Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

If there were any doubts that Hillary Clinton favors a neoconservative foreign policy, her performance at Thursday’s debate should have laid them to rest. In every meaningful sense, she is a neocon and – if she becomes President – Americans should expect more global tensions and conflicts in pursuit of the neocons’ signature goal of “regime change” in countries that get in their way.

Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

So, in defending her role in the Libyan “regime change,” Clinton called the slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “genocidal” though that is a gross exaggeration of Gaddafi’s efforts to beat back Islamic militants in 2011. But her approach fits with what the neocons do. They realize that almost no one will dare challenge such a characterization because to do so opens you to accusations of being a “Gaddafi apologist.”

Similarly, before the Iraq War, the neocons knew that they could level pretty much any charge against Saddam Hussein no matter how false or absurd, knowing that it would go uncontested in mainstream political and media circles. No one wanted to be a “Saddam apologist.”

Clinton, like the neocons, also shows selective humanitarian outrage. For instance, she laments the suffering of Israelis under crude (almost never lethal) rocket fire from Gaza but shows next to no sympathy for Palestinians being slaughtered by sophisticated (highly lethal) Israeli missiles and bombs.

She talks about the need for “safe zones” or “no-fly zones” for Syrians opposed to another demonized enemy, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, but not for the people of Gaza who face the wrath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Yes, I do still support a no-fly zone [in Syria] because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and have some place that they can be safe,” Clinton said. But she showed no such empathy for Palestinians defenseless against Israel’s “mowing the grass” operations against men, women and children trapped in Gaza.

In Clinton’s (and the neocons’) worldview, the Israelis are the aggrieved victims and the Palestinians the heartless aggressors. Referring to the Gaza rocket fire, she said: “I can tell you right now I have been there with Israeli officials going back more than 25 years that they do not seek this kind of attacks. They do not invite the rockets raining down on their towns and villages. They do not believe that there should be a constant incitement by Hamas aided and abetted by Iran against Israel. …

“So, I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat, terrorist attack, rockets coming at you. You have a right to defend yourself.”

Ignoring History

Clinton ignored the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the 1940s when Israeli terrorist organizations engaged in massacres to drive Palestinians from their ancestral lands and murdered British officials who were responsible for governing the territory. Israeli encroachment on Palestinian lands has continued to the present day.

But Clinton framed the conflict entirely along the propaganda lines of the Israeli government: “Remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people. And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza. So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.”

So, Clinton made clear – both at the debate and in her recent AIPAC speech – that she is fully in line with the neocon reverence for Israel and eager to take out any government or group that Israel puts on its enemies list. While waxing rhapsodic about the U.S.-Israeli relationship – promising to take it “to the next level” – Clinton vows to challenge Syria, Iran, Russia and other countries that have resisted or obstructed the neocon/Israeli “wish list” for “regime change.”

In response to Clinton’s Israel-pandering, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who once worked on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, did the unthinkable in American politics. He called out Clinton for her double standards on Israel-Palestine and suggested that Netanyahu may not be the greatest man on earth.

“You gave a major speech to AIPAC,” Sanders said, “and you barely mentioned the Palestinians. … All that I am saying is we cannot continue to be one-sided. There are two sides to the issue. … There comes a time when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

But in Hillary Clinton’s mind, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is essentially one-sided. During her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month, she depicted Israel as entirely an innocent victim in the Mideast conflicts.

“As we gather here, three evolving threats — Iran’s continued aggression, a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, and the growing effort to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage — are converging to make the U.S.-Israel alliance more indispensable than ever,” she declared.

“The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our shared values. … This is especially true at a time when Israel faces brutal terrorist stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home. Parents worry about letting their children walk down the street. Families live in fear.”

Yet, Clinton made no reference to Palestinian parents who worry about their children walking down the street or playing on a beach and facing the possibility of sudden death from an Israeli drone or warplane. Instead, she scolded Palestinian adults. “Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families,” she said.

Then, Clinton promised to put her future administration at the service of the Israeli government. Clinton said, “One of the first things I’ll do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to visit the White House. And I will send a delegation from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to Israel for early consultations. Let’s also expand our collaboration beyond security.”

Pleasing Phrases

In selling her neocon policies to the American public, Clinton puts the military aspects in pleasing phrases, like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” Yet, what she means by that is that as President she will invade Syria and push “regime change,” following much the same course that she used to persuade a reluctant President Obama to invade Libya in 2011.

The Libyan operation was sold as a “humanitarian” mission to protect innocent civilians though Gaddafi was targeting Islamic militants much as he claimed at the time and was not engaging in any mass slaughter of civilians. Clinton also knew that the European allies, such as France, had less than noble motives in wanting to take out Gaddafi.

As Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal explained to her, the French were concerned that Gaddafi was working to develop a pan-African currency which would have given Francophone African countries greater freedom from their former colonial master and would undermine French economic dominance of those ex-colonies.

In an April 2, 2011 email, Blumenthal informed Clinton that sources close to one of Gaddafi sons reported that Gaddafi’s government had accumulated 143 tons of gold and a similar amount of silver that “was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency” that would be an alternative to the French franc.

Blumenthal added that “this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.” Sarkozy also wanted a greater share of Libya’s oil production and to increase French influence in North Africa, Blumenthal wrote.

But few Americans would rally to a war fought to keep North Africa under France’s thumb. So, the winning approach was to demonize Gaddafi with salacious rumors about him giving Viagra to his troops so they could rape more, a ludicrous allegation that was raised by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who also claimed that Gaddafi’s snipers were intentionally shooting children.

With Americans fed a steady diet of such crude propaganda, there was little serious debate about the wisdom of Clinton’s Libyan “regime change.” Meanwhile, other emails show that Clinton’s advisers were contemplating how to exploit Gaddafi’s overthrow as the dramatic moment to declare a “Clinton Doctrine” built on using “smart power.”

On Oct. 20, 2011, when U.S.-backed rebels captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him, Secretary of State Clinton couldn’t contain her glee. Paraphrasing a famous Julius Caesar quote, she declared about Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died.”

But this U.S.-organized “regime change” quickly turned sour as old tribal rivalries, which Gaddafi had contained, were unleashed. Plus, it turned out that Gaddafi’s warnings that many of the rebels were Islamic militants turned out to be true. On Sept. 11, 2012, one extremist militia overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Soon, Libya slid into anarchy and Western nations abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. President Obama now terms the Libyan fiasco the biggest mistake of his presidency. But Clinton refuses to be chastened by the debacle, much as she appeared to learn nothing from her support for the Iraq invasion in 2003.

The Libyan Mirage

During Thursday’s debate – instead of joining Obama in recognition of the Libyan failure – Clinton acted as if she had overseen some glowing success: “Well, let me say I think we did a great deal to help the Libyan people after Gaddafi’s demise. … We helped them hold two successful elections, something that is not easy, which they did very well because they had a pent-up desire to try to chart their own future after 42 years of dictatorship. I was very proud of that. …

“We also worked to help them set up their government. We sent a lot of American experts there. We offered to help them secure their borders, to train a new military. They, at the end, when it came to security issues, … did not want troops from any other country, not just us, European or other countries, in Libya.

“And so we were caught in a very difficult position. They could not provide security on their own, which we could see and we told them that, but they didn’t want to have others helping to provide that security. And the result has been a clash between different parts of the country, terrorists taking up some locations in the country.”

But that is exactly the point. Like the earlier neocon-driven “regime change” in Iraq, the “regime change” obsession blinds the neocons from recognizing that not only are these operations violations of basic international law regarding sovereignty of other nations but the invasions unleash powerful internal rivalries that neocons, who know little about the inner workings of these countries, soon find they can’t control.

Yet, America’s neocons are so arrogant and so influential that they simply move from one catastrophe to the next like a swarm of locust spreading chaos and death around the globe. They also adapt readily to changes in the political climate.

That’s why some savvy neocons, such as the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, have endorsed Clinton, who The New York Times reported has become “the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

Kagan told the Times, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Now with Clinton’s election seemingly within reach, the neocons are even more excited about how they can get back to work achieving Syrian “regime change,” overturning Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and – what is becoming their ultimate goal – destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and seeking “regime change” in Moscow.

After all, by helping Assad bring some stability to Syria and assisting Obama in securing the Iranian nuclear deal, Russian President Vladimir Putin has become what the neocons view as the linchpin of resistance to their “regime change” goals. Pull Putin down, the thinking goes, and the neocons can resume checking off their to-do list of Israel’s adversaries: Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.

And what could possibly go wrong by destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia and forcing some disruptive “regime change”?

By making Russia’s economy scream and instigating a Maidan-style revolt in Moscow’s Red Square, the neocons see their geopolitical path being cleared, but what they don’t take into account is that the likely successor to Putin would not be some malleable drunk like the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin but, far more likely, a hardline nationalist who might be a lot more careless with the nuclear codes than Putin.

But, hey, when has a neocon “regime change” scheme veered off into a dangerous and unanticipated direction?

A Neocon True-Believer

In Thursday’s debate, Hillary Clinton showed how much she has become a neocon true-believer. Despite the catastrophic “regime changes” in Iraq and Libya, she vowed to invade Syria, although she dresses up that reality in pretty phrases like “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.” She also revived the idea of increasing the flow of weapons to “moderate” rebels although they, in reality, mostly fight under the command umbrella of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.

Clinton also suggested that the Syria mess can be blamed on President Obama’s rejection of her recommendations in 2011 to authorize a more direct U.S. military intervention. “Nobody stood up to Assad and removed him,” Clinton said, “and we have had a far greater disaster in Syria than we are currently dealing with right now in Libya.”

In other words, Clinton still harbors the “regime change” goal in Syria. But the problem always was that the anti-Assad forces were penetrated by Al Qaeda and what is now called the Islamic State. The more likely result from Clinton’s goal of removing Assad would be the collapse of the Syrian security forces and a victory for Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State.

If that were to happen, the horrific situation in Syria would become cataclysmic. Millions of Syrians – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, secularists and other “infidels” – would have to flee the beheading swords of these terror groups. That might well force a full-scale U.S. and European invasion of Syria with the bloody outcome probably similar to the disastrous Iraq War.

The only reasonable hope for Syria is for the Assad regime and the less radical Sunni oppositionists to work out some power-sharing agreement, stabilize most of the country, neutralize to some degree the jihadists, and then hold elections, letting the Syrian people decide whether “Assad must go!” – not the U.S. government. But that’s not what Clinton wants.

Perhaps even more dangerous, Clinton’s bellicose rhetoric suggests that she would eagerly move into a dangerous Cold War confrontation with Russia under the upside-down propaganda theme blaming tensions in Eastern Europe on “Russian aggression,” not NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 which ousted an elected president and touched off a civil war.

That coup, which followed neocon fury at Putin for his helping Obama avert U.S. bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, was largely orchestrated by neocons associated with the U.S. government, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), Sen. John McCain and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman.

After the violent coup, when the people of Crimea voted by 96 percent to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. government and Western media deemed that a “Russian invasion” and when ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine rose up in resistance to the new authorities in Kiev that became “Russian aggression.”

NATO on the Move

Though President Obama should know better – and I’m told that he does know better – he has succumbed this time to pressure to go along with what he calls the Washington “playbook” of saber-rattling and militarism. NATO is moving more and more combat troops up to the Russian border while Washington has organized punishing economic sanctions aimed at disrupting the Russian economy.

Hillary Clinton appears fully onboard with the neocon goal of grabbing the Big Enchilada, “regime change” in Moscow. Rather than seeing the world as it is, she continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope in line with all the anti-Russian propaganda and the demonization of Putin, whom Clinton has compared to Hitler.

Supporting NATO’s military buildup on Russia’s border, Clinton said, “With Russia being more aggressive, making all kinds of intimidating moves toward the Baltic countries, we’ve seen what they’ve done in eastern Ukraine, we know how they want to rewrite the map of Europe, it is not in our interests [to reduce U.S. support for NATO]. Think of how much it would cost if Russia’s aggression were not deterred because NATO was there on the front lines making it clear they could not move forward.”

Though Clinton’s anti-Russian delusions are shared by many powerful people in Official Washington, they are no more accurate than the other claims about Iraq’s WMD, Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops, the humanitarian need to invade Syria, the craziness about Iran being the principal source of terrorism (when it is the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks and other Sunni powers that have bred Al Qaeda and the Islamic State), and the notion that the Palestinians are the ones picking on the Israelis, not the other way around.

However, Clinton’s buying into the neocon propaganda about Russia may be the most dangerous – arguably existential – threat that a Clinton presidency would present to the world. Yes, she may launch U.S. military strikes against the Syrian government (which could open the gates of Damascus to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State); yes, she might push Iran into renouncing the nuclear agreement (and putting the Israeli/neocon goal to bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran back on the table); yes, she might make Obama’s progressive critics long for his more temperate presidency.

But Clinton’s potential escalation of the new Cold War with Russia could be both the most costly and conceivably the most suicidal feature of a Clinton-45 presidency. Unlike her times as Secretary of State, when Obama could block her militaristic schemes, there will be no one to stop her if she is elected President, surrounded by likeminded neocon advisers.

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?’]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Related Video:

‘Corruption’ as a Propaganda Weapon

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propaganda – and the careerism of too many writers – that I now become suspicious whenever the mainstream media trumpets some sensational story aimed at some “designated villain.”

Far too often, this sort of “journalism” is just a forerunner to the next “regime change” scheme, dirtying up or delegitimizing a foreign leader before the inevitable advent of a “color revolution” organized by “democracy-promoting” NGOs often with money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy or some neoliberal financier like George Soros.

We are now seeing what looks like a new preparatory phase for the next round of “regime changes” with corruption allegations aimed at former Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The new anti-Putin allegations – ballyhooed by the UK Guardian and other outlets – are particularly noteworthy because the so-called “Panama Papers” that supposedly implicate him in offshore financial dealings never mention his name.

Or as the Guardian writes: “Though the president’s name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage. The documents suggest Putin’s family has benefited from this money – his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend.”

Note, if you will, the lack of specificity and the reliance on speculation: “a pattern”; “seemingly”; “suggest”; “appear.” Indeed, if Putin were not already a demonized figure in the Western media, such phrasing would never pass an editor’s computer screen. Indeed, the only point made in declarative phrasing is that “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records.”

A British media-watch publication, the Off-Guardian, which criticizes much of the work done at The Guardian, headlined its article on the Putin piece as “the Panama Papers cause Guardian to collapse into self-parody.”

But whatever the truth about Putin’s “corruption” or Lula’s, the journalistic point is that the notion of objectivity has long since been cast aside in favor of what’s useful as propaganda for Western interests.

Some of those Western interests now are worried about the growth of the BRICS economic system – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – as a competitor to the West’s G-7 and the International Monetary Fund. After all, control of the global financial system has been central to American power in the post-World War II world – and rivals to the West’s monopoly are not welcome.

What the built-in bias against these and other “unfriendly” governments means, in practical terms, is that one standard applies to a Russia or a Brazil, while a more forgiving measure is applied to the corruption of a U.S. or European leader.

Take, for instance, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s millions of dollars in payments in speaking fees from wealthy special interests that knew she was a good bet to become the next U.S. president. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Clinton Stalls on Goldman-Sachs Speeches.”]

Or, similarly, the millions upon millions of dollars invested in super-PACS for Clinton, Sen. Ted Cruz and other presidential hopefuls. That might look like corruption from an objective standard but is treated as just a distasteful aspect of the U.S. political process.

But imagine for a minute if Putin had been paid millions of dollars for brief speeches before powerful corporations, banks and interest groups doing business with the Kremlin. That would be held up as de facto proof of his illicit greed and corruption.

Losing Perspective

Also, when it’s a demonized foreign leader, any “corruption” will do, however minor. For example, in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s denounced Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for his choice of eyewear: “The dictator in designer glasses,” declared Reagan, even as Nancy Reagan was accepting free designer gowns and free renovations of the White House funded by oil and gas interests.

Or, the “corruption” for a demonized leader can be a modest luxury, such as Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s “sauna” in his personal residence, a topic that got front-page treatment in The New York Times and other Western publications seeking to justify the violent coup that drove Yanukovych from office in February 2014.

Incidentally, both Ortega and Yanukovych had been popularly elected but were still targeted by the U.S. government and its operatives with violent destabilization campaigns. In the 1980s, the CIA-organized Nicaraguan Contra war killed some 30,000 people, while the U.S.-orchestrated “regime change” in Ukraine sparked a civil war that has left some 10,000 people dead. Of course, in both cases, Official Washington blamed Moscow for all the trouble.

In both cases, too, the politicians and operatives who gained power as a result of the conflicts were arguably more corrupt than the Nicaraguan Sandinistas or Yanukovych’s government. The Nicaraguan Contras, whose violence helped pave the way for the 1990 election of U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro, were deeply implicated in cocaine trafficking. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.”]

Today, the U.S.-supported Ukrainian government is wallowing in corruption so deep that it has provoked a new political crisis.[See Consortiumnews’com’s “Reality Peeks Through in Ukraine.”]

Ironically, one of the politicians actually named in the Panama Papers for having established a shadowy offshore account is the U.S.-backed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, although he got decidedly second-billing to the unnamed Putin. (Poroshenko denied there was anything improper in his offshore financial arrangements.)

Double Standards

Mainstream Western journalism no longer even tries to apply common standards to questions about corruption. If you’re a favored government, there might be lamentations about the need for more “reform” – which often means slashing pensions for the elderly and cutting social programs for the poor – but if you’re a demonized leader, then the only permissible answer is criminal indictment and/or “regime change.”

One stark example of these double standards is the see-no-evil attitude toward the corruption of Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who is touted endlessly in the Western media as the paragon of Ukrainian good governance and reform. The documented reality, however, is that Jaresko enriched herself through her control of a U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund that was supposed to help the people of Ukraine build their economy.

According to the terms of the $150 million investment fund created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Jaresko’s compensation was supposed to be capped at $150,000 a year, a pay package that many Americans would envy. But it was not enough for Jaresko, who first simply exceeded the limit by hundreds of thousands of dollars and then moved her compensation off-books as she amassed total annual pay of $2 million or more.

The documentation of this scheming is clear. I have published multiple stories citing the evidence of both her excessive compensation and her legal strategies for covering up evidence of alleged wrongdoing. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine’s Finance Minister Got Rich” and “Carpetbagging Crony Capitalism in Ukraine.”]

Despite the evidence, not a single mainstream Western news outlet has followed up on this information even as Jaresko is hailed as a “reform” candidate for Ukrainian prime minister.

This disinterest is similar to the blinders that The New York Times and other major Western newspapers put on when they were assessing whether Ukrainian President Yanukovych was ousted in a coup in February 2014 or just wandered off and forgot to return.

In a major “investigative” piece, the Times concluded there was no coup in Ukraine while ignoring the evidence of a coup, such as the intercepted phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who they would put into power. “Yats is the guy,” said Nuland – and surprise, surprise, Arseniy Yatsenyuk ended up as prime minister.

The Times also ignored the observation of George Friedman, president of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, who noted that the Ukraine coup was “the most blatant coup in history.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine.”]

The Propaganda Weapon

The other advantage of “corruption” as a propaganda weapon to discredit certain leaders is that we all assume that there is plenty of corruption in governments as well as in the private sector all around the world. Alleging corruption is like shooting large fish crowded into a small barrel. Granted, some barrels might be more crowded than others but the real decision is whose barrel you choose.

That’s part of the reason why the U.S. government has spread around hundreds of millions of dollars to finance “journalism” organizations, train political activists and support “non-governmental organizations” that promote U.S. policy goals inside targeted countries. For instance, before the Feb. 22, 2014 coup in Ukraine, there were scores of such operations in the country financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose budget from Congress exceeds $100 million a year.

But NED, which has been run by neocon Carl Gershman since its founding in 1983, is only part of the picture. You have other propaganda fronts operating under the umbrella of the State Department and USAID. Last year, USAID issued a fact sheet summarizing its work financing friendly journalists around the globe, including “journalism education, media business development, capacity building for supportive institutions, and strengthening legal-regulatory environments for free media.”

USAID estimated its budget for “media strengthening programs in over 30 countries” at $40 million annually, including aiding “independent media organizations and bloggers in over a dozen countries,” In Ukraine before the coup, USAID offered training in “mobile phone and website security,” which sounds a bit like an operation to thwart the local government’s intelligence gathering, an ironic position for the U.S. with its surveillance obsession, including prosecuting whistleblowers based on evidence that they talked to journalists.

USAID, working with billionaire George Soros’s Open Society, also funds the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which engages in “investigative journalism” that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption. The USAID-funded OCCRP also collaborates with Bellingcat, an online investigative website founded by blogger Eliot Higgins.

Higgins has spread misinformation on the Internet, including discredited claims implicating the Syrian government in the sarin attack in 2013 and directing an Australian TV news crew to what looked to be the wrong location for a video of a BUK anti-aircraft battery as it supposedly made its getaway to Russia after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014.

Despite his dubious record of accuracy, Higgins has gained mainstream acclaim, in part, because his “findings” always match up with the propaganda theme that the U.S. government and its Western allies are peddling. Though most genuinely independent bloggers are ignored by the mainstream media, Higgins has found his work touted by both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In other words, the U.S. government has a robust strategy for deploying direct and indirect agents of influence. Indeed, during the first Cold War, the CIA and the old U.S. Information Agency refined the art of “information warfare,” including pioneering some of its current features like having ostensibly “independent” entities and cut-outs present U.S. propaganda to a cynical public that would reject much of what it hears from government but may trust “citizen journalists” and “bloggers.”

But the larger danger from this perversion of journalism is that it sets the stage for “regime changes” that destabilize whole countries, thwart real democracy (i.e., the will of the people), and engender civil warfare. Today’s neoconservative dream of mounting a “regime change” in Moscow is particularly dangerous to the future of both Russia and the world.

Regardless of what you think about President Putin, he is a rational political leader whose legendary sangfroid makes him someone who is not prone to emotional decisions. His leadership style also appeals to the Russian people who overwhelmingly favor him, according to public opinion polls.

While the American neocons may fantasize that they can generate enough economic pain and political dissension inside Russia to achieve Putin’s removal, their expectation that he will be followed by a pliable leader like the late President Boris Yeltsin, who will let U.S. operatives back in to resume plundering Russia’s riches, is almost certainly a fantasy.

The far more likely possibility is that – if a “regime change” could somehow be arranged – Putin would be replaced by a hard-line nationalist who might think seriously about unleashing Russia’s nuclear arsenal if the West again tries to defile Mother Russia. For me, it’s not Putin who’s the worry; it’s the guy after Putin.

So, while legitimate questions about Putin’s “corruption” – or that of any other political leader – should be pursued, the standards of evidence should not be lowered just because he or anyone else is a demonized figure in the West. There should be single not double standards.

Western media outrage about “corruption” should be expressed as loudly against political and business leaders in the U.S. or other G-7 countries as it is toward those in the BRICS.

Related Video:

Brussels Bombing Psyop a Victory for the Ruling Elite and Global Police State

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Bernie Suarez

Source: Waking Times

There are many signs pointing to a false flag attack in Brussels on 3-22-16. Independent and alternative media, as usual, has been right on top of the story catching many of the usual oddities, lies and coincidences which are characteristic of false flags and are now piling on top of each other as they always do. And here’s another thing everyone should take note of; something we also observed during the Paris attacks on 11-13-15. As we saw in the Paris attacks, once again we’re seeing a “global” component to the “reaction” phase of the usual problem-reaction-solution dialectic employed by the controllers. Look for it. Problem at point A, subsequent “reaction” to the problem at point B, all the way on the other side of the world. This then leads to a “solution” that applies to both point A and B. This also serves to endorse the illusion that the bogeymen, in this case ISIS of course, involved in the Brussels attack are somehow everywhere at once.

One of the key purposes of this event, among other purposes like maintaining an excuse for U.S. military intervention in Syria, is to reinforce the need for a global police which is being sold as a “global solution” to a “global problem.” This global police state is a very clear agenda of the U.S., NATO and the U.N. This entire event is also designed to push the Authorization for Unlimited Military Force (AUMF) the Pentagon wants so badly and it’s a perfect quick and easy event in NATO’s and the European Union’s home turf to push for all of these goals at once. What am I talking about?

Following the Brussels “attacks,” which were immediately and deliberately linked to “ISIS,” we saw how in the city of Atlanta, Georgia halfway across the world, police were “on edge” and completely evacuated the Atlanta airport because of an unattended “package” they thought could be related or connected to the “ISIS” Brussels attacks. Though the whole thing turned out to be nothing at all, make no mistake this is part of the mass conditioning that comes with the entire quest for global police and perpetuation of the ISIS psyop. Even the officers involved in the airport evacuations I’m sure got caught up in the hysteria simply following protocol. Can you imagine how easy it would be for someone to purposely leave an unattended package just to extract the reaction, fear and hysteria from the masses while at the same time endorsing the idea of “global terrorism” and conditioning the masses to accept the idea of a need for a “global police.” One tiny fake package in Atlanta accomplishes all of this and more. And it wasn’t just Atlanta caught in the psyop, in Denver we saw “evacuations” as well:

Atlanta’s airport was briefly evacuated on Wednesday over a suspicious package while U.S. law enforcement agencies and travelers were on edge a day after deadly suicide bombings by Islamist militants rocked Brussels.

Passengers were ordered out of public areas of the domestic terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the United States’ busiest by passenger volume, but the site was quickly cleared and operations resumed, airport officials said.

Parts of Denver airport were also evacuated on Tuesday, hours after at least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train, as airports across the United States tightened security.

As you can see, the hysteria wasn’t just in Atlanta. Notice the article doesn’t even bother to discuss what exactly happened in Denver. Was it also a “suspicious package” there? Was it a phone call from ISIS? Who cares, right? Because apparently the only thing that matters is that it’s part of the “reaction” phase; and the true answer is, this is part of the mass conditioning for the new world order’s global police state which is now being born with every ISIS “attack.”

Historic Mass Conditioning

So for the first time in human history an event at point A in one side of the world forces a Pavlov-style reaction at point B, on the opposite side of the world; even though the 2 events (in the organic reality) have no association with each other other than the conditioned response. The conditioning of the masses can be compared to Pavlov’s dog experiment. In the Pavlov dog salivation experiment, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was able to demonstrate that dogs can be conditioned to organically react a certain way by simply associating one artificial stimulus enough times with a natural stimulus. Eventually Pavlov demonstrated that you wouldn’t need the natural stimulus (food) to elicit the conditioned response (salivation) if you provide the artificial stimulus (a bell).

If you understand Pavlov’s classical conditioning then you should understand the mass conditioning of the masses going on right now via the mainstream media and politicians. The Brussels attacks is no different from the Paris “attacks” of November of 2015. Isn’t it a coincidence that less than a week ago the mainstream media brought back the Paris attack “story” as if to prepare the masses subconsciously for the upcoming Brussels attacks in Belgium? How about the fact the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan basically subliminally announced the upcoming attacks 4 days prior? Are we surprised given that Erdogan’s Turkey is right now the primary lifeline for ISIS purchasing their oil and supporting fighters with resources in the Turkey-Syrian border while blowing up Russian planes that interfere with that mission? This has all the markings of a mass psychological operation.

First of all, we don’t know who planted those explosives in the Brussels airport or subway system and we don’t know why or who told them to do it. With ISIS being credited, that alone is proof as far as I’m concerned that this is a state crime funded by NATO countries. We must all shed the myth that ISIS fighters are freely doing what they want, independent of the will of the states that created, funded, trained and armed them. Think about this. No one trains fighters only to let them go away and fight for someone else. Whoever trained these guys is still giving the orders or they wouldn’t have wasted their resources training these guys. Just like in the U.S. military, you wouldn’t train a Marine in boot camp, show them how to survive and offer weapons training only to watch them leave the Marines after boot camp and fight elsewhere. Yet this is precisely what Americans are asked to believe every day by the mainstream media. We’re told to believe these fighters just so happened to switch sides AFTER being trained to fight for the “Free Syrian Army.”

If it wasn’t that ISIS is a mercenary group employed by NATO countries, they’d be long gone by now. The only reason ISIS is still “alive” in our consciousness is because nations like Turkey, US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are keeping them alive both literally and figurative using their controlled media. ISIS is therefore alive because they (U.S., NATO and company) want and need them to be alive for political reasons. No ISIS means no Syria, no PNAC Middle East plan completion, no fear, no war on terror, no global police and no stripping away of individual rights, it’s that simple.

Incidentally the location of the explosions in Brussels Belgium is immensely convenient. There’s no question that the headquarters of NATO and the European Union would be a perfect place to execute and control a false flag like this. This is also the perfect false flag to quickly put together during this election year campaign hysteria pause. It likely took very little coordination and effort requiring a couple of explosives and a patsy or 2. Here’s the sequence as I see it: Boom! ISIS did it, lockdown airports in the U.S. due to an unattended package, goals and conditioning reinforced by media, back to election campaign with the candidates calling for “solution” to ISIS.

This is the part where ALL politicians running for president get to offer their “solution” to the same artificially created “problem.” In other words, this is a win-win for the ruling elite. And in this sense the Brussels attack is already part of the election campaign itself. Be on the look out for candidates endorsing ideas “global solutions” to ISIS.

Finally, I call on readers to observe how these false flags are getting easier and easier for them to do. I’m sure there was a time when a false flag attack like this took years to prepare (think 9/11). Now we are seeing quick attacks being strung together with minimal preparation, attacks which nonetheless have long-lasting implications for freedom, the rise of the global police, obtaining their AUMF license to kill, and obtaining all the excuses they need to justify U.S. aggression in Syria in hopes of forcibly removing their democratically elected president.

Remember practice makes perfect. So as they get better and more efficient at pulling these false flag attacks, let us get better and more efficient at diagnosing them and spreading the word. I believe both phenomenons are happening simultaneously. Hopefully, the ability of alternative and independent media to quickly diagnose these attacks by simply observing the process of problem-reaction-solution will help us turn a corner in changing minds at the highest level and thus effect much needed change sooner rather than later.

The Wickedness of [US] Foreign Policy

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Sheldon Richman

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

If you want to see how inhumane people can be, just watch those who make and execute foreign policy. We could spend all day discussing the cruelties that politicians and bureaucrats commit against people who live inside the United States. Think how many are caged like wild animals because they manufacture, sell, or consume disapproved substances; gamble where government has forbade it; traded sexual services for money; possessed a gun they weren’t “supposed” to possess; etc. ad infinitum. Naturally, America leads the world in locking up people.

But at least the policy of mass imprisonment gets increasing attention. Subject to far less scrutiny is how America’s (mis)leaders, (mis)representatives and public (self-)servants treat foreigners, especially those with dark skins and a still-unfamiliar religion. When we talk about foreign policy, how easy it is to get wrapped up in abstractions like empire,intervention, nonintervention, and kinetic military action. These are important concepts to understand, of course, but foreign-policy conversations often become sterile examinations of “policy,” when what we need is a full awareness of the harm to individual human beings, the destruction of their families, homes, communities, and societies. These persons are the victims of our rulers’ geopolitical stratagems, which seemly outrank all other considerations. Yet each victim has a story embodying unique relationships and aspirations, a story that is permanently changed by an American cluster bomb, drone-launched missile, or special-ops mission.

The best that can be said of the perpetrators of this carnage and social devastation is that they are guilty of gross negligence. Many of their acts, however, cross into the territory of premeditated murder and the infliction of mayhem with malice aforethought.

One need not look hard for the most egregious examples taking place right at this moment. In Yemen the Obama administration gives indispensable material support to Saudi Arabia’s barbaric war — war ought not to require a qualifier like barbaric, but it seems necessary these days — on the poorest population in the region. The U.S.-facilitated starvation blockade and cluster-bombing take an untold number of Yemeni lives while devastating the social order. Policymakers — a euphemism for the architects of devastation — can rationalize this cruelty in geopolitical terms — the Houthis, who incidentally are fighting al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadis, are (falsely) said to be instruments of Iran — but the fact remains that individual persons who did no harm to anyone are being slaughtered and starved with the help of American politicians and military bureaucrats.

Or how about Syria? U.S. conduct carries out a seemingly incoherent policy of simultaneously targeting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and one of his chief adversaries, the Islamic State, while helping another Islamist group, al-Nusra Front, that has pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as head of al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Estimates of the death total in Syria’s civil war reach as high as 340,000, a number that represents the toll at the hands of both government and rebel forces. (The total is sometimes invidiously attributed to Assad’s military alone.) The injured and refugees are probably uncountable.

What must be understood is that most of these deaths, injuries, and dispossessions would probably not have occurred had the Obama administration — most especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — not early on intensified the civil war by declaring Assad’s regime “illegitimate,” demanding that he “go” (i.e., die), and overseeing the transfer weapons and jihadi fighters from Benghazi, Libya. While doing all this, the Obama administration was thwarting promising efforts toward a negotiated settlement, which might have stopped or at least reduced the killing of innocent persons. For details see these three articles by the excellent investigate journalist Jonathan Marshall.

And then there’s Libya itself, which Clinton boasts is an example of “smart power at its best.” In 2011 she had egg on her face because she was on the wrong side of the Arab Spring, having defended Egypt’s military dictator, Hosni Mubarak, as a family friend and trusted world leader to the bitter end while throngs of aggrieved Egyptians were in the streets demanding his exit. Needing to clean up her image (perhaps in preparation for her quest for the presidency), she along with administration national-security VIPs Samantha Power and Susan Rice persuaded a reluctant Obama that the residents of Benghazi had to be saved from Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged genocidal designs. The only problem was that Gaddafi had no genocidal designs. (Also see this and this.) And in a classic exhibition of mission-creep, the U.S.-led NATO air campaign went from protecting Benghazi to changing the regime in Tripoli, prompting Clinton to gloated, “We came. We saw. He died.” (Gaddafi was killed extrajudicially, reportedly in a most gruesome manner.)

Since the U.S. intervention, Libya has been wracked by sectarian civil war — even the Islamic State now holds territory there — prompting many Libyans to flee to Europe, which now has to contend with a growing refugee crisis. As noted, the Libyan power vacuum, featuring the unlocking of Gaddafi’s arsenal of heavy weapons, helped to boost the Islamist rebel militias in Syria, to the delight of U.S. allies Turkey (which fears the Kurds) and Saudi Arabia (which fears Iran and the Shi’ites). After the nightmare in Iraq, one has to wonder what Clinton was thinking. The closest thing we have to an answer is from then-Secretary of War Robert Gates, an opponent of the intervention, who said, “We were playing it by ear.” (And let’s not forget: destabilization itself can be an objective.)

Of course we could point to Iraq, George W. Bush’s invasion of which in 2003 set most of the aforementioned mayhem in motion, and Afghanistan, but the story is largely the same: innocent lives are sacrificed to the politicians’ grand agenda. Little people living small lives can’t be allowed to stand in the way.

War, Repression and International Gangsterism: U.S. State Policy From Benghazi to Baltimore

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: CounterPunch.org

A mere two months after clashes between black youth and police in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray while in police custody, President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of twenty-four year old Raymon Carter for his alleged involvement in the torching of a CVS pharmacy. The national government’s intervention into the case had an unmistakable message – if you engage in “unauthorized” forms of resistance – in this case, crimes against property – expect to confront the full power of the national government.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein made it even clearer: “Anyone in the future who participates in a ‘riot’ should know that police, prosecutors and citizens will track them down and send them to prison.”

This aggressive and speedy move on the part of the DOJ to criminalize poor, black kids in Baltimore differed sharply from the DOJ approach to high government officials, armed servants of the state at the local level and the big banks and investment firms. For the officials involved in torture under the Bush Administration, the financial gangsters who engineered the 2008 economic crisis, and the killer cops across the country who have yet to experience one indictment from Obama’s DOJ after months of “investigations,” DOJ-granted impunity has been the operative principle in practice.

But Obama’s DOJ has not been the only state institution involved in providing cover and impunity for repression and criminality in the service of the capitalist oligarchy.

Impunity for State Terrorism: the Real Story of Benghazi

What might seem oppositional and important in the game of U.S. politics is usually insignificant and diversionary. Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the House Select Committee, ostensibly established to conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the events that led to the death of Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. citizens on September 11, 2012, was a case in point.

Despite the supposed acrimony between the two ruling class parties in Congress, an ideological consensus exists around the overall strategic commitment to maintain U.S. global dominance. On that ultimate objective both corporate parties share an interest in shifting public attention away from state policies and actions that demonstrate the state’s absolute commitment to the principle of “by any means necessary” for maintaining and advancing the interests of the White supremacist, patriarchal, colonial/capitalist order.

For example, initially the Republican majority’s decision to launch another investigation into the events of 2012 was met with a considerable amount of consternation on the part of some democrats who saw the investigation as just another effort to sabotage Clinton’s run for the Presidency. However, when the republicans settled on the issue of Clinton’s emails the democrats were concerned that Clinton’s use of a private server might cause some embarrassment for her candidacy, but it was also clear that the hearings were going to be rigged and the real questions related to Benghazi would never be raised.

If the House Committee had really been committed to public accountability and surfacing the truth, there were a number of questions that could have been raised such as: 1) what was the role of the facility that was attacked? Was it a U.S. Consulate, a CIA facility or some other entity? 2) Why were those facilities set up so quickly even before a stable government was established in the aftermath of the destruction of the Libyan state? 3 ) Why were there estimated to be more than twenty CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi just miles from the facility on the night of the attack and what was the mission of those CIA personnel? And 4) Why did the U.S. government contract with an organization to provide security for the facility that had clear ties to Jihadist groups that the U.S. considered as part of the international terrorist networks?

These kinds of questions that would have delved into U.S. involvement in Libya were not raised for two reasons: 1) The Syrian issue – Congress didn’t want the public to focus too much attention on the question of the timeline of U.S. involvement. Although many right-wing republicans were upset that the Obama administration was not more aggressive with more open and direct support for its regime change strategy, everyone in Congress knows that the narrative of reluctant and recent involvement on the part of the Obama administration in the events in Syria is pure fiction. And 2) elements in congress and the Obama administration, with the full collaboration of the corporate press, have suppressed the facts around the mission of the CIA and the role of the State Department in Libya during the period leading to the attack on the two compounds because those activities contravened both U.S. and international law.

Investigative journalist Seymore Hersh revealed that a classified annex to a report prepared by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Benghazi that was not made public, discussed a secret agreement made in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administration in Turkey to run an arms supply line from Libya using arms secured with the overthrow of the Libya state to the so-called rebel forces in Syria. The operation was run by CIA director David Petraeus, and the elements that received support included jihadist groups, including the Al Nusrah Front, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate.

So even though information on the real role of the U.S. in the war in Syria is getting more coverage, the elites in Congress and the Administration were still not interested in calling too much attention to the fact that the U.S. provided material support to groups that it defined as terrorists which technically under U.S. law should have made that assistance prosecutable.

Vice President Joe Biden even stated publically that governments allied with the U.S. and their nationals were supplying arms to elements that they knew were terrorists and U.S. officials knew it:

“They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadist coming from other parts of the world. “

Yet not one of these individuals or government officials, many who travel on a regular basis to the U.S. and other Western nations have been charged or had sanctions applied to them. In fact, in a pathetic and disingenuous comment, Biden claims that even though it was pointed out to those states by U.S. officials that their support was going to extremist jihadists forces – “We could not convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.”

Obviously for the Obama Administration charging them, freezing their bank accounts, slapping sanctions on the government as was done with the governments and individuals in Iran and Russia was out of the question.

This is why for anyone whose vision is not distorted by the myopia of white supremacist, capitalist ideology, the crude class politics of the DOJ’s decision to prosecute the young resisters in Baltimore is so outrageous.

Benghazi is only a symptom of a pattern of criminal activity on the part of U.S. officials from both parties. From the illegal attacks on Iraq and Libya, subversion in Syria and Venezuela, surveillance, police state repression and mass incarceration domestically, coups in Honduras and Haiti, support for genocide in Yemen, and the continued occupation of Palestine, it is clear that what unites the elites of both parties is their unshakable commitment to maintaining the power of the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination as the institutional expressions of concentrated white power for as long as possible.

In the meantime, Raymon Carter is facing years in prison because the state claims it has a right to hunt down and prosecute who it defines as criminals.

But the social world is not static and the balance of forces is shifting. One day using that same logic but informed by an alternative ethical framework that centers real justice, the people will be in a position to hunt down and bring to justice the international colonial gangsters who destroy our earth, torture, exploit and bring death to countless millions.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (CounterPunch Books, 2014). He can be reached atwww.AjamuBaraka.com

Time Is Running Out For Pax Americana’s Apologists

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Reid Mukai

aa-American-Empire-statue-of-liberty-and-military

By Rostisla Ischenko

Source: Dissident Voice

The paradox of the current global crisis is that for the last five years, all relatively responsible and independent nations have made tremendous efforts to save the United States from the financial, economic, military, and political disaster that looms ahead. And this is all despite Washington’s equally systematic moves to destabilize the world order, rightly known as the Pax Americana (“American peace”).

Since policy is not a zero-sum game; i.e., one participant’s loss does not necessarily entail a gain for another, this paradox has a logical explanation. A crisis erupts within any system when there is a discrepancy between its internal structure and the sum total of available resources (that is, those resources will eventually prove inadequate for the system to function normally and in the usual way).

There are at least three basic options for addressing this situation:

Through reform, in which the system’s internal structure evolves in such a way as to better correspond to the available resources.
Through the system’s collapse, in which the same result is achieved via revolution.
Through preservation, in which the inputs threatening the system are eliminated by force, and the relationships within the system are carefully preserved on an inequitable relationship basis (whether between classes, social strata, castes, or nations).

The preservation method was attempted by the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, as well as the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. It was utilized successfully (in the 19th century) prior to the era of capitalist globalization. But neither of those Eastern civilizations (although fairly robust internally) survived their collision with the technologically more advanced (and hence more militarily and politically powerful) European civilization. Japan found its answer on the path of modernization (reform) back in the second half of the 19th century, China spent a century immersed in the quagmire of semi-colonial dependence and bloody civil wars, until the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping was able to articulate its own vision of modernizing reforms.

This point leads us to the conclusion that a system can be preserved only if it is safeguarded from any unwanted external influences; i.e., if it controls the globalized world.

The contradiction between the concept of escaping the crisis, which has been adopted by the US elite, and the alternative concept – proposed by Russia and backed by China, then by the BRICS nations and now a large part of the world – lay in the fact that the politicians in Washington were working from the premise that they are able to fully control the globalized world and guide its development in the direction they wish. Therefore, faced with dwindling resources to sustain the mechanisms that perpetuate their global hegemony, they tried to resolve the problem by forcefully suppressing potential opponents in order to reallocate global resources in their favor.

If successful, the United States would be able to re-enact the events of the late 1980s – early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global socialist system under its control allowed the West to escape its crisis. At this new stage, it has become a question of no longer simply reallocating resources in favor of the West as a collective whole, but solely in favor of the United States. This move offered the system a respite that could be used to create a regime for preserving inequitable relationships, during which the American elite’s definitive control over the resources of power, raw materials, finance, and industrial resources safeguarded them from the danger of the system’s internal implosion, while the elimination of alternative power centers shielded the system from external breaches, rendering it eternal (at least for a historically foreseeable period of time).

The alternative approach postulated that the system’s total resources might be depleted before the United States can manage to generate the mechanisms to perpetuate its global hegemony. In turn, this will lead to strain (and overstrain) on the forces that ensure the imperial suppression of those nations existing on the global periphery, all in the interests of the Washington-based center, which will later bring about the inevitable collapse of the system.

Two hundred, or even one hundred years ago, politicians would have acted on the principle of “what is falling, that one should also push” and prepared to divvy up the legacy of yet another crumbling empire. However, the globalization of not only the world’s industry and trade (that was achieved by the end of the 19th century), but also global finance, caused the collapse of the American empire through a policy that was extremely dangerous and costly for the whole world. To put it bluntly, the United States could bury civilization under its own wreckage.

Consequently, the Russian-Chinese approach has made a point of offering Washington a compromise option that endorses the gradual, evolutionary erosion of American hegemony, plus the incremental reform of international financial, economic, military, and political relations on the basis of the existing system of international law.

America’s elite have been offered a “soft landing” that would preserve much of their influence and assets, while gradually adapting the system to better correspond to the present facts of life (bringing it into line with the available reserve of resources), taking into account the interests of humanity, and not only of its “top echelon” as exemplified by the “300 families” who are actually dwindling to no more than thirty.

In the end, it is always better to negotiate than to build a new world upon the ashes of the old. Especially since there has been a global precedent for similar agreements.

Up until 2015, America’s elite (or at least the ones who determine US policy) had been assured that they possessed sufficient financial, economic, military, and political strength to cripple the rest of the world, while still preserving Washington’s hegemony by depriving everyone, including (at the final stage) even the American people of any real political sovereignty or economic rights. European bureaucrats were important allies for that elite; i.e., the cosmopolitan, comprador-bourgeoisie sector of the EU elite, whose welfare hinged on the further integration of transatlantic (i.e., under US control) EU entities (in which the premise of Atlantic solidarity has become geopolitical dogma) and NATO, although this is in conflict with the interests of the EU member states.

However, the crisis in Ukraine, which has dragged on much longer than originally planned, Russia’s impressive surge of military and political energy as it moved to resolve the Syrian crisis (something for which the US did not have an appropriate response) and, most important, the progressive creation of alternative financial and economic entities that call into question the dollar’s position as the de facto world currency, have forced a sector of America’s elite that is amenable to compromise to rouse itself (over the last 15 years that elite has been effectively excluded from participation in any strategic decisions).

The latest statements by Kerry and Obama which seesaw from a willingness to consider a mutually acceptable compromise on all contentious issues (even Kiev was given instructions “to implement Minsk“) to a determination to continue the policy of confrontation – are evidence of the escalating battle being fought within the Washington establishment.

It is impossible to predict the outcome of this struggle – too many high-status politicians and influential families have tied their futures to an agenda that preserves imperial domination for that to be renounced painlessly. In reality, multibillion-dollar positions and entire political dynasties are at stake.

However, we can say with absolute certainty that there is a certain window of opportunity during which any decision can be made. And a window of opportunity is closing that would allow the US to make a soft landing with a few trade-offs. The Washington elite cannot escape the fact that they are up against far more serious problems than those of 10-15 years ago. Right now the big question is about how they are going to land, and although that landing will already be harder than it would have been and will come with costs, the situation is not yet a disaster.

But the US needs to think fast. Their resources are shrinking much faster than the authors of the plan for imperial preservation had expected. To their loss of control over the BRICS countries can be added the incipient, but still fairly rapid loss of control over EU policy as well as the onset of geopolitical maneuvering among the monarchies of the Middle East. The financial and economic entities created and set in motion by the BRICS nations are developing in accordance with their own logic, and Moscow and Beijing are not able to delay their development overlong while waiting for the US to suddenly discover a capacity to negotiate.

The point of no return will pass once and for all sometime in 2016, and America’s elite will no longer be able to choose between the provisions of compromise and collapse. The only thing that they will then be able to do is to slam the door loudly, trying to drag the rest of the world after them into the abyss.

Rostislav Ischenko is the President of Centre for System Analysis and Forecasting (Kiev) currently living in Moscow. Read other articles by Rostisla.

Turkey-NATO Crisis Sets The Scene For New European ‘EU Army’

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Reid Mukai

nato-1

By Patrick Henningsen

Source: 21st Century Wire

They say there are no coincidences in politics and foreign affairs.

Less than 72 hours after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter inside of Syrian airspace, moves are already afoot to increase the role of Europe in Syria.

Germany has now joined the party this week by revealing its intention to deploy ground troops in the fight against ISIS. Angela Merkel’s government announced its plan to send 100 Bundeswehr Special Forces into Northern Iraq to support of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

Britain is not far behind either, as David Cameron intensifies his lobbying efforts to get his country into the war in Syria.

Is this part of a defacto NATO action now, or NATO by fiat? If only it were that simple…

There is much more going on here than meets the eye. With Germany now entering the fray, this brings a total of at least FIVE major NATO member states who are either actively involved in the fight, or about to enter the combat theater. The most important point here is that each and every one of these countries is in the conflict in clear violation of international law. Neither has the backing of the UN Security Council, or has an invitation from the legal and internationally recognized (including by the UN) government in Damascus. In addition, none of these actors is acting under NATO Article 5, in other words, none has been attacked by another internationally recognized nation-state of entity (although it’s curious why the western governments have insisted on referring to a brutal terrorist group as a “State”, unless of course, they recognize it as such, which somehow gives them the color of law in Article 5).

For all intents and purposes, NATO is already in. Here are the FIVE major NATO members, all of whom appear to be operating under highly dubious mandates in and around Syria:

France

Following the Paris Attacks on Friday the 13th, and still without any real evidence presented to the public that ISIS itself was responsible for the Paris Attacks – almost immediately, France deployed the full-force of its military supposedly to hit ISIS targets in the alleged Islamic State “stronghold” of Raqqa, Syria. Coincidentally, even mainstream reports questioned what the objective of France’s airstrikes were (all target data was supplied by the US), with some claiming that the French move was purely for show and that they could not confirm any actual ISIS militants were killed. Note that France had already been caught announcing its move of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to Syria on Nov 5th – a full week before the Paris attacks. Of course, no mention of this in the media.

Aside from giving the state license to unleash a new level of domestic Police State at home, more importantly, the Paris Attacks gave France an immediate “official” entry into the Syria War. Undoubtedly, this was a huge game-changer.

United States

When the ‘Islamic State Caliphate’ crisis public relations campaign was officially launched by the US-UK Government-Media Complex in June 2014 (before that, there was scant if little mention of this branded terror organization by western politicians and media outlets), it took some time before the US announced its grand ‘Anti-ISIS Coalition’. Perhaps ISIS needed more time to get organized, and to release a series of shocking internet videos of which the western media fed off – – and which were mostly proven as fakes and digital forgeries. Something was not right about the ISIS Crisis by US media outlets who were so enthralled with the sensational propaganda videos that no one dared question the lack of authenticity of what was eventually exposed as fake ISIS beheading video productions (the CIA has previously admitted staging such videos) or the ISIS narrative itself. Oddly, the western media treated anything coming out of ISIS HQ as sacred and unimpeachable in media terms. It wasn’t until Iranian and Hezbollah ground forces entered the fight against ISIS that US President Barack Obama finally decided it was time to move in August 2014 by waging airstrikes in Northern Iraq. Over the next few months, the US began assembling its ‘Anti-ISIS (ISIL) Coalition’, although it was hard to spot anyone else in the ‘Coalition’ other than the US.

It should be noted that on the first day of US airstrikes inside Syria (Sept 23, 2014), it was pretty clear that the US had actually bombed a series of empty buildings in Raqqa, Syria (somehow ISIS was tipped off before hand, weeks in advance, in fact). Not a good start to the “big push”. At that point, our suspicions were confirmed – that the US had no intention of actually rooting out ISIS, and that secretly Washington was actually hoping that ISIS and other terrorist brigades on the ground could do what their previous proxy ground force, the Free Syria Army, could not do – which was to overthrow the government in Damascus, which Washington and its allies refer to (just in like Iraq in 2003) the ‘Assad regime’.

Great Britain

It’s no surprise that the British Tory government has been chomping at the bit to get into the Syrian War. In August 2013, they nearly got their mandate, but lost in a Parliamentary vote. Some Tory ministers had public temper tantrums. As it turns out, the pretext for their entire push for war, ‘WMDs’, aka chemical weapons (Sarin) allegedly deployed by Syrian government forces – was exposed as a false flag attack and the US-UK’s attempt to blame Syrian President Bashar al Assad was a media fiction (just in like Iraq in 2003), a chemical attack launched by the US-led Coalition’s ‘Moderate Rebels” in order to blame the government of Syria and trigger a western intervention. The plan was a complete failure, so bad in fact, it caused the US to back off their own war vote a month later in September 2013.

It seems that the Paris Attacks have also given David Cameron some wind in his war sails too, and yesterday we discovered that the French government is now lobbying for Britain’s Royal Air Force to join in the scrum, with London stating that it, “will soon be working side by side with their French counterparts” in taking military action in Syria. In order to help sell this new leg of the war, the French were provided the use of famed ‘liberal’ British newspaper The Guardian to openly lobby for British involvement by claiming it would “put additional and extreme pressure on the ISIS terror network”. The article goes on to describe the work Britain is already doing as part of the ‘Coalition’:

“The RAF has significant capabilities for precision airstrikes, aerial reconnaissance and air-to-air refuelling support,” he says. “On a daily basis, its Tornado aircrafts and unmanned drones are causing very severe damage to Isis in Iraq. The use of these capabilities over Syria would put additional and extreme pressure on the Isis terror network.”

So what’s Cameron’s rush to get deeper into the Syrian side of the conflict? It appears as if the Paris Attacks have given Cameron a new life-line on the Syria War vote, one he’s long been pursuing. The shock and horror of Paris will certainly help his case pass muster with public opinion in accepting his long-term agenda to deploy British military assets in Syria. One reason is to showcase British hardware to the world’s lucrative arms sales market, something Cameron is no stranger to after performing the role as sales closer for BAE Systems and other firms landing billion dollar contracts in the Gulf in recent years. Currently, Cameron is desperate to rescue those contracts which threaten to be scrapped over an ‘inconvenient’ human rights row between Westminster’s political left and the Kingdom over Saudi’s plan to behead and crucify a 17 old boy – the son of a Shia activist. Covering Saudi Arabia’s ghastly human rights record in favor of turning a few quid (tens of billions for 100 Typhoon jets and a prison contract) has always been an obsession of Westminster. Coupled with the Syria issue, this last row has prompted some of most amazing double speak and spin ever seen coming out of the Foreign Office, as evidenced by this humdinger about “The World’s Most Misunderstood Feudal Kingdom: Saudi Arabia”, seemingly straight out of the Office of Information Dispersal:

“One well-placed Whitehall source said: “It appears that the Saudis believe that they are being treated like a political football and had enough. It was only after the personal intervention of the Prime Minister that the situation has temporarily cooled but the Saudis want assurances.”

It gets worse, as Westminster is trying to sell the idea that somehow Saudi Arabia has ‘absolutely nothing to do’ with ISIS. Seriously…

“In the week that Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, warned that Britain is facing mass casualty attacks from Isil terrorists, Number 10 is desperate to ensure that it maintains good relations with Saudi Arabia, its most important ally in the Middle East. There were fears that the increased tensions between the two countries might result in the Saudis scaling down their vital intelligence-sharing arrangement with British intelligence, as well as jeopardising future lucrative arms deals with British firms such as BAE Systems.”

And we wonder why the public is mostly clueless as to what’s happening in Syria. They hardly stand a chance against such a relentless propaganda oracle.

Germany

This week, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and Justice Minister Heiko Maas, drafted a plan for military intervention and held a secret meeting on Thursday – to discuss exactly how this would be managed in terms of public relations, Bild newspaper reported. There are some historic considerations regarding Germany in this story, too. RT adds here:

“The cabinet is set to discuss the bill that may raise the question of a constitutional change on December 17. German Basic Law has strict limits on military involvement since the end of World War II, originally destined to prevent a revival of Nazi crimes.”

Considering how Turkey’s recent dangerous provocation ‘stunt’ was no accident, and how NATO members are beginning to back away from Turkey slightly (albeit temporarily, at least), the international focus is finally shifting towards Turkey’s obvious and direct role in facilitating and even supporting the rise of ISIS and al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), and many other Islamic militant fighting groups active in Syria.

Turkey

Turkey is guilty on potentially two international war crimes according to the Geneva Conventions – shooting down an aircraft in Syrian airspace (it’s becoming clearer from multiple reports that the Turkish F16 air-to-air missile may have fired in Turkish airspace, but the missile hit the Russian fighter in Syrian airspace, a clear war crime), and also the fact that Turkey is providing direct support to the same jihadi Turkmen insurgents who then shot and killed a Russian pilot while he was parachuting in the air, another war crime. In fact, one of the NATO-backed ‘moderate’ terrorists who boasted of killing the downed pilot is actually a Turkish citizen with links to both elected officials and a ultra-nationalist group, the Grey Wolves, based in Turkey.

This is only the beginning of Turkey’s problems. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accused of harboring a Sultan Complex – hoping to lead Turkey’s restoration to its former seat at the head of the Islamic world, in an Ottoman Caliphate redux. Add to this fresh allegations of his son Bilal’s business links to ISIS, and we can see how this mafia state may have too many crimes to answer for when it’s all said and done. If Turkey becomes an international pariah for its increasingly obvious collusion with ISIS and the wider terrorist conclave gallivanting freely through Syria and Turkey – then there could be calls for NATO to dump the rogue state and bad actor in the Syrian conflict.

Consider the Hegelian Dialectic as in, problem, reaction, solution. Problem: Turkey has ‘gone rogue’. Reaction: Turkey must leave NATO. Solution: the formation of a new, well-funded European-based multilateral military organization.What would that look like? Perhaps something like this…

‘New Model Army’ For Europe

If a major NATO player like Turkey is dumped from NATO, then this means that western central planners no longer have a multilateral ‘beach head’ positioned at the historic crossroads of Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Back in March 2015, 21WIRE reported something which many may have missed at the time, but what we thought was significant. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced that the European Union (EU) now needs a new standing army, or an “EU Army” – supposedly to “defend its values” from the sudden existential threats. He was not referring to ISIS, but to Russia. Two months later, Junker called for it again while saying, “Such an army would also help us to form common foreign and security policies and allow Europe to take on responsibility in the world.” Clearly this is no fluke, and it’s been brewing under our noses for a few years now. Back in Dec 2013, during a “heated” summit debate, Speaker of the European Parliament Martin Schulz called for the creation of a EU Army. The Telegraph reported:

“If we wish to defend our values and interests, if we wish to maintain the security of our citizens, then a majority of MEPs consider that we need a headquarters for civil and military missions in Brussels and deployable troops.” Geoffrey Van Orden MEP, the Conservative spokesman on European defence, said that the prime minister had “turned the tide on an EU army”. “It’s been a long haul to get to this position,” he said.

On the surface, one might read that NATO would be unhappy with a call from Brussels for a new EU Army, but Jucker’s call was only an opening salvo in a larger transatlantic political shift taking place right now. To prove our point, we can show our readers that right on cue this week, we see mainstream media propaganda being ramped-up to make the public used to the idea of an EU Army. Holding the baton on this story is ‘liberal’ newspaper The Independent:

“The British public is broadly supportive of the creation of a standing army for the European Union, a new poll suggests. The YouGov survey found that 36 per cent actively supported a permanent multi-national force drawn from all the bloc’s nations, compared to only 29 per cent who opposed such a move.”

Anyone who has actually been paying attention to the declining state of the British military will know that it’s almost down to a level where it cannot possibly function autonomously. Soon, all that will remain are a few shiny set-pieces like the Trident nuclear submarine fleet, but more importantly – the key remaining component: a rapid reaction, special forces capability which will slot into the new EU Army matrix. Anything which is not fulfilling a role within the larger infrastructure will be scrapped.

Not convinced? Consider this little known fact, revealed in early 2011 in an investigation by the UK Column into David Cameron’s 50 year ‘Defence Pact’ with France – plan that was hatched behind closed doors through the front organization called the Franco British Council, a charity supposedly set up to foster good relations between Britain and France. This was one of many quiet moves engineered to nudge Britain’s military into an eventual EU Army.

For any remaining doubters that an EU Army is not only in the cards, but is in its final stages of planning between Germany, France and Britain and others, note how just two months ago, Angela Merkel was seen openly ‘horse trading’ with David Cameron – asking him to drop his (public) opposition to an EU Army… in exchange for Germany supporting Britain’s “renegotiation” of EU membership, presumably on issues of welfare spending and immigration. The Telegraph states:

“The German chancellor will ask Britain to stand aside as she promotes an ambitious blueprint to integrate continental Europe’s armed forces.”

“While there is no expectation or obligation for Britain to take part in steeper integration, the creation of an EU army could marginalise Britain within Nato and result in the United States downgrading the special relationship with Britain in favour of Paris and Berlin, experts warn.”

“The Telegraph has seen an unpublished position paper drawn up by Europe and Defence policy committees of Mrs Merkel’s party, the CDU, that sets out a detailed 10-point plan for military co-operation in Europe. It is understood to closely reflect her thinking, and calls for a permanent EU military HQ, combined weapons procurement and a shared military doctrine.”

“The paper says it is “urgent” to integrate armed forces “in the face of multifaceted crises”.

In other words, it’s more or less a done deal.

So regarding Syria, Turkey, Russia and NATO, as the elite adage goes, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. There are 5 main points to consider right now:

1. Eurozone Crisis. The Greek economic meltdown, followed by Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Ireland’s economic struggles means that the European Union’s Eurozone economic integrity is under threat – and by extension, so is their physical shape should any member state eventually want to leave the European Super State. US-led economic sanctions against Russia over the downing of MH17 in 2014 (a likely false flag event of which the US accused Russia of being ‘responsible’.)

2. EU Crisis. Add to this the recent ‘Migrant Crisis’, and you have a public perception that European borders are under threat, too. In addition, Great Britain has seen a loud clamor to “leave the EU”, led recently by the ruling Tory Party, even though David Cameron has remained a committed Europhile his entire career. Many people viewed the Tory ‘Exit’ Campaign as mere play acting to win-over some available UKIP nationalist votes in the last general election. Ditto with Spain, who was recently blackmailed by Brussels over the prospect of a newly independent Catalonia. No surprise that Spain is set to play a key role in a new EU Army.

3. Migrant Crisis. The current ‘Migrant Crisis’ provides a perfect pretext to call for a new centralized, ‘federal’ EU Border Control Agency. This is a perfect fit with the EU Army. Funny how the entire Migrant Crisis has been unmasked as one of the most engineered and stage-managed crisis events in recent history. A perfect example of how a crisis is used to strengthen an EU Federal State framework. Then comes the killer: in October, Brussels offers Turkey its first step towards ‘normalization with Europe’, or soft membership into the EU. Brussels offered cash and visas to Turkey if it would ‘promise’ to help stop the flow of migrants into the EU. The terms of this latest deal were almost unbelievable. With most of the new ISIS recruits now coming from Turkey, this new plan will give legal access into Europe for many Syria and Turkey-based ISIS and al Nusra Front terrorists. So Turkey could be out of NATO, but into the EU? Wow.

4. Terrorism Crisis. The Paris Attacks were important in order to join together the Syrian Conflict, the Migrant Crisis and the War on Terror (rebranded now to the ‘War on Radicalization’). From this one event grew a raft of emergency policies, decrees and military actions. For the security state – it was a grand slam. The Paris Attacks also triggered calls for a new EU ‘FBI’ agency to “help combat terror”. Add to this, other calls for an EU ‘CIA’ too. That’s right, all the trappings of a Federal Super State. Still, no one bothered to question the premise of the grand slam, in this case, a planted, fake Syrian passport which magically appeared at the scene of the alleged ISIS suicide bomb attack in Paris on Nov 13th. Forensically speaking, there is no actual proof that ISIS carried out the Paris Attacks. Still, everyone it seems, is assuming it’s ISIS and that it’s connected to Syria. Again, more power flowing to an EU Federal State framework.

4. NATO Crisis. The reality is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a Cold War relic that’s way outside the bounds of its original mandate, and has no real practical application in the 21st century. NATO used to have some air of moral mandate around the world but that’s fading quickly. By encircling Russia with missile batteries, signing-up Russia’s neighbors, NATO has become more of an offensive entity, rather than a defensive one. The real dirt on NATO’s hands comes with its dark partnership with NeoNazi factions to help achieve its military objectives in the Ukraine. We also learned this week how NATO has opened up a new proxy war front in Crimea, as western-backed NeoNazis carried out terrorist attacks against Crimean infrastructure, and perhaps the most disturbing report we’ve seen here – what looks like CIA support of Islamic Chechen militants brought into east Ukraine.

There’s another fundamental problem with NATO: funding. The US supplies NATO with approximately 75% of its funding which guarantees that NATO is always under Washington’s control, but the US needs to have real stakeholders in order to have a real ‘alliance’. Few have paid attention to NATO’s ongoing weakening of its military assets, mostly due to a lack of spending by the majority of its member states. Every NATO member state is expected to spend at least 2% of its annual GDP on defense spending. That’s not happening anymore, and there is absolutely nothing the Brussels HQ can do about it outside of the US giving money away to those in financial need. Weapons Welfare? That’s not happening either.

NATO’s days are numbered. All the tea leaves point to its schedule for decommissioning. All NATO needs is a good crisis to hasten that inevitability. Maybe Turkey has delivered the pretext Brussels needs. This does not necessarily mean that NATO would be winded-down, but that it would give way to another military structure – like an EU Army.

You’d expect Washington to be averse to a NATO downgrade, down to a second tier international organization. After all, the US has used NATO as a multilateral trojan horse of sorts – an alternative flag it could fly in order to bypass any due process or Constitutional restrictions in waging war around the globe. In other words, Washington has used NATO to cheat its own laws, and expand its geopolitical hegemony, and to drag along its European partners where possible to help make it look like a ‘team effort’, and a unilateral action. The truth is, regarding international affairs, the US has long-since replaced its NATO widget with the “Coalition” widget, and will wage war as and when. At home, it has replaced the near redundant Constitutional Declaration of War with the more fluid and flexible ‘Authorization of Military Force‘ (AUMF), and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which essentially means that, on paper at least (through color of law, and not actual law), that the US is always under emergency war footing.

There is visible US-EU split, one which became evident during the planning of Washington’s coup d’etat in the Ukraine in 2013-2014, when the US Sate Department’s assistant secretary for European affairs, Victoria Nuland was caught on tape telling her colleague Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to, “F*ck the EU!”, as they argued over which US-backed puppet leader would be installed in Kiev.

What Washington really wants (and needs) now is a big Coalition partner, preferable one which is not directly governed by a local representative democracy, but governed by a remote, mostly unelected bureaucratic system. In this context, a new European multinational force would be the perfect ‘Coalition’ partner for Washington.

This is where this complex confluence of events is taking us – from Brussels, Paris, Syria, Ukraine, and Russia, all roads lead to an EU Army.

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH IN PARIS AND THE UGLY TRUTH OF STATE TERROR

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John Chuckman

Source: RINF

Mass murder, as that which just occurred in Paris, is always distressing, but that does not mean we should stop thinking.

Isn’t it rather remarkable that President Hollande, immediately after the event, declared ISIS responsible? How did he know that? And if he was aware of a serious threat from ISIS, why did he not take serious measures in advance?

Within days of Friday 13, French forces assaulted an apartment with literally thousands of bullets being fired, killing a so-called mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Just how are you instantly elevated to the rank of “mastermind”? And if security people were previously aware of his exalted status, why did they wait until after a disaster to go after him?

Well, the ugly underlying truth is that, willy-nilly, France for years has been a supporter of ISIS, even while claiming to be fighting it. How do I know that? Because France’s foreign policy has virtually no independence from America’s. It could be described as a subset of American foreign policy. Hollande marches around with his head held stiffly up after getting off the phone at the Élysée Palace, having received the day’s expectations from Washington. He has been a rather pathetic figure.

So long as it is doing work the United States wishes done, ISIS remains an American protectorate, and regardless of Hollande’s past rhetoric, he has acted according to that reality. But something may just have changed now.

It is important to note the disproportionate attention in the West to events in Paris. I say disproportionate because there are equally ugly things going on in a number of places in the Middle East, but we do not see the coverage given to Paris. We have bombs in Lebanon and Iraq. We have daily bombings and shootings in Syria. We have cluster bombs and other horrors being used by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. And of course, there are the ongoing horrors of Israel against Palestinians.

We have endless interviews with ordinary people in Paris, people who know nothing factual to help our understanding, about their reaction to the terror, but when was the last time you saw personal reactions broadcast from Gaza City or Damascus? It just does not happen, and it does raise the suspicion that the press’s concern with Paris is deliberately out of proportion. After all, Israel killed about twenty times as many people in Gaza not very long ago, and the toll was heavily weighted with children, many hundreds of them. Events in Paris clearly are being exploited for highly emotional leverage.

Leverage against what? Arabs in general and Muslims in particular, just part of the continuing saga of deliberately-channeled hate we have experienced since a group of what proved (after their arrest) to be Israeli spies were reported on top of a truck, snapping pictures and high-fiving each other as the planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001. What those spies were doing has never been explained to the public. I’m not saying Israel is responsible for 9/11, but clearly some Israeli government interests were extremely happy about events, and we have been bombarded ever since with hate propaganda about Muslims, serving as a kind of constant noise covering the crimes Israel does commit against Palestinians and other neighbors.

It is impossible to know whether the attack in Paris was actually the work of ISIS or a covert operation by the secret service of an ISIS supporter. The point is a bit like arguing over angels on a pinhead. When you are dealing with this kind of warfare – thugs and lunatics of every description lured into service and given deadly toys and lots of encouragement to use them – things can and do go wrong. But even when nothing goes wrong in the eyes of sponsors for an outfit like ISIS, terrible things are still happening. It’s just that they’re happening where the sponsors want them to happen and in places from which our press carefully excludes itself. Terrible things, for example, have been happening in the beautiful land of Syria for four or five years, violence equivalent to about two hundred Paris attacks, causing immense damage, the entire point of which is to topple a popularly-supported president and turn Syria into the kind of rump states we see now in Iraq.

A covert operation in the name of ISIS is at least as likely as an attack by ISIS. The United States, Israel, Turkey, and France are none of them strangers to violent covert activities, and, yes, there have been instances before when a country’s own citizens were murdered by its secret services to achieve a goal. The CIA pushed Italian secret services into undertaking a series of murderous attacks on their own people during the 1960s in order to shake up Italy’s “threatening” left-wing politics. It was part of something called Operation Gladio. Operation Northwoods, in the early 1960s, was a CIA-planned series of terrorist acts on American civilians to be blamed on Cuba, providing an excuse for another invasion. It was not carried out, but that was not owing to any qualms in the CIA about murdering their own, otherwise no plan would have ever existed. The CIA was involved in many other operations inside the United States, from experiments with drugs to ones with disease, using innocent people as its subject-victims.

There have been no differences worth mentioning between Hollande’s France and America concerning the Middle East. Whatever America wants, America gets, unlike the days when Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq, or earlier, when de Gaulle removed France’s armed forces from integration within NATO or bravely faced immense hostility, including a coup attempt undertaken by French military with CIA cooperation, when he abandoned colonialism in Algeria.

If anything, Hollande has been as cloyingly obsequious towards America’s chief interest in the Middle East, Israel, as a group of Republican Party hopefuls at a Texas barbecue fund-raiser sniffing out campaign contributions. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, Hollande honored four Jewish victims of the thugs who attacked a neighborhood grocery store with France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor. I don’t recall the mere fact of being murdered by thugs ever before being regarded as a heroic distinction. After all, in the United States more than twenty thousand a year suffer that fate without recognition.

Israel’s Netanyahu at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack actually outdid himself in manic behavior. He barged into France against a specific request that he stay home and pushed himself, uninvited, to the front row of the big parade down the Champs-Élysées which was supposed to honor free speech. He wanted those cameras to be on him for voters back home watching.

Free speech, you might ask, from the leaders of Egypt, Turkey, the UAE, and Israel, who all marched in front? Well, after the free-speech parody parade, the Madman of Tel Aviv raced around someone else’s country making calls and speeches for Jewish Frenchmen to leave “dangerous” France and migrate “home” to Israel. It would in fact be illegal in Israel for someone to speak that way in Israel to Israelis, but illegality has never bothered Netanyahu. Was he in any way corrected for this world-class asinine behavior? No, Hollande just kept marching around with his head stiffly up. I guess he was trying to prove just how free “free speech” is in France.

But speech really isn’t all that free in France, and the marching about free speech was a fraud. Not only is Charlie Hebdo, the publication in whose honor all the tramping around was done, not an outlet for free speech, being highly selective in choosing targets for its obscene attacks, but many of the people marching at the head of the parade were hardly representatives of the general principle.

France itself has outlawed many kinds of free speech. Speech and peaceful demonstrations which advocate a boycott of Israel are illegal in France. So a French citizen today cannot advocate peacefully against a repressive state which regularly abuses, arrests, and kills some of the millions it holds in a form of bondage. And Hollande’s France enforces this repressive law with at least as much vigor as Israel does with its own version, in a kind of “Look, me too,” spirit. France also has a law which is the exactly the equivalent of a law against anyone’s saying the earth is flat: a law against denying or questioning the Holocaust. France also is a country, quite disgracefully, which has banned the niqab.

Now, America’s policy in the Mideast is pretty straightforward: subsidize and protect its colony Israel and never criticize it even on the many occasions when it has committed genuine atrocities. American campaign finance laws being what they, politics back home simply permits no other policy. The invasion of Iraq, which largely was intended to benefit Israel through the elimination of a major and implacable opponent, has like so many dark operations backfired. I call the invasion a dark operation because although the war was as public as could be, all of America’s, and Britain’s, supposed intelligence about Iraq was crudely manufactured and the reasons for undertaking an act which would kill a million people and cripple an entire country were complete lies.

America’s stupid invasion created new room for Iran to exert its influence in the region – hence, the endless noise in Israel and Saudi Arabia about Iran – and it led directly to the growth of armed rabble groups like ISIS. There were no terrorists of any description in Saddam’s Iraq, just as there were no terrorists in Gadhafi’s Libya, a place now so infested with them that even an American ambassador is not safe.

Some Americans assert that ISIS happened almost accidentally, popping out of the dessert when no one was looking, a bit like Athena from the head of Zeus, arising from the bitterness and discontents of a splintered society, but that view is fatuous. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens by accident in this part of the world. Israel’s spies keep informed of every shadowy movement, and America always listens closely to what they say.

It is silly to believe ISIS just crept up on America, suddenly a huge and powerful force, because ISIS was easy for any military to stop at its early stages, as when it was a couple of thousand men waving AK-47s from the backs of Japanese pick-up trucks tearing around Iraq. Those pick-up trucks and those AK-47s and the gasoline and the ammunition and the food and the pay required for a bunch of goons came from somewhere, and it wasn’t from Allah.

A corollary to America’s first principle about protecting Israel is that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in Israel’s neighborhood that is not approved, at least tacitly, by the United States. So whether, in any given instance of supply and support for ISIS, it was Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or America – all involved in this ugly business – is almost immaterial. It all had to happen with American approval. Quite simply, there would be hell to pay otherwise.

As usual in the region, Saudi Arabia’s role was to supply money, buying weapons from America and others and transshipping them to ISIS. Ever since 9/11, Saudi Arabia has been an almost pathetically loyal supporter of America, even to the extent now of often cooperating with Israel. That couldn’t happen before an event in which the majority of perpetrators proved to be Saudi citizens and which led to the discovery that large amounts of Saudi “go away” money had been paid to Osama bin Laden for years. But after 9/11, the Saudis feared for the continuation of their regime and now do what they are told. They are assisted in performing the banking function by Qatar, another wealthy, absolute state aligned with the United States and opposing the rise of any possibly threatening new forces in its region.

Of course, it wasn’t just the discoveries of 9/11 that motivated Saudi Arabia. It intensely dislikes the growing influence of Iran, and Iran’s Shia Muslim identity is regarded by Sunni sects in Saudi Arabia in much the way 17th century Protestantism was viewed by an ultramontane Catholic state like Spain. The mass of genuine jihadists fighting in Syria – those who are not just mercenaries and adventurers or agents of Israel or Turkey or the Saudis – are mentally-unbalanced Sunni who believe they are fighting godlessness. The fact that Assad keeps a secular state with religious freedom for all just adds to their motivation.

ISIS first achievement was toppling an Iraqi government which had been excessively friendly to Iran in the view of Israel, and thereby the United States. Iraq’s army could have stopped them easily early on but was bribed to run away, leaving weapons such as tanks behind. Just two heavy tanks could have crushed all the loons in pick-up trucks. That’s why there was all the grotesque propaganda about beheadings and extreme cruelty to cover the fact of modern soldiers running from a mob. ISIS gathered weapons, territory, and a fierce reputation in an operation which saw President al-Maliki – a man disliked by the United States for his associations with Iran and his criticism of American atrocities – hurriedly leave office.

From that base, ISIS was able to gain sufficient foothold to begin financing itself through, for example, stolen crude sold at a discount or stolen antiquities. The effective splitting up of Iraq meant that its Kurdish population in the north could sell, as it does today, large volumes of oil to Israel, an unheard of arrangement in Iraq’s past. ISIS then crossed into Syria in some force to go after Assad. The reasons for this attack were several: Assad runs a secular state and defends religious minorities but mainly because the paymasters of ISIS wanted Assad destroyed and Syria reduced in the fashion of Iraq.

Few people in the press seem to have noted that ISIS never attacks Israel or Israeli interests. Neither does it attack the wheezingly-corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic equivalent of ancient Rome’s Emperor Nero. Yet those are the very targets a group of genuine, independent warrior-fundamentalists would attack. But ISIS is not genuine, being supplied and bankrolled by people who do not want to see attacks on Israel or Saudi Arabia, including, notably, Israel and Saudi Arabia. ISIS also is assisted, and in some cases led, by foreign covert operators and special forces.

There does seem to be a good deal of news around the idea of France becoming serious in fighting ISIS, but I think we must be cautious about accepting it at face value. Putin is reported as telling ship commanders in the Mediterranean to cooperate and help cover the French aircraft carrier approaching. Hollande keeps calling for American cooperation too, as Putin has done for a very long time, but America’s position remains deliberately ambiguous. A new American announcement of cooperation with Turkey in creating a “safe zone” across the border with northern Syria is a development with unclear intentions. Is this to stop the Kurds Erdogan so despises fighting in the north of Syria from establishing themselves and controlling the border or is it a method for continued support of ISIS along the that border? Only time will tell.

I do think it at least possible Hollande may have come around to Putin’s view of ISIS, but America has not, and the situation only grows more fraught with dangerous possibilities. I’ve long believed that likely America, in its typically cynical fashion, planned to destroy ISIS, along with others like al-Nusra, once they had finished the dirty work of destroying Syria’s government and Balkanizing the country. In any event, Israel – and therefore, automatically, America – wants Assad destroyed, so it would be surprising to see America at this point join honestly with Putin and Hollande.

America has until now refused Russia any real support, including such basic stuff as sharing intelligence. It cooperates only in the most essential matters such avoiding attacks on each other’s planes. It also has made some very belligerent statements about what Russia has been doing, some from the America’s Secretary of Defense sounding a lot like threats. Just the American establishment’s bully-boy attitude about doing anything which resembles joining a Russian initiative does not bode well.

After all, Putin has been portrayed as a kind of Slavic Satan by American propaganda cranking stuff out overtime in support of Ukraine’s incompetent coup-government and with the aim of terrifying Eastern Europe into accepting more American weapons and troops near Russia’s border, this last having nothing to do with any Russian threat and everything to do with America’s aggressive desire to shift the balance of power. How do you turn on a dime and admit Putin is right about Syria and follow his lead?

And there are still the daily unpleasant telephone calls from Israel about Assad. How do you manoeuvre around that when most independent observers today recognize Assad as the best alternative to any other possible government. He has the army’s trust, and in the end it is the Syrian army which is going to destroy ISIS and the other psychopaths. Air strikes alone can never do that. The same great difficulty for Hollande leaves much ambiguity around what he truly means by “going to war against ISIS.”

It is an extremely complicated world in which we live with great powers putting vast resources towards destroying the lives of others, almost killing thousands on a whim, while pretending not to be doing so. We live in an era shaped by former CIA Director Allen Dulles, a quiet psychopath who never saw an opportunity for chaos he did not embrace.

The only way to end terror is to stop playing with the lives of tens of millions in the Middle East, as America has done for so long, and stop supporting the behaviors of a repressive state which has killed far greater numbers than the madmen of ISIS could dream of doing, demanding instead that that state make peace and live within its borders. But, at least at this stage, that is all the stuff of dreams.

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Turkey-NATO Crisis Sets The Scene For New European ‘EU Army’

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH IN PARIS AND THE UGLY TRUTH OF STATE TERROR