GeoPlotilicalNWO

Fear and loathing in the American Gulf; US tells Israelis it won't join their war....

2012-02-02T01:58:00.001-08:00

Fear and loathing in the American Gulf; US tells Israelis it won't join their war....
By Pepe Escobar

Persian Gulf? Khaleej-e-Fars? Forget it; time to call it the American Gulf - to the delight of the vultures, jackals and hyenas of war, Israeli and Anglo-American. The House of Saud wouldn't be too displeased either.

So much for the Pentagon's "pivoting" strategy from the Middle East to East Asia - recently announced by United States President Barack Obama. The confrontation against China starts in Southwest Asia - in the American Gulf; and goes way beyond Washington cheerleading the hardcore Sunni sectarian killers of Jundallah in Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province, Israeli Mossad agents posing as US Central Intelligence Agency operatives, serial assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, computer viruses, and ludicrous accusations of Tehran helping al-Qaeda and vice-versa.

MOP it all up
Time to review the evidence. In roughly one month, no less than three US aircraft carriers and their strike groups will be sloshing around the American Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea; the USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise, plus good ol' French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. And yet one more Pacific-based US aircraft carrier can be swiftly dispatched.

Apart from this naval hajj of US aircraft carrier groups, the 40-year-old USS Ponce is being retrofitted into a special ops amphibious hub - to be dispatched to the American Gulf.

The Pentagon's CENTCOM is fast upgrading the 14,000-kilogram Orwellian bunker-buster monster known as Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP), theoretically capable of taking out Iran's underground nuclear installations.

A certain Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Project - one of those myriad revolving doors in Washington mixing politicians and military-complex types - wants to give Israel some 200 additional MOPs and three KC-135 aerial refueling tankers to "increase the credibility of a military strike" against Iran.

DEBKA-Net is a digital front for Israeli propaganda/disinformation - so it's essentially untrustworthy. But its latest bombast deserves scrutiny. DEBKA is peddling that the Pentagon is in fast and furious mode in two strategic islands; the paradisiacal Socotra, 380 kilometers southeast of Yemen (where the Pentagon has been building a giant base since 2010); and Camp Justice in Masirah, 70 km south of the Strait of Hormuz, in Oman.

Socotra thus joins key American Gulf nodes of the US Empire of Bases such as Jebel Ali and al-Dahfra in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), al-Udeid in Qatar and Arifjan in Kuwait. It's crucial to keep in mind the extra 15,000 US troops deployed to Kuwait only a few weeks ago. The Pentagon, predictably, is thunderously mum about the build up in both Socotra and Masirah, and Yemeni and Omani officials are not talking.

DEBKA claims that in two weeks, around 50,000 US troops, flown in from Diego Garcia, 3,000 km away, will be massed in both islands - plus the 50,000 troops already based in the American Gulf. Add to this air, naval and special forces from Britain and France constantly pouring into Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Not enough to launch a ground invasion of Iran - but more than enough for major logistical support in a "no options off the table" (copyright Obama) scenario.

Build up, and pray for war
DEBKA predictably spins all these developments - not independently confirmed - into Obama's "resolve to attack Iran's nuclear facilities in the course of 2012", which is absolute nonsense. This may mirror (hysterical) wishful thinking by the Benjamin Netanyahu government in Israel, but has nothing to do with the Obama administration's strategy, which essentially is to impose a "roll over and die" form of "diplomacy" on Iran (sanctions/oil embargo + Pentagon build up in the American Gulf) as a means of extracting an Iranian capitulation in the nuclear dossier.

Wishful thinking is also the weapon du jour for The New York Times, which now seems to be subcontracting the Iran dossier to Israeli writers, as in getting rid of the US middleman.

One Ronen Bergman writes that "after speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012". Gary Sick conclusively debunked this nonsense [1] stressing how "his conclusion is at odds with virtually everything he produces as evidence".

The only good thing among all this weaponized orgy is that Tehran and Washington are still talking - sort of - using the proverbial back channels; in Baghdad (via both ambassadors); via Turkey (with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as middleman); and in Vienna, the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency (via diplomats). There's a five-month window for good sense to prevail until July 1 - when the US/European Union oil embargo on Iran kicks in.

And then there's the resurfacing of "Austere Challenge 12" - the massive joint Israel-US war games involving thousands of US soldiers and testing of a number of Israeli and US missile defense systems.

"Austere Challenge" is now rescheduled for October, less than a month before the US presidential election, when Mitt Romney, the neo-con gang and deranged evangelicals will be bombing Iran non-stop on cable TV. Until then, it's up to world public opinion, to quote Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy, to "rise like lions, after slumber, in unvanquishable number", and drive fear and loathing away from the American Gulf.

Note
1. See here.

US tells Israelis it won't join their war...lol lol
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) General Martin Dempsey told Israeli leaders on January 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.

Dempsey's warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the US is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.

But the Israeli government remains defiant about maintaining its freedom of action to make war on Iran, and it is counting on the influence of right-wing extremist views in US politics to bring pressure to bear on Obama to fall into line with a possible Israeli attack during the election campaign this autumn.

Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

Dempsey's trip was highly unusual, in that there was neither a press conference by the chairman nor any public statement by either side about the substance of his meetings with Israeli leaders. Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either US or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive.

The substance of Dempsey's warning to the Israelis has become known, however, to active and retired senior flag officers with connections to the JCS, according to a military source who got it from those officers.

A spokesman for the JCS, Commander Patrick McNally, offered no comment on Wednesday when Inter Press Service (IPS) asked him about the above account of Dempsey's warning to the Israelis.

The message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally. But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had given a clear hint in an interview on "Face the Nation" on January 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.

Asked how the United States would react if Israel were to launch a unilateral attack on Iran, Panetta first emphasized the need for a coordinated policy toward Iran with Israel. But when host Bob Schieffer repeated the question, Panetta said, "If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that's what we'd be concerned about."
Defense Minister Barak had sought to dampen media speculation before Dempsey's arrival that the chairman was coming to put pressure on Israel over its threat to attack Iran, but then proceeded to reiterate the Netanyahu-Barak position that they cannot give up their responsibility for the security of Israel "for anyone, including our American friends".

There has been no evidence since the Dempsey visit of any change in the Netanyahu government's insistence on maintaining its freedom of action to attack Iran.

Dempsey's meetings with Netanyahu and Barak also failed to resolve the issue of the joint US-Israeli military exercise geared to simulate a missile attack, "Austere Challenge '12", which had been scheduled for April 2012 but had been postponed abruptly a few days before his arrival in Israel.

More than two weeks after Dempsey's meeting with Barak, the spokesman for the Pentagon, John Kirby, told IPS, "All I can say is that the exercise will be held later this year." That indicated that there has been no major change in the status of US-Israeli discussions of the issue since the postponement of the exercise was leaked on January 15.

The postponement has been the subject of conflicting and unconvincing explanations from the Israeli side, suggesting disarray in the Netanyahu government over how to handle the issue.

To add to the confusion, Israeli and US statements left it unclear whether the decision had been unilateral or joint as well as the reasons for the decision.

Panetta asserted in a news conference on January 18 that Barak himself had asked him to postpone the exercise.

It now clear that both sides had an interest in postponing the exercise and very possibly letting it expire by failing to reach a decision on it.

The Israelis appear to have two distinct reasons for putting the exercise off, which reflect differences between the interests of Netanyahu and his defense minister.

Netanyahu's primary interest in relation to the exercise was evidently to give the Republican candidate ammunition to fire at Obama during the fall campaign by insinuating that the postponement was decided at the behest of Obama to reduce tensions with Iran.

Thus Mark Regev, Netanyahu's spokesman, explained it as a "joint" decision with the United States, adding, "The thinking was it was not the right timing now to conduct such an exercise."

Barak, however, had an entirely different concern, which was related to the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF's) readiness to carry out an operation that would involve both attacking Iran's nuclear facilities and minimizing the Iranian retaliatory response.

A former US intelligence analyst who followed the Israeli military closely told IPS he strongly suspects that the IDF has pressed Barak to insist that the Israeli force be at the peak of readiness if and when they are asked to attack Iran.

The analyst, who insisted on anonymity because of his continuing contacts with US military and intelligence personnel, said the 2006 Lebanon war debacle continues to haunt the thinking of IDF leaders.

In that war, it became clear that the IDF had not been ready to handle Hezbollah rocket attacks adequately, and the prestige of the Israeli military suffered a serious blow.

The insistence of IDF leaders that they never go to war before being fully prepared is a primary consideration for Barak, according to the analyst. "Austere Challenge '12" would inevitably involve a major consumption of military resources, he observes, which would reduce Israeli readiness for war in the short run.

The concern about a major military exercise actually reducing the IDF's readiness for war against Iran would explain why senior Israeli military officials were reported to have suggested that the reasons for the postponement were mostly "technical and logistical".

The Israeli military concern about expending scarce resources on the exercise would apply, of course, regardless of whether the exercise was planned for April or late 2012. That fact would help explain why the exercise has not been rescheduled, despite statements from the US side that it will be.

The US military, however, has its own reasons for being unenthusiastic about the exercise. IPS has learned from a knowledgeable source that, well before the Obama administration began distancing itself from Israel's Iran policy, US Central Command chief James N Mattis had expressed concern about the implications of an exercise so obviously based on a scenario involving Iranian retaliation for an Israeli attack.

United States officials have been quoted as suspecting that the Israeli request for a postponement of the exercise indicated that Israel wanted to leave its options open for conducting a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in the spring. But a postponement to the fall would not change that problem.

For that reason, the former US intelligence analyst told IPS he doubted that "Austere Challenge '12" will ever be carried out.

But the White House has an obvious political interest in using the military exercise to demonstrate that the Obama administration had increased military cooperation with Israel to an unprecedented level.

The Defense Department wants the exercise to be held in October, according to the military source in touch with senior flag officers connected to the Joint Chiefs....lol

Mormons condemn alcohol, smoking, and coffee, but CIA shenanigans, the White House Murder INC, and organized crime is another story....

2012-02-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

Mormons condemn alcohol, smoking, and coffee, but CIA shenanigans, the White House Murder INC, and organized crime is another story....

February, 2012 -- A Romney presidency? Get ready for massive Mormon nepotism...

WMR, DC

The word from federal departments and agencies that have experienced a steady influx of Mormon senior officials over the past few years is that one thing that can be expected from a Mitt Romney presidency is the type of rampant nepotism and cronyism already witnessed at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and CIA, but on a much wider scale..., given that Mitt Romney has chosen an infamous Assassin who is owned and operated by the odious White House Murder INC, in the Levant with the little weasel Walid Phares....

Former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt served as EPA administrator from 2003 to 2005 and Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2005 to 2009. While in both positions, Leavitt ensured that his Mormon friends and members of their families were appointed to high-level positions in both agencies. Leavitt's conflicts-of-interest at EPA and HHS were even more stark when considering that he inherited the Leavitt Group regional insurance company founded by his father and served on the board of Utah Power & Light.

One of Leavitt's first acts at EPA and HHS was to hire his good friend Charles Johnson. Johnson was Leavitt's chief financial officer for EPA and his Assistant Secretary for Budget, Technology, and Finance at HHS. Johnson, in turn, hired his niece as the director of the grants program at HHS. President Obama kept Johnson on at HHS and Johnson's niece managed to burrow down from a political appointment to a career civil service position before the Bush to Obama transition. As a further example of Mormon nepotism, Johnson served as President of Huntsman Cancer Foundation and as Vice President of Huntsman LLC in Utah. Jon Huntsman, Jr., a former Utah governor who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for president, served as Obama's ambassador to China.

Huntsman and Romney are cousins.

If Mormon nepotism in Washington is this bad under Obama, there is a question of how bad it would become under a President Romney?

A clue may come from the CIA and FBI, which have instituted hiring preferences for Mormons in the belief that they are squeaky-clean when it comes to alcohol and drug use. In addition, many Mormon recruits have proficiency in at least one foreign language, a result of their foreign Mormon missionary work.

But for those who believe that all Mormons are squeaky-clean and besides the fact that Romney has destroyed entire towns through the actions of his vulture capital company, Bain Capital, consider the close ties between the Mormon Church and organized crime in the Western states. For Arizona Republic investigative journalist Don Bolles, the links between the "Mormon Mafia" and western states' gambling interests -- connections he was investigating -- became all-too-real when he was killed by a car bomb on June 2, 1976 in Phoenix. Bolles was investigating horse and dog racing organized crime links in Arizona that were tied to the same Mormon Mafia connections. Bolles was investigating the mob connections of Emprise, which is now Delaware North Corporation, a large entertainment and gaming firm with locations around the world.

The Arizona Mormon Mafia was closely linked to the Nevada Mormon Mafia that surrounded billionaire recluse Howard Hughes and Las Vegas gambling interests. In fact, Hughes's inner circle of Las Vegas businessmen was known as the "Mormon Mafia."

A few weeks after Hughes died in April 1976 and a few months before Bolles's assassination in Phoenix, a will, purported to be that of Hughes, was found in the office of a Latter Day Saints official in Salt Lake City. In addition to a $625 million gift to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, $470 million was to go to Hughes's closest aides, including the members of the Mormon Mafia, headed by Bill Gay,who was also president of Hughes's Summa Corporation, which owned The Sands, Silver Slipper, Frontier, Landmark, Castaways, and Desert Inn hotel-casinos in Las Vegas. The so-called Mormon Will of Hughes was later ruled a forgery by a Nevada court, which concluded that Hughes died intestate.

Today, the traditional links between the Mormons and Western states organized crime is carried on by Mormon U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid is considered owned and operated by Las Vegas gambling interests and he earmarked federal funds for the building of a "Mob Museum" in Las Vegas....

A dragon dance in the Negev, US ZOG looses the Plot....

2012-02-01T03:05:00.000-08:00

A dragon dance in the Negev, US ZOG looses the Plot....
By M K Bhadrakumar

There is no record of dragons in the nomadic life of the Negev desert, which dates back at least 4, 000 years (some say 7,000). That may be about to change in the Year of the Dragon.

The Bedouins of the Negev will soon witness the sight of a Chinese-built railway line snaking its way through the melange of brown, rocky, dusty mountains and the wadis and deep craters, leading north from the resort city of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba toward the eastern Mediterranean.

Having developed strong interests on the two sides of the Persian Gulf divide - Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and Iran - China is taking an awesome leap as a big-time player in the geopolitics of the Middle East by elevating its ties with Israel to a strategic partnership.

Paradoxically, just as the United States is hoping to nettle the dragon in the South China Sea and "contain" it in the Asia Pacific, it makes a dramatic, outflanking appearance in the citadel of American geo-strategies in the Middle East. The geopolitical implications are profound.

Amid the cacophony of the war drums beating in the Persian Gulf and in the Levant, it almost went unnoticed that the exchange of greetings between Beijing and Tel Aviv last week marking the 20th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries acquired a sudden verve that went far beyond the calls of mere protocol.

Diplomacy for all seasons
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country and China make a "successful combination" and he could visualize a "dramatic expansion" of the ties. "I think we've barely scratched the surface of Israeli-Chinese relations", he said at a celebration in Tel Aviv last Tuesday.

In his message of greetings for the anniversary, President Hu Jintao said China "attaches great importance to advancing Sino-Israeli ties and is ready to make joint efforts with Israel". In turn, Premier Wen Jiabao noted that China and Israel have "huge potential and broad prospects for cooperation" and Beijing is "ready to continue to expand and deepen" the ties and raise them to "a new high".

Speaking at the function in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu pointedly invited Beijing to work with Israel to "address the challenges of securing Middle East peace". And China's ambassador to Israel Gao Yanping, who was present, responded:

The further development of China-Israel relations is not only beneficial to both countries and the two peoples, but are also very much conducive to regional stability, world peace and global prosperity.

Facing the ongoing transformation and adjustment in the region [read Arab Spring] and in the world, China-Israel relationship is now at a new historical point. We should continue to work together, grow together and succeed together in the years to come.

These are heady, brave thoughts for a region where angels fear to tread. But the maturity of China-Israel ties today is such that even as Gao was speaking at Tel Aviv, her counterpart in the United Nations in New York, ambassador Li Baodong, was taking note of the "stalemate" in the Middle East peace process and reiterating China's strong support for a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, restoring the "lawful right" of Palestinian people.

Li said, "China supports the establishment of an independent Palestinian state that enjoys full sovereignty, with East Jerusalem as its capital and based on the 1967 border. China supports Palestine's membership in the United Nations." Li went on to roundly condemn the Israeli government's recent decision giving approval for plans of expansion of new settlements. He said:

China is always against Israel's establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem. We urge Israel to cease the settlement construction immediately, by prudent in action and work actively in collaboration with the efforts of the international community to promote peace, and create conditions for the resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiation.

Li seemed unperturbed by the warm sentiments being mutually expressed between the Chinese and the Israeli leaderships the very same day that he spoke.

The parallel portfolio of China's stunning Middle East diplomacy that was evident during Wen Jiabao's recent six-day tour of the GCC states is repeating. (China weighs 'right side of history' in Gulf, Asia Times Online, January 17, 2012).

China's Middle East diplomacy is adroitly advancing three parallel tracks engaging Iran, GCC states and Israel. This may seem improbable against the backdrop of the rise of Iran and the concomitant hostility it arouses in Israel and the GCC states. But Beijing sees no contradiction here, and is striving to make the three tracks even complement each other. Conceivably, one day they well might.

The great beauty is that all three Middle Eastern camps - Iran, the GCC and Israel - equally want the best of relationships with China and are manifestly vying with each other for the dragon's prime time. This is going to pose an unsolvable riddle for other outside powers aspiring for influence in the region, be it the West or Turkey and Russia.

Netanyahu said, "I appreciate China's need to ensure a regular supply of sources of energy in order to continue its impressive growth. I believe it is possible to replace Iranian oil." He still hopes to wean China away from Iranian oil, although Beijing has no intentions to erode its economic relationship with Iran. China-Iran trade is booming at US$45 billion - as compared to $8 billion China-Israel trade.

'Junction between continents'
Nonetheless, Israel is making an offer out of the massive oil and gas reserves in the Levant Basin province in the eastern Mediterranean. The area, encompassing approximately 32,000 square miles, covers onshore and offshore territory including the Gaza Strip, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2010 that the area holds a mean of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a mean of 122 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable gas.

The earlier estimation was that these reserves would ensure Israel's energy security, but more recent assessment in the light of new findings of reserves is that they are far greater than required to meet Israel's needs.

Huge infrastructure development is on the cards including liquefaction facilities to be set up on Israel's coast and transportation routes leading to viable markets for Israel's energy export. These alluring vistas of cooperation explain Netanyahu's confidence that Israel's bilateral trade with China can be easily doubled in the very near future. (China already figures as Israel's third important trading partner after the US and European Union.)

Israeli Transport Minister Yisrael Katz visited Beijing in September and he has been quoted recently as saying, "The professional capability of the Chinese companies in the construction of railway systems and transportation networks is among the best in the world."

The Israeli Transport Ministry has underscored that Israel would prefer Chinese state-owned companies to undertake the construction of a so-called "Med-Red" railway through the Negev Desert's Zin Valley connecting Israel's Mediterranean and Red Sea coast cities of Haifa and Eilat.

Swiftly following up on Katz's discussions in Beijing, China began working on a joint proposal with Israel for the Eilat link. Chinese and Israeli companies may jointly execute the project and, conceivably, China may invest in the project.

Now, the two biggest Israeli gas finds - Leviathan and Tamar - lie off 130 and 80 kilometers from the port city of Haifa. While Leviathan is estimated to hold reserves of 16 tcf of gas, Tamar's reserves amount to at least 8.4 tcf. (Recently, two more gas fields - Sarah and Mira - were discovered off the port city of Hadera further south of Haifa.)

The proposed rail-cum-road links would facilitate transfer of liquefied natural gas from Israel's Mediterranean coast to the Red Sea coast from where they can be shipped across the Indian Ocean to China. Again, the communication link would enhance the scope for China's exports to central and southern Europe and the Balkans.

The relationship between China and Israel has been complex. It has had its ups and downs. But the Israeli Foreign Ministry is justified in claiming in a statement last week that the two countries are presently "enjoying a flowering of relations in recent years".

Indeed, 2011 has been a good year. In May the commander of the Chinese navy Admiral Wu Shengli visited Israel, which was followed in August by the visit by the chief of the People's Liberation Army general staff department General Chen Bingde. This was the first visit by a Chinese military chief to Israel.

In between, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited China in June, which was also the first of its kind. In July, the two countries concluded an economic cooperation agreement. To quote Netanyahu, "The bilateral ties are important to us; therefore, we are committed to expanding them quickly in a variety of fields. To this end, I have issued a sweeping directive to approve any invitation to visit China."

Clearly, Israel and China are poised to enter a profound and highly strategic engagement. Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv on Sunday that he intended to develop the proposed rail and road networks joining Eilat to northern Israel as a "junction between continents". He went on to flag China's interest in the project.

Beijing would have already sized up the immense strategic potential of an audacious transportation route across the Negev bypassing Egypt's congested Suez Canal, which would connect Asia with Europe. It almost seems Washington has lost the plot....LOL LOL

US hypes Iran terror threat again, No exit in the Persian Gulf...

2012-02-01T03:01:00.000-08:00

US hypes Iran terror threat again, No exit in the Persian Gulf...

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

PALO ALTO, California - Like left-over food repeatedly reheated for public consumption, United States allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington received a new lease of life on Monday via the congressional testimony of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, as a dress rehearsal for a fuller bout of Iran-bashing at this week's "threat assessment" hearings in congress.

In October last year, the United States Justice Department charged a dual Iranian-American national and an alleged member of the Islamic Republic's special operations unit Qods Force of conspiring to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir.

A 21-page indictment filed in New York federal court said the two named defendants, US-based Manssor Arbabsiar and Iran-based Gholam Shakuri, sought to hire someone who they believed was a member of a Mexican drug cartel but who was actually an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency to carry out the plot in exchange for US$1.5 million.

Arbabsiar, who allegedly arranged a down payment of $100,000 to the informant, was arrested on September 29 at JFK Airport in New York on a return flight from Mexico where he had been denied entry.

As a result of Clapper's comments, instead of focusing on the crucial Iran visit by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, US media are concentrating on the new leaks on the "Iran threat" that once again fuel political hysteria against Iran in a maneuver to sidetrack Iran's nuclear transparency.

That plot "shows that some Iranian officials - probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime", Clapper said in his prepared testimony.

This despite the great deal of discontent and internal grumbling in the US intelligence community over the allegations, which many see as untenable and suspect will unravel.

For now, however, the bosses are banking on a quiet and compliant Western media that eschews its earlier skepticism regarding the seemingly concocted terror plot. With the stakes being so high, geostrategically speaking, putting Iranphobia into a higher gear makes only short-term sense, from the US's vantage point, yet one with serious side-effect.

This author has provided a legal deconstruction [1] of the US terror story that cites numerous reasons to question the US allegation by pin-pointing various flaws, contradictions and implausible defects in the US investigation. These include missing charges, unnamed defendants, flip-flops on the "terror money," the over-usage of a paid informer, unreliable confessions and signs of entrapment, etc.

For Clapper and his intelligence officers to claim that Iran's supreme leader was directly involved in an amateurish plot centered on a used-car salesman who was granted US citizenship only a precious few months before the plot's exposure smacks of an American indulgence in its Cold War pastime of demonizing the "hostile other".

The indications are that the US has tried to frame Iran with a fictitious terror plot to up the ante against the Islamic Republic, call it another mischief of the empire striking back at Tehran at a critical time of growing tumult in the pro-West status quo in the Middle East encapsulated under the term Arab Spring, although a better description may be Arab storm, denoting an ongoing political hurricane targeting the US's favorite dictators.

Suffice to say that the US criminal complaint, presently pending in a Manhattan court, is permeated with the unpleasant odor of ill-intent and malicious prosecution.

Note
1. See Iran Phobia And US Terror Plot: A Legal Deconstruction by Kaveh L Afrasiabi, CreateSpace (January 14, 2012).

No exit in the Persian Gulf...
By Michael T Klare

Ever since December 27, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond. On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block the strait and create havoc in international oil markets if the West placed new economic sanctions on his country.

"If they impose sanctions on Iran's oil exports," Rahimi declared, "then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz." Claiming that such a move would constitute an assault on America's vital interests, President Barack Obama reportedly informed Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep the strait open. To back up their threats, both sides have been bolstering their forces in the area and each has conducted a series of provocative military exercises.

All of a sudden, the Strait of Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries. Why, of all locales, has it become so explosive?

Oil is a major part of the answer, but - and this may surprise you - only a part.

Petroleum remains the world's most crucial source of energy, and about one-fifth of the planet's oil supply travels by tanker through the strait. "Hormuz is the world's most important oil chokepoint due to its daily oil flow of almost 17 million barrels in 2011," the US Department of Energy noted as last year ended. Because no other area is capable of replacing these 17 million barrels, any extended closure would produce a global shortage of oil, a price spike, and undoubtedly attendant economic panic and disorder.

No one knows just how high oil prices would go under such circumstances, but many energy analysts believe that the price of a barrel might immediately leap by $50 or more. "You would get an international reaction that would not only be high, but irrationally high," says Lawrence J Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.

Even though military experts assume the US will use its overwhelming might to clear the strait of Iranian mines and obstructions in a few days or weeks, the chaos to follow in the region might not end quickly, keeping oil prices elevated for a long time.

Indeed, some analysts fear that oil prices, already hovering around $100 per barrel, would quickly double to more than $200, erasing any prospect of economic recovery in the United States and Western Europe, and possibly plunging the planet into a renewed Great Recession.

The Iranians are well aware of all this, and it is with such a nightmare scenario that they seek to deter Western leaders from further economic sanctions and other more covert acts when they threaten to close the strait. To calm such fears, US officials have been equally adamant in stressing their determination to keep the strait open. In such circumstances of heightened tension, one misstep by either side might prove calamitous and turn mutual rhetorical belligerence into actual conflict.

Military overlord of the Persian Gulf
In other words, oil, which makes the global economy hum, is the most obvious factor in the eruption of war talk, if not war. Of at least equal significance are allied political factors, which may have their roots in the geopolitics of oil but have acquired a life of their own.

Because so much of the world's most accessible oil is concentrated in the Persian Gulf region, and because a steady stream of oil is absolutely essential to the well-being of the US and the global economy, it has long been American policy to prevent potentially hostile powers from acquiring the capacity to dominate the Gulf or block the Strait of Hormuz.

President Jimmy Carter first articulated this position in January 1980, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America," he told a joint session of congress, "and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force".

In accordance with this precept, Washington designated itself the military overlord of the Persian Gulf, equipped with the military might to overpower any potential challenger. At the time, however, the US military was not well organized to implement the president's initiative, known ever since as the Carter Doctrine. In response, the Pentagon created a new organization, the US Central Command (CENTCOM), and quickly endowed it with the wherewithal to crush any rival power or powers in the region and keep the sea lanes under American control.

CENTCOM first went into action in 1987-1988, when Iranian forces attacked Kuwaiti and Saudi oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, threatening the flow of oil supplies through the strait. To protect the tankers, president Ronald Reagan ordered that they be "reflagged" as American vessels and escorted by US warships, putting the navy into potential conflict with the Iranians for the first time.

Out of this action came the disaster of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew members, all of whom died when the plane was hit by a missile from the USS Vincennes, which mistook it for a hostile fighter plane - a tragedy long forgotten in the United States, but still deeply resented in Iran.

Iraq was America's de facto ally in the Iran-Iraq war, but when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 - posing a direct threat to Washington's dominance of the Gulf - the first president George H W Bush ordered CENTCOM to protect Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

And when Saddam rebuilt his forces, and his very existence again came to pose a latent threat to America's dominance in the region, the second president Bush - George W - ordered CENTCOM to invade Iraq and eliminate his regime altogether (which, as no one is likely to forget, resulted in a string of disasters).

If oil lay at the root of Washington's domineering role in the Gulf, over time that role evolved into something else: a powerful expression of America's status as a global superpower. By becoming the military overlord of the Gulf and the self-appointed guardian of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Washington said to the world: "We, and we alone, are the ones who can ensure the safety of your daily oil supply and thereby prevent global economic collapse."

Indeed, when the Cold War ended - and with it an American sense of pride and identity as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in Europe and Asia - protection of the flow of Persian Gulf oil became America's greatest claim to superpowerdom, and it remains so today.

Every option on every table
With the ouster of Saddam in 2003, the one potential threat to US domination of the Persian Gulf was Iran. Even under the US-backed shah, long Washington's man in the Gulf, the Iranians had sought to be the paramount power in the region. Now, under a militant Shi'ite Islamic regime, they have proven no less determined and - call it irony - thanks to Saddam's overthrow and the rise of a Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad, they have managed to extend their political reach in the region.

With Saddam's fate in mind, they have also built up their defensive military capabilities and - in the view of many Western analysts - embarked on a uranium-enrichment program with the potential to supply fissile material for a nuclear weapon, should the Iranian leadership choose someday to take such a fateful step.

Iran thus poses a double challenge to Washington's professed status in the Gulf. It is not only a reasonably well-armed country with significant influence in Iraq and elsewhere, but by promoting its nuclear program, it threatens to vastly complicate America's future capacity to pull off punishing attacks like those launched against Iraqi forces in 1991 and 2003.

While Iran's military budget is modest-sized at best and its conventional military capabilities will never come close to matching CENTCOM's superior forces in a direct confrontation, its potential pursuit of nuclear-arms capabilities greatly complicates the strategic calculus in the region.

Even without taking the final steps of manufacturing actual bomb components - and no evidence has yet surfaced that the Iranians have proceeded to this critical stage - the Iranian nuclear effort has greatly alarmed other countries in the Middle East and called into question the continued robustness of America's regional dominance. From Washington's perspective, an Iranian bomb - whether real or not - poses an existential threat to America's continued superpower status.

How to prevent Iran not just from going nuclear but from maintaining the threat to go nuclear has, in recent years, become an obsessional focus of American foreign and military policy. Over and over again, US leaders have considered plans for using military force to cripple the Iranian program though air and missile strikes on known and suspected nuclear facilities.

Presidents Bush and Barack Obama have both refused to take such action "off the table", as Obama made clear most recently in his State of the Union address. (The Israelis have also repeatedly indicated their desire to take such action, possibly as a prod to Washington to get the job done.)

Most serious analysts have concluded that military action would prove extremely risky, probably causing numerous civilian casualties and inviting fierce Iranian retaliation. It might not even achieve the intended goal of halting the Iranian nuclear program, much of which is now being conducted deep underground.

Hence, the consensus view among American and European leaders has been that economic sanctions should instead be employed to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, where they could be induced to abandon their nuclear ambitions in return for various economic benefits. But those escalating sanctions, which appear to be causing increasing economic pain for ordinary Iranians, have been described by that country's leaders as an "act of war", justifying their threats to block the Strait of Hormuz.

To add to tensions, the leaders of both countries are under extreme pressure to vigorously counter the threats of the opposing side. Obama, up for re-election, has come under fierce, even hair-raising, attack from the contending Republican presidential candidates (except, of course, Ron Paul) for failing to halt the Iranian nuclear program, though none of them have a credible plan to do so.

He, in turn, has been taking an ever-harsher stance on the issue. Iranian leaders, for their part, appear increasingly concerned over the deteriorating economic conditions in their country and, no doubt fearing an Arab Spring-like popular upheaval, are becoming more bellicose in their rhetoric.

So oil, the prestige of global dominance, Iran's urge to be a regional power, and domestic political factors are all converging in a combustible mix to make the Strait of Hormuz the most dangerous place on the planet. For both Tehran and Washington, events seem to be moving inexorably toward a situation in which mistakes and miscalculations could become inevitable.

Neither side can appear to give ground without losing prestige and possibly even their jobs. In other words, an existential test of wills is now under way over geopolitical dominance in a critical part of the globe, and on both sides there seem to be ever fewer doors marked "Exit."

As a result, the Strait of Hormuz will undoubtedly remain the ground zero of potential global conflict in the months ahead....lol

Imperial errors cost US the Middle East...

2012-01-31T02:42:00.000-08:00

Imperial errors cost US the Middle East...
By Dmitry Shlapentokh

The United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an important event in post-Cold War history that is well-placed in the context of a series of other "preventive" wars, such as against Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and, lately, Libya.

All of them were conducted under various excuses, but their geopolitical underpinning was clear. On one hand, the West, especially the US, is increasingly pressed by the economic rise of Asia - mostly China.

On the other hand, the West, the US in particular, tried to take advantage of a military superiority emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The attack against Iraq was designed not only to demonstrate the US's superior military power and disregard for international law and European allies, but also to provide the US with a hold over the strategic resources of oil and gas in the Middle East. The designs failed. Still, the US might yet turn this defeat, if not into victory, at least into some of advantage.

The US's major mistake in Iraq - in stark contrast to the United Kingdom during its colonial quest - is that it tried to engage in "regime change", where the entire state structure of the old regime was not superseded but destroyed. Later, the US tried to restore it, but the damage was irreversible.

Secondly, Washington, following the dictum that democracy should spread to any part of the world, launched what were the freest elections in Iraq's history. Both decisions were grave mistakes and led to disaster, at least from Washington's perspective.

The destruction of the state unleashed anarchy and a milieu where jihadis and other extremists could flourish. The election led to the Shi'ite majority - with its strong pro-Iranian sympathies - gaining power. Then the only force that would have been able to stabilize Iraq and prevent it from becoming Iran's proxy - US troops - left. .

Essentially, Washington should have stayed in Baghdad indefinitely as the British would have done in their heyday of empire.

Still, Washington had no resources to do this. To start with, the Department of Defense - a huge and inefficient cash cow - made the soldiers' upkeep unbearably expensive.

As a result, the cost of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq for a few years was the same amount of cash as had been for the arms race with the mighty "Evil Empire".

With an industrial base in the process of erosion and mounting debt and budget cuts, the hands of Washington were tied; and it would be naive to attribute the withdrawal from Iraq conducted recently to the naivete of President Barack Obama.

With the US's departure, a trend where Baghdad was drawing closer to Tehran has intensified, and Iraq supports the regime in Syria - Tehran's proxy.

At the same time, Sunni violence, with the possible participation of jihadis, has intensified. This also could be said to a lesser degree about the Kurds, who have not lost hope of building an independent state.

This process has provided an opportunity to Sunni jihadis, the enemy of not just Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government but also that of his masters in Tehran.

Moreover, they could well reinforce the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, who are the enemy not just of the US but also of Iran. It is not surprising that Iran has engaged in moves not just to prepare for a potential war with the US/Israel but also started maneuvers near its borders with Afghanistan.

The Kurdish problem could be helpful for Washington for it creates permanent pressure for Ankara and might at least slow Turkey's slide toward Iran.

The US's defeat in the Middle East still could bring some benefits for Washington and Brussels; and it would not be surprising if the West were already at work on this scheme. Still, other powers are working on schemes of their own; and the situation in the region - and globally - has become unstable and, therefore, fluid....

What is the GCC up to in Syria?

2012-01-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

What is the GCC up to in Syria?
By Pepe Escobar

So the Arab League has a new draft United Nations Security Council resolution to "solve" the Syrian saga. [ 1]

World public opinion may be fooled into believing this is an altruistic Arab solution to an Arab problem. Not really.

First of all this is a draft resolution of NATO-GCC - that symbiosis between selected North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and selected petro-monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. By now, after their "success" in blasting regime change into Libya, NATO-GCC should be well known as the axis between the European poodles of the Pentagon and the six monarchies that compose the GCC, also known as Gulf Counter-revolution Club.

This draft UN resolution goes one step beyond a so-called Arab League transition plan laid out over a week ago. Now the spin is of a "political road-map" that essentially means President Bashar Assad voluntarily stepping out, his vice president installed in power for a transition, the formation of a national unity government, and free and fair elections with international supervision.

According to the Foreign Minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, "The president will delegate his first vice president the full power to work with the national unity government to enable it to perform its task in the transitional period."

Sounds very civilized - except that it masquerades the real agenda of UN-imposed regime change. A quick look at the draft resolution also reveals a two-week deadline for Assad to get out of Dodge; if not, expect hell, "in consultation" with the Arab League.

"Arab" League is now a fiction; what’s really in charge is the Arab Gulf league, or GCC league; in practice, the House of Saud. Even aspiring regional superpower Qatar plays second fiddle. And everyone else, they are just extras.

So here we have the House of Saud and its Gulf minions detailing a road map for regime change followed by full Western parliamentary democracy, and places like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait defending human rights in Arab lands. It's as if this whole thing was a joint plan concocted by dadaist Tristan Tzara and surrealist Andre Breton with a Monty Python twist.

Stuff your Somalia remix
Not surprisingly, the Syrian government rejected the drat resolution as a "blatant intervention in its internal affairs", according to the SANA news agency. The Syrian ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja'afari, was even more graphic; "Syria will not be Libya; Syria will not be Iraq; Syria will not be Somalia; Syria will not be a failing state."

BRICS member Russia - which alongside China had already vetoed a previous Western-redacted resolution - has already buried this one. For starters, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov couldn't understand why the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission in Syria this past Saturday. Instead, Lavrov would "support an increased number of observers".

Russia - which in no time learned the lessons of the open-ended UN resolution on Libya - has its own draft resolution which, according to Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin, privileges a "Syrian-led political process", not "an Arab League-imposed outcome of a political process that has not yet taken place", or, worse yet, "regime change" a la Libya.

Russia - unlike the West - ascribes the now non-stop violence in Syria to both the Assad regime and the "rebels". Even the GCC League has somewhat admitted that there are shabbihah (armed goons) on both sides, those on the "rebel" side affiliated with the already discredited Free Syrian Army.

That tray of sweets is all mine
Even though there are no objective conditions whatsoever for a NATO bombing of Syria, the NATOGCC + Israel geopolitical axis will pursue its objectives relentlessly.

The objectives are vast; exercising total control over any Arab Spring-related transition (as in the case of Yemen); preventing any changes to the status quo (as in pre-emption in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco); outright repression (as in the case of Bahrain); and preferably getting their cake and eating it too (as in the case of Libya).

But Syria is infinitely more complex; because of the Iranian connection; because BRICS members Russia and China will block any regime change scheme; because there have been no significant cracks among the Syrian military; and because the Assad regime is expert in navigating the divisions between a Sunni majority and the Alawite minority.

So the GCC League was successful in Yemen - controlling the "transition" and even having the dictator Ali Abdulla Saleh sent to the United States. It has been relatively successful in Egypt; even though the head of the snake (Hosni Mubarak) was kicked out, the snake is very much alive and kicking (the military establishment), and to top it off, the new parliament boasts a huge Islamist majority (our heart goes out to the youngsters who actually started everything in Tahrir Square and are left with nothing).

Even the venerable stones in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus know that the Syrian National Council (conveniently exiled in NATO members Turkey and France) is being financed by the House of Saud and Qatar. So expect more GCC-financed weapons to continue raising hell in Syria - now even in some Damascus suburbs. No wonder the GCC League had to pull out its "monitors"; they would have to roundly denounce the very people they are arming.

Even the Playstation King of Jordan - who was the first Arab potentate on the record to want to topple Assad (no wonder Jordan was invited to be a GCC member) - has been forced to admit, "I don't see Syria going through many changes." King Abdullah at least had the good sense to observe, "It's a very complicated puzzle and there is no simple solution. If you can imagine Iraq being a simple solution ... and it's different in Libya, so it has everybody stumped and I don't think anybody has a clear answer on what to do about Syria."

By the way, there are pro-democracy protests in GCC-addicted Jordan virtually every day; but not a peep will be heard about it in Western corporate media. "Liberated" Libya totally disappeared from the Western triumphalist narrative - even as Amnesty International now has evidence of systematic torture in makeshift mini-gulags, and Medicines sans Frontiers (MSF) decided to leave Misrata for good after being asked by those formerly known as "rebels" to treat victims of torture, so they could be tortured again.

Which leads us to the ghastly equivalence between the "transitional councils" in both Libya and Syria. Their undisguised masters were - and are - NATOGCC. Russia may have its own agenda in Syria, but at least the Russians know hardcore violence is being served as much by the Assad regime as by the Syrian National Council and the Free Syria Army.

King Playstation at least got one thing right; no one has a clue on what to do about Syria. So it's Assad on one side against NATOGCC on the other, with average Syrians - covering a wide spectrum of opinion - squeezed in the middle. Rumors swirl about a possible plan C; a bazaar-style deal, over endless cups of green tea, between Assad and the House of Saud. That's unlikely; the GCC League wants the whole tray of sweets - and to eat them too.

Note 1. See here.

La Geopolitique de L'eau....

2012-01-26T02:36:00.000-08:00

La Geopolitique de L'eau....

Le rapport de Glavany au Parlement Français :

http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rap-info/i4070.asp

The Strategic Importance of Iran for Russia and China....

2012-01-26T01:49:00.001-08:00

CONFRONTATION BETWEEN MILITARY BLOCS: The Eurasian "Triple Alliance." The Strategic Importance of Iran for Russia and China....

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Despite areas of difference and rivalries between Moscow and Tehran, ties between the two countries, based on common interests, have developed significantly.

Both Russia and Iran are both major energy exporters, they have deeply seated interests in the South Caucasus. They are both firmly opposed to NATO's missile shield, with a view to preventing the U.S. and E.U. from controlling the energy corridors around the Caspian Sea Basin.

Moscow and Tehran's bilateral ties are also part of a broader and overlapping alliance involving Armenia, Tajikistan, Belarus, Syria, and Venezuela. Yet, above all things, both republics are also two of Washington’s main geo-strategic targets.

The Eurasian Triple Alliance: The Strategic Importance of Iran for Russia and China

China, the Russian Federation, and Iran are widely considered to be allies and partners. Together the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, and the Islamic Republic of Iran form a strategic barrier directed against U.S. expansionism. The three countries form a "triple alliance," which constitutes the core of a Eurasian coalition directed against U.S. encroachment into Eurasia and its quest for global hegemony.

While China confronts U.S. encroachment in East Asia and the Pacific, Iran and Russia respectively confront the U.S. led coalition in Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. All three countries are threatened in Central Asia and are wary of the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

Iran can be characterized as a geo-strategic pivot. The geo-political equation in Eurasia very much hinges on the structure of Iran's political alliances. Were Iran to become an ally of the United States, this would seriously hamper or even destabilize Russia and China. This also pertains to Iran's ethno-cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, and geo-political links to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Moreover, were the structure of political alliances to shift in favour of the U.S., Iran could also become the greatest conduit for U.S. influence and expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This has to do with the fact that Iran is the gateway to Russia's soft southern underbelly (or "Near Abroad") in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In such a scenario, Russia as an energy corridor would be weakened as Washington would "unlock" Iran's potential as a primary energy corridor for the Caspian Sea Basin, implying de facto U.S. geopolitical control over Iranian pipeline routes. In this regard, part of Russia's success as an energy transit route has been due to U.S. efforts to weaken Iran by preventing energy from transiting through Iranian territory.

If Iran were to "change camps" and enter the U.S. sphere of influence, China's economy and national security would also be held hostage on two counts. Chinese energy security would be threatened directly because Iranian energy reserves would no longer be secure and would be subject to U.S. geo-political interests. Additionally, Central Asia could also re-orient its orbit should Washington open a direct and enforced conduit from the open seas via Iran.

Thus, both Russia and China want a strategic alliance with Iran as a means of screening them from the geo-political encroachment of the United States. “Fortress Eurasia” would be left exposed without Iran. This is why neither Russia nor China could ever accept a war against Iran. Should Washington transform Iran into a client then Russia and China would be under threat.

Misreading the Support of China and Russia for U.N. Security Council Sanctions

There is a major misreading of past Russian and Chinese support of U.N. sanctions against Iran. Even though Beijing and Moscow allowed U.N. Security Council sanctions to be passed against their Iranian ally, they did it for strategic reasons, namely with a view to keeping Iran out of Washington's orbit.

In reality, the United States would much rather co-opt Tehran as a satellite or junior partner than take the unnecessary risk and gamble of an all-out war with the Iranians. What Russian and Chinese support for past sanctions did was to allow for the development of a wider rift between Tehran and Washington. In this regard, realpolitik is at work. As American-Iranian tensions broaden, Iranian relations with Russia and China become closer and Iran becomes more and more entrenched in its relationship with Moscow and Beijing.

Russia and China, however, would never support crippling sanctions or any form of economic embargo that would threaten Iranian national security. This is why both China and Russia have refused to be coerced by Washington into joining its new 2012 unilateral sanctions. The Russians have also warned the European Union to stop being Washington's pawns, because they are hurting themselves by playing along with the schemes of the United States. In this regard Russia commented on the impractical and virtually unworkable E.U. plans for an oil embargo against Iran. Tehran has also made similar warnings and has dismissed the E.U. oil embargo as a psychological tactic that is bound to fail.

Left photo: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Dmitry A. Medvedev of Russia during a bilateral meeting in Dushabe, Tajikistan.
The bilateral Iranian-Russian meeting was held on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit on August 28, 2008.
Right photo: Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov together in Moscow discussing Russia’s step-by-step nuclear proposal.

Russo-Iranian Security Cooperation and Strategic Coordination

In August 2011, the head of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Secretary-General Saaed (Said) Jalili, and the head of the National Security Council of the Russian Federation, Secretary Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev met in Tehran to discuss the Iranian nuclear energy program as well as bilateral cooperation. Russia wanted to help Iran rebuff the new wave of accusations by Washington directed against Iran. Soon after Patrushev and his Russian team arrived in Tehran, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, flew to Moscow.

Both Jalili and Patrushev met again in September 2011, but this time in Russia. Jalili went to Moscow first and then crossed the Urals to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

The Iran-Russia Yekaterinburg meeting took place on the sidelines of an international security summit. Moreover, at this venue, it was announced that the highest bodies of national security in Moscow and Tehran would henceforth coordinate by holding regular meetings. A protocol between the two countries was was signed at Yekaterinburg.

During this important gathering, both Jalili and Patrushev held meetings with their Chinese counterpart, Meng Jianzhu. As a result of these meetings, a similar process of bilateral consultation between the national security councils of Iran and China was established. Moreover, the parties also discussed the formation of a supranational security council within the Shanghai Cooperation Council to confront threats directed against Beijing, Tehran, Moscow and their Eurasian allies.

Also in September 2011, Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian envoy to NATO, announced that he would be visiting Tehran in the near future to discuss the NATO missile shield project, which both the Moscow and Tehran oppose.

Reports claiming that Russia, Iran, and China were planning on creating a joint missile shield started to surface. Rogozin, who had warned in August 2011 that Syria and Yemen would be attacked as "stepping stones" in the broader confrontation directed against Tehran, responded by publicly refuting the reports pertaining to the establishment of a joint Sino-Russo-Iranian missile shield project.

The following month, in October 2011, Russia and Iran announced that they would be expanding ties in all fields. Soon after, in November 2011, Iran and Russia signed a strategic cooperation and partnership agreement between their highest security bodies covering economics, politics, security, and intelligence. This was a long anticipated document on which both Russia and Iran had been working on. The agreement was signed in Moscow by the Deputy Secretary-General of the Supreme Security Council of Iran, Ali Bagheri (Baqeri), and the Under-Secretary of the National Security Council of Russia, Yevgeny Lukyanov.

In November 2011, the head of the Committee for International Affairs in the Russian Duma, Konstantin Kosachev, also announced that Russia must do everything it can to prevent an attack on neighbouring Iran. At the end of November 2011 it was announced that Dmitry Rogozin would definitely visit both Tehran and Beijing in 2012, together with a team of Russian officials to hold strategic discussions on collective strategies against common threats.

Left and right photos: Secretary-General Jalili and Secretary Patrushev in Tehran, Iran holding Iranian-Russian national security talks during August 2011.

Left photo: Deputy Secretary-General Ali Bagheri at a press conference in Moscow, Russia after signing a security pact with Russian officials.
Right photo: Konstantin Kosachev, the Chairperson of the Committee for International Affairs in the Russian Duma.

Russian National Security and Iranian National Security are Attached

On January 12, 2012, Nikolai Patrushev told Interfax he feared that a major war was imminent and that Tel Aviv was pushing the U.S. to attack Iran. He dismissed the claims that Iran was secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons and said that for years the world had continuously heard that Iran would have an atomic bomb by next week ad nauseum. His comments were followed by a dire warning from Dmitry Rogozin.

On January 13, 2012, Rogozin, who had been appointed deputy prime minister, declared that any attempted military intervention against Iran would be a threat to Russia's national security. In other words, an attack on Tehran is an attack on Moscow. In 2007, Vladimir Putin essentially mentioned the same thing when he was in Tehran for a Caspian Sea summit, which resulted in George W. Bush Jr. warning that World War III could erupt over Iran. Rogozin's statement is merely a declaration of what has been the position of Russia all along: should Iran fall, Russia would be in danger.

Iran is a target of U.S. hostility not just for its vast energy reserves and natural resources, but because of major geo-strategic considerations that make it a strategic springboard against Russia and China. The roads to Moscow and Beijing also go through Tehran, just as the road to Tehran goes through Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut. Nor does the U.S. want to merely control Iranian oil and natural gas for consumption or economic reasons. Washington wants to put a muzzle around China by controlling Chinese energy security and wants Iranian energy exports to be traded in U.S. dollars to insure the continued use of the U.S. dollar in international transactions.

Moreover, Iran has been making agreements with several trade partners, including China and India, whereby business transactions will not be conducted in euros or U.S. dollars. In January 2012, both Russia and Iran replaced the U.S. dollar with their national currencies, respectively the Russian rouble and the Iranian rial, in their bilateral trade. This was an economic and financial blow to the United States.

Left photo: Vladimir V. Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holding talks in Tehran, Iran on the sidelines of a summit of Caspian Sea nations in October 2007.
Right photo: Dmitry O. Rogozin, the departing representative of Russia at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Syria and the National Security Concerns of Iran and Russia

Russia and China with Iran are all staunchly supporting Syria. The diplomatic and economic siege against Syria is tied to the geo-political stakes to control Eurasia. The instability in Syria is tied to the objective of combating Iran and ultimately turning it into a U.S. partner against Russia and China.

The cancelled or delayed deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Israel for "Austere Challenge 2012" was tied to ratcheting up the pressure against Syria. On the basis of a Voice of Russia report, segments of the Russian media erroneously reported that "Austere Challenge 2012" was going to be held in the Persian Gulf, which was mistakenly picked up by news outlets in other parts of the world. This helped highlight the Iranian link at the expense of the Syrian and Lebanese links. The deployment of U.S. troops was aimed predominately at Syria as a means of isolating and combating Iran. The "cancelled" or "delayed" Israeli-U.S. missile exercises most probably envisaged preparations for missile and rocket attacks not only from Iran, but also from Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories.

Aside from its naval ports in Syria, Russia does not want to see Syria used to re-route the energy corridors in the Caspian Basin and the Mediterranean Basin. If Syria were to fall, these routes would be re-synchronized to reflect a new geo-political reality. At the expense of Iran, energy from the Persian Gulf could also be re-routed to the Mediterranean through both Lebanon and Syria.

Left photo: Syrian Defence Minister Dawoud (David) Rajha visiting the docked Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in the Syrian port of Tartus on January 8, 2012.
Right photo: Syrian allies, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, join President Bashar Al-Assad for a summit in Damascus, Syria on February 25, 2010.

Left photo: The Alvand, one of the two Iranian warships that visited the Syrian port of Lattakia during February 2011.
Right photo: Rear-Admirial Habibollah Sayyari holding a press conference on February 28, 2001 at the Iranian Embassy in Syria about the Iranian naval presence off Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

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Japan's strategic outlook....

2012-01-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

Japan's strategic outlook....
Rod Lyon
Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Japan's strategic outlook

Image: Josh Liba / flickr

19 December 2011Japan will remain an introverted strategic player during the next decade, and for Australia, the challenge is how to partner with that inward-looking Japan.

Japan has endured a difficult couple of decades, but probably confronts another. With its economy stalled, its political system still evolving towards a genuine multiparty system, and its population ageing and shrinking, it confronts a daunting array of domestic challenges. The great East Asian earthquake of March has only added to its problems. The after-effects will be felt for years, not least in the continuing nuclear problems at Fukushima. Those challenges mean Japan will probably remain an introverted strategic player during the next decade or so. Arguments made by a range of commentators about five years ago, that Japan had entered a critical ‘turning point’ in its strategic policy, now seem less compelling.

For Australia, the challenge is how to partner with that inward-looking Japan over the next ten-to-fifteen years. The pace of change in Asian strategic settings is such that much may change during that period. And there aren’t many Japan-sized players in the regional system, so we have to work to ensure that the one we already have remains committed to shared objectives to the greatest extent possible. We need to ‘work with’ Japan, perhaps bringing more ourselves to the relationship to offset Japan’s period of hesitancy. But we might also need a ‘work around’ strategy—accepting that we need to do more with others to compensate for Japan’s strategic hesitancy. Australia wants an Asia with a range of engaged great powers—and Japan is an important part of that future Asia.’

Dr Rod Lyon, Director of ASPI’s Strategy and International Program, is the author of this report.

Image: Josh Liba / flickr

Publication type	Report
Publisher Type	APO Member, Think tank
Coverage	Australia, Asia and the Pacific
Permanent URL	http://apo.org.au/node/27513

Dr Rod Lyon, Director of ASPI’s Strategy and International Program, is the author of this report.

Download PDF

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120121bc.html

Turkey confirms links between Israel, Syria and Kurdish rebels....

2012-01-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

Turkey confirms links between Israel, Syria and Kurdish rebels....

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS

Turkish intelligence agencies have authored a report detailing alleged Israeli assistance to Kurdish rebels, whose goal is to secede from Turkey and create an independent Kurdish homeland, according to a leading Turkish newspaper. The Ankara-based Zaman said the intelligence report was commissioned after Turkish forces detected Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) conducting reconnaissance missions over Turkey. The paper, which is tacitly affiliated with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, said the UAVs were spotted flying over Turkey’s Adana and Hatay provinces, both of which are adjacent to Turkey’s border with Syria. As intelNews reported last August, Turkey’s main intelligence directorate, the MİT, is convinced that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has increased its clandestine support for the largest Kurdish secessionist group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), in an attempt to court Syria’s 500,000-strong Kurdish minority. According to the Zaman news report, airborne intelligence collected by Israeli Heron UAVs is shared with PKK guerrillas, who then use it to construct training bases in Syrian border regions. This explains, claims the paper, why most PKK training bases in Syria are located “in areas that are known to be weak spots for the Turkish military”. The report also claims that Turkish intelligence has verified that senior PKK military commander Kenan Yıldızbakan has visited Israel “several times” in recent months. Yildizbakan is believed to have commanded a brazen PKK assault on a Turkish naval base in İskenderun in 2010, which killed seven and wounded four members of the Turkish armed forces. Earlier this month, we reported that an Israeli drone flying over Turkey was nearly shot down by the Turkish Air Force. IntelNews also reported earlier this month on a news story from leading French newspaper Le Figaro, which claimed that officers of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad were recruiting and training Iranian dissidents in clandestine bases located in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. The Paris-based daily cited a “security source in Baghdad”, who alleged that the Mossad was actively recruiting Iranian exiles in Kurdistan, for use in Israel’s clandestine war against the Iranian nuclear program....

East Asian energy dilemma over Iran....

2012-01-23T02:38:00.001-08:00

East Asian energy dilemma over Iran....
By Yong Kwon

A few months before the outbreak of the Suez Crisis in 1956, Japanese economist Wakimura Yoshitaro pointed to the transport of Middle Eastern oil as a potential flashpoint for global conflict. His assessment appears obvious in retrospect, but his policy recommendation to deal with this serious threat to economic and political stability still remains relevant.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Wakimura and several other prominent economists argued that reliance on oil increased the risk of Japan being dragged into an unwanted war. Therefore, to ensure Japanese neutrality, the best policy for Tokyo would be to develop an independent and reliable source of energy. [1] At the time, people looked to nuclear energy.

More than half a century and a meltdown later, when confidence in nuclear power is at an all-time low and alternative sources of energy are still unready to be applied on an industrial scale, Washington's expansion of the diplomatic and economic offensive against Iran comes as an unpleasant reminder to East Asian nations of the cost of maintaining ties with the United States.

Furthermore, US President Barack Obama's imposition of US foreign policy interests in the Middle East will undoubtedly lead Seoul and Tokyo's attention to develop deeper political ties with Beijing, something Washington has been working to prevent since its strategic refocusing to the Asia-Pacific.

The Middle East has always been a contentious issue in Washington's relationship with Seoul and Tokyo. In particular, economically coercing Tehran is difficult for the two countries because a significant share of their petroleum imports come from Iran. This supply constitutes a vital lifeline to two economies deeply invested in shipping, transport, and heavy industry. The recent urging by the US to reduce or ban oil imports from Iran was met with negotiations from both governments to find alternative means of punishing the Islamic Republic while protecting their vital supply.

Since December of last year, the Japanese government has prohibited domestic businesses from working with Iranian banks and frozen the assets of several Iranian organizations. However, Japanese banks have been allowed to continue doing business with Iran's central bank, which settles the accounts for the oil trade.

South Korea has followed suit by forbidding new investments in Iranian oil and blacklisting Iranian firms, but not taking measures to reduce the supply of the much-valued energy source. Obviously the two governments do not intend to rupture their relationship with the United States. Both states recognize the vital role that Washington plays in regional security and commerce. Nonetheless, the sanctions on Iran remain a divisive policy because it forces both countries to choose between maintaining economic stability and establishing grounds for greater cooperation in security.

Some Israeli security experts have joined US officials in forwarding the view to Seoul that it would be in South Korea's best interest to join the tough sanctions as this would invariably put pressure on North Korea as well. [2] They added that Seoul should not worry about oil imports from Iran because other Gulf nations will increase their supply to supplement South Korea's needs.

While it is true that the ties between Iran and North Korea create greater impetus for South Korea to seek means to prevent Iranians from developing nuclear capabilities, the ongoing measures introduced by the United States have only brought on larger security problems while weapons technology transfers and sharing arrangements are likely continuing undeterred between Pyongyang and Tehran. [3]

Meanwhile, Seoul is seeking alternative sources of crude oil to satisfy its needs in case it has no other choice but to abide by US foreign policy in the Middle East. Likewise, Tokyo has yet to provide an official answer on reducing the import of oil from Iran and probably will not do so until it can secure alternative suppliers.

There appears to be confusion within the fledgling Yoshihiko Noda administration on how to approach the matter. When US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner visited Japan earlier in January, Finance Minister Jun Azumi suggested that Japan will reduce its oil procurement from Iran.

However, Noda, who assumed office in September, has reversed the statement, clarifying that his government has not concluded on whether to follow Washington or not. Meanwhile, certain members of the Diet (parliament) in the opposition Liberal Democratic Party such as Taro Kono have supported Japan having a separate foreign policy from the United States when it comes to Iran. [4]

For the two countries, fears that the escalating crisis along the Straits of Hormuz will raise oil prices to backbreaking levels, regardless of their participation in the sanctions, remains prevalent as they attempt unsuccessfully to remain uninvolved as possible.

Enter China. On his state visit to Qatar, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao clearly noted Beijing's opposition to both Washington's sanctions and Iran's threat to close the Straits of Hormuz. China has proposed discussing the matter of Iran's nuclear developments at the United Nations with the five permanent members of the Security Council. This solution would be to the best interest of South Korea and Japan as well.

China's passive and pragmatic opposition to US policy on Iran reveals how Washington's aggressive policies in one part of the world could hurt its influence in East Asia. South Korea and Japan are already inextricably more closely tied to the Chinese economy than to the American one.

Even with the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership that is under development with Japan, it is hard to foresee the United States taking over China as the principal mover of the region's economic development. Therefore, when East Asian states are forced to undertake high risk issues that are practically non-essential to them, such as Iran's nuclear program, it only highlights the slowly diminishing importance of the United States.

By all means, Washington is still a critical player in the Asia-Pacific, both economically and militarily; however, it increasingly appears out-of-touch with the real concerns of its allies and lacking a long-term game plan for the region.

Obama should revisit the issue that Wakimura Yoshitaro saw as the key problem with the Middle Eastern oil supply. The late economist recognized that the only way stable commerce could continue in the region is if Western states negotiated with, rather than dictate to, oil producing nations, appreciating their aspirations and excising fears. These are not merely the words of a bygone economist, this is diplomacy 101.

Notes
1. Laura Hein. Reasonable Men, Powerful Words. Washington D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004.
2. Kirsty Taylor. Israeli experts urge Korea to sanction Iranian oil imports. Korea Herald, January 19, 2012.
3. Joshua Pollack. Ballistic Trajectory: The Evolution of North Korea's Ballistic Missile Market. The Nonproliferation Review, July 2011, Vol. 18 No. 2.
4. Event, Reviving Japan: Can It Win the Asian Century? Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, January 4, 2012.

Soros Site Blends Kyrgyz News Item, CENTCOM Misinformation and Asia Times Misdirection In Obvious Psyop...

2012-01-21T10:39:00.001-08:00

Soros Site Blends Kyrgyz News Item, CENTCOM Misinformation and Asia Times Misdirection In Obvious Psyop...

21 01 2012

[The following disinformation piece follows a 1, 2, 3 formula--first the facts, followed by the outright lies, finished with speculation about the original facts obscured by the lies. CentralAsiaOnline is a CENTCOM disinformation site. Any news derived from it is tainted and misleading. Turkey is an Imperial proxy. By crediting the Turkish military with building the NATO Special Forces Training Center at Batken, instead of correctly labeling it a NATO facility, it gives substance to the lie that Kyrgyzstan has the choice of a third direction, between Russia and the US.]

Turkey Promises To Boost Military Aid To Kyrgyzstan....As NATO, Russia Continue On Same Path To New World Order...

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64866

by Joshua Kucera

press office of the Presidency of Turkey

President Almazbek Atambayev meets his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, in Ankara.

Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev has made his first foreign trip since becoming president, to Turkey. And while trade and aid seemed to top the agenda, the two sides also agreed to increase military cooperation, reports 24.kg:

Turkey will assist Kyrgyzstan in strengthening of Defense Ministry, Security Council and Frontier Service. It was announced by Foreign Affairs Minister Ruslan Kazakbaev during the official visit of President Almazbek Atambayev to Turkey.

According him on bilateral negotiations the issues of security, fighting against international terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal migration, strengthening of Defense Ministry, Frontier Service and law machinery,” said Ruslan Kazakbaev.

As the minister noted the issue of quota increasing for students, officers and young diplomats wishing to study in Turkey was also discussed. “Turkish part is going to support our request,” added the Minister.

And Central Asia Online reports, citing a Kyrgyzstan defense ministry statement, that Turkey will help build a military school in Osh and build up the country’s defense industry:

“One of the high-priority issues for Kyrgyzstan is construction of an Armed Forces Military Institute in Osh,” said Kyrgyz Defence Minister Taalaybek Omuraliyev. “Its creation would permit us to train highly skilled officers for the Armed Forces and other Kyrgyz military forces.”

“Another important direction that we’d like to develop is the opening of joint defence industry factories,” he said. “We could foresee the conduct of joint tactical counter-terrorism exercises in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.”

A pseudonymed analyst writing in Asia Times suggests that the visit was an effort by Atambayev to add more vectors to his country’s foreign policy:

Turkey’s foremost priority and preoccupation for the past 40 years or so has been integration into the European Union, so Ankara’s periodic surges of interest in other regions, including Central Asia, have waxed and waned based on the progress or lack of thereof in its talks with the EU.

This time, the new-found love between Kyrgyzstan and Turkey seems to suggest that it is not Turkey that is trying to reengage its Central Asian cousin more strongly; rather, President Atambayev is attempting to diversify Kyrgyzstan’s foreign policy away from superpowers such as Russia, the United States and China and thus lessen his country’s heavy dependence on them. Cultivating the so-called second-tier countries like Turkey may look a better bet, as they emerge as strong economies with increasing technological and investment potential.

The building in Osh seems particularly noteworthy. Kyrgyzstan has tried, and seems to have failed, to interest both the U.S. and Russia in creating military infrastructure in the southern part of the country. [Both countries still have plans to build a new center at Batken.] Bishkek’s interest, in addition to the overt one of improving the training of its military, appears to be to create some international stake in southern Kyrgyzstan, so that if Uzbekistan (as Bishkek fears) invades, Kyrgyzstan will have some immediate international support. So is Turkey willing to play this role?....

Although disagreements remain between Russia and NATO over the US missile defense project which Russia has called a threat to its national security, the two sides will continue working together in 2012.

Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov praised Russia-NATO achievements in 2011, which he said provided the basis for further cooperation in 2012.

“On the whole, we have a positive impression from Russia-NATO military cooperation in 2011,” Makarov told reporters following a meeting with NATO colleagues at the Russia-NATO Council in Brussels on Thursday. “Thus, a plan of military cooperation (between Russia and NATO) for 2012 has been approved.”

Russia’s top military official picked out some of last year’s high points in Russia’s partnership with NATO.

“Vigilant Skies and Bold Monarch were the most significant joint exercises in 2011,” Makarov noted. “We also had useful contacts in military medicine, logistics, disarming of handmade bombs and personnel training.”

Russia’s highest-ranking military official also mentioned the “joint combating of pirates off the Horn of Africa,” which he said is now entering “a new phase.”

Finally, Makarov discussed the situation in Afghanistan, where Russia and NATO are “intensifying their interaction” in the fight against dire local threats including, but not limited to, terrorism and drug trafficking.

The Chief of General Staff stressed that what happens in Afghanistan, where Allied forces have been fighting a 10-year uphill war against Taliban forces, has a “direct influence on security along the Russian border and worries our allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).”

Given the urgency of the situation, Russia will continue to “render assistance to the peacekeepers in Afghanistan, primarily with the transit of cargo,” he said.

Robert Bridge, RT

TAIWAN: 'At a time of swift growth, China isn't inclined to conflict'....

2012-01-21T01:22:00.000-08:00

TAIWAN: 'At a time of swift growth, China isn't inclined to conflict'....

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-01-20/edit-page/30643649_1_taiwan-and-china-cross-strait-relations-democratic-progressive-party

Since their stormy separation in 1949, Taiwan has resisted China's stated goal of taking over the small island state. Former member of Taiwan's National Assembly, professor Tang Shaocheng spoke with Rudroneel Ghosh about China's dramatic rise, Taiwan's recent presidential elections and why the new regime's policy of engagement seems to work:

How do Taiwanese view mainland China's rise?

Taiwanese view China with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, people fear China's rise could harm the status quo between the two sides, namely no unification, no indepen-dence and no use of force. Due to a lack of mutual trust, confidence-building measures are necessary to improve the situation. On the other hand, some Taiwanese judge the rise of China in a more positive way. They cite Beijing's insistence on unification through peaceful means. The 2008 global financial tsunami is still vivid in the memory of many Taiwanese. Taiwan's swift economic reco-very must be attributed to President Ma Ying-jeou's policy of reconciliation with mainland China while the US itself was the epicentre of the crisis - trade and financial injections from China, the influx of Chinese tourists and the procurement of Taiwanese commodities by Chinese provincial governments were vital to the recovery of Taiwan's economy.

Taiwan is an example of Chinese democracy - aren't there fears Beijing could stifle this through a tight economic embrace?

Taiwan's democracy is deep-rooted enough not to be rever-sed. Beijing can only win the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people to reach its goal of unification. Even then, the Taiwanese would have the last say. We must also realise a chaotic Taiwan with constant unrest will not be an acceptable option for Beijing.

President Ma's re-election vindicated his pro-China economic policies. But is any form of unification between Taiwan and China realistically possible in the near future?

No. There is no such plan of unification - the time is not ripe. The two sides are now preparing for dialogue on a peace accord... without the precondition of a renunciation of violence, there will be no foundation for further negotiations. However, if severe external factors were to affect cross-strait relations, anything is possible. If another financial crisis affects both sides, why can't they work together to face the challenge? Germany was reunited in 1990 - but nobody expected that, even in 1989.

If President Ma had lost his re-election bid, how would cross-strait relations be affected?

This would have meant uncertainties because the opposition Democratic Progressive Party doesn't accept the 1992 Consensus, which is 'One China with different interpretations'. This is Beijing's prerequisite for bilateral negotiations, accepted by the ruling Kuomintang.

China insists its ambi-tions are peaceful - but its actions can be aggressive. How should countries res-pond to emerging disputes?

According to the famous Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, the best strategy to win a war is to adopt non-war measures - win the hearts and minds of the opponents or make clear to them the serious consequences of confrontation. Such tactics are commonly used by Chinese authorities. But at a time of swift domestic growth, China isn't inclined to conflict with others.

Also, its rise has enabled Beijing to be much more influential in the international arena. Therefore, next to the realist approach - the use of power and interests - the liberal and social constructivist approaches through the use of trade, cooperation and culture are all relevant means to negotiate with China and settle disputes....

The Zioconned US policies can be best called: LOSE/LOSE

2012-01-19T10:22:00.001-08:00

The Zioconned US policies can be best called: LOSE/LOSE

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28767

By Michael Brenner

Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh

American foreign policy over the past 11 years has demonstrated a perverse genius for placing the United States in lose/lose situations. Navigating without a strategic gyroscope, and with maladroit diplomacy, we repeatedly have painted ourselves into a corner from which there is no escape other than by taking risky and highly costly expedient actions. That's true of Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq (where Mr. Maliki rubs our noses in our failure by inflicting enhanced humiliation techniques on us weekly, Lebanon, Bahrain/Saudi Arabia, Palestine and - most dangerous of all - Iran. Two successive administrations have presumed to set unrealizable objectives and to reach them by fruitless methods by ignoring the fundamental givens of the situation.

One, Iran will never forego the option of developing a nuclear CAPABILITY that is crucial to their objective security needs. Two, therefore, sanctions and other means short of war will not work. Three, the undeclared 'war' by other means that we are conducting confirms the security imperative and solidifies a national consensus on the nuclear issue. Four, somehow neutralizing the potentially destabilizing effects of the Iranian nuclear program requires reaching a set of understandings and putting in place arrangements that satisfy the basic security interests of all parties in the Gulf region. Five, talks on the nuclear question that ignore the above are doomed to failure. Six, to paint the Islamic Republic as the epitome of evil and to pursue a veiled strategy of regime change makes serious negotiation impossible. Seven, consequently Washington's tiptoeing to the brink of conflict puts us in the position of either backing away and thereby losing face (and votes in November) or taking military action whose effects would be disastrous.

As American post-Cold War imperial ambitions flounder against the harsh realities of international life, it would be tragic of the curtain falls on a scene of catastrophic failure of our own making....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkIIBnIuXHM&feature=youtu.be

Welcome to the Fog of Conflict Analysis....

By Paul Sullivan

Professor of Economics, National Defense University

First let us look at the closing of the straits of Hormuz. Many in leadership here and there think it is possible, if for a limited time. It would also be considered an act of war by many of the Sunni states in the Gulf region which rely on the straits for exporting their oil, gas, and refined products, but also for imports of food, equipment and many of the necessities of life. Many of the states that rely a lot on their ports on the inside of the straits are already in a delicate food security balance, for example. This could complicate things quite a bit. Also, if a conflict does erupt many of the states on the inside of the Gulf use the Gulf as a source of saline water to desalinate. They have particularly fragile water security issues to deal with if the Gulf is polluted. Qatar and the UAE may have 2 or so days of water reserves if their desalinization plants are shut.

The odd thing about this threat from Iran is that if they do shut down the Straits they will be harming themselves severely for similar reasons to how they would harm the Sunni states. They would also be harming their ally, Iraq. Almost all of the outlets for oil from Iran are on the inside of the straits. All of its major oil and gas fields are on the inside of the straits. Its major export facilities of Kharg and Lavan islands are on the inside of the straits. All of their major import ports are on the inside of the straits, aside from some smaller ports on the outside that have not been fully developed yet. Iran needs lots of imports to keep its economy going. It most particularly needs refined products, chemicals and the like. It also imports a lot of agricultural products, machine parts, transport vehicles, etc. Some have asked me whether Iran could just let Iranian trade go through. Well, have you ever faced down a carrier group in a small space, and the straits are a pretty small space?

Most Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Emirati, Qatari and other trade goes via the Straits of Hormuz. This is more than just oil. Qatar is the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Most of this LNG goes to Asia. India is one of their biggest customers. Japan, South Korea and China are also big or growing markets for them.

China gets about 11 percent of its oil from Iran, but gets nearly double that from Saudi Arabia. It also imports a lot of oil from Iraq, Oman, and Kuwait. It may be now turning more to the UAE. India also gets about 11 percent of its oil from Iran, but 18 percent from Saudi Arabia. It also imports oil from the UAE, Kuwait, etc. Japan relies on the Gulf region for about 77 percent of its oil. South Korea relies on the Gulf for about the same percentage. The EU gets about 15 percent of its oil from Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Italy and Spain, countries in some economic stress get about 13 percent of their oil from Iran. Greece gets even more from Iran: about 30 percent. Turkey gets about 50 percent of its oil from Iran. Sri Lanka gets 100 percent of its oil from Iran. South Africa gets about 25 percent from Iran. And all of these countries, outside of Sri Lanka, which rely on Iran for oil also rely on others from the inside of the straits for either oil, gas, refined products or all three in variably important ways. The US gets about 1.5 million barrels a day from inside the straits, mostly from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This is not a large percentage of our 19-20 million barrel a day usage, but shutting it down quickly even for a short time would be an issue, and would have ripples in our markets and our supply systems.

My sense is that the Iranian threat is a bluff, but it has rattled some market analyses and some actual markets. Closing off the straits would strangle the economy of Iran. It would damage further its relations with the Sunni states. It would harm its relations with its major customers in Asia. It would be a cause of war and all of its implications, which are vast.

I cannot say whether there will be a war or not. Maybe something or someone will bring us back from the precipice. Maybe some sense will walk into the situation. But in times of great stress and increasing stress between countries the chances for mistakes to be made get higher than if there were some sort of effective dispute mechanism to reduce those tensions. There seems to be none between the US and Iran, or even between the Sunni states and Iran. EU-Iranian relations seem to be also getting more distant by the day.

It is not just the oil that could be a shock to the world systems if a war breaks out. Yes, there are about 15-17 million barrels of day going through the straits in mostly very few VLCC and ULCC tankers carrying 2 million barrels or so of oil each. There are smaller tankers and refinery tankers also, but the big ships could be a key to this crisis if it breaks out. One of these ships being diverted to Spain, for example, would mean a potentially huge shock to their economy unless other tankers and pipeline flows were moved about to take up the short fall in short order.

I could go into hundreds of oil market scenarios, but the bigger and simpler picture is this: if the straits are closed off for a considerable period, even a couple of weeks or so, oil prices will go through the roof for a while. However, the psychology of the oil markets may also have changed due to this and some nearly permanent risk premiums might be added to the prices of different types of oils.

Natural gas is increasingly becoming a part of the trade via the straits and any stoppage of LNG ships to Asia could disrupt LNG markets in Asia, but also beyond due to diversion of some shipments and price shocks.

Given that the world economy is fragile already any oil, gas, or other shocks could put many places back into deeper recessions or pushed some over the edged into new ones. The EU is especially vulnerable given its still unresolved debt issues. Japan is vulnerable due to its need for imported oil and gas from the region. China is vulnerable due to its energy imports from the region, but its also seemingly increasingly fragile economy. There is a housing bust in process and China needs to produce 12-14 million new jobs each year. If it does not then we have some real civil disturbance potential. India could also get hammered economically due to oil and gas shocks.

Any oil and gas shocks out of the Gulf could have serious repercussions worldwide, not just in the countries I mention.

Then there are the chances that the major oil facilities in the Gulf could be damaged in a conflict. Think Ab Qaiq, ABOT, and KABOT, Kharg and Lavan islands, oil and gas facilities in the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait and you start to get the picture.

The economic effects of an all-out, protracted war including the damaging of major oil and gas facilities in the Gulf would be an economic catastrophe in many ways. A less protracted, less damaging war, well, we might pro-rate the economic damages, but they could also be vast. And the psychology of the situations in oil and other markets could serious change. Think of effects on stock markets, food markets, transport, and just about everything else and you start to get it.

Are there economic, political, military, diplomatic and social nightmares on the way if many of the potential scenarios happen?

Indeed.

Oh, yes, that question about hitting the Iranian nuclear facilities. Ever heard of nuclear fallout and have that might affect areas near and far from the attacks? This could be a significant result of any attacks on the nuclear facilities. I find it odd that so many people here and in the EU are so worried about the safety and other risks of nuclear power, but seem quick to the pistol to want to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

Indeed, the Iranian regime needs desperately nuclear bombs, given all the threats against it by the Zioconned Western powers....but at what price?

The entire situation is fraught with cognitive dissonance, but what else is new?

Leadership and nuanced thinking is needed. Real strategic thinking is needed. The real and actual national security threats and opportunities of the US need to be considered very carefully and fully as this situation unfolds.

None of this is simple. Not much of it is really that clear.

Welcome to the fog of conflict analysis.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkIIBnIuXHM&feature=youtu.be

And this is just the broad brush view of it.....

Obviously, the sanctions are intended to force Iran's hand.....an attempt to manipulate them into doing something, anything, that will justify an attack, be it from Israel or the U.S./NATO, in the court of world public opinion....as if that opinion really matters any longer. Iran has played it well up until this point. I don't think they will do anything stupid or rash....but as we saw in Vietnam (Maddox).....and with Iraq (Yellow Cake), ultimately it doesn't matter how well Iran plays it, The Babe has pointed to the right field wall and that's where the ball is going to end up....in the right field bleachers.

Think ahead twenty years....the year 2032. If Alzheimer's hasn't established its grip on you yet, if you are a betting man, would you bet that the Mullahs would still be in power in Iran? I wouldn't take that bet, because the odds are so slim to none, you're sure to lose your shirt. The only way to extricate the Mullahs is by outside physical force. Iran is incapable of another internal revolution that could possibly oust the Mullahs.

So, it's going to happen, it's just a matter when and how (the tactical analysis)....and the various ramifications it will have for the rest of the world, which is a source of interesting conjecture.

FYI, I don't condone any of the above, but that's my assessment. It's irrelevant how I feel about it...because they haven't asked and they never will....

Refusing battle, saving the World and USA from endless Blow-back....

2012-01-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

Refusing battle, saving the World and USA from endless Blow-back....

[Excellent protest piece, rejecting the notion of "persistent warfare" (a.k.a. never-ending war), found in the unlikeliest of locations, the Armed Forces Journal. Considering the publication date of the article, April 2009, it is almost prescient, in its predictions of the disasters to befall the United States, NATO and the world, should Obama continue the disastrous "regime change" policies of Bush and Cheney.]

Refusing battle

Armed Forces Journal, April 2009

The alternative to persistent warfare....

BY COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET.)

“Sir, I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is becoming really impossible … if they (Sunni and Shiite) are not prepared to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear out. … At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”

Winston Churchill to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Sept. 1, 1922

Despite the seriousness of the present economic crisis, the greatest danger to the future security of the U.S. is Washington’s inclination to impose political solutions with the use of American military power in many parts of the world where Washington’s solutions are unneeded and unsustainable. President Barack Obama must arrest this tendency by making pragmatic and methodical changes to the goals of American military strategy. The Bush legacy in foreign and defense policy presents Obama with a stark choice: Will we continue to pursue global hegemony with the use of military power to control and shape development inside other societies? Or will we use our military power to maintain our market-oriented English-speaking republic, a republic that upholds the rule of law, respects the cultures and traditions of people different from ourselves, and trades freely with all nations, but protects its sovereignty, its commerce, its vital strategic interests and its citizens? This essay argues for the latter approach; a strategy of conflict avoidance designed to make the U.S. more secure without making the rest of the world less so.

For Americans who’ve lived in a world with only one true military, political and economic center of gravity — the U.S. — changing how America behaves inside the international system is not an easy task. Since 1991, Americans have become so accustomed to the frequent use of American military power against very weak opponents they seem to have lost their fear of even the smallest conflict’s unintended consequences.

But the 21st century is no time for the leaders of the U.S. to make uninformed decisions regarding the use of force or to engage in desperate, end-game, roll-of-the-dice gambles. Recent events in the Caucasus involving Russia and Georgia may simply be a foretaste of what is likely to happen during the 21st century in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the ancient practice of encouraging one ethnic group to dominate others as a means of securing foreign imperial power is breeding new conflicts. These conflicts are likely to resemble the Balkan Wars of the early 20th century, except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with the competition for energy, water, food, mineral resources and the wealth they create. In nations such as Iran and Turkey, states with proud histories, huge populations under the age of 30 and appetites for more prominence in world affairs, the influx of wealth from the energy sector will also support much more potent militaries and, potentially, more aggressive foreign policies, too.

In this volatile setting, direct American military involvement in conflicts where the U.S. itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk should be avoided. Otherwise, American military involvement could cause 21st century conflicts to spin out of control and confront Americans with regional alliances designed to contain American military power; alliances that but for American military intervention would not exist. It is vital the U.S. not repeat the mistakes of the British Empire in 1914: overestimate its national power by involving itself in a self-defeating regional war it does not need to fight and precipitate its own economic and military decline.

Avoiding this outcome demands new goals for American military power and a strategic framework that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method and end-state; a strategy in which American military action is short, sharp, decisive and rare. Such a strategy involves knowing when to fight and when to refuse battle.

LEE’S CHOICE

On June 24, 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia — 74,000 strong — completed its crossing of the Potomac River and pushed northward into Pennsylvania toward Gettysburg. Six days later, when Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, arrived in front of Gettysburg, he discovered to his dismay that a much larger and better equipped Union Army — 115,000 strong — confronted him in strong defenses on the high ground above the town. As an officer of engineers, Lee knew what this development meant for his army; his troops would have to attack uphill while the Union troops poured rifle and artillery fire into them.

Fortunately for Lee, his opponent opted to immobilize itself in defensive positions. The Army of Northern Virginia was not yet decisively engaged. Lee still had options.

Lee could move his army away from Gettysburg, placing it between the Union Army and Washington, D.C., an action likely to draw the Union Army out of its strong defensive positions to attack and eliminate the danger Lee presented to Washington. Such a fight would occur on terms more favorable to Lee, increasing the likelihood of yet another Southern victory. A major Confederate victory on Northern territory would almost certainly have resulted in Lee’s occupation of Washington, D.C., and maybe even Southern independence.

Flush with their victory at Chancellorsville seven weeks earlier, Lee and his troops were spoiling for a fight, and they got the one they did not want or expect. After repeated charges and the loss of thousands of men, Lee retreated southward over the Potomac River without interference from the Union Army, but Lee lost a battle that cost the Confederacy the war.

Lee should have refused battle. Had he done so, he would have kept his army and its capabilities intact until he could achieve a position of advantage and with it more favorable conditions for the employment of his force.

LOSING AN EMPIRE

When word reached Britain on Aug. 1, 1914, of Germany’s mobilization for war, Winston Churchill recorded that of the Cabinet “at least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel unless Great Britain was herself attacked, which was unlikely.” The members knew the English Channel and the massive Royal Navy made a German offensive against Britain not only unlikely, but impossible.

However, Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, a man who spoke only English, seldom left England and was contemptuous of foreigners, reached a different conclusion. He believed moral obligations dictated British intervention to save its historic enemy, France, from defeat. While England’s drinking classes sang the jingoistic ballad made popular during the Boer War, “We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too,” Grey warned the House of Commons, “If France is beaten … and if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland and then Demark … the most awful responsibility is resting on the government in deciding what to do.”

The argument was specious. Germany’s war aims had nothing to do with Britain or the states mentioned. It did not matter. Grey’s emotional appeal to patriotism, and fear, worked.

When Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, the newly appointed British minister of war, told the Cabinet its decision to go to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary meant the British Empire would have to maintain an army of millions, the war would last for at least three years and that it would be decided on the continent — not at sea — the Cabinet ministers were astonished. For reasons that seem baffling now, Britain’s political leaders, including Churchill, who was first lord of the Admiralty, believed a war with Germany would be short, and that the Royal Navy — not the British and French armies — would decide its outcome in a great sea battle with the German surface fleet. The possibility that Britain’s very small, professional army could not sustain a war with Germany and Austria for more than a few months, that Germany would decline to fight on Britain’s terms (at sea) and that the war on land would consume Britain’s national wealth, did not seem to occur to most of the Cabinet members until Kitchener made his presentation.

How could the British leaders have been so misguided in their assumptions? The British interpreted the world that existed beyond Britain’s global imperial power structure in ways that flattered their self-image of limitless money and sea-based power.

Britain should have refused battle and sought strategic conditions more favorable to the effective use of Britain’s considerable, but still limited, military and economic resources. Instead, Britain joined a regional conflict, turning it into a world war; a war Britain, along with France and Russia would lose until the manpower and industrial might of the U.S. rescued them from defeat in 1918.

Britain’s human losses were staggering; one in 16 British men aged 15 to 50, or nearly 800,000, died. Paying for Britain’s victory in World War I led to a tenfold increase in Britain’s national debt. Paying the interest alone consumed half of British government spending by the mid-1920s.

Britain fought a war that cost the British people their national power, their standard of living, and, in less than 20 years, their empire. Had anyone in London’s leadership stopped to seriously examine what outcome (end-state) it was they wanted to achieve with military power (purpose) and what military capabilities (method) were at their disposal to do so, it is doubtful they would have reached the decisions they did.

PRICE OF VICTORY

The lesson is a straightforward one: When national military strategy fails to answer the questions of purpose, method and end-state, military power becomes an engine of destruction not just for its intended enemies, but for its supporting society and economy, too. Regardless of how great or how small the military commitment, if the price of victory is potentially excessive, then the use of force should be avoided. After all, the object in conflict and crisis is the same as in wrestling: to throw the opponent by weakening his foothold and upsetting his balance without risking self-exhaustion.

This strategy served President Franklin Roosevelt well during the years leading up to and including World War II. Roosevelt concluded it made no sense to challenge the German war machine on its own terms. That was a job Roosevelt left to Stalin. Instead, Roosevelt avoided German strength and moved his forces through North Africa and Italy waiting for the combined effect of massive Soviet offensives and Anglo-American bombing campaigns to weaken the Nazi grip on Europe to the point where France could be invaded. When American and allied forces stormed ashore at Normandy, the strategic outcome in Europe was effectively decided.

But even when conflict is forced upon the U.S., as it was in World War II or Korea in 1950, there are still opportunities to halt ongoing, inconclusive military operations before they consume America’s military, economic and political reserves of strength. This was Eisenhower’s rationale for ending the Korean conflict in 1953. Unfortunately, chief executives such as Eisenhower are rarer than hens’ teeth.

Before committing to military action, political and military leaders must always measure what they might gain by what they might lose. Even when wars are won and the victorious military achieves total military domination of its opponent — the case in Iraq and Afghanistan — the population of the “defeated” country may not submit to the victor’s demands, particularly if the victor insists on garrisoning his troops in the defeated population’s territory. If the foreign military presence provokes local hostility — and it usually does — the result will be more fighting, not stability. These are all good reasons for the U.S. to end conflicts on terms the defeated party can accept and disengage U.S. forces; even when the terms may not meet all of America’s security needs. What militates against this line of reasoning is the delusion of limitless national power and the unhealthy condition of national narcissism that thrives on it.

The Johnson administration’s decision to intervene with large-scale conventional forces in Vietnam rested on this delusion. Even worse, President Lyndon Johnson subscribed to the idea that whatever military action the American government initiated, it was inherently justified on moral grounds, even if, as in the case of Vietnam, the military action turned out badly for the U.S. Tragically, Johnson’s wish-based ideology made retreat from inflexible and irrational policy pronouncements impossible when they no longer made sense.

Wish-based ideology is dangerous because it imagines a world that does not really exist; the kind of world described in 1992 by the late Defense Secretary Les Aspin, where the U.S. armed forces are employed to “punish evil-doers,” or Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s idea that armed forces not engaged in fighting should export democracy-at-gunpoint. Not only has this ideological thinking and behavior since 1991 failed to create stability around the world, it has made the U.S. and its allies less secure. Understanding why means leaving the 20th century’s wars of ideology behind.

The U.S. and Europe spent most of the 20th century coping with the forces of nationalism and social change unleashed by the French Revolution and Karl Marx’s mock scientific theory of history as the systematic unfolding of a predictable, dialectical process.

The Bolsheviks, later called communists, tried to unite the two in an attempt to perfect human society through force of arms at home and abroad. Fascists were ideological opportunists who borrowed from the right and the left seeking to fuse society’s classes inside mass movements of radical nationalism.

The failed utopian projects resulting from both European ideologies turned the 20th century world into a battlefield littered with the ruins of great civilizations. Communism and fascism exalted territorial conquest and occupation; a form of total warfare that pushes violence to its utmost limits and rejects the deliberate employment of military means to achieve anything less than the opponent’s complete annihilation — what Stalin and Hitler called “victory.”

Such war aims are not limited to changing the opponent’s policy stance to create the basis for a new status quo all sides can support. The aim of total war is to replace the defeated government and its supporting society with ones subservient to the victor’s. It is the mentality that created the Warsaw Pact. This mind-set is dangerous and incongruous with the strategic interests of the American people and the realities of the 21st century. Political and military leaders who talk and think in these terms should be rejected. The disproportionate use of military force and the unlimited political aims it supports will not protect or safeguard American interests or the interests of our allies.

In the 21st century, the “total victory” construct as it equates to the establishment of Western-style governments and free-market economies subservient to the U.S. is counterproductive. In the Middle East, as well as in most of Africa, Latin America and Asia, “damage control,” not “total victory,” is the most realistic goal for U.S. national military strategy.

NEW GOALS AND DIRECTIONS

America’s experience since 2001 teaches the strategic lesson that in the 21st century, the use of American military power, even against Arab and Afghan opponents with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air defenses, can have costly, unintended strategic consequences. Put in the language of tennis, the use of American military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of “unforced errors.” Far too often, national decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by a rigorous application of the purpose/method/end-state strategic framework.

Decision-making of this kind explains why Operation Iraqi Freedom never had a coherent strategic design. The capability to remove Saddam Hussein was enough to justify action in the minds of American leaders who assumed that whatever happened after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, American military and civilian contractor strength would muddle through and prevail. It’s also why U.S. forces were kept in Iraq long past the point when it was clear that the American military and contractor presence in Iraq was a needless drain on American military and economic resources.

The superficial thinking informed by a fanciful view of American history and international relations that gave birth to the occupation of Iraq is not a prescription for American prosperity and security in the 21st century. The recently annunciated military doctrine known as “persistent warfare” is a case in point.

Persistent warfare advocates the use of military power to change other peoples’ societies through American military occupation. It’s a dangerous reformulation of Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy for the bloody excesses of the French Revolution summed up in his slogan, “Until all men are free, no man is free.” Fortunately for the American people, President George Washington rejected Jefferson’s enthusiasm for an American alliance with Revolutionary France, an alliance that would have invited the destruction of the new U.S. “Twenty years’ peace, combined with our remote situation would enable us in a just cause to bid defiance to any power on earth,” Washington argued in 1796.

Washington understood the importance of making prudent choices in national military strategy at a time when the economic and political development of the United States was extremely fragile. Today, America’s economic woes along with the larger world’s unrelenting drive for prosperity creates the need for new choices in national military strategy. The most important choice Obama must make is to reject future, unnecessary, large-scale, overt military interventions in favor of conflict avoidance; a strategy of refusing battle that advances democratic principles through shared prosperity — not unwanted military occupation.

ISLAMIST TERRORISM

This strategy does not change America’s policy stance on Islamist terrorism. The exportation of Islamist terrorism against the U.S. and its allies must remain a permanent red line in U.S. national military strategy. Governments that knowingly harbor terrorist groups must reckon with the very high probability that they will be subject to attack. However, long-term, large-scale American military occupations, even to ostensibly train indigenous forces to be mirror images of ourselves, are unwise and should be avoided. Iranian interests gained prominence in Baghdad because Tehran’s agents of influence wear an indigenous face while America’s agents wear foreign uniforms and carry guns. And Iran will remain the dominant actor in Iraq so long as it maintains even the thinnest veil of concealment behind the façade of the Maliki government and its successors.

As a declaratory goal of U.S. military strategy, conflict avoidance is not merely a restatement of deterrence or a new affirmation of collective security. It is a policy stance that stems from a decent regard for the interests of others, regardless of how strange and obtuse these interests may seem to Americans. It is an explicit recognition by Washington that no one in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Latin America wants American troops to police and govern their country, even if American troops are more capable, more honest and provide better security than their own soldiers and police. The question for Americans is how to translate the goal of conflict avoidance into operational strategy: What will the U.S. do if it is not compelled to fight?

Conflict avoidance would appear to require action on several levels. First, conflict avoidance requires that America continue to maintain the military power to make a direct assault on U.S. and allied security interests unthinkable and then pursue peaceful relations with the peoples of the world, so the danger of war involving the world’s great military powers is reduced and contained. America already has a surplus of military power for this stated purpose. American nuclear power is overwhelming, and any state or subnational group that contemplates the use of nuclear weapons against the U.S. or its allies understands that nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in general have “return addresses” on them with ominous consequences for the user. American conventional military power is no less impressive when it is employed within an integrated, joint framework that exploits capabilities across service lines.

What America lacks is an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum use of increasingly constrained resources. More specifically, the 1947 National Security Act reached block obsolescence years ago.

Second, conflict avoidance balances the need to make the U.S. secure against the danger of making the rest of the world less so. Instead of defining events around the world as tests of American military strength and national resolve, and rather than dissipating American military resources in remote places to pass these alleged tests, the U.S. should define its role in the world without feeling compelled to demonstrate its military power. Otherwise, the U.S. runs the risk that other states, not the U.S., will dictate America’s strategic agenda.

Though as privately pro-British as his cousin President Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt had no intention of declaring war against Germany on behalf of another state, including Britain. He would not make President Woodrow Wilson’s mistake and commit millions of Americans to an ideological crusade that promised no tangible strategic benefit to the American people. Put more bluntly, Roosevelt would not commit political suicide for Churchill.

From 1939 to 1942, Roosevelt resisted Churchill’s considerable powers of persuasion, providing only the assistance Britain needed to survive and nothing more. When Hitler turned on the Soviet Union, Hitler’s closest ally until June 1941, Roosevelt reasoned he could afford the time to build up American strength while the Nazis and communists exhausted themselves in an ideological war of mutual destruction.

Even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt declared war only on Japan. Roosevelt had no intention of declaring war on Germany if it could be avoided. It was Hitler who — in an essentially romantic gesture of solidarity with Japan unanimously opposed by the German General Staff — declared war on the U.S.

HANDLING RUSSIA

In the Caucasus, a region where political structures are closer in character to the Mafia organizations of Al Capone than Jeffersonian democracy, it makes no sense for the U.S. and its European allies to extend security guarantees. Russia’s security interests in many of the states that border it are legitimately paramount. American interests in these regions shrink to insignificance next to Russia’s.

Whereas Russia’s proximity to Georgia and Ukraine ensures Russia’s ability to effectively and efficiently apply military power, the U.S. and its allies are no more able to guarantee Georgian or Ukrainian security than Britain could guarantee Poland’s security against Nazi and Soviet military intervention in 1939. In eastern Ukraine beyond the Dnieper River and the Crimea, where the population is unambiguously Russian in language, culture and ethnicity, it would be folly to think that a guarantee of NATO military assistance would be interpreted as anything but a threat.

Third, when the U.S. confronts crises and conflicts, American armed forces should be committed on terms that favor the U.S. where the use of military power can achieve tangible strategic gains for the nation. As Churchill argued in 1909: “It would be very foolish to lose England in safeguarding Egypt. If we win the big battle in the decisive theater, we can put everything else straight afterwards. If we lose it, there will not be any afterwards.”

American military interventions have routinely violated this line of reasoning. In Vietnam, American military assistance failed for many reasons, chiefly because the Saigon government was thoroughly corrupt and indifferent to the security of its own people. All the military might at America’s disposal, whether the North Vietnamese military enjoyed sanctuaries in neighboring states or not, was never enough to rescue the incompetent South Vietnamese government from its eventual conquest by North Vietnamese communists.

America’s decision to garrison Iraq after its initial goals of removing Saddam and eliminating WMD were achieved added little, if anything, of strategic value to American security, but the presence of so many conventional American forces did present America’s enemies in the Muslim world with an opportunity they would have otherwise missed: the chance to directly attack U.S. forces, damage American military prestige and exhaust American economic resources while strengthening their own. By the beginning of 2008, the most serious unanticipated outcome of this exposure was a monthly bill of $12 billion to maintain U.S. forces in support of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad that was and is effectively tied to Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has become a co-belligerent for the various factions and peoples — Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Saudi, Sunni or Shiite Arabs — struggling for power inside Iraq. These realities explain why the Bush administration was reluctant to remove large numbers of troops from Iraq. The current status quo is not merely fragile, it will not survive the withdrawal of U.S. military power.

WHAT ABOUT AFGHANISTAN?

In consideration of what to do next about Afghanistan’s rapidly deteriorating situation, current discussions in Washington are dominated by people who advocate increasing force levels and plunging these forces into Pakistan’s tribal areas. Yet a more sober analysis suggests the real problem with Afghanistan resides in Kabul, another corrupt and ineffective government unworthy of American military support.

The key questions missing from discussions in Washington about Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 include: Where is the legitimate government that asked for help from the U.S. in defeating the internal armed challenge to the government’s monopoly of control over the means of violence and political power? Legitimacy is not exclusively a function of elections. Legitimacy is also defined by a government’s competence to win and hold power in ways that benefit American and allied interests.

Where are the organized indigenous forces defending the legitimate government that must conduct the operations? While U.S.-provided training, equipment and advisers can significantly improve a partner state’s capabilities, there must already be an indigenous force to equip, indigenous fighters to train and a senior leadership echelon to advise. And the costs of long-term U.S. military assistance should be realistically assessed. Had any of these questions been raised and accurately addressed within the purpose/method/end-state framework, it is doubtful American military action would have followed the course it did after Sept. 11.

Treating conflict avoidance as a declared strategic goal should give pause to those in Washington who think counterinsurgency is something American military forces should seek to conduct. For outside powers intervening in other peoples’ countries as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called counterinsurgency has not been the success story presented to the American people. Making cash payments to buy cooperation from insurgent groups to conceal a failed policy of occupation is a temporary expedient to reduce U.S. casualties, not a permanent solution for stability.

Lord Salisbury, one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers, told his colleagues in the House of Commons “the commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” Salisbury’s words should resonate strongly with Americans today. America’s scientific-industrial base and the military power it supports give American policies and interests global influence, but the deliberate use of American military power to bring democracy to others in the world under conditions that never favored its success has actually weakened, not strengthened, American influence and economic power.

It is crucial that choices among competing resource allocations in defense be illuminated by a much clearer perception of their likely strategic impact. Strategy and geopolitics always trump ideology, and military action is not merely a feature of geopolitics and statecraft, it’s the employment of it.

The choices the new president makes among various military missions will ultimately decide what national military strategy America’s military executes. Of the many missions he must consider, open-ended missions to install democracy at gunpoint inside failed or backward societies along with unrealistic security guarantees to states and peoples of marginal strategic interest to the U.S. are missions America’s military establishment cannot and should not be asked to perform.

Today, America’s share of the total world gross national product is roughly 32 percent, substantially less than its 49 percent share of 40 years ago. Yet the U.S., like the British Empire 100 years ago, continues to lead the world in the creation of wealth, technology and military power. And, thanks to American naval and aerospace supremacy, America retains the strategic advantage of striking when and where its government dictates, much as Britain did before World War I.

But like Britain’s resources in 1914, American resources today are not unlimited. Years of easy tactical military victories over weak and incapable nation-state opponents in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq have created the illusion of limitless American military power. This illusion assisted the Bush administration and its generals in frustrating demands from Congress for accountability; allowing politicians and generals to define failure as success and to spend money without any enduring strategic framework relating military power to attainable strategic goals.

The result is an unnecessarily large defense budget of more than $700 billion and military thinking that seeks to reinvigorate the economically disastrous policies of territorial imperialism. Unchecked, the combination of these misguided policies will increase the likelihood the U.S. follows the path of Britain’s decline in the 20th century. Though Britain was not defeated militarily in World War I, it squandered its blood and treasure on a self-defeating war with Germany in 1914 along with a host of imperial experiments in the aftermath of World War I, all of which were political, military and economic disasters for the British people. A strategy of refusing battle that routinely answers the questions of purpose, method and end-state in the conduct of military operations is the best way for the U.S. to avoid following in the footsteps of the British Empire into ruin. AFJ

COL. DOUGLAS MacGREGOR (Ret.) is a retired Army colonel. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Defense Department or the U.S. government....

Sequence of coup-d’états by narco cartels supervised by US intelligence agencies, widespread....

2012-01-19T05:28:00.000-08:00

Sequence of coup-d’états by narco cartels supervised by US intelligence agencies, will be widespread in Central& South Asia and MENA....

By ORIENTAL REVIEW

For the last few years the incumbent US administration was getting adhered to a new, more sophisticated principle in foreign policy: to act overseas by means of its allies and to promote American initiatives as multilateral through the international organizations.

Thus, the war against Libya was unleashed by France, and the US was carrying out merely ‘supportive’ functions. The Modern Silk Road project is initiated by Turkey while the United States is a “neutral but enthusiastic supporter” [1]. The Arab League is churning out petitions to overthrow legitimate, but undesired leaders. In October 2011 the UN resolution against Syria was proposed by France, UK, Germany and Portugal, and the US was just ‘seconding’ it together with Colombia, Nigeria, Gabon and Bosnia. This is indeed a smarter and subtle tactics if compared with the cowboy pounces of the previous administration: now the wastes and risks lay on the others. A comprehensive theoretical backing for such approach was made by Joseph Parent from the University of Miami and Paul MacDonald from the Wellesley College in their latest article in the Foreign Affairs [2].

The United Nations Organization, the major mechanism for conflict management, is being turned into multilateral extension of the State Department aimed to legitimize its one-side initiatives internationally. Washington is also trying to get use of separate UN bodies in American interests. The IAEA for example serves to pressure Iran. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime is an instrument to interfere into post-Soviet Central Asia. The Hague-based International Criminal Court, another UN institution created in 2002 to fight crimes against humanity, serves to prosecute the leaders of the states who have refused to enter global matrix designed by the US strategists. Ironically, the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the ICC was never ratified and was ‘unsigned’ by the US in 2002. Most recently UNESCO, another UN body located in Geneva, was financially ‘punished’ by the United States and several allies for admittance of Palestine into this organization.

Another favorite American maneuver is to facilitate ‘regional’ organizations thousands of miles away from its borders being joined by the US as a member or observer. The Washington curators used to repeat to local authorities: ‘It is your idea, your structure, we are just assisting you…’, but at the same time obtain efficient mechanisms and abundant opportunities to influence remote domains.

As a pretext to create such mechanisms the United States prefers raising the flag of ‘cooperation in the name of common interests’. Now, when the standard bugaboo of international terrorism turns politically unsuitable (since quite recently the global elites decided to use the blind Islamist underground as an agent of regression for the third world), they have returned to play off a card of ‘anti-narcotic cooperation’, this time in post-Soviet Central Asia. The paradox of argumentation applied to justify the deeper US penetration into this region still under strong Russian influence is that it should be done ‘to dispel Russian concerns over the consequences of withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan’. If the United States is so much concerned about the drug trafficking in Central Asia, why did they refuse to fight it inside Afghanistan where they had 140 thousand-strong contingent? They still maintain clandestine contacts with a number of ‘field commanders’ who are ‘securing’ US/NATO convoys and drug-trafficking routes at the same time. Nevertheless they prefer to wait until the stuff is spread throughout thousands of locations in Central Asia and then to establish operational, training and intelligence-sharing cooperation with the states subject to heroin attack. One of such mechanisms is the Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Centre for Combating Illicit Trafficking of Narcotic Drugs, Psychotropic Substances and their Precursors (CARICC) launched in 2009 under the aegis of UNODC. The institution uniting several anti-narcotics agencies of post-Soviet Central Asian states, is funded by a number of NATO countries (US, UK, Italy, Canada, Turkey, France, Czech Republic), Finland and Luxemburg, all investing $15,4 million into the project. These states plus Afghanistan and Pakistan have acquired the status of observers and have access to all data bases of the Centre. According to the documents revealed by Wikileaks, CARICC mandate might be ‘broadened to encompass all transnational crime rather than just counter-narcotics’.

Interestingly, after the failure of US attempts to channel several CARICC training programs through NATO-Russia Council or OSCE (Washington tried not to publicize the fact that US CENTCOM was among the key sponsors of these programs), Assistant Secretary William Brownfield, the head of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has announced a new Central Asian Counternarcotics Initiative, (CACI) in June 2011. This initiative would apparently lead to the creation of elite special units similar to notorious CIA-backed death squads that committed a number of resonant extrajudicial killings in Latin America and other countries during the Cold war. Mr. Brownfield’s background and his Central Asian agenda were perfectly analyzed by Nil Nikandrov quite recently [3].

The Canadian political analyst Peter Dale Scott has concluded in his famous book ‘American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan’ that the increase of drug trafficking occurs because of, and not despite of, American efforts. He is seconded by another well-known researcher of the CIA involvement into drug trade, Alfred McCoy, who stated that where and when the United States conduct ‘a war against narcotics’, the production of stuff usually increases [4].

Those in Central Asia who are ready to play American game should be aware of their destiny. It is equal to one of several Central American countries in 1980s: the role of cannon-fodder on service of American interests, years of bloody civil wars, and backwardness for decades. Do their leaders understand the rules of the game they are being involved? Do they want the same future as it is the present in Afghanistan, where the nation is torn by both internal extremism and foreign occupation? The point of non-turn is still not crossed. The sequence of coup-d’états carried out by narco cartels supervised by the US intelligence agencies, widespread massacres and foreign occupation are a likely, but not imperative future for Central Asia.

Notes:

1. Andrew Kuchins, Thomas Sanderson, David Gordon: The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road – Planning for Afghanistan’s Future // Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). December 2009. P.3. http://csis.org/files/publication/091217_Kuchins_NorthernDistNet_Web.pdf

2. Joseph M. Parent, Paul K. MacDonald: The Wisdom of Retrenchment – America Must Cut Back to Move Forward // Foreign Affairs. November/December 2011.

3. Nil Nikandrov: US Drug War Against Russia Waged From the Asian Foothold, Strategic Culture Foundation, December 10, 2011.

4. Alfred W. McCoy The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, Second revised edition. 2003. P. 449.

In A Replay of Falklands War, Zioconned Britain Would Lose....

2012-01-19T05:20:00.001-08:00

In A Replay of Falklands War, Zioconned Britain Would Lose badly....

David Cameron accused Argentina of “colonialism” towards the Falklands and warned Britain was ready to defend them, stoking tensions over the islands 30 years after they sparked a war.

Speaking to the House of Commons on Wednesday, Cameron condemned Argentina’s increasingly strong rhetoric over the British-held South Atlantic archipelago, which Buenos Aires claims as its own.

He revealed that Britain’s National Security Council had met on Tuesday to review its military plans for the islands, saying he was “determined we should make sure that our defences and everything else is in order”.

“The key point is we support the Falkland Islanders’ right to self-determination,” Cameron told lawmakers, referring to the 3,000 residents of the remote territory.

“What the Argentinians have been saying recently, I would argue, is actually far more like colonialism because these people want to remain British and the Argentinians want them to do something else.”

His comments sparked a furious response in Argentina, with Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo telling reporters they were “totally offensive, especially coming from Great Britain”.

Foreign Minister Hector Timerman added that “obviously at a time when there are only remnants of colonialism, Great Britain, in an imperial decline, decides to rewrite history”, in remarks to the official Telam news agency.

The heated exchange was the latest in a long dispute over the Falklands, internally self-governing islands located 400 nautical miles from Argentina.

They have been held by Britain since 1833 but are still claimed by Argentina, where they are known as the Malvinas, despite its defeat in the 74-day war fought between the two countries in 1982.

Tensions began rising in 2010, when London authorised oil prospecting around the islands, and have spiralled in recent weeks as Argentina’s neighbours joined the dispute.

In December, South American trading bloc Mercosur agreed to close its ports to ships flying the Falklands flag.

And during British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s first official visit to Brazil on Wednesday, his counterpart, Antonio Patriota, made clear that all Latin American nations backed Argentina’s claim.

The imminent deployment to the Falklands of Prince William, the second in line to the British throne who works as a search and rescue pilot with the Royal Air Force (RAF), is unlikely to calm the waters.

Although the RAF insists his six-week visit is a routine mission, Argentina has said it is a “provocative act”.

The National Security Council meeting was sparked by the 30th anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in April, a government spokeswoman said, and concluded that “we have the right strategy in place” to defend the islands.

But concerns have been raised that Britain’s military would struggle to defend the islands from another Argentine attack following deep cuts in its defence budget.

Admiral Sandy Woodward, the commander of the naval task force that took back the islands in 1982, warned last year that the lack of an aircraft carrier and weakening US support for British sovereignty left them close to indefensible....

The Zioconned US-GCC fatal attractions.....

2012-01-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

The Zioconned US-GCC fatal attractions.....
By Pepe Escobar

There's no way to understand the larger-than-life United States-Iran psychodrama, the Western push for regime change in both Syria and Iran, and the trials and tribulations of the Arab Spring(s) - now mired in perpetual winter - without a close look at the fatal attraction between Washington and the GCC. [1]

GCC stands for Gulf Cooperation Council, the club of six wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates - UAE), founded in 1981 and which in no time configured as the prime strategic US backyard for the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, for the long-drawn battle in the New Great Game in Eurasia, and also as the headquarters for "containing" Iran.

The US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain and Central Command's forward headquarters is based in Qatar; Centcom polices no less than 27 countries from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia - what the Pentagon until recently defined as "the arc of instability". In sum: the GCC is like a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf magnified to Star Trek proportions.

I prefer to refer to the GCC as the Gulf Counter-revolution Club - due to its sterling performance in suppressing democracy in the Arab world, even before Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia over a year ago.

Cueing to Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, the Rosebud inside the GCC is that the House of Saud sells its oil only in US dollars - thus the pre-eminence of the petrodollar - and in exchange benefits from massive, unconditional US military and political support. Moreover the Saudis prevent the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) - after all they're the world's largest oil producer - to price and sell oil in a basket of currencies. These rivers of petrodollars then flow into US equities and Treasury bonds.

For decades virtually the whole planet has been held hostage to this fatal attraction. Until now.

Gimme all your toys
The GCC, essentially, is the core of the empire in the Arab world. Yes, it's essentially about oil; the GCC will be responsible for over 25% of global oil production within the next few decades. Their tiny ruling classes - from monarchies to business associates - function as a crucial annex to the mighty projection of US power all across the Middle East and beyond.

That explains, among other things, why in October last year Washington closed a juicy US$67 billion deal - the largest bilateral deal in US history - to supply the House of Saud with a prime collection of brand new F-15s, Black Hawks, Apaches, bunker-buster bombs, Patriot-2 missiles and warships.

It explains why Washington will shower the UAE with thousands of bunker-buster bombs, and Oman with Stinger missiles. Not to mention another juicy mega-deal - worth $53 billion - with Bahrain, which has not gone through yet because human-rights associations - to their credit - have fiercely denounced it.

And there's the redeployment - or, in Pentagon speak, "repositioning" - of 15,000 US troops from Iraq to Kuwait.

The rationale for all this weaponized orgy is provided by the usual suspect logic; the necessity of building a "coalition of the willing" to "counter Iran". Why Iran? Half-jokingly, because Iran is not part of the GCC - that is, a pliable US satrapy, just like in those jolly good times under the shah.

Adam Hanieh, professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and author of Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States has been one of very few global analysts trying to decode the centrality of the GCC in the imperial strategy. In a crucial interview, Hanieh outlines all one needs to know. And it's not pretty. [2]

As Asia Times Online has extensively documented, the Arab Spring was virtually dead on arrival in the GCC. In Oman, Sultan Qaboos basically distributed loads of cash. In Saudi Arabia, there was fierce pre-emption and sustained hardcore repression in the Shi'ite majority Eastern province, close to Bahrain, where the oil is.

And in Bahrain itself, there was not only hardcore repression - with documented detention and torture of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters - but an outright invasion by Saudi and UAE troops.

The invasion may have given the GCC the sweet taste of an actual physical expansion. Morocco and Jordan - although not exactly in the Gulf as basic geography rules - were "invited" to be part of the wealthy club; after all they are duly reactionary Sunni monarchies, not "decadent" secular Arab republics like Libya and Syria.

A fair question is why the Arab Spring has not touched Jordan - since the same socioeconomic volcano that convulsed Tunisia and Egypt is also active. The key part of the answer is that the GCC - even more than Washington, European capitals and Israel - is terrified that the Hashemite throne might fall.

For immense GCC wealth it's a piece of cake to control Jordan - a small country, where most of the population is actually Palestinian, with a tiny organized opposition (no wonder; Jordanian intelligence imprisoned or killed any dissidence). For the GCC that's pocket money compared to the billions of dollars earmarked for Egypt and Tunisia so they don't dare becoming "too" democratic.

There was no way for the GCC other than to become Counter-revolution Central after the initial democracy rush in North Africa. As Hanieh emphatically stresses, the ruling autocrats in the Gulf couldn't care less about the impoverished masses in MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa).

The culmination of this process has been the birth of a new geopolitical monster - NATOGCC. That embodies the key role of Qatar and the UAE in the NATO invasion - and destruction - of Libya. Libya was an all-out GCC special - from actual cash and weapons dispensed to the "rebels" to actual operatives, intelligence and last but not least, political legitimacy, via that fake Arab League vote legitimizing a no-fly zone vote at the United Nations (only nine out of 22 Arab League members voted yes, and six of them were GCC; the other three were bought, and Syria and Algeria were against it).

And now a tragic joke reigns supreme; the GCC trying to intervene and actually financing hardcore Sunni fundamentalists in Syria under the cover of helping pro-democracy protesters. When the meek UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon urges President Bashar al-Assad to stop the violence against Syrian protesters and says the time of dynasties and one-man rule in the Arab world is coming to an end, obviously he believes the GCC is a colony in one of Saturn's rings.

After the NATOGCC win in Libya, no wonder they are on a roll. The GCC strategy of regime change in Syria is the preferred way to weaken Iran and the so-called Shi'ite crescent - a fiction jointly concocted during the George W Bush administration by the Playstation king of Jordan and the House of Saud.

And that leads to an inevitable question; what are two of the top BRICS - Russia and China - doing about all this?

Enter the dragon
The immensely powerful secretary of the National Security Council and former head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB), Nikolai Patrushev - a frequent visitor to Iran - has already warned of a "real danger" of a US strike on Iran; the US, he says, is "trying to turn Tehran from an enemy into a supportive partner, and to achieve this, to change the current regime by whatever means".

Yet for Russia, regime change in Iran is a no-no. Russia's deputy prime minister and former envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has already stated, unequivocally, "Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security."

So on one side we have Washington, NATO, Israel and the GCC. Not exactly an "international community", as the spin goes. And on the other side, we have Iran, Syria, a fed-up-with-Washington Pakistan, Russia, China, and scores of countries linked to the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

It's China's position in relation to the GCC that is a source of endless fascination. China's Premier Wen Jiabao has just visited the three key GCC members - Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar.

Imagine Wen Jiabao telling Crown Prince Nayef (King Abdullah's half-brother) in Riyadh that Beijing wants "strong and reputable" Chinese companies to invest fortunes in ports, railways and infrastructure development in Saudi Arabia - part of their increased cooperation "in the face of changeable and complicated regional and international trends". Imagine Nayef salivating over his mighty moustache, stressing the House of Saud is indeed willing to "expand cooperation" in energy and infrastructure.

What adds spice to the mix is that Beijing also happens to hold a strategic relationship with Iran - and enjoys a healthy trading relationship with Syria. So as far as the Middle East and Central Asia are concerned, Beijing is betting - unlike the Pentagon - on a true "arc of stability".

As Xinhua has put it in its unrivalled all-inclusive style, what matters for the Beijing leadership is for China and Southwest and Central Asia to take "full advantage of their respective strengths and jointly strive for common development". How come no one in Washington can ever come up with something as simple as this?

It's true that whoever dominates the GCC - with weapons and political support - projects power globally. The GCC has been absolutely key for US hegemony within what Immanuel Wallerstein defines as the world system.

Yet let's take a look at the numbers. Since last year Saudi Arabia is exporting more oil to China than to the US. This is part of an inexorable process of GCC energy and commodity exports moving to Asia.

By next year foreign assets held by the GCC could reach $3.8 trillion with oil at $70 a barrel. With all that non-stop "tension" in the Persian Gulf, there's no reason to believe oil will be below $100 in the foreseeable future. In this case GCC foreign assets could reach a staggering $5.7 trillion - that's 160% more than in pre-crisis 2008, and over $1 trillion more than China's foreign assets.

At the same time, China will be increasingly doing more business with the GCC. The GCC is increasingly importing more from Asia - although the top source of imports is still the European Union. Meanwhile, US-GCC trade is dropping. By 2025, China will be importing three times more oil from the GCC than the US. No wonder the House of Saud - to put it mildly - is terribly excited about Beijing.

So for the moment we have the pre-eminence of NATOGCC military, and USGCC geopolitically. But sooner rather than later Beijing may approach the House of Saud and quietly whisper, "Why don't you sell me your oil in yuan?" Just like China buying Iranian oil and gas with yuan. Petroyuan, anyone? Now that's an entirely new Star Trek.

Notes
1. See The myth of an isolated Iran Asia Times Online, January 19.

2. See here.

Mossad plays the Zioconned U.S.A. and Thailand like an old fiddle in phony "terror" threat alert in Thailand....

2012-01-18T08:25:00.001-08:00

Mossad plays the Zioconned U.S.A. and Thailand like an old fiddle in phony "terror" threat alert in Thailand....

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

January , 2012 -- Mossad fakes out U.S. intelligence on "Hezbollah" threat in Thailand...

WMR's sources in Bangkok, the Thai capital, report that the recent U.S. and Israeli alert that a Lebanese man, said to have links with Hezbollah, was planning a terrorist attack in Thailand, is the result of Israel and its diamond business attempting to shit out Lebanese Shi'ite competitors who are in Thailand and are competing with the Israelis for access to Southeast Asian gems. Israeli diamond merchants also compete with Lebanese Shi'ites for access to diamonds and other precious gems in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Thai police arrested Atris Hussein, a Swedish national of Lebanese descent who was traveling on a Swedish passport. Police later discovered urea and ammonium nitrate in a building known to Hussein in the town of Samut Sakhon, near Bangkok. Hussein said the materials were intended for use in a third country, possibly Cambodia or Burma, where such agricultural-grade explosives are used to extract diamonds and other rare gems. Thai police said they were looking for an accomplice of Hussein. In tandem, the United States and Israel warned that "foreign terrorists" were planning attacks in Thailand "in the near future." WMR Thai sources say the threat is completely and utterly bogus....

Our sources in Bangkok say that the United States and the Thai government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra were misled by Israel in an attempt to put Thailand and surrounding Southeast Asian nations, known to have diamond and other rare gem deposits, off limits to Lebanese Shi'ite competitors. The "intelligence" provided about Hussein and Hezbollah to Thailand and the United States came from Mossad.... In Thailand, Bangkok's Chabad House of Lubavitch Jews was at the heart of spinning the Hezbollah "threat" in Thailand. Chabad Houses around the world serve as virtual safe houses for Israeli intelligence operatives. The Chabad Houses are also involved in the smuggling of weapons, drugs, diamonds and other precious gems, indentured servitude prostitutes, and human organs....

The Israeli-manufactured Hezbollah "threat" in Thailand comes at the same time that Britain's ambassador to Thailand, Asif Ahmad, who reportedly has ties to MI-6 run Islamist radical groups in Pakistan and elsewhere, has suggested an "R2P" program for southern Thailand, where a Muslim ethnic Malay insurgency has been ongoing for decades. Asif is believed to maintain strong links to the government of Qatar, which has been at the forefront of Arab states that are behind R2P interventions in Libya and Syria. It is believed in Thailand that Britain, Israel, and the United States would like to establish a Kosovo-style provisionally-independent Muslim-governed state in southern Thailand's Patani region, with the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO), the largest of the separatist groups, becoming the governing party. PULO would enjoy the same support from the West as afforded to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Kosovo.

PULO and other Patani separatists wear black uniforms and are well-financed. It is believed that much of the financing of the Patani separatists now comes from Qatar in anticipation of an "Arab Spring" R2P operation in southern Thailand. Prime Minister Yingluck is attempting to implement a program of national reconciliation with the southern Muslims and the victims of the 2010 Bangkok massacre by the previous military-backed government but the interference of the Israelis, British, Americans, Qataris, and Saudis threaten her program.

In the past, PULO received much of its funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The rebel group was founded in 1968 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia with the blessing and support of the Saudi government. In 1991, the various Patani rebel groups, including those more radical and violent than PULO, united to form the United Front for the Independence of Pattani" or "Bersatu." Younger members of the group have received Wahhabi Salafist religious training in madrassas in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the UAE.

Although the Thai government has conducted secret peace negotiations with all the coalition members of Bersatu in Bahrain, Stockholm, and other cities, no substantive progress has resulted. There is one radical Islamist group -- Runda Kumpalan Kecil (RKK), or “Small Patrol Group,” -- which continues to conduct attacks against Thai government targets in the south. RKK and other militant Patani groups allegedly receive terrorist support from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Britain. The Patani groups carefully avoid striking targets such as bars, night clubs, and American iconic businesses like McDonald's and Starbucks, where Western and Arab Middle Eastern tourists gather, especially in Phuket.

By suggesting that Hezbollah was behind an attempted terrorist attack in Thailand, the Qataris and Saudis are trying to eliminate Shi'ite influence in Thailand in order to maintain the Salafist control of Thai Muslim groups in the south. Israel benefits by eliminating Lebanese Shi'ite influence in the diamond and other rare gem trade in the country, and hide the barbaric assassinations of the Infamous White House Murder INC, in the Levant and Worldwide.....

The myth of an "isolated' Iran....

2012-01-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

The myth of an "isolated' Iran....
By Pepe Escobar

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the United States and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country's oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.

He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington's "bulwark" in the Persian Gulf - until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the mullahs. While Khomeini & Co were hardly Washington's men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.

In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the US "Atoms for Peace" program, started in the 1950s by president Dwight D Eisenhower, the shah is allowed to buy a five-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which - call it irony - is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program).

Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the shah might use the "peaceful atom" as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands. "An aggressive successor to the shah," went a 1974 Pentagon memo, "might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran's complete military dominance of the region." But that didn't stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran's national "right" and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants. As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: "The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world. Yet he's building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country. He knows the oil is running out - and time with it." In other words, the US nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Khomeini's Iran. In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington's man, our "bulwark" in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand - and also "detailed information" on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military.

Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Ronald Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Khomeini's Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the "Iran-Contra Affair" and which almost brings down the president and his men. Success!

March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new "Hitler" who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over US cities. So the George W Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to - in the words of deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz - "float on a sea of oil".

(Bush officials hope, in the wake of a "cakewalk" of a war to revive that country's oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, driving down the price of oil on world markets.) Nine years later, a Shi'ite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous US occupation.

So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find. In more than 50 years, America's leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn't lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback. Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers - this time sanctions against Iran's central bank meant to cripple the country's oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.

And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong? Regime change in Iran? It's bound to be a slam dunk and if you don't believe it, check out Pepe Escobar below, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times Online and TomDispatch regular.

Let's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington's ultimate red line, straight from the lion's mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us."

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was "enrichment" of uranium. Now, it's evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the US Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no "red line", but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.

Banking on sanctions?
Let's start here: In December 2011, impervious to dire consequences for the global economy, the US Congress - under all the usual pressures from the Israel lobby (not that it needs them) - foisted a mandatory sanctions package on the Barack Obama administration (100 to 0 in the Senate and with only 12 "no" votes in the House). Starting in June, the US will have to sanction any third-country banks and companies dealing with Iran's central bank, which is meant to cripple that country's oil sales. (Congress did allow for some "exemptions.")

The ultimate target? Regime change - what else? - in Tehran. The proverbial anonymous US official admitted as much in the Washington Post, and that paper printed the comment. ("The goal of the US and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior US intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran's government as it is on engaging with it.") But oops! The newspaper then had to revise the passage to eliminate that embarrassingly on-target quote. Undoubtedly, this "red line" came too close to the truth for comfort.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen believed that only a monster shock-and-awe-style event, totally humiliating the leadership in Tehran, would lead to genuine regime change - and he was hardly alone. Advocates of actions ranging from air strikes to invasion (whether by the US, Israel, or some combination of the two) have been legion in neo-con Washington.

Yet anyone remotely familiar with Iran knows that such an attack would rally the population behind Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In those circumstances, the deep aversion of many Iranians to the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat would matter little.

Besides, even the Iranian opposition supports a peaceful nuclear program. It's a matter of national pride.

Iranian intellectuals, far more familiar with Persian smoke and mirrors than ideologues in Washington, totally debunk any war scenarios. They stress that the Tehran regime, adept in the arts of Persian shadow play, has no intention of provoking an attack that could lead to its obliteration.

On their part, whether correctly or not, Tehran strategists assume that Washington will prove unable to launch yet one more war in the Greater Middle East, especially one that could lead to staggering collateral damage for the world economy.

In the meantime, Washington's expectations that a harsh sanctions regime might make the Iranians give ground, if not go down, may prove to be a chimera. Washington spin has been focused on the supposedly disastrous mega-devaluation of the Iranian currency, the rial, in the face of the new sanctions.

Unfortunately for the fans of Iranian economic collapse, Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani has laid out in elaborate detail the long-term nature of this process, which Iranian economists have more than welcomed. After all, it will boost Iran's non-oil exports and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran.

More connected than Google
Though few in the US have noticed, Iran is not exactly "isolated", though Washington might wish it. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has become a frequent flyer to Tehran. And he's a Johnny-come-lately compared to Russia's national security chief Nikolai Patrushev, who only recently warned the Israelis not to push the US to attack Iran.

Add in as well US ally and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At a loya jirga (grand council) in late 2011, in front of 2,000 tribal leaders, he stressed that Kabul was planning to get even closer to Tehran.

On that crucial Eurasian chessboard, Pipelineistan, the Iran-Pakistan (IP) natural gas pipeline - much to Washington's distress - is now a go. Pakistan badly needs energy and its leadership has clearly decided that it's unwilling to wait forever and a day for Washington's eternal pet project - the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline - to traverse Talibanistan.

Even Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu recently visited Tehran, though his country's relationship with Iran has grown ever edgier. After all, energy overrules threats in the region. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member Turkey is already involved in covert ops in Syria, allied with hardcore fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq, and - in a remarkable volte-face in the wake of the Arab Spring(s) - has traded in an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis for an Ankara-Riyadh-Doha one.

It is even planning on hosting components of Washington's long-planned missile defense system, targeted at Iran.

All this from a country with a Davutoglu-coined foreign policy of "zero problems with our neighbors". Still, the needs of Pipelineistan do set the heart racing. Turkey is desperate for access to Iran's energy resources, and if Iranian natural gas ever reaches Western Europe - something the Europeans are desperately eager for - Turkey will be the privileged transit country. Turkey's leaders have already signaled their rejection of further US sanctions against Iranian oil.

And speaking of connections, last week there was that spectacular diplomatic coup de th้โtre, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Latin American tour. US right-wingers may harp on a Tehran-Caracas axis of evil - supposedly promoting "terror" across Latin America as a springboard for future attacks on the northern superpower - but back in real life, another kind of truth lurks.

All these years later, Washington is still unable to digest the idea that it has lost control over, or even influence in, those two regional powers over which it once exercised unmitigated imperial hegemony.

Add to this the wall of mistrust that has only solidified since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Mix in a new, mostly sovereign Latin America pushing for integration not only via left-wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador but through regional powers Brazil and Argentina. Stir and you get photo ops like Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saluting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Washington continues to push a vision of a world from which Iran has been radically disconnected. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is typical in saying recently, "Iran can remain in international isolation." As it happens, though, she needs to get her facts straight.

"Isolated" Iran has $4 billion in joint projects with Venezuela including, crucially, a bank (as with Ecuador, it has dozens of planned projects from building power plants to, once again, banking). That has led the Israel-first crowd in Washington to vociferously demand that sanctions be slapped on Venezuela. Only problem: how would the US pay for its crucial Venezuelan oil imports then?

Much was made in the US press of the fact that Ahmadinejad did not visit Brazil on this jaunt through Latin America, but diplomatically Tehran and Brasilia remain in sync. When it comes to the nuclear dossier in particular, Brazil's history leaves its leaders sympathetic.

After all, that country developed - and then dropped - a nuclear weapons program. In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey brokered a uranium-swap agreement for Iran that might have cleared the decks on the US-Iranian nuclear imbroglio. It was, however, immediately sabotaged by Washington. A key member of the BRICS, the club of top emerging economies, [1] Brasilia is completely opposed to the US sanctions/embargo strategy.

So Iran may be "isolated" from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM (the 120 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement), it has the majority of the global South on its side. And then there are those staunch Washington allies, Japan and South Korea, now pleading for exemptions from the coming boycott/embargo of Iran's central bank.

No wonder, because these unilateral US sanctions are also aimed at Asia. After all, China, India, Japan, and South Korea together buy no less than 62% of Iran's oil exports.

With trademark Asian politesse, Japan's Finance Minister Jun Azumi let Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner know just what a problem Washington is creating for Tokyo, which relies on Iran for 10% of its oil needs. It is pledging to at least modestly "reduce" that share "as soon as possible" in order to get a Washington exemption from those sanctions, but don't hold your breath. South Korea has already announced that it will buy 10% of its oil needs from Iran in 2012.

Silk Road redux
Most important of all, "isolated" Iran happens to be a supreme matter of national security for China, which has already rejected the latest Washington sanctions without a blink. Westerners seem to forget that the Middle Kingdom and Persia have been doing business for almost two millennia. (Does "Silk Road" ring a bell?)

The Chinese have already clinched a juicy deal for the development of Iran's largest oil field, Yadavaran. There's also the matter of the delivery of Caspian Sea oil from Iran through a pipeline stretching from Kazakhstan to Western China. In fact, Iran already supplies no less than 15% of China's oil and natural gas. It is now more crucial to China, energy-wise, than the House of Saud is to the US, which imports 11% of its oil from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, China may be the true winner from Washington's new sanctions, because it is likely to get its oil and gas at a lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market. At this moment, in fact, the two countries are in the middle of a complex negotiation on the pricing of Iranian oil, and the Chinese have actually been ratcheting up the pressure by slightly cutting back on energy purchases.

But all this should be concluded by March, at least two months before the latest round of US sanctions go into effect, according to experts in Beijing. In the end, the Chinese will certainly buy much more Iranian gas than oil, but Iran will still remain its third biggest oil supplier, right after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

As for other effects of the new sanctions on China, don't count on them. Chinese businesses in Iran are building cars, fiber optics networks, and expanding the Tehran subway. Two-way trade is at $30 billion now and expected to hit $50 billion in 2015. Chinese businesses will find a way around the banking problems the new sanctions impose.

Russia is another key supporter of "isolated" Iran. It has opposed stronger sanctions either via the United Nations or through the Washington-approved package that targets Iran's central bank. In fact, it favors a rollback of the existing UN sanctions and has also been at work on an alternative plan that could, at least theoretically, lead to a face-saving nuclear deal for everyone.

On the nuclear front, Tehran has expressed a willingness to compromise with Washington along the lines of the plan Brazil and Turkey suggested and Washington deep-sixed in 2010. Since it is now so much clearer that, for Washington - certainly for congress - the nuclear issue is secondary to regime change, any new negotiations are bound to prove excruciatingly painful.

This is especially true now that the leaders of the European Union have managed to remove themselves from a future negotiating table by shooting themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet. In typical fashion, they have meekly followed Washington's lead in implementing an Iranian oil embargo. As a senior EU official told National Iranian American Council President Trita Parsi, and as EU diplomats have assured me in no uncertain terms, they fear this might prove to be the last step short of outright war.

Meanwhile, a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors has just visited Iran. The IAEA is supervising all things nuclear in Iran, including its new uranium-enrichment plant at Fordow, near the holy city of Qom, with full production starting in June. The IAEA is positive: no bomb-making is involved. Nonetheless, Washington (and the Israelis) continue to act as though it's only a matter of time - and not much of it at that.

Follow the money
That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles - a similar move to ones already made in its trade with China and Japan. As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its leaders also refuse to stop buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be conducted in dollars.

India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan. As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will be settled in yuan and rial.

Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran's oil will be traded in dollars.

Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India and China) allied with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties won't be affected by the whims of a US Congress. In fact, when the developing world looks at the profound crisis in the Atlanticist West, what they see is massive US debt, the Fed printing money as if there's no tomorrow, lots of "quantitative easing", and of course the Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.

Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran's central bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it's the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.

It's been spearheaded by Iran and it's bound to translate into an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major strategic competitors China and Russia. No wonder all those carriers are heading for the Persian Gulf right now, though it's the strangest of showdowns a case of military power being deployed against economic power.

In this context, it's worth remembering that in September 2000 Saddam Hussein abandoned the petrodollar as the currency of payment for Iraq's oil, and moved to the euro. In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change occurred. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa's common currency and as the currency of payment for his country's energy resources. Another intervention and another regime change followed.

Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different narrative. Iran's "threats" are at the heart of the present crisis, even if these are, in fact, that country's reaction to non-stop US/Israeli covert war and now, of course, economic war as well. It's those "threats," so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street's casino capitalism or massive US and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran's around to be the fall guy for popular anger.

As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. But consider 2012 the start-up year as well for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world - mostly the global South - doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in US Treasury bonds.

The US can always count on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates - which I prefer to call the Gulf Counter-revolution Club (just look at their performances during the Arab Spring). For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a US satrapy.

Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle East. Centcom, after all, is based in Qatar; the US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we could label Greater Pipelineistan - and that the Pentagon used to call "the arc of instability" - extending through Iran all the way to Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of US hegemony.

If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum", Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Still, it's the cog that Washington is now focused on. They have regime change on the brain. All that's needed is a spark to start the fire (in - one hastens to add - all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).

Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the US and blame them on Fidel Castro's Cuba. (President John F Kennedy shot the idea down.) Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by president Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War. The US accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on US ships. Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even happened and the president had lied about it.

It's not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore full-spectrum dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation). Consider as well the new US military strategy just unveiled by President Barack Obama in which the focus of Washington's attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China).

Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the US Navy.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call "Iran" may turn out to be as much about China and the US dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran's non-existent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?

Note
1. The BRICS countries are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Asian Finlandization?

2012-01-18T01:46:00.001-08:00

Asian Finlandization?

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE,

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- Finlandization is back in vogue in the geopolitical handbook.

In Cold War jargon, Finlandization meant the danger of some NATO allies, cowered by mounting Soviet military power, shifting to the art of fence-sitting. Plucky Finland should never have been a pejorative.

In 1939, Moscow demanded land concessions from Finland "in defense of the motherland." The Finns refused, the Soviets invaded and Finland surrendered in March 1940 after heavy losses. For eight years after World War II, 3.5 million Finns were condemned to produce some $300 million (in 1938 dollars) in reparations -- e.g., 525 locomotives, 340,000 railroad cars, 619 vessels -- while neglecting their own needs.

An ungainly posture but some -- mostly on the left -- felt far more secure demonstrating against their own governments as the Soviet Union began deploying the intermediate-range SS-20 and short-range nuclear missiles, at the rate of two a week.

A first-strike weapon of unmatched power, the United States and its NATO allies concluded it was designed to start and win a nuclear war. Its three independently targeted nuclear warheads would take only 15 minutes from launch to impact in London, Paris and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Finlandization was biting.

Beginning in 1977, the Soviet Union began deploying several hundred SS-20s along its western and southwestern borders. Moscow's geopolitical shorthand for NATO's European members was clear: "Distance yourself from NATO and you'll be secure."

Post-Cold War, Moscow used the Finlandization process to dissuade former Warsaw Pact members from joining NATO. It failed.

The magic formula -- pursue a foreign policy of neutrality that takes Moscow's strategic interests into account while preserving Western democratic systems -- is working its way through the South China Seas and the bilateral relations that Taiwan maintains with Beijing and Washington.

Taiwan's pro-Beijing, Harvard-educated president Ma Ying-jeou, who favors more integration with China and is seen by many as a realist, was recently re-elected. He concedes that the United States, following failure in Iraq, an uncertain future in Afghanistan, possible confrontation with Iran and faced with major defense cutbacks, is no longer the automatic deterrent it once was.

Ma has negotiated 16 agreements with China to expand air, sea and economic links. Daily flights across the 100-mile wide Taiwan Strait and cargo and passenger ferries are routine.

Ma's opponent, Tsai Ing-wen, is committed to independence, which is China's red line. Neither China nor the United States seek confrontation over Taiwan.

Some 2 million young Taiwanese have moved to the mainland and found life more exciting in Shanghai than in Taipei. Hong Kong, now an integral part of China, has kept its independence. So has Macao, a Las Vegas on the South China Sea. And some younger Taiwanese have been asking, "If one China three systems works, why not four systems?"

Is Taiwan under Ma also under the influence of Finlandization? Many fear so and many hope so.

Ma would have to be geopolitically myopic not to see the constant growth of China's military power and the fact that almost 6 million Chinese workers are deployed throughout what was once called the Third World, building and mining for raw materials and its future export markets. Some 6,000 are building a Macao-type gambling complex 10 minutes from Nassau airport in the Bahamas.

Is Finlandization also spreading to the South China Sea? A report by the Center for a New American Security describes "American interests (as) increasingly at risk (there) due to the economic and military rise of China and concerns about its willingness to uphold existing legal norms."

The South China Sea, says the report by Patrick M. Cronin and Robert D. Kaplan, "functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans -- a mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce … the demographic hub of the 21st-century global economy."

Defending U.S. interests and promoting the status quo, say the authors, "need not -- and should not -- lead to conflicts with China." But it will require strengthening America's naval presence by building back up to a 346-ship fleet instead of retreating to the 250-ship mark under new budget cuts.

The 11-carrier task forces are also facing cutbacks, first to 10 and then nine. One former defense chief said privately he thought eight carriers would be the final number picked a year or two hence.

But this would face monumental opposition from many Republicans who are convinced China is another Soviet Union in the making, stealing our secrets, planning to put a man back on the moon -- and that this expansionist power must be contained.

The South China Sea will be a geopolitical test case for the Finlandization process. Countries that border this sea -- Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines -- "face 'Finlandization' by China if U.S. naval and air power diminishes," the report says.

Faced with recently published books in the United States, policy makers in these countries cannot help but be alarmed.

Michael O'Hanlon, the Brookings Institution's prolific U.S. defense strategic expert, writes in his latest book titled, "The Wounded Giant -- America's Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity," that "the military budget may be cut by up to a trillion dollars over a decade, far more than the $400 billion in 12-year savings that President Obama had proposed in his April 13, 2011, speech that signaled the White House's full engagement on the deficit issue … above and beyond savings that will result, and indeed are already resulting, from troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"America the Vulnerable," is by Joel Brenner, a veteran of the inner sanctum of U.S. espionage, who takes the reader "inside the new threat matrix of digital espionage, crime and warfare."

This former inspector general of the National Security Agency and then head of counterintelligence for the director of National Intelligence, describes at close range the battleground on which our adversaries are eating our lunch -- cyberspace.

Brenner writes we are at the mercy of a new generation of spies who operate from China, Russia and the Middle East, who have already stolen our latest naval technology, robbed our banks and invaded the Pentagon's secret communications system.

Results of our "special friends" activities are yet to surface in mainstream America. When they do, Republicans will have their campaign manual.

Zioconned US imperial militarism is rotten to its very core....

2012-01-17T03:43:00.000-08:00

Zioconned US imperial militarism is rotten to its very core....

The posting online last week of a video showing US Marines in Helmand province urinating on the corpses of unknown Afghans elicited rapid and widespread scorn from the US government. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta described the video as "utterly deplorable", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her "total dismay", while chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Martin Dempsey, stated that the actions in the video were "not only illegal but are contrary to the values of a professional military and serve to erode the reputation of our joint force".

The reaction from the US media establishment largely echoed official sentiments. As the Los Angeles Times editorialized, the released video was "disheartening" and a "step backwards" for the US in Afghanistan. [1]

Yet, with two of the marines depicted in the video now reportedly identified, startled Americans have been assured that justice will be done. The bad apples will be removed, and discipline and honor shall be restored to the armed forces. The whole incident, then, will soon begin to fade from American popular consciousness (if it has not already), as it comes to be flushed down the memory hole. Back to war, it is.

The truth, however, is that the video is hardly illustrative of a few bad apples. Rather, the incident is illustrative of a system of US imperial militarism that is rotten to its very core. For as despicable as the acts in the video most certainly are, they are by no means aberrations.

As was brought to light just last year, US soldiers in Afghanistan have actually hunted Afghan civilians as sport. As Rolling Stone reported in grizzly detail, the US "kill team" not only murdered civilians, but also kept their severed fingers, teeth, and skull fragments as trophies. [2]

On a much more systemic level, the US to this day routinely fires Hellfire missiles from its growing fleet of Predator drones, reigning terror and sowing death from above upon an unknown number of Afghan and Pakistani civilians.

And let us not forget the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq. Although, there are an unknown number of similar atrocities that have been committed in the web of US black op sites and secret prisons encircling the globe.

Such barbarism by American armed forces, it should be noted, has not been limited to Afghans. In the past year alone, two Chinese-American US soldiers were driven to take their own lives while on service in Afghanistan, after having endured race-based hazing from their fellow Army soldiers. [3]

And yet focusing on such incidents - as many and as heinous as they are - threatens to obscure the larger and more fundamental crimes occurring in the last decade of the US "war on terror". As former US Marine Ross Caputi pointed out, the crimes depicted in the latest video clip pale in comparison to far more consequential US atrocities. As Caputi, who took part in the siege of Fallujah Iraq in 2004, wrote in The Guardian:

I witnessed marines stealing from the pockets of dead resistance fighters and looting houses. I've heard firsthand accounts of marines mutilating dead bodies, of a marine who murdered a civilian, and of a marine who slit a puppy's throat ... My behavior and the behavior of others in my unit was despicable, as was the behavior of these marines urinating on corpses. [4]

We can certainly extrapolate out even further from the siege of Fallujah, to the wars as a whole in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For both of which, we must remember, were launched by cynically turning the criminal acts of 11 September 2011 into an act of war. This declaration of war was then seamlessly parlayed into feeding the insatiable US military-industrial complex, while realizing long held geopolitical strategic aims.

Urinating on corpses is thus nothing but a byproduct of this calculated decision to turn to war. After all, it is in war that one must come to dehumanize one’s enemies. As Sebastian Junger noted in the Washington Post:

As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing US Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters (it is actually unknown whether those in the video were indeed Taliban fighters or civilians), but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed. [5]

Indeed, in conflict - despite the claims of civility and professionalism coming from the US military brass - sadism not only rears its ugly head, but actually thrives. As Chris Hedges writes in his book, War is the Force Which Gives Us Meaning: In war “those who abandoned their humanity, betrayed their neighbors and friends, turned their back on their family, stole, cheated, killed, and stomped on the weak and infirm were often those who made it out alive."

Let us not, then, be fooled by the farcical show of outrage by US officials over the desecration of dead Afghans. For their faux moral disgust stems only from the bad PR such a display will likely garner. Their real unease, leave no doubt, is whether such scenes will hinder the war effort, that is, hinder their continued plunder and slaughter of the Afghan people. And it is this that ought to be deemed utterly deplorable.

Notes
1. See here.
2. See here.
3. See here and here.
4. See here.
5. See here.

Ben Schreiner

U.S. ZOG Government Funded the Iranian Terrorist Group Which “Found” The Documents Upon Which the Warmongers Are Relying....

2012-01-16T03:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/4527

The U.S. ZOG Government Funded the Iranian Terrorist Group Which “Found” The Documents Upon Which the Warmongers Are Relying....

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/01/14/iran-usisraeli-false-flag-attack-may-be-underway/

Expose the wicked intentions the Zionist warmongers and the Soetoro administration have in mind of igniting a war in the Persian Gulf. The phrase these misanthropes hate most is called FALSE FLAG....

http://newscentralasia.net/2012/01/16/american-military-pit-bulls-and-their-handlers/

Israeli submarines deployed in the Sea of Oman will sink an American warship that happens to be navigating close to the Strait of Hormuz – an attack to subsequently be blamed on Iran. Most likely one of these Zionist submarines (Type 800 Dolphin class) is already operating in the Sea of Oman:
INS Dolphin
INS Livyathan
INS Tekumah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCH1ECkyio

Another plausible way by which Barry & Associates (including the Zionist warmongers) could justify a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran is by staging another FALSE FLAG ATTACK on continental United States: a controlled nuclear explosion (dirty bomb) targeting a major urban concentration that may kill dozens of thousands of civilians. This operation will be carried out by the CIA in partnership with Israel’s Mossad and British MI6 to subsequently be blamed on elements of Iran’s IRGC.

SPREAD THE WORD: FALSE FLAG and cowardly assassinations by the most Infamous White House Murder INC, which is likely to pull another false flag assassination trigering a new war....

Educate the masses about what FALSE FLAG operations and the infamous White House Murder/Assassinations INC, are all about....in the Levant since January 24th 2002 and beyond.....

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.)

The IAEA report being trumpted as a casus belli contains no new information, but is based on a re-hashing of old, debunked claims stemming from “laptop documents”.

State Department cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the new IAEA head was heavily backed by the U.S., based upon his promises of fealty to the U.S. Indeed, as we’ve seen in the nuclear energy arena, the IAEA is not a neutral, fact-based organization, but a wholly-captured, political agency.

But where did the documents come from originally?

As Gareth Porter noted in 2008:

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.

Interestingly, the Bush Administration – and especially Dick Cheney – helped to fund the MEK (see confirming articles here and here).

And the New York Times, Washington Post and others are reporting that Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey are supporting the MEK as well.

So the terrorist group which “found” the documents is funded by neoconservatives who want to overthrow Iran. What a coincidence!

And as Gareth Porter notes in the above-linked article, the Mossad may have created the documents in the first place:

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

One thing is clear: the U.S. and its allies have a long history of using forged documents as an excuse for war.....

What IAEA reports about Iran’s nuclear energy/medicine, how US War Criminal 1% lie for war....

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in their inspection role for compliance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has their November 2011 report in similar misleading language as their February 2010 report.

IAEA appears to be under the same political pressure to make a case for war on Iran that we witnessed before US armed attack of Iraq. US corporate media and US political “leadership” will not remind Americans that the US eliminated the UN agency director who would have resolved concerns of alleged Iraq weapons:

“…the conservative first option should have been the UN Security Council voting for the UN WMD agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to directly request Saddam to submit to OPCW’s authority. The Director-general of OPCW, Jose Bustani, was in talks with Saddam to do so. Instead of supporting this reasonable alternative to war, the US promised to withhold its funding of the UN (22% of the UN’s budget) until Bustani was fired. The US called Bustani’s talks with Saddam an “ill-considered initiative.” The US request was honored; the US then paid its 2002 UN dues in April 2002; less than one year before the US invasion of Iraq. This was the first time in UN history where the Director of an international program was fired.[13] By the way, the US does not cooperate with the OPCW to ensure US compliance with International Laws of chemical and biological WMD.”

Consider an etymology of the word, war: to confuse, to perplex.

Comparing the last two IAEA report conclusions in the historical context of propaganda leading to war on Iraq:

2010:

“46. While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

2011:

“52. While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement, as Iran is not providing the necessary cooperation, including by not implementing its Additional Protocol, the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Let’s unpack this:

IAEA confirms zero evidence of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. This conforms to the agreement of all 16 US intelligence agencies in their December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and Seymour Hersh’s report on the classified but leaked 2011 NIE.
IAEA continues obfuscating language Iran’s Additional Protocol, a voluntary set of additional safeguards Iran temporarily administratively approved, but kept open to withdraw by not ratifying the treaty by their legislature. Iran withdrew after two years of US non-compliance of NPT (history here). IAEA’s language states they can’t prove there isn’t nuclear material they don’t know about. This is similar to propaganda to damage your family: “While the Agency continues to verify the non-terrorism of your family, your family isn’t providing the necessary cooperation for the Agency to provide credible assurance about the absence of your family’s terrorist activities.”

Additional propaganda for war on Iran comes in this part of IAEA’s 2010 and 2011 reports:

2010:

“The information available to the Agency in connection with these outstanding issues is extensive and has been collected from a variety of sources over time. It is also broadly consistent and credible in terms of the technical detail, the time frame in which the activities were conducted and the people and organizations involved. Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

2011:

“After assessing carefully and critically the extensive information available to it, the Agency finds the information to be, overall, credible. The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information also indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme, and that some activities may still be ongoing.”

This propaganda of “gathering concern” is similar to what preceded war with Iraq; the admission of zero evidence of unlawful activity framed in a cheap rhetorical trick of possible “secret crimes.” IAEA also lies in omission that previous “sources” concerning Iran nuclear weapon development are now confirmed as planted evidence (here, here and here).

US corporate media propagandizes for war: US corporate media is concentrated in six corporations, with previous CIA disclosure of “influencing” content. The biggest context of lies of omission are the damning disclosures by our own government that all “reasons” for war with Iraq are now known to be lies as they were told, and in direct violation of war law.

Examples of obvious lies of commission and omission:

New York Times 1/5/2012 front page article lying that IAEA reported “Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective.”
Current political “leadership” and Republican presidential candidates fomenting fear and war threat over Iran’s “nuclear program” and lies about Iran’s president insisting lawful behavior by Israel with Palestine.
CNN’s 2010 screaming headline: Watchdog: Iran may be working on nuclear warhead leads the glaring lie of omission that all nuclear material is accounted for lawful use. The “reporting” includes the White House lie that Iran’s disclosed Qom nuclear facility can’t be used for peaceful nuclear use, despite independent analysis that its specifications are precisely for that purpose, and IAEA would know immediately if enrichment went beyond the facility’s limits. They lie again by reporting the facility as “secret” despite the fact it was reported by Iran to IAEA ahead of their NPT requirement to do so. They continue on their roll of lies by not reporting Iran’s several offers to accept medical isotopes as imports provided they had a guaranteed timeline.
CNN’s 2010 video report has this banner at the bottom: “Iranian nuclear warhead?” with the glaring lie of commission that a 20% enrichment is a “magic number” that shows enrichment for a nuclear weapon despite it being exactly what’s needed for lawful nuclear medicine. IAEA has constant video and chemical monitoring for enrichment to never exceed 20%; weapons-grade requires 85%+ with different physical equipment requirements.
Among many of Israel’s headlines, this is typical: IAEA report: Iran may be developing atom bomb

So understand: this whole “issue” could be averted if the US merely agreed for a simultaneous swap of fuel. But the US wants the problem unsolved, and US corporate media won’t report this solution anymore than they reported that the US got rid of the UN Director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons who was working with Saddam to resolve any concern over alleged weapons.

Except for Pulitzer-winner Seymour Hersh, you have to go outside corporate media to find exposure of this propaganda, such as Global Research, Activist Post, Want to Know, Prison Planet, What Really Happened.

The following additional resources document further US “leadership” and corporate media lies of commission and omission:

US overthrew Iran’s democracy 1953-1979, helped Iraq invade 1980-1988, now lies for more war (and an analogy if the US were the victim of empire)

What Iran’s president said about Israel, and how US War Criminal 1% lie for war

US constantly violates war law: arrest Obama before ‘false flag’ war on Iran

Analogy: US wars on Iraq, Iran as US criminal gangster “business”

9/11 killed 1, injured 2 if US was a city of 100,000. US wars: CRIMINAL response

Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now (6-part series)

Documentation to prove the “emperor has no clothes” obvious facts: US constantly violates war law; arrest Obama before ‘false flag’ war on Iran

US government “leadership” violates all Americans by constantly violating war law won by our families through two world wars. The US was the primary author of current war law, bound by treaty and Constitutional Law under Article 6 as the US’ supreme law. War law states a nation can use their military on other nations only if that nation’s government attacks.

Afghanistan and Iraq’s government did not attack the US on 9/11. Under law and to serve the purpose of the law to protect the world from the “scourge of war,” the UN Security Council quickly aligned for international cooperation for factual discovery and arrests of suspects. Afghanistan agreed.

The US violated our international obligations and US Constitutional Law by choosing to bomb, invade, and occupy Afghanistan.

US “leadership” committed a nation’s worst crime: using military to kill human beings against clear law, and against legal peaceful alternative already explicitly agreed upon. US “leadership” committed unlawful Wars of Aggression. They are War Criminals.

US “leadership” violated a UN-managed “cease fire” in Iraq while the UN was finishing weapons inspections. Rather than have this peaceful legal and agreed-upon alternative (to a questionable issue in the first place), US “leadership” chose to unlawfully order to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq.

Again, the above facts are uncontested and easily verifiable; the only reason they are not clear is that with all historic criminal regimes, US “leadership” includes propagandizing corporate media to lie before the crimes, lie during the crimes, and lie after the crimes.

US “leadership” have military-murdered over a million human beings and five thousand US soldiers. They plundered Americans of ~$5 trillion in long-term costs in no-bid contracts to their own corporations; a staggering and difficult to grasp $50,000 per average US family.

US “leadership,” now desperate from the “99%” recognition and stating the “emperor has no clothes” facts as you are reading here, assassinates US citizens at their dictate and passed NDAA to order US military to seize Americans from their homes and “disappear” them.

US “leadership” lies to create a new war target: Iran. Just as we know all “reasons” to attack Iraq were known lies as they were told, anyone can verify that “reasons” to attack Iran are obvious lies: Iran’s president only asks for lawful acts with Palestinians from Israel (not “wiping Israel off the map”), and all Iran’s nuclear energy and medical isotopes are verified as only and always used for their legal purposes (not a “nuclear program” that might have “secret” planning for weapons). Moreover, it’s conservative uncontested history that the US overthrew Iran’s democracy from 1953-1979, and assisted criminal war on Iran from 1980-1988.

The predictable US “leadership” move is a false flag attack by them upon Americans that is then blamed on Iran. That is, US “leadership” will attack and kill Americans, use their own media to lie and blame Iran, and then continue the lies in a “defensive” war.

US military, law enforcement, all Americans, and all global citizens have opportunity to stand, speak, and act for truth, justice and peace before Obama and “leadership” mass-murder Iranians.

The most powerful and effective act is to arrest US criminal “leadership” for their obvious War Crimes.

The US has actively violated treaties for foreign wars from over 160 years; again in conservative uncontested history.

The above links document the facts. Here are analogies that might help communicate because the stories sooth cognitive dissonance, place the facts in an abstract form that become obvious, and use a different part of our brains to more strongly see, stand, and state what is really “emperor has no clothes” obvious:

If the US was attacked by a criminal empire: analogy to confront US-Iran history

Analogy: US wars on Iraq, Iran as US criminal gangster “business”

9/11 killed 1, injured 2 if US was a city of 100,000. US wars: CRIMINAL response

"Al-Qaeda" is "Old Coke" -- time for some new CIA/MOSSAD/MI6 products....

2012-01-15T12:10:00.001-08:00

"Al-Qaeda" is "Old Coke" -- time for some new CIA/MOSSAD/MI6 products....

Forget Muslim Arab "Terrorists" of Al-CIAda : America’s Enemy Is Being Rebranded....

Wayne MADSEN (USA)

President Obama’s recent decision to re-focus U.S. military power away from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Asia-Pacific region and, to a lesser extent, Africa, means that China and certain rebel groups in Africa have replaced the old contrived bogeyman of Osama bin Laden’s “Al Qaeda” at the top of Uncle Sam’s “Most Wanted List.” Of course, the change in the Pentagon’s strategy has nothing to do with reality but is yet another attempt by the imperialists who dominate both duopolistic U.S. political parties – the Democrats and Republicans – to advance American hegemony around the world. The major U.S. strategic goal is to pre-empt the rise of new superpowers, especially China.

Obama and his generals and admirals are emulating the fictitious leaders of Oceania in George Orwell’s famed classic “1984” about a dystopian future world, By switching enemies mid-stream from “Al Qaeda” in south Asia and the Middle East to China in East Asia, Obama, like Oceania’s “Big Brother” propaganda structure, is saying “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” In this case, just as in “1984,” Eastasia largely comprised China. But “1984” is a novel and was never intended by Orwell to serve as a Pentagon planning document. Or, perhaps Orwell had a crystal ball and foresaw just how dystopian the world would actually become under a charismatic “Big Brother” American president.

Although Obama continues to rattle sabers at Iran and he may, in order to neutralize the pro-Israeli war hawks in the Republican Party, covertly or overtly support an Anglo-Israeli-French military operation directed at Iran during the presidential campaign, it is China that is now the major focus of a changing American military posture.

Obama has reacted to China’s commercial moves into Afghanistan by agreeing to talk to the Afghan Taliban, even permitting them to open a diplomatic office in Qatar, the home to America’s large Al-Udeid airbase and a country that is a short boat ride away from the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain.

Obama’s decision to establish five bases in Australia and station as many as 2500 U.S. Marines in northern Australia is part of the new military policy aimed at China. The new Pentagon policy is also aimed at fighting military cyber-attacks and China has been accused by a number of U.S. military and intelligence agencies of being behind multiple cyber-attacks on U.S. government and corporate computer systems and networks. It is noteworthy that while the U.S. ramps up its military assets against China, two of its East Asian allies – Japan and South Korea – have stated that they do not intend to abide by western oil sanctions imposed against Iran. The diplomatic paradox the United States finds itself in as it transitions from a Middle East-centric to an Asia-Pacific-centric military strategy is striking.

The appearance of George Soros non-governmental organization (NGO)-backed “themed revolutions” in Indonesia and Malaysia, two nations that are rich in natural gas and oil resources but which have maintained relatively friendly relations with China, indicates that the U.S. is looking at expanding its list of allies in the Asia-Pacific zone. The nationalist tendencies of Indonesian President Susilo Bambamg Yudhoyono and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak have been a stumbling block for U.S. geo-political designs in the region. The appearance of the “Sandal Revolution” in Indonesia targeting endemic corruption in the courts and political system, coupled with the acquittal on sodomy charges of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim opens the way for a further coalescing of opposition forces in both nations. The opposition Bersih movement in Malaysia, funded with dollars from the “democracy engineers” of the neocon-riddled U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, has chosen yellow for its revolution. In Myanmar, or Burma, the NED and Soros operatives are active for another round of the Saffron Revolution.

One of the major problems for the United States has been the refusal of Malaysia and Indonesia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, always a center piece for the Israel-centric foreign policy operatives in both Democratic and Republican administrations.

In Africa, the U.S. is also engaged in a major shift in its military strategy to prop up corrupt regimes like that of Nigeria, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and dictatorships like those of Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Djibouti, and Equatorial Guinea. The recent decision by Nigeria’s western bank servant, President Goodluck Jonathan, to cancel fuel subsidies under pressure form the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a country rich in oil has resulted in a popular revolt. Nigeria had already seen a rise in violence by a group seen as a follow-on Islamist replacement for “Al Qaeda,” the Boko Haram, a group founded in 2002 that was opposed to western education. “Boko” is Hausa for “western education” and Haram is Arabic for “sin.” In 2009, the group, which has no real centralized structure and may be yet another contrivances dreamed up by western intelligence agencies intent on breaking up Nigeria as they are doing in Sudan and DRC, embarked on militant Islamist terrorist violence mostly aimed at Christians and the Nigerian government. In fact, the hybrid name “Boko Haram” may have been conceived by some British MI-6 devotee of the British rock band Procol Harum.

Obama’s decision to shift most of America’s military focus to East Asia with a smaller but no less determined effort in Africa means that the U.S. Navy and Air Force will see budget increases for their Asia-Pacific and Africa theaters of operation, while the U.S. Army will see a decrease in funding as the United States relies more on unmanned drone, manned fighter aircraft and logistics aircraft, and U.S. Marine and Special Operations expeditionary force naval vessels to carry out military insertions from the South China Sea to the Gulf of Guinea.

The playbook being used in Southeast Asia and Africa is the same. George Soros, who runs a multi-billion hedge fund front for the trillionaire Rothschild banking cartel, moves into a targeted country with “democracy” street action provocateurs; bought-and-paid for local journalists, bloggers, and tweeters; and election engineers. Soon, a symbol or color – rose, tulip. lotus, cedar, olive tree, saffron, jasmine, orange, Facebook, Twitter, orange, green, yellow, purple, or white – is chosen and the themed revolution is given a name, a name that is uniformly used and hyped by the corporate media around the world from Al Jazeera and Fox News to the Washington Post and Le Monde. In Indonesia, it is the used sandal, which is being deposited at police stations and government offices, that has been adopted as the theme for the western-directed revolution. In Malaysia, it is the color yellow. In Nigeria, there has not yet been an agreement on whether to call it the cassava or yam revolution. Yams are too closely identified with the rebellious Christian Igbo of the south, a people who have been fighting the despoliation of their lands by oil companies like Shell.

In any event, under the new Obama military strategy, U.S. service personnel government-issued coffins will continue to arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The only difference will be that there will be more Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Forces bodies than those from the ranks of the Army. In Obama’s America, just consider it a “stimulus package” for the sailors, airmen, Marines, the infamous White House Murder INC, and the special forces....

Turkey's MIT intelligence arm aims to become one of the largest intelligence services in the world, synthesizing the CIA-MOSSAD-FBI-NSA-AMAN models...

2012-01-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

Turkey's MIT intelligence arm aims to become one of the largest intelligence services in the world, synthesizing the CIA-MOSSAD-FBI-NSA-AMAN models....

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/mit-issues-2nd-denial-of-intelligence-blunder.aspx?pageID=238&nID=10848&NewsCatID=338

Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) is setting up an Electronic Intelligence Village on a 3,000 square meter plot of land, which will allow for the tracking of all forms of intelligence signals.

MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan explains that within the next two to three years, they aim to become one of the largest intelligence services in the world and that they are synthesizing the CIA-FBI model.
Yesterday, the "Meeting with the Press" portion of a series of ceremonies held to commemorate to 85th anniversary of the National Intelligence Organization, or MİTs founding, was held at the undersecretariat headquarters.
At the event, which brought together the executive editors and Ankara representatives from newspapers and television stations, MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, announced their objective to become one of the top ten intelligence services, to undergo a restructuring in terms of both internal and foreign intelligence and that they are synthesizing the United States' CIA-FBI model. Fidan stood up for the organization, which has faced intentions of being drawn into the Uludere incident, by sharing their goals for "Perfection and Competitive Pursuit."
OBJECTIVE TO BECOME TOP TEN: "We have always been told "You are very good in your region, Turkey is a shining star." However, we do not consider this to be enough. With the exception of a few countries in this region, this is not an area where there are first class players. We want to become players in the global realm. There are ten intelligence services in this realm, within the next two to three years; we will become one of them."
FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM: "We are preparing a joint intelligence program. Under the headline "Security Intelligence", we have reestablished our units dealing with terrorism doth domestically and abroad. We have created units that will primarily deal with armed terror as well as an analysis unit that will also be dealing with terrorism."

INTELLIGENCE VILLAGE: "The General Staff Electronic Systems Command has been handed over to the MİT. A 3,000 square meter plot of land was purchased next to the Electronic Systems Command (GES) facility.
We are building an Electronic Intelligence Village there that will be befitting of the 21st century. 21. This is a historical step in terms of military-civilian collaboration. Turkey has now been saved from the wasted resources and effort as well as from duplication and has obtained the opportunity to visualize our national capacity. All signal intelligence directed towards our region will be tracked and evaluated from here."
UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE VISUALS ARE NOT OURS: "The visual intelligence obtained from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is obtained by the General Staff and not MİT."

A REMINDER OF AUTHORIZATION: "In Turkey, telephone tapping is conducted through a court ruling. In the west, bureaucrats and ministers are able to do it by their own hands. There is a special authority court for CIA requests. The authorization granted to intelligence services in democratic nations are more than ours. However, I am not trying to deliver any sort of message to anyone on this issue. According to the development of conditions, there may be new evaluations on political authority."
1,000 TV CHANNELS ARE MONITORING: "Intelligence is also developing through open resource systems.
The number of foreign correspondents working for international news agencies is more than the number of foreign agents working for even the largest of intelligence organizations. Today, there is an explosion of information being realized. What is important is for this information to be analyzed. We have a system in which broadcasts from almost a thousand television stations are collected in space from where it arrives to the organization and is distributed to the various related departments."
MEETING WITH THE PKK: Fidan answered a number of questions posed to him. When reminded of a meeting with terrorist organization leaders, Fidan stated, "There were situations where we stated that if the following was known, then society would be able to comprehend it easier. It is as if I have nothing to say in this position. However, there is a copied, pasted and edited text."
SECURITY CLEARANCE: Fidan refrained from answering questions regarding relations with MOSSAD as well as having to do with the death of MİT member Kaşif Kozinoğlu in Silivri. In response to a question regarding security clearances, Fidan stated, "It is no longer in fashion in personnel hires, we do not go into security or threat identification."
'AN UNTIMELY MOVE, IS NOT A MOVE'
During the meeting, the intelligence world was depicted through the metaphor of a chess board. "When the pieces in chess are set up side by side, no one knows who is going to win. An untimely move is not a move."
Journalists expressed a lot of interest in the MİT archives, the containers carrying intelligence notes displayed in the showcase, the listening and tracking devices obtained by foreign missions, cameras and crypto equipment.
The most interesting document was the, "Journal of Individuals Tracked".
The journalists were gifted a candy dish.
INTELLIGENCE WAS NOT FROM US
An informative note distributed following Fidan's announcements stated that the National Intelligence Organization did not share any form of information in regards to a potential group, any places, dates, numbers or routes in relation to the Uludere incident.
The note, which drew attention to one journalist's continued allegations directed at MİT, noted the following: "The aforementioned journalist's December 30th, 2011 article with the headline, "Incorrect Intelligence from MİT", which states, 'A heron recorded footage of civilians in the region and relayed it to Ankara. An official in Ankara who saw the footage was suspicious of the situation. He considers the possibility that they are civilians and contacts MİT twice. MİT informs that, 'the group is definitely PKK' and relays to the headquarters that the intelligence received is 'robust.' Having been told the information is 'accurate', the planes began bombing under orders by the Air Force command … The reason for the three hour span between the time the 'accurate statement' was made and the 'visuals obtained' is due to the official who had suspicions and contacted MİT twice and waited for the information to be confirmed." This sort of explanation is a complete lie and figment of the imagination and has absolutely no connection to reality."

FİDAN: MY LIFE HAS CHANGED
Hakan Fidan talked about the ways in which his life has changed since becoming the Undersecretary for Zioconned MİT....
"There is no such thing as a social life. Relaxing with friends or going to the movies, the theater or restaurants is no longer possible. The boxes are separate, the manner of flying is separate, and it is an isolated life. I work 16 to 17 hours. There is no such thing as a Saturday or Sunday. The telephone is always at an arm's length. We also have a code system at home. I stay on a campus anyways. They are present when they take me and present when they bring me back. It is this sort of life. I have progressed significantly in terms of reading books. Sometimes the thought, "Have we missed anything?" pops up in my dreams. Skipping over any point could be significant in terms of the entire nation's security."

Stand for truth, resist the allure of demagogues, prejudice, old hatreds, and the fear of otherness....

2012-01-13T06:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCH1ECkyio

Stand for truth, resist the allure of demagogues, prejudice, old hatreds, and the fear of otherness....http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/4527

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Second Bank of the United States

"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the bread-stuffs of the country.

When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin!

Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out."

From the original minutes of the Philadelphia bankers sent to meet with President Jackson February 1834, from Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States (1928) by Stan V. Henkels

On our dinner cards tonight is a medallion portrait of a man who gave a memorable toast, "The Federal Union, it must be preserved."

This meeting tonight, in the City of Washington, is one of many hundreds being held throughout our forty-eight States and territorial possessions and even on board ships at sea, in honor of the memory of a great General, a great President, Andrew Jackson. To all of you I extend my most sincere and heartfelt greetings.

I am happy to stand here tonight and declare to you that the real issue before the United States is the right of the average man and woman to lead a finer, a better and a happier life. And that was the same issue, more than a hundred years ago, that confronted Andrew Jackson.

I speak tonight to this Democratic meeting, to these Democratic meetings throughout the Nation, in the same language as if I were addressing a Republican gathering, a Progressive gathering, an Independent gathering, a Farmer-Labor gathering, a gathering of business men or a gathering of workers or farmers. There is nothing that I say here tonight that does not apply to every citizen in the country no matter what his or her political affiliations may be.

It is true that we Americans have found party organizations to be useful, and indeed necessary, in the crystallization of opinion and in the demarcation of issues. It is true that I have received many honors at the hands of one of our great parties. It is nevertheless true that in the grave questions that confront the United States at this hour, I, as President of the United States, must and will consider our common problems first, foremost and preeminently from the American point of view.

To most of us, Andrew Jackson appropriately has become the symbol of certain great ideals. I like best to think of him as a man whom the average American deeply and fundamentally understood. To the masses of his countrymen, his purposes and his character were an open book. They loved him well because they understood him well—his passion for justice, his championship of the cause of the exploited and the downtrodden, his ardent: and flaming patriotism.

Jackson sought social justice; Jackson fought for human rights in his many battles to protect the people against autocratic or oligarchic aggression.

If at times his passionate devotion to this cause of the average citizen lent an amazing zeal to his thoughts, to his speech and to his actions, the people loved him for it the more. They realized the intensity of the attacks made by his enemies, by those who, thrust from power and position, pursued him with relentless hatred. The beneficiaries of the abuses to which he put an end pursued him with all the violence that political passions can generate. But the people of his day were not deceived. They loved him for the enemies he had made.

Backed not only by his party but by thousands who had belonged to other parties or belonged to no party at all, Andrew Jackson was compelled to fight every inch of the way for the ideals and the policies of the Democratic Republic which was his ideal. An overwhelming proportion of the material power of the Nation was arrayed against him. The great media for the dissemination of information and the molding of public opinion fought him. Haughty and sterile intellectualism opposed him. Musty reaction disapproved him. Hollow and outworn traditionalism shook a trembling finger at him. It seemed sometimes that all were against him—all but the people of the United States.

Because history so often repeats itself, let me analyze further. Andrew Jackson stands out in the century and a half of our independent history not merely because he was two-fisted, not merely because he fought for the people's rights, but because, through his career, he did as much as any man in our history to increase, on the part of the voters, knowledge of public problems and an interest in their solution. Following the fundamentals of Jefferson, he adhered to the broad philosophy that decisions made by the average of the voters would be more greatly enduring for, and helpful to, the Nation than decisions made by small segments of the electorate representing small or special classes endowed with great advantages of social or economic power.

He, like Jefferson, faced with the grave difficulty of disseminating facts to the electorate, to the voters as a whole, was compelled to combat epithets, generalities, misrepresentation and the suppression of facts by the process of asking his supporters, and indeed all citizens, to constitute themselves informal committees for the purpose of obtaining the facts and of spreading them abroad among their friends, their associates and their fellow workers.

I am aware that some wise-cracking columnist will probably say that good old Jackson no doubt realized that every red-blooded American citizen considered himself a committee of one anyway. Nevertheless, Jackson got his ideas and his ideals across not through any luxurious propaganda, but because the man on the street and the man on the farm believed in his ideas, believed in his ideals and his honesty, went out and dug up the facts and spread them abroad throughout the land.

History repeats—and I am becoming dimly conscious of the fact that this year we are to have a national election. Sometimes at the close of a day I say to myself that the last national election must have been held a dozen years ago—so much water has run under the bridge, so many great events in our history have occurred since then. And yet but thirty-four months, less than three years, have gone by since March, 1933.

History repeats—in those crowded months, as in the days of Jackson, two great achievements stand forth—the rebirth of the interest and understanding of a great citizenry in the problems of the Nation, and an established Government which by positive action has proved its devotion to the recovery and well-being of that citizenry.

Whatever may be the platform, whoever may be the nominee of the Democratic Party—and I am told by the Chairman that a Convention is to be held to decide these momentous questions—the basic issue, my friends, will be inevitably the retention of popular Government—an issue fraught once more with the difficult problem of disseminating facts and yet more facts, in the face of an opposition bent on hiding and distorting facts.

And that, my friends, is why organization, not party organization alone—important as that is—but organization among all those, regardless of party, who believe in retaining progress and ideals, is so essential.

That is why, in addition to organization, I make this specific recommendation—that each and every one of you who are interested in obtaining the facts and in spreading those facts abroad, each and every one of you interested in getting at the truth that lies somewhere behind the smoke screen of charges and counter-charges of a national campaign, constitute yourself a committee of one. To do this you need no parchment certificate, to do this you need no title. To do this you need only your own conviction, your own intelligence and your own belief in the highest duty of the American citizen.

To act as such a committee of one you will need only your own appointment, an appointment which carries with it some effort, some obligation on your part to carry out the task you have assigned to yourself. You will have to run down statements made to you by others which you may believe to be false. You will need to analyze the motives of those who make assertions to you. You will need to make an inventory in your own community, in order that you may check and recheck for yourself and thereby be in a position to answer those who have been misled or those who would mislead.

After my Annual Message to the Congress last Friday evening, I received many appreciative letters and telegrams from all over the country, and I think it will interest you to know that within a few hours I received more of these than at any time since the critical days of the spring of 1933. I have carefully read those letters and telegrams and I found two facts that I think are worthy of repeating to you tonight. The first is that out of the many, many hundreds, a very large number were sent to me by families who evidently heard my Message while grouped together in the family home. "My wife and I want you to know how much we appreciate," and so forth—or "The Jones family, gathered tonight with our friends, sends you this message of confidence." In other words, as greatly as and perhaps even more greatly than on any other occasion since I have been in the White House, I have the definite feeling that what I have said about the great problems that face us as a Nation has received a responsive, an appreciative and an understanding answer in the homes of America. This means a lot tome.

The other interesting fact about these letters and telegrams is the very great number of them that come from business men, from storekeepers, from bankers and from manufacturers. The gist of their messages to me is that they are grateful, that they appreciate my statement that it is but a minority of business and finance that would "gang up" against the people's liberties. I reiterate that assertion tonight. By far the greater part of the business men, industrialists, and other employers of the Nation seek no special advantage; they seek only an equal opportunity to share in the common benefits, the common responsibilities and the common obligations of their Government.

I am naturally grateful for this support and for the understanding on their part that the Government of the United States seeks to give them a square deal and a better deal—seeks to protect them, yes, to save them from being plowed under by the small minority of business men and financiers, against whom you and I will continue to wage war.

We can be thankful that men and women in all walks of life realize more and more that Government is still a living force in their lives. They understand that the value of their Government depends on the interest which they display in it and the knowledge they have of its policies.

A Government can be no better than the public opinion which sustains it.

I know that you will not be surprised by lack of comment on my part tonight on the recent decision of the Supreme Court. I cannot and will not render offhand judgment without studying, with the utmost care, two of the most momentous opinions, the majority opinion and the minority opinion, that have ever been rendered, in any case before the Supreme Court of the United States. The ultimate results of the language of these opinions will profoundly affect the lives of Americans for many years to come. It is enough to say that the attainment of justice and the continuance of prosperity for American agriculture remain an immediate and constant objective of my Administration.

Just as Jackson roused the people to their fundamental duties as citizens, so must the leadership of this era do its utmost to encourage and sustain widespread interest in public affairs. There was something of eternal youth in the spirit of Andrew Jackson. The destiny of youth became the destiny of America.

Tasks immediately before us are as arduous as the conquest of the frontiers a century ago. The Nation is still young, still growing, still conscious of its high destiny. Enthusiasm and the intelligence of the youth of the land are necessary to the fulfillment of that destiny.

As I understand the temper of the people, particularly the temper of youth, no party of reaction, no candidates of reaction can fulfill the hope and the faith of that everlasting spirit. It is the sacred duty of us who are vested with the responsibility of leadership to justify the expectations of the young men and women of the United States.

We are at peace with the world; but the fight goes on. Our frontiers of today are economic, not geographic. Our enemies of today are the forces of privilege and greed within our own borders.

May a double portion of Old Hickory's heroic spirit be upon us tonight. May we be inspired by the power and the glory and the justice of his rugged and fearless life.

The people of America know the heart and know the purpose of their Government.

They, and we, will not retreat.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jackson Day Dinner Address, Washington, D.C.
January 8, 1936

Remember these leaders, these giants, from days gone by, and their unselfish defense of liberty and the people, as we look upon the empty suits, self-serving spokes-models, and heartless mannequins, vetted and strutted out by the corporate interests, who pretend to the leadership of their great nation in its time of greatest need.

And let us not blame them, for the fault is ours in not having the courage to stand for the truth, even in the most incidental ways, to pass the honest message on, to resist the allure of demagogues, prejudice and old hatreds, the fear of otherness, the seductive mouthpieces and clever arguments of powerful and the monied interests, and support the voices of fundamental reform and equal protection for all people under the law.

What is remarkable is not how many sell themselves and their honor, but how eagerly, how cheaply. But the profit does not matter if one considers their soul to be worth nothing.

And if lawlessness increases, the hearts of many will grow cold. And then comes the downfall, and hell comes with it from the despicable and wicked strategies of the Zioconned Western World and their barbaric shenanigans.....

“History is littered with wars which everyone knew would never happen.”

Why is Iran seen as a threat to the USA? Wouldn't facilitating peace in the Middle East be a better way of making USA safe than ratcheting up conflict and taking sides with Israel all the time?

US Joint Forces Command's Joint Operating Environment 2010
http://www.peakoil.net/files/JOE2010.pdf

refer to page 29....

[RED BOX]

UNITED STATES JOINT FORCES COMMAND
US JOINT OPERATING ENVIRONMENT REPORT 2010

Joint Forces Command is a useless organization that was given the job of writing crap like this by Rumsfeld. because he liked an admiral who was then commander there. the main purpose of the command seem to be to hand out consulting contracts to unemployed retired general officers and beltway bandit consulting companies. Having consulted there several times I know all about it. This paper has no effect on the government at all. I doubt if very many people have ever read it. think of it as science fiction written for a big fee. Now, if this were a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that would be a different matter but it is not....

Here's the link to the German study

Google number of oil futures versus actual oil on American soil, when that collapses hope there is something in the pipeline...lol

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52334

http://www.peakoil.net/headline-news/us-military-warns-oil-output-may-dip-causing-massive-shortages-by-2015

German report information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9uF_qaGS5I&feature=related

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6912

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1655110/pg1

I know peak oil is a huge concern , and there's no doubt we'll eventually run out, but don't stake too much on this. And remember the whole concept was created by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1950s as a marketing scheme to shift both public and private funds towards their then recently acquired uranium interests so they could profit off of the nuclear industry....

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/8/23/183954/741

Compulsive Fabricators of lies...

Romney - His utterances appear to be a mish-mash of well rehearsed and vetted responses that political consultants (the best that money can buy) have provided him. It doesn't really seem that Romney believes a lot of his own "pabulum." His bleating about "America the Beautiful" rings hollow in the face of the bald fact that neither he nor any of his rich-boy sons ever chose to spend some of their oh so valuable time in the US military. Better things to do? The military is something for the lower classes to do? His responses to questions over his leadership of a largely destructive Wall Street M&A company that specialized in wrecking distressed companies to profit from sale of pieces of the wrecks are always to claim that he knows how to "run" the US because he was so good at the wrecking. Among other things this ignores the very different nature of business and government. At the most elemental level business exists to make money by selling things and minimizing costs while government exists to spend money it collects in taxes or creates and provide services otherwise unavailable. Perhaps the most enjoyable of his bleatings was the moment in which he referred Diane Sawyer to Ron Paul on a point of information concerning the US Constitution....

Gingrich - Ron Paul has called him a "chickenhawk." In other words, that would be someone who thinks other people should fight. The basis for this is Gingrich's failure to serve during the draft and the VN War. He appears to love wars in which he, personally, will not fight. When confronted by this "awkwardness" he goes on about his father's 26 years of service in the US Army as though it were his own. He also goes on to cite his "experience" as a child in seeing his father go to war as though that is somehow ennobling. This is rubbish and someone should "call" him on it. Been there, done that, and it is not an informative experience.

Perry - Sad. The fool actually said that he would send US forces back into Iraq by force so that the Iranians would "stop taking over the country." Even Sawyer managed to stop contemplating her own beauty long enough to express surprise. "Well, these Iraqi individuals" as he referred to the government that we "mid-wifed" into being "should be talked to..." Perhaps a constitutional amendment barring presidents from Texas might be contemplated. Paul could be excepted by name.

Santorum. Last night's SNL sketch on him should be savored. Santorum, aside from the Google joke, still seems to justify my earlier comment that he must have been some Sister Mary Margaret's favorite little boy student. So far as I know he is not an Opus Dei type but he surely looks like one, sounds like one, and walks like one. He really seems to be running for Holy Roman Emperor. His world view seems medieval. His obsession with what he calls "radical Islam" is transparently a call to arms against the Islamic World. He clearly believes that "radical Islam" is a threat to.... What? The USA? Or is it really Israel? His attitude ignores the simple truth that Islam is not one thing. It is many, many things as is Christianity. As I recall, there are a lot of widely differing Jewish sects as well. The number of Muslims who are real threats to the USA is minuscule. Those people are being well "dealt with" by SOF, clandestine intelligence and alliances with foreign police. The COIN wars have been nothing but welfare for generals and self-serving theorists. If Santorum is president look for an official renewal of the crusades.

Paul- He is running to change peoples' minds about the role of government. He knows very well that he is unelectable. The "we are all 'Austrians'" outburst is indicative of that intent.

Huntsman- Out after NH.

Except for Paul, a sorry lot.

On the other hand we have the incumbent, a disguised Rockefeller CIA by-product Republican who opted for black identity because he didn't think he could be "white." Colin Powell made the same decision years ago under the influence of his wife. Obama is a man who wrings his hands and then signs laws like the Defense Authorization bill that authorizes the armed forces to arrest and hold American citizens on American soil and to hold them indefinitely without benefit of habeas corpus. In apology for this outrage he says that he will not arrest Americans in his time in power. Après lui, quoi, le deluge? Did he put a "frowny face" after his signature?