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

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....

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

Operation MIKADO....

http://www.franceinter.fr/player/reecouter?play=313367

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.....

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....

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....

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?

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....

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....

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:

1. 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.
2. 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