Monday, March 28, 2011

The Battle for THE MEDITERRANEAN, and The Choke Points to prop up the US global strategy...


Blue: Members of the European Union for the Mediterranean / Green: Other members / Striped green: Libya.

The utterly Corrupt US Aipac/Congress has acquiesced to Caesarism. The American people have no more control over their government than do people in countries ruled by crude dictators.

Washington’s quest for world hegemony is driving the world toward World War III. China is no less proud than was Japan in the 1930s and is unlikely to submit to being bullied and governed by what China regards as the decadent West... Russia’s resentment to its military encirclement is rising... Washington’s hubris can lead to fatal miscalculations....



http://www.win.ru/en/school/6480.phtml


The Mediterranean Union was created in 2008.

http://www.collive.com/show_news.rtx?id=7636

It includes Israel, but not Libya.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24327

This Union will no doubt be a tool of the American Empire.

The HQ of the Mediterranean Union, in Barcelona.

At
http://www.voltairenet.org/en, Rick Rozoff has an article entitled:

Libyan War And Control Of The Mediterranean

From this we learn:


1.
The Mediterranean Sea is the main battle front in the world....

2.
The Mediterranean is to be part of the US empire....

http://www.dailypioneer.com/328012/Caution-over-misadventure.html

Rather than go along with the West and back its duplicitous decision to ‘intervene' in Libya, India has decided to chart its own independent course in foreign affairs....

3.
Almost all the Mediterranean nations are tied to NATO and the US military. The exceptions are Syria, Lebanon and Libya.

(Cyprus is not in NATO but has military bases of use to the US and its allies.)


4.
Libya is also one of only five of Africa's countries that have not been integrated into the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

The others are: Sudan, which is being balkanized....

The strategic significance of the region between Yemen and Somalia becomes the point of geopolitical interest. It is the site of Bab el-Mandab, one of what the US Government lists as seven strategic world oil shipping chokepoints. The US Government Energy Information Agency states that “closure of the Bab el-Mandab could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.” [9]

Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el -Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.

An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars....

It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.

In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. Yemen’s Masila Basin and Shabwa Basin are reported by international oil companies to contain “world class discoveries.” [10] France’s Total and several smaller international oil companies are engaged in developing Yemen’s oil production. Some fifteen years ago I was told in a private meeting with a well-informed Washington insider that Yemen contained “enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years.” Perhaps there is more to Washington’s recent Yemen concern than a rag-tag al Qaeda whose very existence as a global terror organization has been doubted by seasoned intelligence and Islamic experts.....


Ivory Coast
, now under the threat of foreign military intervention, linked to AFRICOM.

Djibouti
, where 5,000 U.S. and French troops are based.

Zimbabwe
. ...

5.
Lin Zhiyuan, deputy director of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences:

"By building a dozen forward bases or establishments in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and other African nations, the U.S. will gradually establish a network of military bases to cover the entire continent and make essential preparations for docking an aircraft carrier fleet in the region.

"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with the U.S. at the head had [in 2006] carried out a large-scale military exercise in Cape Verde, a western African island nation, with the sole purpose of controlling the sea and air corridors of crude oil extracting zones and monitoring how the situation is with oil pipelines operating there.

" Africa Command represents a vital, crucial link for the US adjustment of its global military deployment. At present, it is moving the gravity of its forces in Europe eastward and opening new bases in Eastern Europe.

"The present US global military redeployment centers mainly on an ‘arc of instability’ from the Caucasus, Central and Southern Asia down to the Korean Peninsula, and so the African continent is taken as a strong point to prop up the US global strategy.


"Therefore, AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe."

....

No wonder everything is so fucked up in MENA.....

The UN mandate was for 'humanitarian intervention' to protect civilians in Libya. The British are flying up and down the coast dropping bombs in order to assist one side in a civil war to capture land. Just how was this approved by the Security Council? You will
see that there is nothing even remotely close to supporting what the British are doing, which makes such actions a clear breach of international law.

Scroll down for the Dennis Kucinich
conspiracy theory, that the actions over Libya are part of a live war game, part of the brand new (November 2, 2010) mutual defense treaty between France and Great Britain which contemplated the current military action under the name "Southern Mistral" (the war game has been suspended due to the war reality)....
"The Saudi-US counter-revolution (with Aljazeera on board)" It is clear that there is a planned counter-revolutionary program in operation across the Middle East and North Africa to put a cork in the Arab revolutions before they undermine the despots in the Gulf States....

Controlled Opposition: USA/Zionism 101....

It was the mass murderer of tens of millions of Russian Christians, and leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, who said “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” It should come as to no surprise to anyone that the Zionists who identify themselves as neo-conservative, all of whom are admitted ex-Leninists and ex-Trotskyists (30), are the leaders behind implanting “pro-democracy” groups throughout the MENA to control opposition to global Zionist hegemony. The board of directors at the National Endowment For Democracy (NED), the leader of the “pro-democracy” project in Libya (31), as well as the notorious globalist institution Freedom House (32), are comprised almost entirely of neo-cons.

The foundation of NED was built between 1982-1984 at the behest of a research study headed by staunch Zionist Allen Weinstein, who has headed a plethora of globalist projects masked by the pursuit of democracy. Weinstein has authored numerous books in defense of the Zionist entity’s genocidal operations throughout the Middle East, including one in particular that stressed the necessity of America’s commitment to the illegitimate Israeli state (33). Allen Weinstein publicly admitted in 1991, that the NED’s activities are modeled after the CIA’s operations, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” CIA monies are laundered through the NED (34), which serves as a perfect cover due to its perceived nature as a organization championing the cause of democracy.

The current head of NED is Carl Gershman, a ubiquitous globalist figure and zealous Zionist who has received awards for furthering the CIA’s agenda in Tibet and who has composed a study entitled “Israel, the Arabs and the Middle East” defending al-Nakba and all of Israel’s colonial endeavors (35). Gershman also worked for the most venomous of all Zionist Lobby organizations, the Israeli intelligence wing known as the ADL. Gershman is rabidly anti-Muslim and anti-Christian; he has stated that the Qur’an “vilifies Jews” and that the Christian World spread the “blood libel.” Additionally, he believes that Arabs and Arab culture suffer from a “moral sickness” and has gone on record to chastise any and all people who have associated Mossad with the 9/11 terror attacks as “anti-Semites (36).”

NED is already deeply embedded in the fabric of Egypt, and has reared its ugly head from the shadows upon the command of Gershman since the fall of Mubarak (37). With Qaddafi upsetting the Zionist dragon to the point of rage, Israel-Firster Gershman initiated the activation of the democratic army. Just three of the NED-funded groups taking part in the “pro-democracy” protests in Libya are the Akhbar Libya Cultural Limited (ALCF), Libya Human and Political Development Forum (LHPDF) and the Transparency Libya Limited (TL). These groups were funded in the hundreds of thousands by NED (38).

MEPI is an NED-backed group greatly involved in the deconstruction of Libya.

NED’s chief sister organization, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), headed by Zionist war criminal and butcher of Iraq’s children Madeline Albright (39), is also deeply involved in the Libyan uprising, as is a smaller NED-linked group, the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). Aswat, an Arabic propaganda hub in Libya, Libya’s General People’s Committee for Foreign Liaison and International Cooperation, My Arabic Library (MAL) and Youth Of Today, Leaders Of Tomorrow are all funded by NDI and MEPI (40). So, an umbrella of organizations controlled by an anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-Arab, pro-war, pro-Zionist war monger is looking out for the interest of the Libyan people? Right.

The organizing of the “Feb17 Revolution” in Libya was led by a group known as the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO). The NCLO called for mass protests against the Qaddafi regime in a multi-level manner, inside Libya and abroad, all for the goal of bringing down the 42-year reign of the Libyan Colonel (41). The NCLO was formed on June 25, 2005 in London. The main goal of this organization was to foment the end of Colonel Qaddafi’s revolutionary, political, military and security powers and to trigger the formation of a transitional government run by “trustworthy” individuals (42). The NCLO is comprised of six umbrella groups, with the National Front Of The Salvation of Libya (NFSL) sitting at the head. A Libyan exile who resides in London named Ibrahim Sahad is NFSL’s leader (43).

At the onset of the Feb17 Revolution, Sahad and other NFSL and NCLO members began providing the Zionist media with “first-hand” information of massacres, human rights abuses, death tolls and other outlandish accusations that were never independently verified. Ominously, Sahad made it clear to state in an interview that “Qaddafi will not survive the protests (44).” The Zionist media has never given an audience to dissidents from occupied Palestine, occupied Iraq, occupied Kashmir, occupied Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan or the Resistance in Lebanon. So why Libyan dissidents? Simple. Because these particular Libyan dissidents belong to the NFSL, an organization funded for decades by the CIA and closet-Zionist regime of Saudi Arabia (45). In fact, whether it’s the American-Zionist puppet Qatar’s Al-Jazeera or typical Western media outlets like the Zionist-owned BBC and the New York Times, all reports leave a trail that leads back to the CIA’s NFSL (46).

The NFSL, Libya's premier "opposition" group, is fully backed by the CIA.

As aforementioned, one of the NFSL’s goals was to set up a transitional government to replace the regime of Qaddafi as momentum from the wave of protests was mounted. On February 27, 2011, 13 days after the fake Feb17 Revolution began, the National Transitional Council, also known as the Libyan National Council, was formed (47), in perfect accordance with the NFSL’s CIA-based agenda. One member of this transitional council is Mahmoud Jibril, who recently met privately with Zionist warmonger Hillary Clinton in Paris (48). Jibril also held a meeting with the Zionist President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy and spoke by phone with the warmongering British Foreign Secretary, William Hague (49).

Jibril, who heads the Foreign Affairs division of the Council, was educated in the United States,

Mahmoud Jibril, the Western dope groomed to replace Qaddafi in the new, Zionized Libya.

receiving a master’s degree and PHD at the University of Pittsburgh prior to teaching there for many years. Jibril also headed an organization called the National Economic Development Board (NEDB), Libya’s largest think tank, formed in 2009 (50). The NEDB was set up and advised by a group of international consulting firms from the US and UK and is in partnership with the London School of Economics (51), which receives its largest amount of funding from none other than George Soros (52). Once the “rebels” secure victory and Qaddafi is overthrown, Jibril is expected to maintain his position at the head of this institution of subservience to neoliberalism. With Jibril’s ties alone, it invalidates the Council’s claims to being the sole representative of the people of Libya. It is the sole representative of Zionism in Libya.

The Council almost immediately called for a no-fly zone over Libya (53). No self-respecting person of conscience, let alone the righteous Libyan people, the sons of the great Omar al-Mukhtar (rip) who led two decades of Resistance to Italy’s colonization of their nation, who are keenly aware of the aims of foreign occupiers and colonialists, would ever call for a no-fly zone over Libya. The same military operation that led to NATO bombing thousands of innocents to death in Kosovo with depleted uranium and cluster bombs and that led to the bombing of tens of thousands to death in Iraq prior to 2003′s invasion. However, stooges of Western interests most certainly would. Could anyone imagine Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (rip) or Hugo Chavez calling for a no-fly zone? Didn’t think so....


This of course is same strategy used by Brzezinski in Afghanistan when al Qaeda was organized to work for US/CIA purposes. The same strategy used again in the Balkan wars (a Brzezinski Clinton operation) is now being played out in Libya. Divide and conquer!

http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony/pdf/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf

"Operation Libya" and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa"
What we have in motion is that the MATRIX is glitching with EURASIA/China.....


...
Queen Hillary of Libya
Foreign intervention in Libya - "legitimized" by dodgy United Nations cover - is shaping up as a counter-revolutionary master coup to squash the momentum of the great 2011 Arab revolt, show who's boss, and present neo-colonialism with a facelift. And the new kingmaker presiding over Libya's balkanization is actually a queen: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
- Pepe Escobar (Mar 30, '11)

Arab revolt keeps
China on its toes

China will suffer if prolonged fighting in Libya and elsewhere pushes up global food and oil prices, whereas fast regime change would relieve the economic pain but increase pressure for political reform at home. While this is unlikely to cause major disturbances of the kind seen in Egypt, the myriad possible adjustments to changing factors will keep the government on its toes. - Francesco Sisci (Mar 30, '11)

China has a blueprint for social order
An overbearing focus of China's latest five-year plan on social stability suggests a major conservative shift is underway, with "social-management" offices to feature on every major street amid mass recruitment of public vigilantes. With security forces' rapid-response capacity for "mass incidents" also to be honed and political reform frowned upon, the renewed drive to spurn Western norms will likely frustrate progressive intellectuals. - Willy Lam (Mar 30, '11)

There's no business like war business
It's easy to identify who profits from the war in Libya: The Pentagon, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the "rebels", the French and al-Qaeda. But that's only a short list of profiteers; control of an ocean of fresh water is crucial to the war mix, and nobody knows who'll end up getting the oil and the natural gas. - Pepe Escobar (Mar 29, '11)

.Back to Westphalia
The Westphalian principle that nation states could run their internal affairs as they pleased helped to reduce war for 300 years. That principle is now increasingly abandoned, not just in Libya but through the International Monetary Fund and other non-democratic international organizations. The consequences are hugely hazardous, while putting at risk the immense benefits the ancient treaty brought. - Martin Hutchinson (Mar 29, '11)

...
Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal
By Pepe Escobar

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, "This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner."

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to "seduce" three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

Profiteers rejoice
Humanitarian imperialists will spin en masse this is a "conspiracy", as they have been spinning the bombing of Libya prevented a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi. They will be defending the House of Saud - saying it acted to squash Iranian subversion in the Gulf; obviously R2P - "responsibility to protect" does not apply to people in Bahrain. They will be heavily promoting post-Gaddafi Libya as a new - oily - human rights Mecca, complete with US intelligence assets, black ops, special forces and dodgy contractors.

Whatever they say won't alter the facts on the ground - the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia Times Online has already reported on who profits from the foreign intervention in Libya (see
There's no business like war business, March 30). Players include the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League's Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize everything in sight in the new Libya - even the water. And we're not even talking about the Western vultures hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

Exposed, above all, is the astonishing hypocrisy of the Obama administration, selling a crass geopolitical coup involving northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as a humanitarian operation. As for the fact of another US war on a Muslim nation, that's just a "kinetic military action".

There's been wide speculation in both the US and across the Middle East that considering the military stalemate - and short of the "coalition of the willing" bombing the Gaddafi family to oblivion - Washington, London and Paris might settle for the control of eastern Libya; a northern African version of an oil-rich Gulf Emirate. Gaddafi would be left with a starving North Korea-style Tripolitania.

But considering the latest high-value defections from the regime, plus the desired endgame ("Gaddafi must go", in President Obama's own words), Washington, London, Paris and Riyadh won't settle for nothing but the whole kebab. Including a strategic base for both Africom and NATO.

Round up the unusual suspects
One of the side effects of the dirty US-Saudi deal is that the White House is doing all it can to make sure the Bahrain drama is buried by US media. BBC America news anchor Katty Kay at least had the decency to stress, "they would like that one [Bahrain] to go away because there's no real upside for them in supporting the rebellion by the Shi'ites."

For his part the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, showed up on al-Jazeera and said that action was needed because the Libyan people were attacked by Gaddafi. The otherwise excellent al-Jazeera journalists could have politely asked the emir whether he would send his Mirages to protect the people of Palestine from Israel, or his neighbors in Bahrain from Saudi Arabia.

The al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain is essentially a bunch of Sunni settlers who took over 230 years ago. For a great deal of the 20th century they were obliging slaves of the British empire. Modern Bahrain does not live under the specter of a push from Iran; that's an al-Khalifa (and House of Saud) myth.

Bahrainis, historically, have always rejected being part of a sort of Shi'ite nation led by Iran. The protests come a long way, and are part of a true national movement - way beyond sectarianism. No wonder the slogan in the iconic Pearl roundabout - smashed by the fearful al-Khalifa police state - was "neither Sunni nor Shi'ite; Bahraini".

What the protesters wanted was essentially a constitutional monarchy; a legitimate parliament; free and fair elections; and no more corruption. What they got instead was "bullet-friendly Bahrain" replacing "business-friendly Bahrain", and an invasion sponsored by the House of Saud.

And the repression goes on - invisible to US corporate media. Tweeters scream that everybody and his neighbor are being arrested. According to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, over 400 people are either missing or in custody, some of them "arrested at checkpoints controlled by thugs brought in from other Arab and Asian countries - they wear black masks in the streets." Even blogger Mahmood Al Yousif was arrested at 3 am, leading to fears that the same will happen to any Bahraini who has blogged, tweeted, or posted Facebook messages in favor of reform.

Globocop is on a roll
Odyssey Dawn is now over. Enter Unified Protector - led by Canadian Charles Bouchard. Translation: the Pentagon (as in Africom) transfers the "kinetic military action " to itself (as in NATO, which is nothing but the Pentagon ruling over Europe). Africom and NATO are now one.

The NATO show will include air and cruise missile strikes; a naval blockade of Libyia; and shady, unspecified ground operations to help the "rebels". Hardcore helicopter gunship raids a la AfPak - with attached "collateral damage" - should be expected.

A curious development is already visible. NATO is deliberately allowing Gaddafi forces to advance along the Mediterranean coast and repel the "rebels". There have been no surgical air strikes for quite a while.

The objective is possibly to extract political and economic concessions from the defector and Libyan exile-infested Interim National Council (INC) - a dodgy cast of characters including former Justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, US-educated former secretary of planning Mahmoud Jibril, and former Virginia resident, new "military commander" and CIA asset Khalifa Hifter. The laudable, indigenous February 17 Youth movement - which was in the forefront of the Benghazi uprising - has been completely sidelined.

This is NATO's first African war, as Afghanistan is NATO's first Central/South Asian war. Now firmly configured as the UN's weaponized arm, Globocop NATO is on a roll implementing its "strategic concept" approved at the Lisbon summit last November (see
Welcome to NATOstan, Asia Times Online, November 20, 2010).

Gaddafi's Libya must be taken out so the Mediterranean - the mare nostrum of ancient Rome - becomes a NATO lake. Libya is the only nation in northern Africa not subordinated to Africom or Centcom or any one of the myriad NATO "partnerships". The other non-NATO-related African nations are Eritrea, Sawahiri Arab Democratic Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Moreover, two members of NATO's "Istanbul Cooperation Initiative" - Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - are now fighting alongside Africom/NATO for the fist time. Translation: NATO and Persian Gulf partners are fighting a war in Africa. Europe? That's too provincial. Globocop is the way to go.

According to the Obama administration's own official doublespeak, dictators who are eligible for "US outreach" - such as in Bahrain and Yemen - may relax, and get away with virtually anything. As for those eligible for "regime alteration", from Africa to the Middle East and Asia, watch out. Globocop NATO is coming to get you. With or without dirty deals....



Is the US Losing Afghanistan, Losing Central Asia...Afghanistan, a proxy war again b/w Pakistan/China and the USA/India....and an Attack on Iran is still very much in the cards....
We’re back to colonialism as an overlay on neocolonialism. The prize? Continued and intensified hegemony, wealth, power (for the elites). All the rest is persiflage. Let’s see what China and India do next....

Obama is now asking Congress for a waiver on Uzbekistan's human rights record – arguably the worst in the world – in order to restart military supplies to President Karimov of Uzbekistan. Even Bush stopped these, after the 2005 Andijan massacre of at least 800 civilian demonstrators.

This blog has repeatedly pointed to the ever-increasing role of the “Northern Distribution Network” for getting supplies to the NATO troops in Afghanistan, with Uzbekistan as the point of entry. The Wikileaks cables from Tashkent outline a consistent US policy of sacrificing the human rights of Uzbeks in order to promote this military agenda.

Unfortunately, by promoting evil dictatorship in Central Asia, the United States and NATO are not advancing their own long term interests. Like Mubarak, Karimov is passing his sell-by date. But all rational thinking is thrown out of the window as NATO concentrates on the war it is losing in Afghanistan.

I am advised by the British Embassy that to visit the scenes of the November 1841 uprising in central Kabul as research for my book on Burnes is too dangerous. After ten full years of occupation, with 180,000 troops and billions of dollars in military hardware, they do not even control a few square miles in the center of the capital, let alone the country. The recent attacks on the US Embassy and British Council have proved that. This war is lost.

America’s increasing fawning to Karimov is yet more evidence of that. The reason America is now so desperate for his favor is that, as they leave defeated, taking Karzai with them, they have to get out millions of tonnes of vehicles and military equipment, which has to pass overland. They have lost this war so absolutely that they no longer have possession of the ground they started with. They cannot get out the way they went in, through Pakistan, as they would be attacked in the Bolan and Khyber passes, and along the entire route. So they have to leave through Uzbekistan. The Americans will do anything for Karimov, just as long as they get permission to slink out through his country. I hope as they go they look into the faces of the people whose continued enslavement buys their permission....

What if… Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, are more than mere blunders, mistakes, the result of incompetence?

What if the strategy is perfectly sensible and rational, but so outrageous and cynical that one cannot state it publicly, and the leadership of the United States would prefer to be called idiots rather than criminals?

I don’t believe the US will ever retreat from Iraq or Afghanistan. Look at the new US embassy in Baghdad. It’s absolutely enormous, close to the size of 100 football fields. It’s effectively a city within a city. A militarized castle dominating Baghdad with a garrison numbering thousands and a total population exceeding 15,000. One could compare it in significance to a power statement like the Tower of London.

Iraq is awash with both oil and gas, and a recent UN report boldly states that Iraq has the potential to develop into a gigantic source of oil comparable to Saudi Arabia. The idea that the US will simply walk away from such a prize is… fanciful.

Afghanistan is a strategic bridgehead in Asia. It is of vital importance if one is going to invade the Asian heartland and the area around the Caspian Sea, more oil and gas. It’s also an outpost which can be used to cut off China’s oil and gas supplies from the Caspian Basin and throttle any attempt to re-establish the Silk Road and pushing it even further into Africa and its resources, thereby undermining China’s attempts to establish an alternative route for its imports and exports that avoids a potential American naval blockade of the China Sea at some future point.

Finally, one can also see the NATO attack on Libya and the attempt to put a pro-western regime in power, as a brilliant strategic thrust. Almost at a stroke one has control over African’s largest reserves of oil and gas, a land route into the heart of the Sahara Desert, and perhaps most importantly, China has been strategically defeated. Over 36,000 Chinese workers and technicians have left Libya, China is down 3 billion dollars and is unlikely to participate in the carving up of Libya’s energy resources. NATO seems to be sending a message to China… we’re back and Africa is ours....

Schmoozing up to Karimov has more to do with an organized retreat than with strategic planning.

Should the US attack Iran before they’re due to leave, than their presence in western Afghanistan will be more crucial to them than Helmand or Kabul, so I expect some switching of priorities, very soon., another reason why they need the K2 bridgehead in Uzbekistan....

I think that US are not going to leave Afghanistan in any near future.... Their mission there was not to bring peace and development to a long time victims of the great powers proxy war strategy but to occupy Afghanistan in order to project power in a very geo-strategically important region. It was clear that Russia as long as it has any influence over former colonies will not permit US to settle in Central Asia safely and in this circumstances Afghanistan seems to be an ideal ground for the US to have vast region under potential supervision. With China growing, having strong US military presence just outside of Chinese borders is very important for Pentagon strategists. Unfortunately once again Afghanis are falling victims of their land’s geographical position which is considered to be more important for great powers than the prospects of long term stability and development....

It is eerily reminiscent of the mess the UK got itself into at Port Said in late ’56. In which case, the humiliation heaped upon the US could even trump that of Saigon in April ’75....



Found at Follow the Money - "LIBYA STRATEGY PAPER & NATIONAL INDICATIVE PROGRAMME 2011 - 2013"

It's a big doc, but one thinks the most pertinent phrase is "The EC strategy has one overarching objective:
to consolidate Libya’s integration in the rules based international political and economic system"

Friday, March 25, 2011

Syrian sauce for the Chinese gander....





Syrian sauce for the Chinese gander....
By Peter Lee

The increasingly anachronistic and unwelcome single-party dictatorial rule in Syria and China....



Israel and USA through the Kissinger doctrine have been working on the utter disintegration of Eurasia since the 1970s and are directly involved in fomenting troubles for the establishment of hundreds of Tribes with Flags and the re-shaping of borders, from Kosovo to Africa to China in time....and Israel would significantly benefit from the disintegration of its neighboring states, chiefly among them...Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, UAE, Libya and Saudi Arabia....
and possibly Egypt....


Turkey sees Kurdish threat in Syria unrest

Demonstrations in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad's rule threaten to destabilize Turkey's security arrangements with its neighbor to contain Kurdish rebels, while a collapse of Assad's state could prompt a regional push for Kurdish autonomy. Ankara has responded by gently nudging Damascus to accept some democratic reform, but its converging economic and geopolitical interests with Syria make this an uncomfortable task.
- Jacques N Couvas (Mar 30, '11)


For the Chinese leadership, the ominous tottering of Middle East dominoes - and the foundations of authoritarian doctrine - continues. The Chinese media have become fixated on Libya as an object lesson of the dangers of revolutionary and humanitarian enthusiasm run amok.

Certainly, the Libyan adventure presents a less than edifying spectacle: Western military powers, led by France, exploited a United Nations resolution allowing humanitarian intervention to engage in a freewheeling attack against military assets of the Libyan government with the apparent motive of assuring the survival of rebel forces in the eastern part of the country.

The Barack Obama administration is trying to bolster the case for humanitarian intervention with the kind of loose, hypothetical talk that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to prevent potential mushroom clouds over Cleveland....

Politico's senior White House reporter Glenn Thrush revealed during a radio program that the administration was briefing congressional leaders with the dubious claim that "there could have been 50 to 100,000 deaths associated with allowing Muammar Gaddafi's forces to over-run Benghazi". [1]

It took Hafez al-Assad three weeks of shelling, bombing and ground operations against the virtually defenseless city of Hama, Syria to kill perhaps 35,000 people in 1982. That is currently the gold standard for massacres by Arab despots perpetrated on their own people. It is questionable whether Colonel Muammar Gaddafi would be in a position to exceed this figure in Benghazi, especially when reports indicate that the actual stock of trained rebel fighters opposing him there might only be on the order of 1,000. [2]

Gaddafi should be grateful that the State Department didn't declare he was planning to annihilate Benghazi's entire population of 700,000.

There is no good number for how many people have died to date in what the ex-Libyan ambassador to the United Nations characterized as the "genocide" of Libya, but the most detailed estimate is 2,000 - 500 of whom were Gaddafi loyalists. [3]

Once the humanitarian needs of the Libyan rebels are met, short of regime change in Tripoli a friendly regime in eastern Libya would presumably be the absolute minimum outcome acceptable to France and Italy, which lean on Libya for energy supplies.

There is already an available precedent for partition of Libya, which would leave a pro-Western regime in Benghazi in control of most of Libya's petroleum resources and Gaddafi presiding over an impotent and defunded rump state; that would be the US-brokered peace agreement in Sudan, which led to the establishment of a pro-Western regime in Juba in control of most of Sudan's petroleum resources and left Omar Bashir presiding over an impotent and defunded rump state.

Funny coincidence if the West ends up on the positive side of the oil equation in both instances.

The Chinese government abstained from the UN no-fly resolution; since then media has been full of criticisms and dire warnings over the consequences of the Western military intervention.

On March 21, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson declared:
China has noted the latest developments in the Libyan situation and expresses regret over the military strike against Libya... China always disapproves the use of force in international relations and maintains that the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and relevant norms of international law be adhered to, and Libya's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity be respected. We hope to see Libya restore stability as soon as possible and avoid the escalation of military conflicts and more civilian casualties. [4]
Xinhua also gave prominence to a report that called into question the "no boots in the sand" avowals of the West in enforcing the UN resolutions: the dispatch of the amphibious assault vessel USS Bataan, with 900 marines and perhaps three dozen attack helicopters, to join the Libya operation in the Mediterranean. [5]

In what is unlikely to be a propaganda windfall for the United States, the Bataan gained a certain notoriety when it was identified as a prison ship used to detain terrorism suspects incommunicado in the Indian Ocean in late 2001 and 2002. [6]

In an ironic aside - and an indication of how murky things are over there - Time Magazine dug up a US Army report that Libya provided the highest number of anti-US foreign fighters in Iraq per capita based on their home country.... They virtually all came from the impoverished and neglected environs of Benghazi, Darnah, Ajdabiyah, and Misrata - the heartland of the current rebellion. [7]

Certainly, there is plenty to criticize, and China is not alone...

The African Union, Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Brazil, and India have all repudiated the ad hoc intervention which, in addition to its myriad contradictions and dangers, has the additional disadvantage of being led by the hypocritical and impotent French....

With implicit eye-rolling, Russia's RIA Novosti reported a news item that neatly encapsulated the opportunistic pandering of the rebels and the invincible self-regard of the French government:
France says it feels a sense of responsibility for Libyan rebels after its flag was raised over the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, France's prime minister said on Tuesday.

"There is hope in Benghazi now, the French flag is being waved there, and also the flag of a different Libya which dreams of democracy and modernization," Francois Fillon told the French parliament. [8]
To make things worse, France's Libyan adventure was reportedly concocted as a side project of France's much-mocked premier philosophical poseur, "intellectual dandy", and ubiquitous media hound Bernard-Henri Levy. Diane Johnstone writes in Counterpunch:
Bernard-Henri Levy held a private meeting in Benghazi with Moustapha Abdeljalil, a former justice minister who has turned coats to become leader of the rebel "National Transition Council". That very evening, BHL [Bernard-Henri Levy] called Sarkozy on his cellphone and got his agreement to receive the NTC leaders. The meeting took place on March 10 in the Elysee palace in Paris.

As reported in Le Figaro by veteran international reporter Renaud Girard, Sarkozy thereupon announced to the delighted Libyans the plan that he had concocted with BHL: recognition of the NTC as sole legitimate representative of Libya, the naming of a French ambassador to Benghazi, precision strikes on Libyan military airports, with the blessings of the Arab League (which he had already obtained). The French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, was startled to learn of this dramatic turn in French diplomacy after the media. [9]
Writing for Stephen Walt's realist blog at Foreign Policy, Mark Sheetz of Boston College characterized BHL, perhaps with a tinge of envy, as "another vain French Zionist rooster strutting around looking for glory". [10]

For China, the temerity of France's philosophers in usurping the US role as the verbal and military scourge of inconvenient dictators is beside the point.

The issue in Libya is the astounding ease with which a regime that found itself at cross-purposes with the United States was unilaterally stripped of its legitimacy and exposed to military intervention through aggressive and creative interpretation of an ambiguous UN resolution - in a mere three days.

This issue is important enough that People's Daily has been carrying the propaganda burden itself, instead of relying on its stridently nationalistic but less official international mouthpiece, Global Times. A selection of People's Daily headlines provides a taste of the official Chinese mood:
- China reaffirms its reservation to part of "no-fly zone" resolution on Libya. [11]
- How humanitarian is Western intervention in Libya? [12]
- Libya intervention: Driven by oil or humanitarianism? [13]

China's liberal bloggers, on the other hand, appear to be brimming with enthusiasm for military intervention by Western democracies.
On February 26, China's "Great River" - the nom du Web of journalist Zhang Wen - had already written a piece entitled "Support America Taking Military Action Against Libya".

Indeed, he supported US unilateral action even if UN sanction was blocked by "the resistance of some countries" aka China. This put him several steps in front of the Obama administration, which had serious reservations about intervention, was stampeded in abandoning its cautious stance by domestic and international pressures, and found it politic to proceed only after the Arab League and the UNSC were on board. [14]

(Zhang, with blog posts like "Why Is It That My Predictions So Accurate?" - "Answer: It's simple. One has to understand human nature and grasp the overall situation", seems a worthy Zionist contender for the crown of China's Bernard-Henri Levy.) [15]

China's most popular blogger, Han Han, also picked up the theme that human rights trumps national sovereignty - and that the need to protect people from slaughter is more important that what happens to the oil-with a post titled, "Dictators Don't Have Internal Affairs". [16]

Within the Chinese tradition of remonstrance by analogy, the implication is that sauce for the Libyan goose might also suit the Chinese gander....

Regardless of its duration or outcome, the West's oily, self-righteous, violent and disorganized adventure in Libya will probably provide ample grist for the China's government's propaganda mill. Whether it will shake the convictions of China's interventionist liberal hawks is another matter.

However, the matter of closest interest to Beijing may be the fate of another Middle East authoritarian government that has explicitly modeled its doctrine of economic development and political control on China's example...

That country is Syria, and the outlook for Bashar Assad's regime has darkened with a local manifestation of the regional unrest, in the southern town of Daraa. Syria is one of three Chinese strategic partners in the region, together with the Infamous White House Murder INC,...Iran and Turkey.

With its secular, single-party Ba'athist rule, its liberalized but state-dominated economy, its lack of an oil cushion, and hostility to any reforms....and its regional allies (last year Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced that Syria had replaced Iraq in the "axis of evil", apparently to uphold the principle that the axis must always have three members - the other two are ZIOCONS and the assassins on the Potomac of the most infamous White House Murder INC,), Syria occupies a political and social space analogous to, if much smaller than, China's.

It also incorporates the characteristic Chinese problems of princeling rule and utter corruption. The president of Syria, Bashar Assad, is the son of the previous Dictator/president, Hafez Assad. His relatives pervade the government and economy and have aroused considerable resentment....
Syria's potentially fatal flaw, however, is unique to that nation. The Assad family and significant numbers of its ruling elite is drawn from the Alawi sect, a Crypto-Zionist Druze-like esoteric faith whose claims to Muslim orthodoxy within the Shi'ite tradition are challenged especially by Sunni skeptics, but also by some Shi'ites. Alawites only make up 12% of Syria's population, while Sunni believers comprise over 70%. [17]

The government has attempted to compensate for its vulnerability to sectarian challenge by a commitment to secularism, nationalism, utter corruption, demagoguery, brutal suppression, an utter security diktat and fake economic growth.

The government's insecurity was exemplified by its ferocious response to an armed challenge to its power by an alliance of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni elites in the 1980s. Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, inflicted the Hama outrage in order to break the back of the Brotherhood in its stronghold.

Under Bashar, the regime has liberalized and done a relatively skillful job of surviving in a remarkably dangerous neighborhood while maintaining its foreign policy dependence on the odious White House Murder INC's machinations in the Levant, ever since January 24th 2002, its close cooperation with CIA/MOSSAD and renditions after the inside Job of 9/11....

It was able to make a sufficiently convincing demonstration of its utility to the United States in the "war on terror" (while absorbing 1.5 million Iraqi refugees) to sidetrack plans by US hawks to turn left at Baghdad and march on Lebanon with Saatchi&Saatchi machinations in Beirut.... While reaching out to the West, Syria was also able to maintain its ties with Iran, improve its relations with Turkey, and avoid an attack by Israel....because the Assads are partners in crime with Israel since 1963....and have sold the Golan Heights to Israel for peanuts....

Assad's persistence paid off as the Obama administration nominated Robert Ford as ambassador to Syria in December 2010, continuing a constant relationship run by CIA for decades in Syria....where foggy bottom is sidelined completely....
The Guardian's David Hirst acknowledged the fake nationalist foundation of Syrian government foreign policy, while denying it had actually taken root with the Syrian people:
[Assad's] regime was chiefly stable, he said, because it was the true embodiment of the Arabs and Syrians' "ideology, belief and cause" - essentially the struggle against Israel and western powers standing behind it. It thereby boasted a "patriotic legitimacy" that all other regimes lacked....LOL

But this argument, advanced by a despot in favor of his own survival, appears almost as delusional as those advanced by others - such as the al-CIAda of Colonel MOSSAD Qaddafi's bizarre imagining. The patriotic card clearly counts for little with the Syrian public. [18]
The Syrian government's attempts to bolster its legitimacy by shepherding the nation's economic development, on the other hand, have been only moderately successful.

Professor Josh CIA Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a crony of Syria's butchers and assassins..., told Asia Times Online:
The Syrian leadership has often invoked the China model and something it would like to emulate - a one party state guiding the country toward capitalism and economic renewal... Syria, unfortunately, is not China. It has been unable to produce economic growth over 5% a year and unwilling to control rapid population increases that wipe out economic growth. Syria doesn't have the clout or competitiveness to open Western markets.

That said, the Syrian state may not weather the present storm sweeping the Arab world, but it will be badly hobbled by the growing consciousness of its youth that they can question authority and push back against the authorities that run rough shod over their interests and can provide only a bleak future for most of them.
The clashes in Daraa were triggered by the arrest of 15 teenagers for scrawling anti-government graffiti inspired by Egyptian and Tunisian slogans they saw on al-Jazeera. Protests followed the arrests, security forces opened fire and killed several people, and the protests/funerals grew and began to spread to neighboring towns.

The demonstrations have a certain sectarian aspect, despite the efforts of liberal sympathizers to spin the slogans as generic expressions of virtuous religiosity. The calls of "No Iran No Hezbollah" by orthodox Sunni townspeople imply an open challenge to their at best Shi'ite-esque and at worst heretic Alawite Zionist rulers....

The Syrian regime's guiding slogan over the past three decades has been the very Chinese "Stability and Security", as embodied in a perpetual state of emergency, single-party rule and a pervasive security apparatus.

However, on March 24 the government responded to the burgeoning crisis in Daraa by turning away from the tried-and-true practice of repression and announcing plans that, if carried out, would signal fake reforms, as al-Jazeera reported:
"I am happy to announce to you the decisions made today by the Arab Ba'ath party under the auspices of President Bashar CIA Assad ... which include ... studying the possibility of lifting the emergency law and licensing political parties," the president's media adviser Buthaina Shaaban said at a news conference on Thursday. [19]
The licensing of political parties is not necessarily a stepping-stone to liberal democracy.

Instead, Syria's government may have decided to take a page from the book of its ally, Israel....

Iran, in addition to its assigned role as nuclear bogeyman and threat to all that is good and right in the Middle East, is also a democracy, if profoundly flawed, one of the few functioning in that part of the world....

It is home to a welter of political parties that, in addition to expressing the desires of their constituents, also allow the regime to play divide-and-conquer with its rivals - and let pro-government parties take some of the heat and infamy for beating back the challenge from reformists.

Iran's government has also shown considerable success in resisting the 2011 revolutionary wave - at least for now.

In light of what is happening in Syria - and the experience of Iran - China may be forced to take another look at its most cherished, and self-serving, concept: the central importance and attractiveness of stability.

Stability is a product that authoritarian regimes want to sell but the people on the street aren't buying right now. Appeals to consider the virtues of stability has not put the brakes on any of the popular movements in the Arab countries.

Stability is not, to put it mildly, a hallmark of Iranian society.

That presents a challenge to China, since the justification for the Communist Party's unpopular political monopoly (as opposed to its successful economic franchise) pretty much boils down to one word: stability. A March 10 People's Daily editorial laid out the defense of "stability" in an editorial entitled, China is definitely not the Middle East. It stated:
The Chinese people, like the people of other countries, yearn for the lasting peace and stability. People in China, now better fed and better clothed, are striving to pursue their still better living standards; they are fully aware that the premise for the auspicious days is precisely the national stability and a harmonious society ...

Chinese people fear turbulence and worry about being led into troubles and so they ardently hope for stability, harmony and peace. They exert themselves to seek development wholeheartedly and still better livelihoods, and most of them long for a better quality of life. Hence, the only very few trouble makers cannot randomly make a crack up in the country even if they vainly attempt to make trouble.

The leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is laid on a very solid foundation in recent years. China held the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, all performed with flying colors. And the relief work in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake and the ensuing Yushu Quake rescue work, as well as the efforts to cope with the impact of the global financial crisis, and the latest Libya evacuation of more than Chinese 30,000 nationals - All these difficult matters were done so well. [20]
However, the events in Syria imply that appeals to nationalism, patriotism, lunch-pail issues, the need to protect a vulnerable international standing in the face of Western hostility, and the craving for stability may not outweigh a popular yearning for instability: a desire to experience and participate in the enormous, exciting, and fundamentally empowering changes sweeping the world.

If this attitude prevails in China despite its economic success - or if that success falters - the Chinese leadership may find itself in a losing battle to preserve its increasingly anachronistic and unwelcome single-party rule.

Instead, it may find it necessary to turn toward the messy, multi-party system that underpins the authoritarian rule in Russia and Iran - and may also become the standard in Syria - much earlier than it hoped and expected....

Notes
1. Click
here for the broadcast.
2.
Rebel Insider Concedes Weaknesses in Libya, New York Times, March 23, 2011.
3.
Casualties of the 2011 Libyan uprising, Wikipedia.
4.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Jiang Yu's Remarks on Multinational Military Strike against Libya, Chinese Foreign Ministry, March 21, 2011.
5.
Libya: What is the role of the USS Bataan?, BBC, March 23, 2011.
6.
Prison ships, torture claims, and missing detainees, Guardian, June 2, 2008.
7.
Just Who Are These Libyan Rebels?, Time, March 24, 2011.
8.
Fillon says French flag raised over rebel-held Benghazi, Ria Novosti, March 25, 2011.
9.
Why are They Making War on Libya?, Counter Punch, March 24, 2011.
10.
Has the U.S. forgotten how to pass the buck?, Foreign Policy, March 23, 2011.
11.
China reaffirms its reservation to part of "no-fly zone" resolution on Libya, People's Daily, March 18, 2011.
12.
How humanitarian is Western intervention in Libya?, People's Daily, March 22, 2011.
13.
Libya intervention: Driven by oil or humanitarianism?, People's Daily, March 23, 2011.
14. Click
here for the Chinese text.
15. Click
here for the Chinese text.
16. Click
here for the Chinese text.
17.
'Alawites in the Muslim World, Muslim Hope, May 2007.
18.
Even anti-western Syria is not immune to revolution, Guardian, March 22, 2011.
19.
Protests prompt Syria to pledge reforms, Al-jazeera, March 24, 2011.
20.
China is definitely not Middle East, People's Daily, Mar10, 2011.

Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.

....

Popular uprisings and internecine hostilities will lead to the redrawing of regional maps, which will be a far cry from those underlying the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and other accords....

The struggles for survival of Libyan Col. Muammar Gadhafi, Syrian President Bashar Assad and their counterparts elsewhere herald the last days of the Sykes-Picot agreement from World War I, which in effect divided the region of the Middle East into separate states. Now it is apparent that maps drawn in the coming years will show new or renewed independent states such as South Sudan; Kurdistan; Palestine; maybe also Cyrenaica in eastern Libya; the Western Sahara, which will no longer be in Moroccan hands; reconstructed Southern Yemen; and Gulf states that will separate from the United Arab Emirates. It's even possible that there will be a split in Saudi Arabia between "the state of the holy sites" in the Hejaz and the petroleum powers in the east, and of Syria into Sunni, Alaouite and Druze states. The basis for these divisions will be implementation of the principle of self-definition of nations and tribes, which until now unwillingly and without any alternative have been wrapped up together in the same national package with their foes.

The foreign policy of Israel, even before statehood, has always been built upon the rivalries of Arab and Muslim neighbors. Furthermore, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic unity has relied to a great extent on hostility toward Israel, which for its part has preferred the separatism and nationalism of its neighbors. The more states there are in the region in the future, the easier it will be for Israel to maneuver among them.

The borders in the Middle East were determined between 1916 and 1922 in negotiations involving the European powers, conducted in majestic palaces by officials wearing suits and ties. Those borders are being redrawn in the 21st century by force, by wars and by popular uprisings. This began with America's invasion of Iraq eight years ago, which crushed the central regime and created de facto ethnic enclaves. It continued with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which led to the establishment of a de facto state controlled by Hamas, and later with the referendum on the partitioning of Sudan at the end of a long and cruel internecine war there. The process has been accelerated with the recent revolutions in the Arab countries, which are still in their early stages and have already led to a war in Libya.

In his new book "How to Run the World" (Random House ), which was published just before the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Parag Khanna, a researcher at the New America Foundation, predicts a world comprising 300 independent, sovereign nations in the next few decades, as compared to about 200 today. At the basis of this fission is what Khanna has called "post-colonial entropy": Many states have developed from former colonies, he observes, and since their independence have "experienced unmanageable population growth, predatory and corrupt dictatorship, crumbling infrastructure and institutions, and ethnic or sectarian polarization." Exactly the same reasons can be used to explain the current vicissitudes in the Arab countries.

In many cases, writes Khanna, current borders are the cause of internal strife - for example, in failed states like Yemen, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his view, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not "America's wars," but rather "unexploded ordinance left over from old European wars, with their fuses lit on slow release."

America is not to blame for the Congress of Berlin in 1884, which divided up Africa without taking its inhabitants into account, or for the British partition of Pakistan and Afghanistan. But America - together with the other powers - can and must help today with solving the resultant problems. Nor only by drawing up new borders or in votes at the United Nations, but also by building infrastructures that will provide sound economic foundations to the new countries, and will free them from dependence on powerful neighbors like Turkey and Israel.

In the early 20th century, the Western powers controlled Asia and Africa and identified a wealth of assets in the Middle East. In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot - a British official and a French diplomat, respectively - drew up an agreement on behalf of their governments describing a tentative division of the Ottoman Empire, which was fighting alongside Germany against the Allies. The document and map they came up with were theoretical and the chances they would be implemented seemed slight: The Turks were still far from defeat and the Western armies were bleeding along Europe's western front. In essence, Sykes' and Picot's governments coveted Syria and most of Palestine for France, and what was later to become Iraq for Britain.

In his fascinating book "A Peace to End All Peace" (1989 ), American historian David Fromkin describes how the great powers shaped the map of the Middle East in World War I and thereafter. According to Fromkin, the anti-Semitic view that the Jews had the ability to influence those powers and foment conspiracies underlay the diplomacy of the Western countries, which hoped to harness Jewish might on their behalf.

After reaching the agreement with Picot, Sykes was about to set out for Saint Petersburg, the capital of the czarist empire, to present the details to the Russians - who had always wanted to gain control of Istanbul and have access to the Mediterranean Sea. En route, Sykes met Capt. William Reginald Hall, head of Royal Naval Intelligence, in London and showed him his map. Hall told him Britain should send its forces to Palestine and only then would the Arabs switch to its side in the war. "Force is the best Arab propaganda" to use when dealing with the Arabs, the intelligence officer explained to the diplomat. (Or translated into our present-day Israeli lingo: "The only thing the Arabs understand is force." )

Sykes was convinced the agreement he had concocted with the French would satisfy Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz, the progenitor of the Hashemite dynasty, who sought independence for his people from the Ottoman Empire in exchange for support of the British. And then Hall surprised his British interlocutor by introducing a new factor into the power equation: The Jews, he said, had "a strong material, and a very strong political, interest in the future of the country." Sykes was dumbstruck. He had never heard of Zionism before then. He rushed to a meeting with the Jewish minister in the British war cabinet, Herbert Samuel, for an explanation.

This was the start of the process that would lead later to the Balfour Declaration, the conquest of Palestine, the establishment of the British Mandate, and the appointment of Samuel as its first high commissioner. At this point were sown the seeds of Arab anger at the Western powers, which had dismantled and then reassembled nations and states in the Middle East and promised Palestine to the Zionists.

The final borders in the Middle East were set by then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference in 1922, which separated Transjordan from the boundaries of the Palestine Mandate. The Israeli right mourns that "tearing apart" to this very day.

With the end of colonialism, maintenance of those borders constituted the basis of political order in the region, even though it left many peoples unsatisfied - for example, the Kurds, who were split up among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. The reaction to colonialism was Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism, which reached its peak in the union of Syria and Egypt (the United Arab Republic ) at the end of the 1950s, though it did not last long. Now, nearly 100 years after the talks between Sykes and Picot, the United States' withdrawal from Iraq will afford the Kurds a chance for independence, despite Turkey's opposition. For their part, the Palestinians are working on international recognition for their country by this coming summer, despite Israel's objections.

Other "artificial states" like Libya, which was made up of three former Italian colonies, as well as Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, could all disintegrate. In all of them there is serious internal tension among tribes and groups or a minority government imposed on the majority. Yemen was divided in the past and could once again split into north and south. In Saudi Arabia, distances are vast. But how is it possible to partition Jordan, where the Bedouin and the Palestinians are mingled? The redrawing of borders is not a panacea.

Meanwhile, the war in Libya is splitting it de facto between Cyrenaica, the bastion of the rebels in the east, and Tripolitania, under Gadhafi's control. The Western powers' entry into the war on the side of the rebels shows they want to create a protectorate under their influence adjacent to the border with Egypt, which is at risk of becoming an Islamic republic hostile to the West. It is hard to find any other strategic rationale for the decision to become involved in Libya.

The battles between the British forces and Rommel's in World War II were fought exactly in those same places and had the same aim: protecting the eastern flank of Egypt and the Suez Canal. Rommel and Montgomery fought there well before oil was discovered in Libya.

The West, like Israel, prefers a fragmented and squabbling Middle East and is fighting on several fronts against pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism led by Osama bin Laden (and, in different ways, also by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ). Therefore, it is possible to assess that the West will not try to thwart the process of fission in the countries of the region, but rather will contribute to it.

Israel and USA through the Kissinger doctrine have been working on the utter disintegration of Eurasia since the 1970s and are directly involved in fomenting troubles for the establishment of hundreds of Tribes with Flags and the re-shaping of borders, from Kosovo to Africa to China in time....and Israel would significantly benefit from the disintegration of its neighboring states, chiefly Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, UAE, Libya and Saudi Arabia.... and possibly Egypt....

....

“We stand for universal values, including the rights of the … people to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and the freedom to access information.” –President Barack Obama, during the Egyptian mass uprising against a detested dictator.
That is the theory .... — U.S. foreign policy in defense of universal values. In practice, the United States has often been unable or unwilling to live up to the values it preaches. Like other big powers, it has placed its self-interest first, which meant dividing the world into acceptable and unacceptable authoritarians.... In an act of selective intervention, the U.S., France, and Britain launched air and missile strikes on Libya on March 19 to prevent the government of Muammar Gaddafi from using “illegitimate force” against Libyans demanding his ouster and clamoring for the same freedoms the Obama administration, after dithering and zig-zagging, eventually cheered in Egypt.......
So why Libya and not Yemen and Bahrain? Here is where lofty talk of universal values collides with self-interest and here is where policies the United States pursued for more than half a century live on. .... It still does, where Yemen and Bahrain are concerned. As a newly leaked cable (dating back to 2005) from the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital put it: “Saleh has provided Yemen with relative stability … but has done little to strengthen government institutions or modernize the country. As a result, any succession scenario is fraught with uncertainty.”...... there has been no public American push for him to step down, not even after the killing of 52 pro-democracy demonstrators in a Sana’a square on March 18. Washington shrugged off a call by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, for a suspension of military assistance to Yemen. Which brings to mind a remark attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 60 years ago, about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch.” Who says there is no consistency in U.S. foreign policy?
In the case of Bahrain, too, U.S. national interests trump universal values. ....... With martial law imposed, the freedoms of which Obama spoke so approvingly when the Egyptians ousted Hosni Mubarak have been suspended in Bahrain. ..... But critics of Washington’s dealings with the world should take note that hypocrisy and double standards are not an American monopoly. Take France and Britain, for example, the United States’ main partners in the attack on the Libyan government. Neither country has a record of unselfish promotion of human rights and freedom, not recently and even less in their colonial pasts. Is hypocrisy the inevitable byproduct of power politics? What makes the United States particularly vulnerable to charges of double standards is its proclivity to going around the world preaching values it cannot live up to — and to portray itself as more moral and righteous than other nations. In his State of the Union speech in January, Obama followed a long tradition of American leaders in describing his country in superlative terms. America, he said was “not just a place on the map but the light to the world.”




Thursday, March 24, 2011

Indonesia may be next target for CIA's "controlled revolution" program....



Indonesia may be next target for CIA's "controlled revolution" program....

March , 2011 -- Like mother, like son: Has Obama authorized a CIA operation to overthrow Indonesian president?


We have previously reported on the post-CIA coup activities of President Obama's mother in helping the CIA, through US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ford Foundation cover, to identify pro-Communist villagers in Java for later assassination targeting... Reports now coming out of Jakarta strongly suggest that the Obama administration is involved in backing a generals' revolt with the aim of toppling democratically-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former general who is now considered a political reformer.

Fears that a possible coup against Yudhoyono is being planned by right-wing active duty and retired Indonesian army elements are being fueled by an Al Jazeera report that a cabal of Indonesian generals have held secret meetings with leaders of Indonesia's radical Islamist groups to help plan terrorist attacks in the country that would then be used as a pretext for an army coup against Yudhoyono. The generals would claim that the ouster of the president was necessitated by his weak leadership in the face of terrorism... In fact, the renegade generals consider Yudhoyono to be too much of a reformist.

The rumors of a planned coup against Yudhoyono come amid the publication by WikiLeaks of U.S. embassy Jakarta cables that report alleged widespread corruption, personal enrichment, nepotism, and spying on political opponents by Yudhoyono's administration.

Our Jakarta source confirms the Al Jazeera report that the Islamist provocateur groups, led by retired Army chief of staff General Tyasno Sudarto, is involved in planning for a series of "false flag" terrorist attacks. The Islamist groups have been recruiting new members since January and are now boldly calling for a revolution in Indonesia, the removal of Yudhoyono, and the formation of an Islamic state. Sudarto has called for Indonesian youth movements to align with the Indonesian armed forces (TNI) and he has accused Yudhoyono of weakening the army.

Leaked WikiLeaks cables about corruption by the former regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and the besieged Qaddafi government in Libya, partly influenced the uprisings in those nations. The same playbook now appears to be aimed at fomenting an uprising and coup in Indonesia. Using false flag terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals as a pretext for a military coup in Indonesia is eerily reminiscent of the 1965 kidnapping and assassination of six Army generals by forces who were later claimed to be members of the Indonesian Communist Party. In fact, the assassins were believed to have been forces loyal to General Suharto, who, with the backing of the CIA, carried out a bloody campaign of retaliation against Indonesian Communists and ethnic Chinese. The current campaign against Yudhoyono is using the predicate threat of Islamist radicals in the same manner that Suharto and the CIA used the threat of Communists in launching their 1965 coup against President Sukarno. And today, it is reportedly General Sudarto who is heading the CIA-influenced coup planning just as it was General Suharto who masterminded the 1965 coup with the CIA's backing. Suharto was considered a loyalist of Sukarno prior to the coup.

The website of one of the Islamist groups, the Islamic People’s Forum (FUI), identifies Sudarto as the security minister in a post-coup Islamist government. The proposed post-coup government list was reportedly drawn up by the Islamist groups in coordination with the cabal of generals who want to foment a coup. Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) chairman Habib Riziq was designated as the new president in place of Yudhoyono, while Abu Jibril of the Indonesian Mujahidin Council (MMI) was designated as the future vice president in place of current Vice President Boediono.

Terrorist attacks against the country's small Ahmadi Muslim community have been linked to the retired army generals' coup planning network. Al Jazeera reported from Jakarta that “senior retired generals have been secretly supporting hard-line [Islamist] groups to incite religious violence in an effort to overthrow Yudhoyono." In what have been additional provocateur action last March, Sudarto addressed an unlikely joint meeting of hard-line Islamists and secular Indonesian nationalists where he openly praised China and attacked the United States for its "neo-liberal" economic policies. Last year, Sudarto also charged the United States with "colonizing" Indonesia on the eve of President Obama's visit to the country where he lived as a young boy.

The Indonesian government and members of the legislature have denied that there is a secret plot by generals to overthrow Yudhoyono. However, our sources in Jakarta report that the threat of a coup, covertly supported by the CIA and using radical Islamist proxies, is real. There have already been a number of terrorist bomb threats in Jakarta and Bali, seven at last count, and our sources claim that such threats often precede an actual "false flag" blast...

The CIA's support for an Islamist coup in Indonesia would not be the first time that the agency relied on Muslims to carry out a coup. It was a Muslim fear of Indonesian Communists backed by China that garnered support for the anti-Sukarno coup in 1965. Many of the Muslim networks that were used by the CIA had originally been used by the Japanese during World War II to convince Muslims that Japan was their natural ally against the Soviet Union and its international Communist movement. The use of disaffected army generals to make common cause with Indonesian Muslim radicals and nationalists may be a way for the CIA to determine post-coup targets, much as Indonesian Communists and ethnic Chinese were targeted after the Suharto coup in 1965. One of those carrying out the targeting in the subsequent months was Lolo Soetori, Obama's step-father....

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What happens in Yemen and Syria should concern us, but the country that we should really pay attention to is also the 800lb gorilla in the room that everyone in the worlds is aware of .... but no one wants to talk about. That country is Saudi Arabia....

In my opinion it is only a matter of time before calls for reform start to percolate in Saudi Arabia, and I can easily predict that the kingdom will ignore them. The violence and uprisings that can result would pale in comparison to what has happening in almost every other country in the region .... doubly so since most of the world is dependent on Saudi Arabia producing and exporting oil. If one has to rank countries being the greatest threat to us .... Saudi Arabia (because of its oil and arrogant Wahhabi crazy Crypto-Zionist leadership) would easily make the top of that list....


A rather good analysis on the impact of wheat and food production on the political turmoil that is occurring in the Middle East. Couple this with the tsunami/nuclear disasters in Japan and its impact on global food supplies .... much of the world appears to be entering even more difficult times....

Back to Westphalia

The Westphalian principle that nation states could run their internal affairs as they pleased helped to reduce war for 300 years. That principle is now increasingly abandoned, not just in Libya but through the International Monetary Fund and other non-democratic international organizations. The consequences are hugely hazardous, while putting at risk the immense benefits the ancient treaty brought. - Martin Hutchinson (Mar 29, '11)




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BOOK REVIEW
The privatization
of US foreign policy

Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs
by Laura A Dickinson

Since the Vietnam War, the United States has steadily shunted foreign policy responsibilities onto private contractors, with no hope now of closing the Pandora's box. This legal look into how privatization has seeped into the Pentagon and why serious abuses take place outlines how a flawed organizational and monitoring structure can be reformed. - David Isenberg (Mar 25, '11)
New bid to break Afghan stalemate
An exhaustive report released in Washington this week seeks to help find a political solution to the United States' war in Afghanistan, primarily by suggesting that the United Nations name a "facilitator" to supervise peace talks among Afghans and foreign stakeholders. Obstacles to a resolution of the conflict remain numerous, though. - Barbara Slavin (Mar 25, '11)
Welcome to the new NATO quagmire
The decision for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to run the show on Libya is a copy of the International Security and Assistance Force arrangement in Afghanistan. Libya is now an official victim of the endless war club and since it is on the ground in Central Asia, NATO is about to enter the era of the double quagmire.
- Pepe Escobar (Mar 25, '11)