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a “manifest destiny” made right by might.

John Pilger is the author of Freedom Next Time. He can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

Dilema shakespeariano de Obama: ¿guerra fría contra Rusia o China?

por Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

Hoy el “nuevo muro” entre Washington y Moscú se recorrió de Berlín a Kiev: al borde de la balcanización entre la parte “occidental” (eurófila) de Ucrania y su parte “oriental” (rusófila), cuando la superestratégica Crimea ha retornado a la “madre patria” rusa.

Después de su sonoro fracaso en Crimea, con su política de asfixiante cerco a Rusia y su pretendido “cambio de régimen” con disfraz “democrático” en Moscú, Zbigniew Brzezinski comenta en Twitter (19/3/14): “Si Occidente apoya, Ucrania libre (sic) puede sobrevivir (sic). Si no lo hace, Putin puede desestabilizar toda Ucrania”.

El fulminante revire del zargeoestratégico global, Vlady Putin, tiene hoy a la parte “oriental” en jaque con su exquisito movimiento de ajedrez en Crimea, que colocó a la defensive a Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex asesor de Seguridad Nacional de Carter, íntimo de Obama y connotado rusófobo, quien tendió la letal trampa jihadista a la URSS en Afganistán que, por sus metástasis, derrumbó el Muro de Berlín y mutiló al imperio soviético.

Los ciudadanos de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña no desean más aventuras bélicas en Siria ni en Ucrania, cuando sus multimedia se olvidan de las bravatas atómicas de John McCain, quien goza la menor aceptación como senador, y explotan una amenaza de Dmitry Kiselyov, presentador de la televisión Rossiya-1, quien espetó que Rusia podría “convertir a Estados Unidos en ceniza radiactiva”(http://news.yahoo.com/state-tv-says-russia-could-turn-us-radioactive-212003397.html ).

Sí existen líneas rojas, no sólo de Estados Unidos, sino también de Rusia, lo cual es susceptible de desembocar en una guerra nuclear de “destrucción mutua asegurada” (MAD, por sus siglas en inglés), cuando las “cenizas radiactivas” serían “mutuas”.

Un editorial del rotativo chino Global Times (http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/849399/Putin-faces-war-of-attrition-with-West.aspx) comenta que las sanciones, de corte sado-masoquista, para lastimar la economía de Rusia, “señalarán el grado de determinación de Occidente para contener a Rusia”, cuando Putin”ha mostrado su dedicación para asegurar los intereses de Rusia, que han impresionado al mundo entero (sic)”.

El rotativo considera que Obama no ha tomado aún “una decisión final en la forma de contener a Rusia estratégicamente”, cuando “Putin despedazó las ofensivas (¡supersic!) de Occidente en el este de Europa, que empezaron al final de la guerra fría”.

Hoy “el límite estratégico entre Rusia y Occidente está siendo redefinido”: Rusia, “estrangulada durante un largo periodo, ha acumulado demasiada fuerza para lanzar una contraofensiva” y puede “enfrentar una guerra de desgaste con Occidente”.

El rotativo chino tampoco se hace ilusiones y sentencia que “la fuerza de Rusia es limitada (¡supersic!). Ni tiene la fuerza nacional de la anterior URSS ni la ayuda del Pacto de Varsovia. Si Occidente está determinado a emprender una confrontación prolongada (sic) con Moscú, Rusia sufrirá desafíos sin precedente”. Sin duda. Pero es mucho mejor que el “cambio de régimen” preprogramado de Estados Unidos en Moscú.

Su pronóstico es adverso: las”sanciones económicas desembocarán en una situación perder-perder. Occidente compartirá el peso de las pérdidas económicas, mientras Rusia estará sola” (¡supersic!), cuando “la estabilidad de Rusia no está garantizada”.

Por lo pronto, “Moscú le ha dado a Occidente y a sus seguidores una lección, obligándolo a reconsiderar el papel de Ucrania en Europa” y aconseja que “Putin debe dejar algún espacio para que Occidente se retire en una manera elegante, lo cual maximizará los intereses de Rusia”. De acuerdo.

El editorial chino arguye que”Occidente se percató que ha perdido la batalla por Crimea”, que “puede ser una victoria para Moscú o el inicio de una confrontación sin fin entre Rusia y Occidente”.

Juzga que a Putin le conviene”mantener el pleito en baja (sic) intensidad, que se acomode a los intereses de largo plazo de Rusia”.

El editorial no se jacta que el gran triunfador resultó China (a mi juicio, junto a Irán e India), lo cual expresa sin tapujos el investigador geoestratégico Artyom Lukin: “el triunfador en Ucrania… es China” (http://www.fpri.org/articles/2014/03/ukraine-and-winner-china ).

Juzga que las sanciones de Occidente contra Rusia “empujarán inevitablemente a Moscú a los brazos de Pekín”, lo cual “incrementará la probabilidad de que sus políticas se alineen frente a Occidente”, lo cual, a su vez, “reforzará las posiciones estratégicas de China en Asia”.

China “se sentirá más confiada en su rivalidad con Estados Unidos para su primacía en la región Asia/Pacífico, después de haber adquirido a Rusia como una zona estratégica segura en su espalda, así como un acceso privilegiado a su abundante energía, a su base de minerales y a sus tecnología militar avanzada”, a juicio de Artyom Lukin, en la visita de Putin a China en mayo “será muy visible cuando los eventos de Ucrania ayudarían a concretar el proyectado gasoducto de Rusia a China”.

No soslaya que los comentarios de la prensa oficial china son “simpáticos a Moscú”, al enfatizar la”determinación de Putin para proteger los intereses de Rusia y los ciudadanos rusófilos”, mientras los ciudadanos chinos expresan su admiración (¡supersic!) por Putin y su desafío a Occidente en portales como Weibo.

Artyom Lukin aduce que existe una”probabilidad cero (sic) para que Pekín apoye cualquier castigo político y económico en contra de Moscú”: algo así como una “neutralidad benevolente” de China con el Kremlin.

Cita a “algunos estrategas de Estados Unidos quienes lamentan que una presión excesiva (¡supersic!) de Occidente puede alterar el equilibrio geopolítico al empujar a Rusia más cerca de China”.

Artyom Lukin arguye que ahora Estados Unidos se encuentra en una posición delicada para confrontar a dos grandes potencias en Eurasia en forma simultánea y “tendrá que decidir cuál región es más importante a sus intereses: la Europa oriental post soviética (cuyo corazón es Ucrania) o Asia oriental”.

Considera que una batalla sin compromisos en Ucrania oriental de Estados Unidos contra Rusia, “en 10 o 15 años puede significar la pérdida de Asia oriental”.

Concluye en forma optimista que la “presente situación en Ucrania no resultará en una guerra, pero puede convertirse en un paso mayor hacia la transformación del orden internacional a una bipolaridad confrontativa” entre “Occidente, encabezado por Estados Unidos, frente al eje China/Rusia”, lo cual se subsume en mi tesis del “G-7 frente a los BRICS” (ver Bajo la Lupa, 16/3/14): el nuevo “muro de Kiev” de la bipolaridad metarregional.

Si no malinterpreto a Artyom Lukin, Rusia exhorta a Occidente a la cesión de “Ucrania oriental” a cambio de no arrojarse a los brazos de China y, por extensión, a los BRICS e Irán.

Mientras Michelle Obama llega con sus hijas a una visita de siete días a Pekín, por invitación de la esposa del <mandarín Xi, no hay que soslayar la búsqueda de Zbigniew Brzezinski de un acercamiento de Estados Unidos con China para castigar a Rusia, como sucedió con Nixon hace 43 años.

Entramos a la “teoría de juegos”, con tres rivales geoestratégicos, de característica no lineal hipercompleja.

Obama se encuentra ante el shakespeariano dilema geoestratégico de su vida: ¿quién será el máximo competidor geopolítico de Estados Unidos: Rusia o China, o los dos?

www.alfredojalife.com

Twitter: @AlfredoJalife

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Quince aniversario de la agresión salvaje de la OTAN que destruyó Yugoslavia

Quince aniversario de la agresión salvaje de la OTAN que destruyó Yugoslavia

Ex: http://paginatransversal.wordpress.com

 

Hace quince años, el 24 de marzo de 1999, la aviación de EEUU y la OTAN atacó un país ubicado en pleno centro de Europa: Yugoslavia. Los bombardeos duraron más de dos meses. Casi dos mil civiles murieron a raíz de la agresión. Los ataques aéreos fueron el punto culminante después de muchos años de una hostil campaña occidental en contra de ese poderoso Estado balcánico. Con las bombas y los misiles, que cayeron desde el cielo nocturno sobre Belgrado, Pristina y otras ciudades serbias, culminó la formación de un nuevo mapa de Europa del Este.

El analista político Alexánder Bovdunov, señala: –La idea era crear un foco de tensión en Europa, dificultando al máximo su conversión en un centro geopolítico independiente, por un lado, y por otro, aplastar y eliminar dentro de lo posible las fuerzas potencialmente capaces de ser aliados de los rusos. En primer término, Serbia y los serbios. Por algo fue que en ese conflicto EEUU y Europa, que le seguía la corriente, comenzaron respaldando a los croatas para terminar sofocando al Estado serbio y desatando el conflicto en torno a Kósovo para minimizar la influencia de los serbios en la región. Uno de los principales objetivos era demostrar que EEUU era capaz de imponer su voluntad al mundo entero y hacer lo que quisiera en cualquier punto de Europa. Gracias a Washington, en el mapa europeo surgió un cuasi Estado: la República de Kósovo. Su papel se limita prácticamente a ser otra cabeza de puente de EEUU en Europa.

El analista Vasili Kashirin explica: –Es un satélite fiable y leal de Occidente. En Kósovo está ubicada la mayor base militar de EEUU en el Viejo Continente. Los estadounidenses han construido allí toda una ciudad-fortaleza. Han llegado para quedarse durante décadas y no piensan abandonar ese territorio. Desde el punto de vista militar, fue un indudablemente triunfo de EEUU. Después de fraccionar Yugoslavia en pequeños países y enclaves, Occidente continuó imponiendo su “democracia alada” en Iraq, Afganistán y Libia, y al devastarlos, estuvo a punto de agredir a Siria, pero en ese momento el mecanismo de influencia unipolar falló, porque Rusia se opuso a la política “euroatlantista” en la región.

Vasili Kashirin señala: –La correlación global de fuerzas ha cambiado. Rusia ya no es tan débil como era en1999,lo demostró el año pasado durante la crisis siria, al impedir con su diplomacia razonable y posición que Occidente agrediera militarmente a Siria. El siguiente error del “euroatlantismo” fue su actitud respecto a Crimea. El deseo natural de Moscú de defender a la población ruso parlante de la península frente a los ultranacionalistas ucranianos, absolutamente justificable desde el punto de vista humano, ha sido interpretado por Occidente como una agresión militar rusa contra Ucrania. Y el resultado de la libre expresión de la voluntad de los crimeos a través de un referéndum ha sido calificada por el mismo como una violación de la integridad territorial del Estado ucraniano. A su vez, Vasili Kashirin califica la reacción de Occidente como una aplicación automática de la política de doble rasero. Solo que los tiempos han cambiado y esta política ha dejado de ser igual de eficaz que antes. Su incongruencia es demasiado evidente para todos.

Fuente: El Espía Digital

Who Has Been More Aggressive?

Who Has Been More Aggressive?

By Michael S. Rozeff

Ex: http://www.lewrockwell.com

Who has been more aggressive, George H.W. Bush in Panama or Vladimir Putin in Crimea? Who has been more aggressive, the U.S. in its actions against Noriega or Russia with respect to Crimea?

These two situations differ but they are comparable in important respects. The U.S. launched a full-scale invasion of Panama. Russia, whatever it did in Crimea, it didn’t launch a full-scale invasion. The U.S. was trying to get rid of Noriega for some years. Russia had not been trying to annex Crimea. It acted in response to Ukraine events in a region it deemed very important just as the U.S. acted in a region it deemed important for reasons of its own. What were they? I won’t go into the detail this invasion deserves. Let’s see what George H.W. Bush’s invasion message said.

“For nearly two years, the United States, nations of Latin America and the Caribbean have worked together to resolve the crisis in Panama. The goals of the United States have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty. Many attempts have been made to resolve this crisis through diplomacy and negotiations. All were rejected by the dictator of Panama, Gen. Manuel Noriega, an indicted drug trafficker. Last Friday, Noriega declared his military dictatorship to be in a state of war with the United States and publicly threatened the lives of Americans in Panama. The very next day forces under his command shot and killed an unarmed American serviceman, wounded another, arrested and brutally beat a third American serviceman and then brutally interrogated his wife, threatening her with sexual abuse. That was enough.”

The Russians have made the claim too of safeguarding Russians as well as their bases. They too have made the claim of safeguarding democracy and there has been a vote to back that claim up. No drug trafficking is involved in Crimea, but that was a poor excuse for Bush to have used anyway. Russia has made the claim that the coup in Ukraine introduced a rogue government just as the U.S. made claims against Noriega. Bush mentioned the failure of negotiations. Whatever they were or weren’t or how they were handled, let’s note that the Ukrainian government had reached an agreement on Feb. 21 that was soon broken by violent mob activity. This was in Ukraine, not Crimea, but there is a political link and it does provide Russia with a parallel rationale that it has used.

These comparisons suggest, at a minimum and understating the case, that the Russians have not behaved in a way that differs that much from how the U.S. has behaved. But in fact the Russian actions have been much milder. There has been no big invasion. A vote was held. The Russians had standing treaty rights in Crimea.

Bush also claimed that Noriega declared war against the U.S. This claim inverted the truth. Noriega said that the U.S. had declared war on Panama. See author Theodore H. Draper’s work on that claim. I quote Draper:

“As I have now learned, Bush’s statement was, at best, a half-truth, at worst a flagrant distortion. On December 15, Noriega had not simply declared war on the United States. He said, in effect, that the United States had declared war on Panama, and that, therefore, Panama was in a state of war with the United States. Just what Noriega said was known or available in Washington by December 16 at the latest. How Noriega’s words came across as a simple declaration of war is a case history of official management of the news and negligence by the press.

“The key passage in Noriega’s speech on December 15 accused the President of the United States of having ‘invoked the powers of war against Panama’ and ‘through constant psychological and military harassment of having created a state of war in Panama, daily insulting our sovereignty and territorial integrity.’ He appealed for ‘a common front to respond to the aggression,’ and stressed ‘the urgency to unite as one to fight against the aggressor.’

“The resolution on December 15 by the Panama Assembly also took this line—’To declare the Republic of Panama in a state of war for the duration of the aggression unleashed against the Panamanian people by the US Government.’”

This war item may appear to digress from the comparison because the Crimean situation doesn’t involve antagonism between Russia and Crimea, whereas the Panama-U.S. situation did. Its relevance is that the U.S. went considerably further militarily in Panama than Russia did in Crimea, using a false and exaggerated claim as an important reason.

Let us reach a conclusion. If the U.S. could launch a large-scale aggression against the government of Panama for some reasons similar to those invoked by Russia (protection of citizens and democracy) and for one unjustifiable reason (drugs), and also with a lie or half-truth (Noriega unilaterally declaring war on the U.S.), then do not the Russian actions in Crimea, where it has treaty rights for bases and military personnel and where it has a longstanding interest in an adjacent strategic region, appear not to be anything excessive as such things go and far milder than the U.S. action in Panama? This seems to be an inescapable conclusion.

If Russia is the big bad bogeyman in Crimea, what was the U.S. in Panama in 1989? If the U.S. claimed noble aims and getting rid of a criminal in Panama’s government, how far different are the Russian claims that the Crimeans have a right to dissociate from a criminal gang in Kiev and to do so by a peaceful vote? Whose actions are milder, those of the Russians in Crimea or those of the U.S. in Panama? Whose actions are more aggressive, those of the Russians in Crimea or those of the U.S. in Panama? It may be that the Russians will invade Ukraine itself, in which case they will be open to much greater and more severe criticism. For the moment, we are addressing Crimea.

There is a difference between Panama and Crimea in that Crimea has voted to join the Russian Federation whereas Panama was a separate country and remains so. However, the U.S., having once invaded the country, obviously has reserved its option, by violence if necessary, to make and unmake Panama’s government at its will and according to its interests.

Seen against this comparison, the statements being made by top U.S. officials or former officials like Hillary Clinton, that Putin is a new Hitler, are wild exaggerations. If Russia has violated international law through its activities surrounding the Crimean vote, as the warmongers in the U.S. shout, how much more did Bush’s invasion of Panama violate international law? And, by the way, how could Bush invade Panama and then inform Congress when it is Congress that must declare war? And how could Bush invade Panama without a U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing it? This U.S. invasion was not even a case of applying the already-expansive Monroe Doctrine, for there was no foreign force invading this hemisphere.

I have not explained why Bush invaded Panama or why the U.S. was so concerned about Noriega in the years preceding that invasion. I have limited the discussion to one question, which is this. Who has been more aggressive, George H.W. Bush in Panama or Vladimir Putin in Crimea? I think it’s evident that Bush was far more aggressive.

Before too many U.S. officials get too upset over Putin, before they absorb too much of the neocon warmongering nonsense and exaggerations, before they lead the U.S. into dangerous confrontations for which there is no need, before they shock the world’s economy with armed confrontations, it would pay them on behalf of Americans in this land to study their own history as well as that of Russia and to gain some much needed perspective so that they can behave with at least some degree of maturity and statesman-like wisdom.

The time is long past for those in Washington and throughout this land who understand and despise the neocon ideas to stand up against them and marginalize them. The neocons should be viewed, not as a constraint on appropriate political actions and responses, but as a spent moral force lacking in moral standing that has been wrong time and again in recommending actions that supposedly benefitted Americans but in reality have dragged this country further and further down.

Remaking the world, freeing peoples, playing global saviour, acting as the world’s policeman, and attempting to be the world’s conscience have all got to be seen as bad and wrong for any state. States cannot do any of these things without becoming monsters of power who are creatures of their own interests and their own bureaucracies who oppress the people they rule. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Syria should all attest to that. Even the Vietnam War should attest to that.

A  state that has the power to do supposedly good things will invariably have the power to do very bad things, and it will. This is both basic human nature and the basic outcome of bureaucratic governments. Power corrupts. Of equal importance is that any such state will consist of bureaucracies that do the actual ruling, and they become self-perpetuating and separated from the interests of the people for whom they are supposedly doing good. Instead, they become unjust, out for themselves, corrupt, slow to act, inconsistent in their actions, and impervious to accountability.

The basic neocon idea is that of an expanding U.S. hegemony according to U.S. political ideas and blueprints. The idea is a monopoly of power, a superpower. This is the basic idea of empire, and it is both bad and wrong, practically and morally. A monopoly on power is the wrong way to strive for the good. The good needs to be constantly discovered and re-discovered at a decentralized level, within each person’s mind and conscience. A person’s own life and willing associations with others provide more than ample scope for challenging a person to figure out what is good and bad as well as what is right and wrong. No one person and certainly no one powerful state knows the good or can achieve it. The good is not provided in any blueprint. It is always a work in progress, dependent on local and individual details and conditions that are unknown to state powers. The attempts by states to achieve the abstract good must fail. They are going against the nature of the human condition.

America has a very serious problem, which is that both parties stand for the empire and the neocon ideas are very much tied in with the ideas that ground the empire. Right now, the empire is viewed by far too many people as good and right. As long as those who might separate themselves from neocon ideas and criticize them strenuously remain locked in support of the empire and/or reluctant to take issue with it, both parties are going to be tools of neocon thinking.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff